Isegoria

The Air Force forgot what business it was in

February 3rd, 2019

The United States Air Force has lost its way, Jerry Hendrix argues — and most of its bombers, too:

It has forgotten what business it’s in, mistakenly believing that its raison d’être is air supremacy while forgetting that the core of its mission is long-range strike. If the nation is to be successful in the great-power competition it finds itself in, the Air Force will need to find its way home and regain its strategic relevance in an environment dominated by anti-access/area-denial systems employed by China and Russia.

[...]

The Air Force once understood its purpose with stark clarity. In the first half of the 20th century, air-power advocates continually stressed the importance of bypassing tactical skirmishes and penetrating to the enemy’s vital centers to coerce either the foreign government or its population to submit. Independent air forces in Great Britain and Italy focused their procurement efforts on larger and longer-range heavy bombers. Non-independent air forces, such as the U.S. Army Air Corps, sought the same even as their parent service (the U.S. Army, in the American case) pressed them to buy tactical aircraft and perform direct-combat air-support missions for ground infantry and armor units. This made some sense during World War II, when long-range bombers found themselves in need of fighter escorts to fend off enemy fighters and establish temporary air dominance for the bombers to get through to their targets. But after the war, science and engineering combined to alter circumstances.

The jet engines that came to dominate aircraft design during the early years of the Cold War changed the nature of force employment, as jet fighters no longer had the range to escort the jet bombers of the newly established and very powerful Strategic Air Command to targets inside the Soviet Union. Fighters then became specialized for air-defense and air-dominance missions within a radius of a couple of hundred miles of fighter bases. Strategic Air Command bombers, which numbered in the thousands, soon began to specialize themselves, evolving towards designs that could fly higher and faster in order to penetrate Soviet air defenses. The Soviets responded by building new surface-to-air missiles and high-altitude/high-speed interceptors to rob American bombers of their advantages. It was only at the end of the Cold War, with the introduction of the stealth B-2 Spirit bomber, that bombers regained the upper hand in the U.S.–USSR strategic competition. But by then, the Strategic Air Command had been disestablished, and the Air Force felt that its mission had changed.

The change began during the Vietnam War, in which fighters flying from land bases in South Vietnam were loaded up with bombs to hit land targets in North Vietnam and along supply routes in neighboring countries. The improved accuracy of smaller aircraft carrying lighter loads of bombs and providing combat air support to American ground forces in direct contact with the enemy began to subtly alter the internal culture of the Air Force. The bomber “tribe,” based in the politically powerful Strategic Air Command, had supplied six of the first ten Air Force chiefs of staff, but it began to lose influence within the service to the fighter “tribe.” In the 36 years since Chief of Staff Lew Allen Jr. retired, no bomber pilot has occupied that office, and the Air Force’s inventory of bombers has shrunk from over 10,000 aircraft during the 1950s to fewer than 200 today. Fighter pilots gained ascendency based upon the assumptions of access to bases within range of their enemies, the ability of their supporting tanker force to survive, and the greater importance of air supremacy than long-range-strike capability.

Air supremacy is a straightforward concept. It seeks a degree of superiority over an opposing air force such that the enemy is incapable of effective interference with friendly aircraft or ground and naval forces. This definition of air superiority held for regional wars such as those in Vietnam, the former Yugoslavia, Iraq (both times), and Afghanistan (where the enemy had no opposing air power to speak of). Air Force theorists also state that air superiority applies to theater campaigns (those that range across an entire region of the globe), enabling larger aircraft, cargo haulers, refueling tankers, and bombers to operate freely — except when they cannot, and that is where the modern United States Air Force lost its way.

Air supremacy is all about fighting a long war. It assumes proximity of air-power units to the front lines and/or to the adversary’s coast. It also assumes that the U.S. will fight the next war the way it has fought small wars over the 70-plus years since the end of World War II — deploying combat and support forces from the United States; gradually building up forces and supplies in theater; “rolling back” adversary defenses to gain air, sea, and ground control; and decisively defeating the adversary’s military in force-on-force engagements. All these assumptions are wrong.

Both China and Russia have noted how effectively the United States has fought its wars over the past 50 years and have invested in a new series of sensors and weapons that seek to push American forces back from their shores. Broadly grouped under the label of “anti-access/area-denial” systems, these radars, satellites, cruise missiles, ballistic missiles, and submarines all seek to ensure that U.S. power-projection forces cannot reach their vital political, economic, and military centers. Because of these investments, most of America’s most recent weapons systems, including all three variants of the new F-35 multi-role fighter, will be unable to reach Chinese or Russian targets. There will be no proximity to “front lines” — not that it matters, as there will be no front lines. The next battlefield will be fluid and spread out over vast areas. Moreover, both legacy fighters and just-fielding F-35s are already vulnerable to modern integrated air- and missile-defense networks. The enemies get a vote, and they have cast it.

[...]

When World War II ended, the Army Air Forces understood these lessons, and when the U.S. Air Force was established in 1947 and the Strategic Air Command thereafter, the long-range bomber and the long-range strike mission lay at the center of their culture. But then regional wars and the end of the Cold War happened, and the Air Force forgot what business it was in. It got into short-range fighters and fought small, short-range wars.

He’s a big fan of the B-21 Raider.

Posted in War, Weapons | 7 Comments »

Affordability has its costs

February 2nd, 2019

Besides its obvious shortcomings, Los Angeles has a number of subtle problems that go back to decisions made long ago:

Much of the Los Angeles area would be better today if early city fathers had realized how valuable the property would eventually become. Los Angeles has quite high population density these days, but lacks urban amenities. The San Fernando Valley on the north side of the city of Los Angeles, for instance, was built up under the assumption that it would remain a rural retreat from the big city, but it now has over 1.75 million residents.

In contrast, Chicago was laid out after its 1871 fire by men like Daniel Burnham who took “Make no little plans” as their motto. L.A. wasn’t. And it’s hard to fix urban-planning mistakes afterward.

To take a seemingly trivial example, Chicago, where I lived from 1982 to 2000, was set up with most streets having sidewalks, and the sidewalks are usually wide enough for two people to walk abreast while conversing. In contrast, sidewalks on residential streets in Los Angeles often peter out at the developers’ whims, and those that exist are usually a little too narrow for two people. So pedestrians end up conversing over their shoulders.

One reason for the sidewalk shortage is that Los Angeles was the first major city in America to develop after the automobile.

Another is that much of it was laid out to be affordable after the stock-market crash of 1929. That introduced a more democratic, less elitist ethos. There’s a lot to be said for the remarkable living standards of average people in postwar L.A., but the city is paying the price today for cutting corners back then.

Chicago, in contrast, was mostly built during the era before the New Deal when upscale bourgeois values dominated tastes. For instance, my Chicago condo was in a three-story brick building on an elegant block of other three-story brick buildings. It was a very respectable-looking block, with every building striving to live up to proper bourgeois standards.

This doesn’t mean that everybody can keep up appearances at all times. My Chicago condo had been built in 1923 with optimistic touches like nine-foot ceilings. During the Depression, the owners must have been ruined as the units were split up into two apartments. But a couple of generations later, the building was rehabbed, and the tall ceilings and other generous touches were still there.

Los Angeles, in contrast, reflects an odd combination of mass-market needs and celebrity tastes.

In 1915, Charlie Chaplin, rapidly becoming the most famous man in the world, lived in Chicago a couple of blocks from where my old condo would go up. But in 1916, as filmmakers realized the advantages of sunshine, he moved from Chicago to Los Angeles.

The movies did in the chance of Los Angeles developing physically along bourgeois lines. Film people valued privacy and self-expression. Screenwriter Nathanael West’s 1939 novel Day of the Locust complained of the excessive diversity of Hollywood houses:

But not even the soft wash of dusk could help the houses. Only dynamite would be of any use against the Mexican ranch houses, Samoan huts, Mediterranean villas, Egyptian and Japanese temples, Swiss chalets, Tudor cottages, and every possible combination of these styles that lined the slopes of the canyon.

One of the most popular architects of celebrity homes was an African-American named Paul Revere Williams whose view, in contrast to the more academically celebrated Los Angeles architects such as Schindler and Neutra, was that his movie-star clients paid him to make their whims come true. So if, say, Frank Sinatra desired a Japanese Modern house with superb acoustics for his state-of-the-art stereo, Williams would figure out how to give the client what he wanted.

Another need celebrities have is privacy from tourists. Not having a sidewalk in front of your house for your stalkers to assemble upon makes sense if you are a world-famous actor.

The peculiar needs of movie stars influence everybody else’s tastes in L.A., with generally unfortunate results. If you are in constant danger of being pestered by crazed fans, it can be a good idea to go everywhere by car. But not being able to walk down your own street without risking being hit by traffic is a dumb idea if you are a nobody.

One lesson from Los Angeles ought to be that it’s hard to retrofit urban-planning mistakes made for reasons of affordability and expedience.

For example, the Los Angeles River, a floodplain that is dry most of the year, almost washed the city away in the 1938 flood. The Army Corps of Engineers were called in and rapidly built the notorious concrete ditch that is now the L.A. River to keep, say, Lockheed from being carried out to sea in the next deluge, causing America to lose the upcoming war.

After the war, newer desert communities like Scottsdale and Palm Springs realized that it makes more sense to convert natural flood channels into parks and golf courses that can absorb runoff. Moreover, the 1994 earthquake in Los Angeles demonstrated that putting up apartment buildings on the old sand and gravel riverbed had been a bad idea, as numerous apartment buildings near the river collapsed.

For decades, public-spirited Angelenos have generated countless plans to replace the ugly concrete culvert. But to do that would require a broader channel, which would demand using eminent domain to purchase all the very expensive real estate along the river. And so nothing ever gets done.

Similarly, it’s hard to undo affordable-housing construction, unless it happens to be in a hugely valuable location, such as along the beach. Gentrification is most likely where there’s something to gentrify.

For instance, Van Nuys in the heart of the San Fernando Valley was built as an affordable place for people who couldn’t afford cars. I recall it in the 1960s being a dump.

Driving through Van Nuys last week, it was still the same dump.

Affordability has its costs.

Posted in Economics, Policy, Urbanism | 1 Comment »

If some idiot from the South tried to be polite, the system broke down

February 1st, 2019

As you travel the world, some of the local rules you can look up or read about, but often the rules are just assumed because “everyone” knows them:

I described an experience of mine in Erlangen, Germany, in an earlier column, where I didn’t know about the practice of collecting a deposit on shopping carts. No one told me about this, and I thought I recognized the context of “grocery store” as familiar, one where I knew the rules. But I didn’t.

I had another experience in Germany, one that made me think of the importance of what Hayek called “the particular circumstances of time and place.” Erlangen, where I taught at Friedrich Alexander University, is a city of bicycles. There are roads, but most are narrow and there are so many bikes that it can be frustrating to drive.

The bike riders, as is true in many American cities, paid little attention to the traffic lights. Often, there were so many bikes that it was not possible to cross the street without getting in the way. But I noticed that people did cross, just walking right out into the street.

I tried this, several times, in my first time in Erlangen. But being from the southern United States, I’m polite and deferential. So, I would start across the street, but then look up the street, and if a bike was close and coming fast I’d stop.

And get hit by a large, sturdy German on a large, sturdy German bicycle. And then I got yelled at, in German. What had I done wrong? Eventually, I figured it out: there had evolved a convention for crossing the street and for riding bicycles. The pedestrian simply walked at a constant speed, without even looking. The bicyclist would ride directly at the pedestrian, actually aiming at the spot where the pedestrian was at that point in time. Since the pedestrian kept moving in a predictable fashion, the cyclist would pass directly and safely behind the pedestrian.

If some idiot from the southern United States, in an effort to impose his own views of “polite” behavior on people whose evolved rules were different, tried to be polite and stop, the system broke down. Though that idiot (me) was stopping to avoid being hit, I was actually being rude by violating the rules. These rules were not written down and could not easily be changed.

In fact, a number of my German colleagues even denied that it was a rule, at first. But then they would say, “Well, right, you can’t stop. That would be dumb. So, okay, I guess it is a rule, after all.”

More precisely, this rule — like many other important rules you encounter in “foreign” settings — is really a convention. A convention, according to Lewis (1969), is a persistent (though not necessarily permanent) regularity in the resolution of recurring coordination problems, in situations characterized by recurrent interactions where outcomes are (inter)dependent.

Conventions, then, exist when people all agree on a rule of behavior, even if no one ever said the rule out loud or wrote it down. No one actor can choose an outcome, and no actor can challenge the regularity by unilaterally deviating from the conventional behavior. But deviation can result in substantial harm, as when someone tries to drive on the left in a country where “we” drive on the right, or social sanction, as when there is intentional punishment on behalf of other actors if deviation is observed and publicized.

According to David Hume, convention is

a general sense of common interest; which sense all the members of the society express to one another, and which induces them to regulate their conduct by certain rules. I observe that it will be to my interest [e.g.] to leave another in the possession of his goods, provided he will act in the same manner with regard to me. When this common sense of interest is mutually expressed and is known to both, it produces a suitable resolution and behavior. And this may properly enough be called a convention or agreement betwixt us, though without the interposition of a promise; since the actions of each of us have a reference to those of the other, and are performed upon the supposition that something is to be performed on the other part. (Hume, 1978; llI.ii.2)

Notice how different this is from the “gamer” conception of laws and rules. For the gamer, all the rules can be — in fact, must be — written down and can be examined and rearranged. For the world traveler, the experience of finding out the rules can involve trial and error, and even the natives likely do not fully understand that the rules and norms of their culture are unique.

One of my favorite examples is actually from the United States, the so-called Pittsburgh Left Turn. In an article in the Pittsburgh City Paper in 2006, Chris Potter wrote:

As longtime residents know, the Pittsburgh Left takes place when two or more cars — one planning to go straight, and the other to turn left — face off at a red light without a “left-turn only” lane or signal. The Pittsburgh Left occurs when the light turns green, and the driver turning left takes the turn without yielding to the oncoming car.

Pittsburgh is an old city, many of whose streets were designed before automobiles held sway. [That means] that street grids are constricted, with little room for amenities like left-turn-only lanes. The absence of such lanes means drivers have to solve traffic problems on their own. Instead of letting one car at the head of an intersection bottle up traffic behind it, the Pittsburgh Left gives the turning driver a chance to get out of everyone else’s way. In exchange for a few seconds of patience, the Pittsburgh Left allows traffic in both directions to move smoothly for the duration of the signal. Of course, the system only works if both drivers know about it. No doubt that’s why newcomers find it so vexing.

The Pittsburgh Left is a very efficient convention. On two-lane streets, turning left can block traffic as the turning car waits for an opening. And left-turn arrows are expensive and add time to each traffic light cycle. Far better to let the left turners — if there are any — go first. If there are no left turners, traffic just proceeds normally, not waiting on a left arrow.

Of course, if some idiot from the southern United States (yes, me again) is driving in Pittsburgh, that person expects to go when the light turns green. I blew my horn when two cars turned left in front of me. And people on the sidewalk yelled at me, as did the left-turning drivers. Once again, I didn’t know the rules, because I was a foreigner, at least in terms of the rules of the road in Pittsburgh.

Actually, it’s worse than that. The Pittsburgh Left is technically illegal, according to the Pennsylvania Driver’s Handbook (p. 47): “Drivers turning left must yield to oncoming vehicles going straight ahead.” The written rules, the gamer rules, appear to endorse one pattern of action. But the actual rules, the ones you have to travel around to learn, may be quite different. Real rules are not written down, and the people living in that rule system may not understand either the nature or effects of the rules. It is very difficult to change conventions, because they represent the expectations people have developed in dealing with each other over years or decades.

Hayek understood this clearly, and argued for what I have called the “world traveler” conception over what I have called the “gamer” conception of rules and laws. As Hayek said in 1988, in The Fatal Conceit:

To understand our civilisation, one must appreciate that the extended order resulted not from human design or intention but spontaneously: it arose from unintentionally conforming to certain traditional and largely moral practices, many of which men tend to dislike, whose significance they usually fail to understand, whose validity they cannot prove, and which have nonetheless fairly rapidly spread by means of an evolutionary selection — the comparative increase of population and wealth — of those groups that happened to follow them.… This process is perhaps the least appreciated facet of human evolution.

Posted in Economics, Policy | 4 Comments »

Standing on the shoulders of jerks

January 31st, 2019

Eric Weinstein discusses the origin of the Intellectual Dark Web:

Posted in Policy | 2 Comments »

Widespread use would provide an entire new category for the Darwin Awards

January 31st, 2019

The Four Thieves Vinegar Collective is a volunteer network of anarchists and hackers developing DIY medicines:

Four Thieves claims to have successfully synthesized five different kinds of pharmaceuticals, all of which were made using MicroLab. The device attempts to mimic an expensive machine usually only found in chemistry laboratories for a fraction of the price using readily available off-the-shelf parts. In the case of the MicroLab, the reaction chambers consist of a small mason jar mounted inside a larger mason jar with a 3D-printed lid whose printing instructions are available online. A few small plastic hoses and a thermistor to measure temperature are then attached through the lid to circulate fluids through the contraption to induce the chemical reactions necessary to manufacture various medicines. The whole process is automated using a small computer that costs about $30.

To date, Four Thieves has used the device to produce homemade Naloxone, a drug used to prevent opiate overdoses better known as Narcan; Daraprim, a drug that treats infections in people with HIV; Cabotegravir, a preventative HIV medicine that may only need to be taken four times per year; and mifepristone and misoprostol, two chemicals needed for pharmaceutical abortions.

[...]

As for the DEA, none of the pharmaceuticals produced by the collective are controlled substance, so their possession is only subject to local laws about prescription medicines. If a person has a disease and prescription for the drug to treat that disease, they shouldn’t run into any legal issues if they were to manufacture their own medicine. Four Thieves is effectively just liberating information on how to manufacture certain medicines at home and developing the open source tools to make it happen. If someone decides to make drugs using the collective’s guides then that’s their own business, but Four Thieves doesn’t pretend that the information it releases is for “educational purposes only.”

[...]

The catalyst for Four Thieves Vinegar Collective was a trip Laufer took to El Salvador in 2008 when he was still in graduate school. While visiting a rural medical clinic as part of an envoy documenting human rights violations in the country, he learned that it had run out of birth control three months prior. When the clinic contacted the central hospital in San Salvador, it was informed the other hospital had also run out of birth control. Laufer told me he was stunned that the hospitals were unable to source birth control, a relatively simple drug to manufacture that’s been around for over half-a-century. He figured if drug dealers in the country were able to use underground labs to manufacture illicit drugs, a similar approach could be taken to life-saving medicines.

This doesn’t seem wise:

Eric Von Hippel, an economist at MIT that researches “open innovation,” is enthusiastic about the promise of DIY drug production, but only under certain conditions. He cited a pilot program in the Netherlands that is exploring the independent production of medicines that are tailor made for individual patients as a good example of safe, DIY drug production. These drugs are made in the hospital by trained experts. Von Hippel believes it can be dangerous when patients undertake drug production on their own.
“If one does not do chemical reactions under just-right conditions, one can easily create dangerous by-products along with the drug one is trying to produce,” von Hippel told me in an email. “Careful control of reactor conditions is unlikely in DIY chemical reactors such as the MicroLab design offered for free by the Four Thieves Vinegar Collective.”

His colleague, Harold DeMonaco, a visiting scientist at MIT, agreed. DeMonaco suggested that a more rational solution to the problems addressed would be for patients to work with compounding pharmacies. Compounding pharmacies prepare personalized medicine for their customers and DeMonaco said they are able to synthesize the same drugs Four Thieves is producing at low costs, but with “appropriate safeguards.”

“Unless the system is idiot proof and includes validation of the final product, the user is exposed to a laundry list of rather nasty stuff,” DeMonaco told me in an email. “Widespread use [of Four Thieves’ devices] would provide an entire new category for the Darwin Awards.”

Posted in Policy, Science, Technology | 3 Comments »

Rising Sun Victorious

January 30th, 2019

Rising Sun Victorious presents ten counterfactuals of Japan winning in WW2 — or getting a negotiated settlement:

“Hokushin: The Second Russo-Japanese War” by Peter Tsouras has Hitler pressuring the Japanese with a full court press before Operation Barbarossa in 1941. The Soviets stripped out their best divisions from Siberia in summer 1941 which are lost in great encirclements at Kiev and outside of Moscow. The Japanese have a successful offensive from Manchuria and seize a part of the Soviet Union’s Far East.

“Be Careful What You Wish For: The Plan Orange Disaster” by Wade G. Dudley. The Japanese don’t attack Pearl Harbor but the Philippines. The U. S. Pacific Fleet charges headlong to destruction under Adm. Kimmel. This is one instance where Japan could have possibly achieved its goals.

“Pearl Harbor: Irredeemable Defeat” by Frank R. Shirer. Nagumo sends in the third wave on the attack on Pearl Harbor. Much more damage including the fuel tanks and the channel blocked by the sunken U. S. S. Nevada. Pearl Harbor is unusable as a base until April 1942.

“Coral and Purple: The Lost Advantage” by James R. Arnold. The Battle of the Coral Sea caused Adm. Yamamoto to make changes to the upcoming offensive against Midway Island.

“Nagumo’s Luck: The Battles of Midway and California” by Forrest R. Lindsey. The Battle of Midway goes badly against the Americans. MacArthur is recalled from Australia to take command of the Western Defense Zone. The Battle of California has the Americans dealing with a Japanese raid on aircraft manufacturing plants in California. This was an imaginative scenario.

“Samurai Down Under: The Japanese Invasion of Australia” by John H. Gill. The Japanese successfully take the island of New Guinea and decide to take Australia out of the war by direct invasion. I enjoyed this one quite a bit.

“The Japanese Raj: The Conquest of India” by David C. Isby. The Japanese attack India after successfully taking Burma. British control collapses holding on to Pakistan only.

“Guadalcanal: The Broken Shoestring” by John D. Burtt. Adm. Halsey does not replace Adm. Ghormley as commander of naval forces at Guadalcanal in fall 1942. Ghormley loses his nerve and evacuates the Marines from the island.

“There are Such Things as Miracles: Halsey and Kurita at Leyte Gulf” by Christopher J. Anderson. The Japanese pull out a miracle victory at the Battle of Leyte Gulf. Japan is able to negotiate a peace where it keeps Indochina, Manchuria, and most of China.

“Victory Rides the Divine Wind: The Kamikaze and the Invasion of Kyushu” by D. M. Giangreco. The invasion of Japan has Pearl Harbor II with the destruction of thirty-eight Liberty ships, a score of destroyers, and twenty-one other vessels within sight of the invasion beaches by kamikazes. There is a Cold War with Japan going on in 1965.

As one reviewer puts it, “The overriding theme of the book is that, with very few exceptions, an Allied victory was inevitable once the US manufacturing juggernaut was fully mobilized.” In retrospect, the key was not waking the sleeping giant and filling him with a terrible resolve.

Posted in War | 13 Comments »

Pay attention to all of the following body language

January 29th, 2019

Greg Ellifritz shares the crime prevention chapter from his upcoming third-world travel book, where he discusses pre-assault indicators:

Pay attention to all of the following body language:

Hands – Hands above the waistline and or being clenched are a warning sign. Look at people who are calm and are not angry. Their hands will be relaxed and generally below waist level. When the hands come up, get ready for action. Any time a person is hiding his hands may indicate that he is in possession of a weapon.

Lower body – Standing in a bladed stance with one leg (and the same side hand) back and out of view is a sign that the person has hostile intentions or is concealing a weapon. Standing on the balls of the feet indicates that the person is getting ready for rapid movement, which may also precede an attack

Arm movements – Wide gesticulating outside the framework of the body is threat and posturing. It’s the sign of a person who is trying to blow off some steam. Gestures inside the body frame and pointing are more closely associated with violent actions.

Breathing – As adrenaline spikes, the criminal’s breathing rate will increase. If you notice someone who appears to be “panting,” it should be a warning sign. Likewise, it should also be a warning when you see or hear someone take a big, deep, breath or audibly sigh. The criminal may be taking these actions to consciously slow his breathing rate and calm down so that he doesn’t prematurely alert you to his plans.

[...]

Masking Behaviors, Pacifying Actions and “Grooming Cues” – One of the really obvious pre-assault indicators is the unnecessary touching of the face, neck, or upper body. Described using different terms depending on the expert cited, these actions all have the same purpose, to “hide” psychological discomfort.

As criminals are evaluating you as a victim or planning their attack, their stress levels rise. The criminals don’t want to get hurt and they don’t want to get caught. The idea of pain, death, or imprisonment amps up the criminal’s fear and baseline level of stress. They know this is happening and subconsciously fear that you will pick up on their nervousness and do something to prevent their successful commission of the crime.

The criminal doesn’t want you to see his psychological stress reactions, so he subconsciously “masks” them by covering his face, eyes, or neck.

[...]

“Target Glancing” – When a criminal wants to steal something from you, he has to figure out how to physically remove it from your protection. Sometimes that takes time. While the criminal is figuring out his plan of action, he will likely be staring at what he wants to take. This is called this “target glancing.”

Any time someone stares intently at some item (especially a valuable item) in your possession, assume that he is planning on stealing it. Immediately implement countermeasures to ensure that he won’t be able to proceed with the criminal activity he is planning. If you take immediate action, there is a good chance the criminal will become frustrated and move on to another victim.

“Looking Around” – Immediately prior to his attack, the criminal has to make sure that there is no one in the immediate area who can frustrate his plans. The criminal will take a quick look around to ensure there are no cops or security guards in the area. He may also be looking for cameras or escape routes. This indicator almost always occurs. If you are being approached by someone who displays a grooming cue and then looks left and right in a furtive manner, get ready. You are about to be attacked.

While we are discussing the direction that a criminal may look, I should also mention criminals often “check their tail.” They look behind themselves to see if anyone is following or watching. If you are observing someone and you notice frequent looks to the rear, you can safely assume that the person you are watching is a criminal, a cop, or a spy. You don’t want to have contact with any of those people.

Predatory Movement Patterns – Criminals targeting you will regularly move in a predictable fashion. Anyone attempting to correlate their movement with yours (following, paralleling, directly approaching in crowds) should be viewed as a danger. Running directly towards you is an obvious threat cue.

People who turn or look away when you notice them are worthy of your attention. A conspicuous lack of movement should also ping your radar. People who are sitting in parked cars without getting out should be watched suspiciously.

A sudden change in status (focusing of attention) – If someone is watching you then suddenly looks away, he is probably trying to hide his attention. Likewise if someone “locks in” on you with his eyes, you should be ready for a potential attack.

Posted in Crime | 3 Comments »

He regularly asks students to throw spears at him

January 28th, 2019

Anthropologists have long concluded that Neanderthals used their thick, heavy spears only at close range, because the academics could only throw those spears about 10 meters. What happens when athletes throw Neanderthal spears?

On a very cold January morning, in an athletic field in central England, Annemieke Milks watched as six javelin-throwers hurled a pair of wooden spears. Their target was a hay bale, “meant to approximate the kill zone of a large animal like a horse,” says Milks, an archeologist at University College London. And their spears were replicas of the oldest complete hunting weapons ever found — a set of 300,000-year-old, six-and-half-foot sticks found in a mine at Schöningen, Germany.

The athletes managed to throw their replicas over distances of 65 feet. That’s a far cry from modern javelin feats — the world record for men, set in 1996, is 323.1 feet. But it’s twice what many scientists thought that primitive spears were capable of. It suggests that, contrary to popular belief, early spear-makers — Neanderthals, or perhaps other ancient species like Homo heidelbergensis — could probably have hunted their prey from afar.

[...]

“The 10-meter distance was repeated over and over again, but not backed up with much evidence.” It came from an influential ethnographic review that considered the spear-throwing skills of many modern populations, but didn’t include adept groups like the Tasmanian and Tiwi peoples of Australia. And it was bolstered by studies and anecdotal reports in which spears were thrown by anthropologists—hardly a decent stand-in for a skilled Neanderthal hunter.

For example, John Shea, an archeologist at Stony Brook University tells me that he regularly takes his students into an athletic field and asks them to throw replica Schöningen spears at him. “If they hit me, I pledge to give them $20,” he says. “I’ve been doing this ‘experiment’ for 25 years and I’ve neither got so much as a scratch on me nor parted with any cash. The spears come sailing in so low and slow I can usually just step sideways out of the way, bat them away with a stick or, if I am feeling really cocky, catch them in mid-air.”

A German sport scientist and javelin-thrower named Hermann Rieder had more success: In a small study, he managed to hit targets from around 16 feet away and suggested that the spears were useful weapons at longer distances.

[...]

It’s sometimes said that heavy spears would slow mid-flight and hit their targets with dull thuds. But Milks found that the replicas slowed very little, and landed with a kinetic wallop comparable to projectiles launched by bows or spear-throwing tools.

But Steve Churchill, an anthropologist from Duke University, notes that the javelin-throwers only hit their target a quarter of the time, and less so at the furthest distances. He’s also unclear as to how many of those “hits” would have been strong enough to, say, penetrate an animal’s hide. In his own experience (and he freely admits that he’s not a trained thrower), Schöningen replicas wobble a lot and tend to strike targets at glancing angles. They might fly far, in other words, but do they fly true? “This is a very good study,” he says, but “I don’t see a lot here to convince me that the Schöningen spears were effective long range weapons.”

Milks counters that professional javelin-throwers go for distance, and aren’t trained to hit targets. Despite that, some of them clearly got the sense that the heavy spears behave unusually, vibrating along their axis and flexing on impact. The more experienced athletes compensated for this by putting spin on the spears. “That brought home how important it is to use skilled throwers,” Milks says. “What I really want to do now is to go to hunter-forager groups and have them show us these spears are capable of. They use spears from age 6, which is something I can’t replicate with javelin athletes.”

Posted in Science, Weapons | 9 Comments »

The one fierce volcano burst had satisfied the need of nature

January 28th, 2019

One of the best-named TV Tropes is the load-bearing boss — the big bad guy whose death causes his whole evil lair to collapse, for rather ambiguous reasons.

What I didn’t realize was that the original Dracula had just such an ending, but it was edited out:

As we looked there came a terrible convulsion of the earth so that we seemed to rock to and fro and fell to our knees. At the same moment with a roar which seemed to shake the very heavens the whole castle and the rock and even the hill on which it stood seemed to rise into the air and scatter in fragments while a mighty cloud of black and yellow smoke volume on volume in rolling grandeur was shot upwards with inconceivable rapidity.

Then there was a stillness in nature as the echoes of that thunderous report seemed to come as with the hollow boom of a thunder-clap – the long reverberating roll which seems as though the floors of heaven shook. Then down in a mighty ruin falling whence they rose came the fragments that had been tossed skywards in the cataclysm.

From where we stood it seemed as though the one fierce volcano burst had satisfied the need of nature and that the castle and the structure of the hill had sunk again into the void. We were so appalled with the suddenness and the grandeur that we forgot to think of ourselves.

This leaves no evidence of there ever having been a vampire.

Posted in Media | 1 Comment »

Throw out your used books

January 27th, 2019

You should simply throw out your used books, Tyler Cowen argues, instead of gifting them:

If you donate the otherwise-thrashed book somewhere, someone might read it. OK, maybe that person will read one more book in life but more likely that book will substitute for that person reading some other book instead. Or substitute for watching a wonderful movie.

So you have to ask yourself — this book — is it better on average than what an attracted reader might otherwise spend time with? Even within any particular point of view most books simply aren’t that good, and furthermore many books end up being wrong. These books are traps for the unwary, and furthermore gifting the book puts some sentimental value on it, thereby increasing the chance that it is read. Gift very selectively! And ponder the margin.

You should be most likely to give book gifts to people whose reading taste you don’t respect very much. That said, sometimes a very bad book can be useful because it might appeal to “bad” readers and lure them away from even worse books. Please make all the appropriate calculations.

Posted in Economics | 8 Comments »

They aren’t gaming the system

January 26th, 2019

Amazon isn’t just the world’s largest book retailer. It’s also a publisher:

When veteran book author Mark Sullivan tried to sell a World War II saga in 2015, eight New York book publishers rejected it. Then Amazon’s publishing arm scooped up Beneath a Scarlet Sky for an advance in the low five figures.

The novel was released in 2017 and featured on Amazon First Reads. The online promotion also is emailed each month to more than 7 million U.S. subscribers and exclusively showcases titles from Amazon Publishing.

“Wham, we get 300,000 downloads,” said Mr. Sullivan, whose title has sold more than 1.5 million print books, e-books and audio books. It was ranked No. 56 on USA Today’s top 100 best-seller list for all of 2018.

The Seattle-based giant houses 15 imprints in the U.S. under the Amazon Publishing banner, turning out everything from thrillers to romance novels to books translated from other languages. Amazon published 1,231 titles in the U.S. in 2017, up from 373 in 2009, the year it entered the $16 billion-a-year consumer book publishing business.

To promote these works, it has tools other publishers can only dream about owning, including Amazon First Reads and Kindle Unlimited, Amazon’s e-book subscription service. Together, they reach an estimated 10 million or more customers who can read offered titles with a few keystrokes.

“They aren’t gaming the system,” literary agent Rick Pascocello said. “They own the system.”

[...]

On Wednesday, 16 of the top 20 books on Amazon’s romance best-seller list were titles from its book-publishing arm or were self-published on Amazon’s platform.

[...]

Amazon commands some 72% of adult new book sales online, and 49% of all new book sales by units, according to book-industry research firm Codex Group LLC.

[...]

Amazon has more than 100 million Amazon Prime members world-wide, and its U.S. subscribers can pick one title from Amazon First Reads free each month. Non-Prime members pay $1.99.

On Jan. 2, Amazon First Reads sent an email to members about six new titles from Amazon Publishing. By early evening, those books were the top six on Amazon’s Kindle store e-book best-seller list.

The power extends to Amazon’s $9.99-a-month Kindle Unlimited e-book subscription service. The service enables subscribers to select as many as 10 e-books at a time. It had an estimated 4.6 million paid subscribers in June 2018, according to Codex. Amazon Publishing titles and Amazon’s self-published books get prominent display, industry executives said,

[...]

Industry trackers say Amazon is shrinking publishing revenue in adult fiction by releasing so many low-price books from Amazon imprints and its self-published authors. Publisher revenue from adult fiction fell 16% to $4.4 billion in 2017 from 2013, the Association of American Publishers said.

[...]

Mr. Hildick-Smith said the decline in revenue for fiction issued by traditional publishers coincided with the Kindle e-book store’s growing share of the overall adult book market—up 43% between 2013 and 2017—to a bit more than a quarter of the total market. E-books skew heavily to fiction, and much of that increase comes from books self-published on Amazon.

[...]

An Amazon spokesman said thousands of self-published authors in 2018 “earned more than $50,000, with more than a thousand surpassing $100,000 in royalties.”

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

It was the usual horror story

January 25th, 2019

I can’t say I know much about Mother Jones, but I was surprised to see them publish a “scary” look into the science of smoking pot:

It’s been a few years since Alex Berenson has “committed journalism,” as he likes to say. As a New York Times reporter, Berenson did two tours covering the Iraq War, an experience that inspired him to write his first of nearly a dozen spy novels. Starting with the 2006 Edgar Award-winning The Faithful Spy, his books were so successful that he left the Times in 2010 to write fiction full time. But his latest book, out January 8, strays far from the halls of Langley and the jihadis of Afghanistan. Tell Your Children is nonfiction that takes a sledgehammer to the promised benefits of marijuana legalization, and cannabis enthusiasts are not going to like it one bit.

The book was seeded one night a few years ago when Berenson’s wife, a psychiatrist who evaluates mentally ill criminal defendants in New York, started talking about a horrific case she was handling. It was “the usual horror story, somebody who’d cut up his grandmother or set fire to his apartment — typical bedtime chat in the Berenson house,” he writes. But then, his wife added, “Of course he was high, been smoking pot his whole life.”

Berenson, who smoked a bit in college, didn’t have strong feelings about marijuana one way or another, but he was skeptical that it could bring about violent crime. Like most Americans, he thought stoners ate pizza and played video games — they didn’t hack up family members. Yet his Harvard-trained wife insisted that all the horrible cases she was seeing involved people who were heavy into weed. She directed him to the science on the subject.

We look back and laugh at Reefer Madness, which was pretty over-the-top, after all, but Berenson found himself immersed in some pretty sobering evidence: Cannabis has been associated with legitimate reports of psychotic behavior and violence dating at least to the 19th century, when a Punjabi lawyer in India noted that 20 to 30 percent of patients in mental hospitals were committed for cannabis-related insanity. The lawyer, like Berenson’s wife, described horrific crimes — including at least one beheading — and attributed far more cases of mental illness to cannabis than to alcohol or opium. The Mexican government reached similar conclusions, banning cannabis sales in 1920 — nearly 20 years before the United States did — after years of reports of cannabis-induced madness and violent crime.

Over the past couple of decades, studies around the globe have found that THC — the active compound in cannabis — is strongly linked to psychosis, schizophrenia, and violence. Berenson interviewed far-flung researchers who have quietly but methodically documented the effects of THC on serious mental illness, and he makes a convincing case that a recreational drug marketed as an all-around health product may, in fact, be really dangerous — especially for people with a family history of mental illness and for adolescents with developing brains.

A 2002 study in BMJ (formerly the British Medical Journal) found that people who used cannabis by age 15 were four times as likely to develop schizophrenia or a related syndrome as those who’d never used. Even when the researchers excluded kids who had shown signs of psychosis by age 11, they found that the adolescent users had a threefold higher risk of demonstrating symptoms of schizophrenia later on. One Dutch marijuana researcher that Berenson spoke with estimated, based on his own work, that marijuana could be responsible for as much as 10 percent of psychosis in places where heavy use is common.

These studies are hardly Reagan-esque, drug warrior hysteria. In 2017, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine issued a report nearly 500 pages long on the health effects of cannabis and concluded that marijuana use is strongly associated with the development of psychosis and schizophrenia. The researchers also noted that there’s decent evidence linking pot consumption to worsening symptoms of bipolar disorder and to a heightened risk of suicide, depression, and social anxiety disorders: “The higher the use, the greater the risk.”

Given that marijuana use is up 50 percent over the past decade, if the studies are accurate, we should be experiencing a big increase in psychotic diseases. And we are, Berenson argues. He reports that from 2006 to 2014, the most recent year for which data is available, the number of ER visitors co-diagnosed with psychosis and a cannabis use disorder tripled, from 30,000 to 90,000.

Legalization advocates would say Berenson and the researchers have it backwards: Pot doesn’t cause mental illness; mental illness drives self-medication with pot. But scientists find that theory wanting. Longitudinal studies in New Zealand, Sweden, and the Netherlands spanning several decades identified an association between cannabis and mental illness even when accounting for prior signs of mental illness. In an editorial published alongside the influential 2002 BMJ study on psychosis and marijuana, two Australian psychiatrists wrote that these and other findings “strengthen the argument that use of cannabis increases the risk of schizophrenia and depression, and they provide little support for the belief that the association between marijuana use and mental health problems is largely due to self-medication.”

One of the book’s most convincing arguments against the self-medication theory is that psychosis and schizophrenia are diseases that typically strike people during adolescence or in their early 20s. But with increasing pot use, the number of people over 30 coming into the ER with psychosis has also shot up, suggesting that cannabis might be a cause of mental illness in people with no prior history of it.”

Malcolm Gladwell wrote a similar piece in the New Yorker, emphasizing how little we know about marijuana compared to legal drugs, and Berenson himself has an opinion piece in the New York Times, where he points out that many of the same people pressing for marijuana legalization argued that the risks of opioid addiction could be easily managed.

Posted in Crime, Policy, Science | 10 Comments »

No formal instruction was given

January 25th, 2019

Some of the most fascinating experiments in education occurred in the 1920s and ‘30s, Peter Gray notes, and almost nobody talks about them today:

Now here’s yet another bit of education research that nobody today talks about. It was published in 1930 in the academic journal School and Society under the title “An Experiment in Self-Directed Education,” by Herbert Williams, the teacher who carried out the research.

The practical problem Williams was trying to address was what to do about delinquent boys, who were frequently absent from school and were causing trouble in the community. For the sake of this experiment, he went through the Juvenile Court records for the city of population 300,000 and identified the “worst” boys he could find. To that group the school principals added a few more, whom they considered to be their “most serious problems.” He ended up with a group that “ranged in age from eight to nearly sixteen, in IQ from 60 to 120, and included colored, Polish, Hungarians, and native white Americans.”

The experiment was started in January, 1924, and lasted until the beginning of June that year. During that period the boys were excused from regular school classes and, instead, were assigned to a special room created for them in a technical school. The room was equipped with desks, blackboards, a large table, and a collection of books, including storybooks, nonfiction works, and textbooks for the various grades. The boys were given standard academic achievement tests in January and again, four months later, in May.

And now, I know no better way to convey what happened than to quote Williams directly:

No formal instruction was given. In the beginning of the experiment the children were told to keep busy and refrain from annoying any of the others. This was the only rule that was enforced. Otherwise, they were permitted to occupy themselves as they saw fit. The instructor [Williams] from time to time passed from one to another to see what was being done. One child might be busily occupied in copying a picture from one of the books; another might be reading a fairy story; another occupied with a problem in arithmetic; another reading a history; others might be looking up places on a geography map; and still others would be studying about some machinery.

Whenever a child was found manifesting an interest in some particular thing, opportunity and encouragement were given him to develop that interest…The child with an interest and aptitude for mechanical work was given an opportunity to do this sort of work in the high-school machine shop. The same was true for those interested in automobile mechanics, woodworking, printing and the like. Arrangements were made for recreation at the neighborhood YMCA…

Each child was told of his accomplishments on the achievement test and encouraged to make up for any deficiencies, but he was not forced to devote his time to these. It was a revelation to the writer how these children turned naturally from one subject to another. A boy might spend an entire day on some book that he was reading. The next day he might devote to arithmetic. One 10-year-old became interested in working square root problems and worked all of these he could find in the arithmetic book. A colored boy became interested in history and read all the histories we could supply. His accounts of interesting historical events kept the entire group keenly interested as he related them. Whenever one of the boys found something in his reading which he felt would prove interesting he was permitted to tell it to the group. However, they were not required to pay attention to the speaker if they wanted to continue what they were doing.

Many of the boys went to the blackboard to work arithmetic problems, primarily for the activity involved. They made up certain games involving arithmetic processes… For example, two or more boys would start at a given signal to add by seventeens to a thousand. The rivalry was often intense, and for some of the boys the increase in speed and accuracy in the fundamentals was striking. The reports of the various boys on interesting material read would stimulate other boys to read the same thing or something of like nature. It is quite possible, too, that the desire to obtain recognition from their fellows motivated them to do tasks that would not have been otherwise attempted.

Although a total of twenty-six boys were in attendance in this special experimental group for shorter or longer periods, only thirteen were present for both the January, Form A, and May, Form B, Stanford Achievement Tests. This was due to out-of-school adjustments, transfers and other causes. Social adjustment was given first importance, and completeness of the experimental records was not allowed to prevent placing a boy on a farm, for example, if this met a pressing need.

Here are the results from the achievement tests:

Over the 4 months period of this experiment, the thirteen children gained an average of slightly over 15 months in language age, 14 months in arithmetic; 11 months in reading; 11 months in science; and 6 months in both history and literature. By the end of the experiment all of these children were above grade level overall. The three boys who showed the least gains were also the three who, for reasons of health or family problems, were most often absent from the group. The average gains for the ten students who were regularly present were 17.4 months for language and arithmetic; 15.8 months for science; and 15.5 months for reading.

Posted in Education | 7 Comments »

Your dominant frequency is how many times per second your brain pulses alpha waves

January 24th, 2019

Magnetic EEG/ECG-guided Resonant Therapy, or MeRT, aims to return a person’s brain to the beat of its natural information-processing rhythm, or its dominant frequency:

Your dominant frequency is how many times per second your brain pulses alpha waves. “We’re all somewhere between 8 and 13 hertz. What that means is that we encode information 8 to 13 times per second. You’re born with a signature. There are pros and cons to all of those. If you’re a slower thinker, you might be more creative. If you’re faster, you might be a better athlete,” Won says.

Navy SEALS tend to have higher-than-average dominant frequencies, around 11 or 13 Hz. But physical and emotional trauma can disrupt that, causing the back of the brain and the front of the brain to emit electricity at different rates. The result: lopsided brain activity. MeRT seeks to detect arrhythmia, find out which regions are causing it, and nudge the off-kilter ones back onto the beat.

“Let’s just say in the left dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex, towards the front left side of the brain, if that’s cycling at 2 hertz, where we are 3 or 4 standard deviations below normal, you can pretty comfortably point to that and say that these neurons aren’t firing correctly. If we target that area and say, ‘We are going to nudge that area back to, say, 11 hertz,’ some of those symptoms may improve,” says Won. “In the converse scenario, in the right occipital parietal lobe where, if you’ve taken a hit, you may be cycling too fast. Let’s say it’s 30 hertz. You’re taking in too much information, oversampling your environment. And if you’re only able to process it using executive function 11 times per second, that information overload might manifest as anxiety.”

If the theory behind MeRT is true, it could explain, at least partially, why a person may suffer from many mental-health symptoms: anxiety, depression, attention deficits, etc. The pharmaceutical industry treats them with separate drugs, but they all may have a similar cause, and thus be treatable with one treatment. That, anyway, is what Won’s preliminary results are suggesting.

“You don’t see these type of outcomes with psychopharma or these other types of modalities, so it was pretty exciting,” he said.

There are lots of transcranial direct stimulation therapies out there, with few results to boast of. What distinguishes MeRT from other attempts to treat mental disorders with electrical fields is the use of EEG as a guide.

Posted in Fitness, Science | No Comments »

A math-schooled mind is a chloroformed mind