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Archive: OTHER

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Clever Ad

I'm not a big fan of advertising, to say the least; I haven't accepted any for this site, and probably won't. At the same time, however, I do appreciate the odd clever ad, an example of which (in my view) is seen above.

Peter Beinart, through the Schwarz lens

Beinart, editor of the New Republic, has surpassed even his own his usual low standards. And Jonathan Schwarz, pungent and amusing as always, has the best take.

For years Peter "Pe-Nart" Beinart has attempted to speak in complete gibberish. And he's gotten close—70% gibberish, 86% gibberish, 93% gibberish. But it's only in a recent Q & A with Kevin Drum about Beinart's book The Good Fight that he's reached his goal of 100% (reg. req.):

Jihadism sits at the center of a series of globalization-related threats, including global warming, pandemics, and financial contagion, which are powered by globalization-related technologies, and all of which threaten the United States more than other countries.

This is outstanding work. The only way his point could be improved would be to put it like this:

Gerbil narcolepsy sofa-bed detritus squanders Bigfoot. Crapulent snurf machine? Crapulent snurf machine knob knobbler! Groucho lithe koala traipsing noreaster flange mucus. Mithril acne fluffernutter shamus fling-ding-a-ling-doo!

Seriously: in what sense can jihadism be said to "sit at the center" of global warming, pandemics, and financial contagion? In what possible way can these all be claimed to be greater threats to the U.S. than to other countries?

Enjoy Jonathan's full post at his tinyrevolution

Specific concerns about genetically modified crops

Much of what is heard in the debate about the potential dangers of GM crops has been vague at best, so it's encouraging (or should I say discouraging?) to find a substantive study which sheds light on the issue.

Pioneer Hi-Bred's website boasts that their genetically modified (GM) Liberty Link corn survives doses of Liberty herbicide, which would normally kill corn. The reason, they say, is that the herbicide becomes "inactive in the corn plant." They fail to reveal, however, that after you eat the GM corn, some inactive herbicide may become reactivated inside your gut and cause a toxic reaction. In addition, a gene that was inserted into the corn might transfer into the DNA of your gut bacteria, producing long-term effects.

[snip]

Liberty herbicide (also marketed as Basta, Ignite, Rely, Finale and Challenge) can kill a wide variety of plants. It can also kill bacteria, fungi and insects, and has toxic effects on humans and animals. The herbicide is derived from a natural antibiotic, which is produced by two strains of a soil bacterium. In order that the bacteria are not killed by the antibiotic that they themselves create, the strains also produce specialized enzymes which transform the antibiotic to a non-toxic form called NAG (N-acetyl-L-glufosinate). The specialized enzymes are called the pat protein and the bar protein, which are produced by the pat gene and the bar gene, respectively. The two genes are inserted into the DNA of GM crops, where they produce the enzymes in every cell. When the plant is sprayed, Liberty's solvents and surfactants transport glufosinate ammonium throughout the plant, where the enzymes convert it primarily into NAG. Thus, the GM plant detoxifies the herbicide and lives, while the surrounding weeds die.

The problem is that the NAG, which is not naturally present in plants, remains there and accumulates with every subsequent spray. Thus, when we eat these GM crops, we consume NAG. Once the NAG is inside our digestive system, some of it may be re-transformed back into the toxic herbicide. In rats fed NAG, for example, 10% of it was converted back to glufosinate by the time it was excreted in the feces. Another rat study found a 1% conversion. And with goats, more than one-third of what was excreted had turned into glufosinate.

Such problems are potentially quite serious, and if you are interested in your health and that of your family, I'd recommend reading the full article at the organic consumers website

Don't Mess with Jack!

Jack, a 15lb. orange and white cat, is apparently both territorial and tough. He's pictured above admiring his handiwork, having chased a black bear – which had made the mistake of encroaching on Jack's yard – up a tree!

Read the full account at Digby's blog

Bye Bye chains?

When I was a kid (oh, around 30 years ago), I was drawn to the (then) new BMW shaft-driven motorcycles. Not because I was technically sophisticated enough to understand them fully, but because they made a very different – and to my ear much more pleasing – sound than the ubiquitous chain-driven models. There are obviously many other advantages to shaft-driven bikes, and it's a bit surprising that it's taken this long for the technology to be adapted to bicycles. It's happend, though, and it will be quite interesting to see how long it takes before dirty bicycle chains become a thing of the past.

A U.K. company called Zero Cycles has them in production

Famous author, minor actor, excellent blogger

That's a recipe for a fine post, if ever I've seen one, and your chef, in this case, is Neddie Jingo.

The job, which, I liked to joke acidly, paid in the "high four figures" (this in New York City in the mid-Eighties -- not a fashionable time or place to be church-mouse-poor), was as a recording engineer for the Talking Books division of the American Foundation for the Blind. For four ninety-minute sessions a day, I would run a tape machine (marvelous old MCI mono jobs, quarter-inch tape) and follow along in the text as a narrator read a book aloud. In essence, I was the producer for the sessions, making sure no text was skipped, correcting pronunciation, researching foreign terminology, and offering only occasionally welcome advice on line-readings. To boil it down further, I was paid to read books all day. Not a half-bad gig.

The readers at AFB weren't your volunteers or your off-the-street hacks. The money AFB saved on paying their engineers was lavished opulently on them instead. Quite a few of them were among the top voiceover talents of their day, and even today I still hear their velvet pipes over commercials and films.

One such gifted reader was Patrick Horgan, a stage and television actor of amazingly wide experience -- he played a Nazi on an episode of Star Trek: TOS, had long-running roles on the soaps The Doctors and The Guiding Light, had a part in the original Thomas Crown Affair. If you've ever watched the great Woody Allen flick Zelig, for which he provided narration, you'll have experienced the wonderfulness of his plummy accent, so posh it verges on parody. A true Renaissance man, Horgan was also renowned in the world of James Joyce scholarship, and was considered quite a big noise among the devotees of Arthur Conan Doyle and Sherlock Holmes in particular -- he played Holmes onstage on numerous occasions and was a fixture in the world of Sherlockiana.

Horgan could be irascible with the hired help, if they slowed the session down by fumbling a tape or stopping the proceedings for some triviality. Because I was very good at my job, I think he enjoyed working with me. Once, owing to his expertise in Joyce, he was given both Finnegans Wake and Richard Ellman's magisterial Joyce biography to narrate, and as I enjoyed some seniority among the plebes, I leaned on the boss to slip me those sessions. Looking back on my life now, I can say that those months were unquestionably a high-water mark for me, even if I couldn't afford a new shirt.

Once during a break in those sessions, we chatted of this and that while I rewound a tape. He began to tell me of a research project he had embarked on, a "detective story" that he was unraveling to his enormous enjoyment. It was his contention that Arthur Conan Doyle, a known prankster who, it has been famously suggested, was the agent behind the Piltdown Man hoax, commited his greatest prank of all when he killed off Sherlock Holmes in 1893 and then resurrected him in 1903. Horgan's belief, which he based on evidence he'd found in the Holmes stories, novels and plays themelves, was that Doyle had always intended to kill off Holmes and resurrect him, and that he had planted clues as to this fact in the Holmes stories both before and after the Hiatus, as a hint to his readers, an invitation to use Holmes' "methods" to embark on a detective story of their own.

One of my life's great regrets is that I didn't immediately invite Horgan to a pub, buy him a beer or three, and prod him further on this audacious idea. In my stupid youthful shyness I didn't think Horgan would have accepted such an invitation from one so insignificant as I -- and besides, I couldn't afford a beer for myself, let alone a few for him.

Read Neddie's full post here

The Athlete as Artist

No matter which game is being played, it's hard not to be inspired by the beauty of an athlete so graceful that the line between sport and art becomes blurred. In baseball, one such player is Torii Hunter. From today's NY Times:

Before the Minnesota Twins' Torii Hunter hears the crack of the bat, before he starts his sprint and times his jump to steal one more home run from one more exasperated hitter, he drops to his knees. Hunter kneels during batting practice, and as each ball flies overhead, he tries to visualize where it will land. "If I'm right," Hunter says, "I'm ready." The Arkansas native started as a shortstop at Pine Bluff High, but his coach saw that Hunter's quickness, leaping ability and hand-eye coordination made him a natural for center field. Hunter, nicknamed Spiderman, has patrolled center ever since, winning Gold Glove awards for the past five years while filling highlight shows with his spectacular grabs. Only six outfielders in the past decade have had 420 putouts or more in one season. Hunter, 30, has done it twice. According to Steve Hirdt, executive vice president of the Elias Sports Bureau, the official statistician of Major League Baseball, this means that Hunter has a rare combination of range and speed. "Baseball can be enjoyed on different levels," Hirdt says, "one of which is statistical and one of which is artistic." Hunter, he says, "feeds into both."

Read Lee Jenkins' full piece here

Wind Turbines

The U.K. is further along in the development and use of wind power than most countries. It should come as no surprise, then, to learn that some of the most creative companies serving that industry are U.K.-based. quietrevolution, Ltd is one such company, and they've developed a really pleasing, simple, turbine design.

Yes, quite

"Listen, strange women lyin' in ponds distributin' swords is no basis for a system of government. Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony."

Monty Python and the Holy Grail

Incarceration Rates: A Visual Aid

Thanks to Kieran at Crooked Timber (at which there are also some interesting comments on thread below the post)

Frederica Krueger

My friend Abbas, editor of the excellent site 3 Quarks Daily, has written a fine, amusing piece on his new cat, Freddy.

Here's the funny thing: despite her fiercely feral, violent tendencies, Freddy was just so beautiful that I fell in love with her. To echo Nabokov's Humbert Humbert speaking about another famous pubescent nymphet: Ladies and Gentlemen of the Jury, it was she who seduced me! As Freddy got more used to us, it was as if she could not decide whether to try and eat us, or be nice. She started oscillating between the two modes, attacking and then affectionately licking my hand, then attacking again... But it was precisely the graceful, lean, single-minded perfection of her design as a killing machine that I could not resist. Like a Ferrari (only much more impressive), she was clearly built for one thing only, and therein lay her seductive power.

Read the full post here

"unfortunate coincidence"? (Experts in what, exactly?)

A Melbourne university has emptied the top floors of one of its buildings after a spate of brain-tumour cases were reported during the past month. Most affected staff worked on the top floor, raising fears that cell-phone masts on top of the building are responsible. But experts say it is far more likely to be an unfortunate coincidence.

Since mid-April, five staff from the business school of the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) University have reported developing brain tumours. Two other cases have been reported since 1999. Of the seven, two are malignant and five benign.

"We suspect there might be other cases, but these haven't been confirmed," says National Tertiary Education Union representative Matthew McGowan, who adds that the union and the university have received phone calls and e-mails from additional staff reporting health concerns.

Five of the seven staff worked on the top floor, and all except one have worked in the building for a decade, mostly on the top level. Some staff are concerned that mobile-phone-transmitter towers on top of the building are to blame.

"It is too much of a coincidence to simply be chance," says McGowan. The university has offered staff on the two top floors alternative office space while it carries out a two-week investigation.

Read the full article at Nature.com (Thanks to 3Quarksdaily)

Smog-Eating Cement? Now that's creative

(ANSA) - Milan, May 16 - An Italian company is releasing a revolutionary 'smog-eating' cement product capable of reducing urban pollution by over 40% .

After 10 years of research, development and testing, Italcementi is putting TX Active on the market. It can be applied to road surfaces or building exteriors .

This cement-based compound has a special chemical composition that enables it to absorb pollutants produced by cars, factories, household heating and city life in general .

Italcementi claims the product has massive potential for major cities struggling with smog, the cause of a range of ailments - some fatal .

Tests on a busy road in the town of Segrate, near Milan, for example, showed it slashed the levels of key pollutants like nitrogen dioxide and carbon monoxide by 40-65% .

Read about it here

Aids in Africa: 12 Million Orphans

blow-up of the print at the bottom of the page:

Shunted to the background, as we deal at home with the disastrous consequences of the Bush Administration policies, is the almost incomprehensible horror of the AIDS crisis in Africa. The Independent (UK) has a special "Red" edition out today which was edited by Bono, and brings into focus the stunning scope of the human tragedy which continues to unfold before us.

* Sub-saharan Africa is home to 10 per cent of the world's population and 60 per cent of the world's Aids population.

* Right now in Nigeria, there are 1.8 million Aids orphans. There are 12 million across the continent.

* In South Africa, 4,000 teachers will die of Aids this year.

* 37.5 per cent of South Africans would keep it secret if a family member was diagnosed with HIV.

* 66 per cent of South Africans think they will never contract HIV. 41 per cent of those use condoms.

* 6,500 people died from Aids on this day last year

* There is at least one HIV-positive child in every classroom in Botswana

* 9,000 people across Africa are infected daily

* More than 15 million people in Africa have died of Aids, more than the highest estimates of the Rwandan genocide (800,000), Khmer rouge regime (up to 2 million), Holocaust (11 million) and Iraq war (up to 38,000) combined.

*Only 16 per cent of HIV positive people in Africa can hope to receive antiretroviral drugs.

Read the special edition by following one of these links:

front page/index

overview article

WOW: 5,000 chiLdren under 16 raped in the UK EVERY year

From Sunday's Guardian (UK):

Extraordinary figures showing the extent of the rape of children under 16 are revealed today. They reveal the number of victims is nearly 5,000 a year - yet only 7 per cent of the attackers are convicted.

It is the first time the Home Office has released such statistics because the ages of rape victims were recorded for the first time only in 2004-5. In that period, 974 girls aged under 13 and a further 3,006 under 16 were raped in England and Wales, while 293 boys under 13 and 320 aged under 16 were raped. Only one in 15 assailants - a total of 303 - were found guilty in court. Senior police officers believe actual numbers of rapes may be far higher because many children do not report the crime.

Extraordinary may be too mild; I find those numbers to be mind-boggling. And the report arouses my curiosity to learn about the equivalent U.S. numbers.

Read the full article here

remembrance of a Father

MY DAD WAS A CROP DUSTER. I was his flagman.

The plane flew a wide arc through the pale sky above the horizon. It took about a half mile to turn around. He straightened out the wings as he headed back toward the field, the plane wobbling slightly while he found the next rows of corn. Sometimes he put the plane in a slip, which was more like falling sideways than actually flying, until he got it lined up. Then the wings leveled out and he headed straight for me—engine howling, prop whistling, tank filled with 150 gallons of broad-spectrum insecticidal poison, coming my direction at one hundred miles an hour.

My arms were waving over my head, my right hand holding the wooden shaft of a white flag. He hit the button and the spray flew out, fogging the horizon behind him. The mist would undulate and settle on the cornfield like leaves falling on a calm fall day.

As soon as I was sure he had the right rows of corn, I would quickly turn and march off the next fifteen, three-foot-wide rows to be sprayed. Time slowed. Then the roar would pick up again as the plane rose and turned, and a few seconds later, I was once more the target, as if a giant insecticidal bull's-eye were marked on my fourteen-year-old chest—a scarlet "I."

Come and get me, Dad. Come and get me.

Back at the airport before we left, he reminded me, "Now, when you see me lined up, get the hell out of the way. Don't let the spray get on you. It's poison!" No matter how many times he said it, he always said it loud—Poison! He'd have a cigarette dangling out of his mouth, its crimson point bobbing and dipping as he spoke. Sometimes the words came out garbled until he grabbed the cigarette between two thick fingers and pulled it out. Poison!

Again and again the red-and-white plane would roar toward me, the whistle and the howl and the hissing of the spray combining in a mad furor. At the ends of each wing, the mist whipped into a vortex, dancing and curling before falling onto the green corn leaves. One second before the plane passed the end of the field, Dad would click the spray off, and the hissing immediately stopped. I would hear the insecticide sprinkling down like the lightest of spring showers. Sometimes I would close my eyes and turn my back as the mist settled. Depending on the wind, I could taste it.

Read the full piece, written by Ecologist Gary Wockner, at Orion online

Nigerian E-mail scam of the century

Truly amazing, and documented meticulously by Mitchell Zuckoff in the current New Yorker.

Worley scrolled through his in-box and opened an e-mail, addressed to “CEO/Owner.” The writer said that his name was Captain Joshua Mbote, and he offered an awkwardly phrased proposition: “With regards to your trustworthiness and reliability, I decided to seek your assistance in transferring some money out of South Africa into your country, for onward dispatch and investment.” Mbote explained that he had been chief of security for the Congolese President Laurent Kabila, who had secretly sent him to South Africa to buy weapons for a force of élite bodyguards. But Kabila had been assassinated before Mbote could complete the mission. “I quickly decided to stop all negotiations and divert the funds to my personal use, as it was a golden opportunity, and I could not return to my country due to my loyalty to the government of Laurent Kabila,” Mbote wrote. Now Mbote had fifty-five million American dollars, in cash, and he needed a discreet partner with an overseas bank account. That partner, of course, would be richly rewarded.

[snip]

Every swindle is driven by a desire for easy money; it’s the one thing the swindler and the swindled have in common. Advance-fee fraud is an especially durable con. In an early variation, the Spanish Prisoner Letter, which dates to the sixteenth century, scammers wrote to English gentry and pleaded for help in freeing a fictitious wealthy countryman who was imprisoned in Spain. Today, the con usually relies on e-mail and is often called a 419 scheme, after the anti-fraud section of the criminal code in Nigeria, where it flourishes. (Last year, a Nigerian comic released a song that taunted Westerners with the lyrics “I go chop your dollar. I go take your money and disappear. Four-one-nine is just a game. You are the loser and I am the winner.”) The scammers, who often operate in crime rings, are known as “yahoo-yahoo boys,” because they frequently use free Yahoo accounts. Many of them live in a suburb of Lagos called Festac Town. Last year, one scammer in Festac Town told the Associated Press, “Now I have three cars, I have two houses, and I’m not looking for a job anymore.”

Read the full post here

Behavioral Economics is Actually Interesting

Who knew?

A national chain of hamburger restaurants takes its name from Wimpy, Popeye’s portly friend with a voracious appetite but small exchequer, who made famous the line, “I’ll gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today.” Wimpy nicely exemplifies the problems of “intertemporal choice” that intrigue behavioral economists like David Laibson. “There’s a fundamental tension, in humans and other animals, between seizing available rewards in the present, and being patient for rewards in the future,” he says. “It’s radically important. People very robustly want instant gratification right now, and want to be patient in the future. If you ask people, ‘Which do you want right now, fruit or chocolate?’ they say, ‘Chocolate!’ But if you ask, ‘Which one a week from now?’ they will say, ‘Fruit.’ Now we want chocolate, cigarettes, and a trashy movie. In the future, we want to eat fruit, to quit smoking, and to watch Bergman films.”

In the March-April 2006 issue of Harvard Magazine, Craig Lambert covers this interesting topic very well. For a more digestible overview, try this excellent post at micromotives

Clemente

As it happens, I essentially analyze athletes (Thoroughbred racehorses) for a living. And while I have never been a big baseball fan, I did watch the sport with interest when I was young. Along with athletes from the other major sports, my observations of baseball players helped me, at that early stage, to develop my analytical skills.

Beyond statistics, and other obvious accomplishments, there was something which attracted me to certain players for which I did not, at the time, have a convenient label. I learned later that what I was seeing, or sensing, was class. Roberto Clemente was a top-class athlete. He also happened to be a beautiful, and elegant athlete, and one whose life story proved to be extraordinarily compelling. David Maraniss has written a new biography of Clemente, and George Will has reviewed it in the NY Times Sunday Book Review.

Most biographies of great athletes are tinged with melancholy, for three reasons. Athletic greatness is often achieved by a narrowing, even infantilizing, monomania about physical things. Sport compresses life's natural trajectory of ascent, apogee and decline. And often an athlete's life after sport is a long, dispiriting decrescendo. David Maraniss's splendid "Clemente: The Passion and Grace of Baseball's Last Hero" is different, for three reasons. Roberto Clemente was an unusually elegant, even noble, athlete. He was emblematic of a social transformation. And he had no life after baseball.

Read the full review here

Bursitis, and...Christ?

There's nothing like an attack of bursitis in the hip to make a fella feel like pinching strange gals and dancing the night away to a frantic disco beat. That Foxy Grandpa cane-shuffle, that bent-over Quasimodo posture with hand supporting the small of the back, that ascending the stairs leading only with the uninjured leg -- it all leads to a suffusion of youthful vigor and a devil-may-care attitude that snaps its fingers at mortality and whistles Dixie in the face of decrepitude.

I betook myself to Medical Science this afternoon, who shot the offending joint full of anapraxyzone, or perhaps it was calmodisodone, or -- memory begins to fail too these days -- hamsammicholol, bungalonozyl, or maybe rum and Coke.

Read on, and enjoy the consistently amusing Neddie Jingo

Photographic Memory? Apparently not

Kaavya Viswanathan has an excuse. In this morning's New York Times, the author of How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life explained how she "unintentionally and unconsciously" plagiarized upward of 29 passages from the books of another young-adult novelist, Megan McCafferty. Viswanathan said she has a photographic memory. "I never take notes."

This seems like as good an opportunity as any to clear up the greatest enduring myth about human memory. Lots of people claim to have a photographic memory, but nobody actually does. Nobody.

Well, maybe one person.

Read Joshua Foer's interesting article on the topic here, at Slate.com

Kenneth Galbraith

John Kenneth Galbraith, who died recently at the age of 97, was an interesting, accomplished man. My father – who would know much better than I – asserts that Galbraith was not a particularly original economic thinker (as opposed to, say, Milton Friedman) But at the same time, he concedes that Galbraith had many redeeming qualities, not the least of which was his willingness to openly point out what he saw as limitations in our capitalist system. For that very reason, he was never a favorite of conservatives. Let's hope that our current President – whether wittingly or not – doesn't wander much further down the path to which Galbraith was referring here:

If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.

Here's a link to an obituary in The Gaurdian (UK)

British healthier than U.S. counterparts

A new study suggests that people living in the U.K. are much healthier than those living here in the U.S. Here's an excerpt from the AP story:

Middle-aged, white Americans are much sicker than their counterparts in England, startling new research shows, despite U.S. health care spending per person that's more than double what England spends.

A higher rate of Americans tested positive for diabetes and heart disease than the English. Americans also self-reported more diabetes, heart attacks, strokes, lung disease and cancer.

I can't say that I'm at all surprised, but it is interesting to consider why it is the case. I travel to the U.K. every year, and, generally speaking, I find that the British lead less stressful lives, and, in spite of the stereotypes, I also find their diet to be better than that of the average American. There is far less processed food consumed in Britain, and high quality, locally produced fresh foods are much more readily available.