The Prestigious Internet

The March of Time, Daily Show Edition

2010-03-16T04:01:00.003-04:00

You can watch every episode of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart on their website. This got me thinking: I could construct an image demonstrating the eroding effects of time on the host. Sic transit gloria mundi, amigos. Just kidding. We'd be lucky to look this good when we're 57.

(click for larger)
Prestigious Internet tip for looking young: Don't sleep in a beef dehydrator.

Some people take a picture of themselves everyday in hopes of someday constructing such a time line. Fortunately for us, television personalities are photographed nearly every day. Sure beats working on it for 12 years.

Film Review: Survival International's "Mine"

2010-02-24T18:36:00.004-05:00

Survival International's new film "Mine: Story of a Sacred Mountain," tells the story of the Dongria Kondh, a tribal people in India trying to save their way of life from an uncaring international mining corporation, Vedanta Resources. While similar to the story of the blockbuster hit "Avatar," "Mine" is considerably lower budget. The special effects were not nearly as immersive as in "Avatar." Further, the antagonists are barely present in "Mine," merely being represented by a smoking aluminum refinery in a formerly fertile plain, and as construction equipment driven by faceless drivers. I would recommending seeing it, as it is not very long. My only real criticism is the unrealistically evil protagonist. Are we to believe that Vedanta Resources would really destroy an entire people just for aluminum? That verges on cartoonish super-villainy. Lastly, the film ends on a cliff-hanger. It remains to be seen what will become of the Dongia Kondh and their mountain. Find out more here.

Trouble in Hague City

2010-02-24T01:20:00.008-05:00

The 2006 elections in the Netherlands presented an interesting problem. For those of you unfamiliar with parliamentary democracies*, after the election the parties in the parliament must form a coalition that will govern the country. There are several costraints on these coalitions. The goal is, generally, to have the smallest coherent coalition that has a majority. Coherency involves not being so ideologically opposed that they cannot work together.
*Americans and people who live in one-party states, I suppose.

Den Haag

After the elections in the Netherlands on November 22, 2006, ten parties were represented in the Tweede Kamer der Staten-Generaal, the Dutch lower house, which is the house that votes on legislation. I made an attempt to order the parties roughly from left to right. This isn't precise, but it gives you an idea of the composition. (For instance, the Party for the Animals is officially neutral to left-right issues. But somebody called "The Party for the Animals" has got to be at least in the left half of the spectrum, right?) Note that historically, the Labour Party and the Christian Democratic Appeal have been the main center-left and center-right parties. Consider them the Democrats and the Republicans, if you are familiar with American politics. (I know that in reality both of those parties would be on the right half of Dutch politics, but they serve congruent conceptual roles.)

Election results by municipality. Green=Christian Democratic Appeal, Red=Labour Party, Yellow=Socialist Party, Blue=People's Party for Freedom and Democracy.

However, unlike in the American Congress in which the two major parties hold all or nearly all the seats, no party in the 150-seat body had a majority. The following is a list of the parties, roughly from left to right, and the number of seats they held.

Socialist Party (25)
GreenLeft (7)
Democrats 66 (3)
Labour Party (33)
Party for the Animals (2)
ChristianUnion (6)
Christian Democratic Appeal (41)
People's Party for Freedom and Democracy (22)
Reformed Political Party (2)
Party for Freedom (9)

It is also important to note where the center-point is. The ChristianUnion considers itself a centrist party. According to Wikipedia, they have "a conservative point of view on ethical issues, with more centre left ideas on economic, migration, social and environmental issues." Seventy-five seats are needed to form a government. Consider the following diagram:

(click for larger)

If the five left-wing parties could join the ChristianUnion, the could form a government with 76 seats. However, the ChristianUnion will not join a coalition without the Christian Democratic Appeal (which, in this case, was the largest party.)

So it would seem if the Christian Union would join a right-wing coalition of the Christian Democratic Appeal, People's Party for Freedom and Democracy, Reformed Political Party, and the Party for Freedom, they would have a majority. This coalition would have 80 seats. However, the Party for Freedom is considered so far to the right that the major parties refuse to coalition with them. Without their 9 seats, a center-right coalition would have only 71 seats, not a majority.**
**Also, the Reformed Political Party is too Calvinist to join any coalition. Ask them about it.

This means that the governing coalition must be a left-right-center coalition. Remember another goal of coalition building is to not have the coalition be larger than necessary. If the Labour Party and the Christian Democratic Appeal agreed to join a coalition, they would have 74 seats.*** They would have to convince one more party to join. But this party must be acceptable to the other coalition members.
***When the main left and right parties coalition, this is sometimes called a "Grand Coalition." Germany had this from 2005-09.

In the course of negotiation, further constraints developed. The Socialist Party would not join a coalition with the Christian Democratic Appeal, who wouldn't join a coalition with them either. The GreenLeft also rejected a coalition with the Christian Democratic Appeal. Democrats 66 said they would not work with the ChristianUnion. The ChristianUnion would not work with the People's Party for Freedom and Democracy over differences regarding immigration. (In case you were wondering, the Party for the Animals did say they would be happy to form a minority government with the Labour Party, the Socialist Party, and the GreenLeft.)

This left only a few possible coalitions. Try out combinations in your head. Remember the goal is to get 75.

What you will find is that the only coalition that works is the Christian Democratic Appeal, ChristianUnion, and Labour Party. This is the coalition that ended up forming the government. The Christian Democratic Appeal got 9 ministries, the Labour Party got 6, and the ChristianUnion got 2. Unsurprisingly, this coalition collapsed in February of 2010.

The reason I wrote about this is to demonstrate how coalition building can become an interesting problem of trying to create the minimum coalition that has a majority and no unacceptable members. Almost like a Sudoku. In this case, it was a bit of a "perfect storm" where a few more seats here or there would have made it simple. The next election looks even more complicated because another right-wing party, Trots op Nederland (Proud of the Netherlands), seems to be on track to get two seats, leading to 11 parties in parliament. Distressingly, polls show the Party for Freedom may be the second largest party. Below is a diagram of what a 14 February Peil.nl poll shows the result might be.

(Gelieve te klikken beeld om het groter te maken.)

UPDATE
For those of you following the Dutch elections on this blog, (and honestly, who isn't?) Peil.nl came out with a new survey on 14 March. I've recorded the results into the now familiar Prestigious Internet Dutch Election Bar Graph.

It looks a lot like the last poll, with D66 and the GreenLeft taking seats from the Socialist Party and the Labor Party, although not as much as in the previous poll. The 14 February poll had the Labor Party losing 18 seats, but the current poll has them losing only 6 seats. The Party of Freedom has grown at the expense (it seems) of the Christian Democratic Appeal, but the left-right balance seems unchanged.

The Next Economic Bubble

2009-12-06T20:53:00.012-05:00

We've all heard about the dot-com bubble and the housing bubble, but any time there is a speculative frenzy, a destructive bubble can develop. The next bubble, I postulate, is zombie movies. The chart below shows the number of zombie movies released per year since the genre was started in 1932. Below that is a detail of the same chart, only showing years since 1990. (Raw data from this page.)

(click for larger)

The zombie movie genre was birthed in 1932 with Victor Halperin's White Zombie. It remained a fringe artistic movement, with such titles as King of the Zombies (1941), Ed Wood's inspired, but budget-constrained Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959), and Ray Steckler's The Increidbly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies (1964). The genre's first breakthrough came in 1968 with George Romero's Night of the Living Dead, which grossed (get it?) $42 million with a budget of $144,000. (Adjusted for inflation, it grossed nearly $700 million.)

From the beginning of the zombie movie in 1932 through 2002, there were an average of 3.23 zombie movies per year. From 2003 through 2010, there were an average of 103.88 zombie movies per year. I think much of this growth was driven by the success of 2002's 28 Days Later, which grossed over $82 million, with a budget of only £5 million. Next, 2004 brought us a re-make of Dawn of the Dead, which grossed $102 million with a budget of $28 million. After that, the market was flush with zombie-dollars ready to fund the next 28 Days Later or Dawn of the Dead. Unfortunately, for every 28 Days Later, there were dozens more like Diary of the Dead (2008), which had a budget of $2 million and grossed $5 million, despite being directed by George Romero, who had 39 years of zombie movie experience.

Like all bubbles, this is doomed to crash. I think we see signs of it already, with studios pumping out dozens of zombie movies a year, like desperate gamblers, trying to make up losses. It isn't a perpetual motion machine, though. Eventually, the public's taste for zombie movies is going to fade, and somebody is going to be left holding the bag. My guess is it's going to be the US taxpayers.

UPDATE
Ryan asks: "Is your graph adjusted for total movie market output? It's only a meaningful statistic if viewed as a percentage of all releases." Good question, Ryan.

Ask, and you shall receive, that's what we say down here at the Prestigious Internet.

First, I had to find the total number of movies released each year. I went to IMDB and did a year by year search for movies. (It isn't a perfect data set, but it should show whether or not zombie movies are constituting a higher percentage of movie output.) That resulted in the following graph, which illustrates my point even better than I thought it would. In 2009, zombie movies constituted over 0.5% of all movies, up from 0.06% ten years earlier. Of the movies slated for 2010, over 2% are zombie movies.

Fig. 1.3: Zombie movies as a percentage of total movies, 1932-2010.

In the period 2003-present, which I call the Zombie Bubble, zombie movies averaged 0.62% of total movies, as opposed to 0.05% in the period 1932-2002. All years taken together, zombie movies averaged 0.11% of movies.

Also, here is a bonus graph of movie output over time.

Fig. 1.4: Movies per year, 1932-2009. Source: IMDB.com

UPDATE II
Newsweek irresponsibly pumps the bubble a little bit more. Haven't they seen Jon Stewart eviscerate Jim Cramer?

Cap and/or Trade

2009-12-05T23:50:00.015-05:00

Did anyone else notice how we went from "any climate change legislation is off the table" to "cap and trade or nothing else" without any public discussion? Rep. Boehner (R-Crazytown) says this to cap and trade legislation: "Hell, no!" For once, though, I think he may have a point. Annie Leonard, of Story of Stuff, has this to say about cap and scam:

She's so casual and well-spoken.
She must be right. (Transcript with references.)

Some environmental groups are behind this, though. Should we let perfect be the enemy of good? I think in this case this is another system that gives control of our world to corporate interests. Like allowing them to patent naturally occurring genes. Further, it hasn't been shown to decrease the bad stuff. Carbon emissions actually have gone up (or gone down) in Europe since they instituted cap and trade. (Remember when PGE left the Chamber of Commerce over the latter's opposition to cap and trade? What they didn't tell you is that under the current bill, utilities like PGE get free permits! This is true in Europe as well.)

Whenever I find myself agreeing with Sarah Palin on something, I pause to reconsider. Which is another part of how clever this plan is. No environmentalist wants to find themselves in the same camp as the pro-pollution crowd. Thankfully, some have seen through the (deliberate?) obfusation and are doing something. Common Dreams has a good article about it here.

Cap and trade worked for sulfur dioxide, though, which is the reason you haven't heard about acid rain in a while. (Acid rain levels are down 65% since 1976.) In addition to the government auctioning off fewer pollution permits, environmental groups have purchased more than 14,000 tons of sulfur dioxide permits, which is clever. (It's like a temperance advocate buying booze to keep it out of the hands of would-be imbibers. Except it makes sense.)

There are a couple differences between sulfur dioxide in the groovy 1990's and greenhouse gases today. In the 1990's, if you ran a coal plant, you could listen to Nirvana's latest album and install scrubbers (a technology that already existed), or switch to low-sulfur coal. Further, the sulfur market only a applied to a few hundred plants, not the entire economy. I stole those points from this article, by the pro-business Institute for Energy Research, so they are probably wrong.

Lastly, balance your view with this article from the generally respectable Grist in favor of cap and trade. As a bonus, they have not one, but two articles replying to "The Story of Cap and Trade." One of them compares it to a "circular firing squad." Now I'm really confused. A lot of this falls into a familiar scenario: Leonard argues against what cap and trade will likely be, while Grist defends what it could be, in its best incarnation. Both important sides to consider while you plant trees, make biochar, bicycle to work, and blockade coal plants.

(As a post-script, I've heard it alleged anti-environment lobbyists pay people to search the Internet for any article about global warming and post lies. I don't get many comments here, so any pro-pollution comments will be suspect. That seems reasonable.)

Bonus articles: Cap and trade will work, won't work, it depends, and won't work.

Happy Armistice Day

2009-11-10T23:35:00.004-05:00

Who are these? Why sit they here in twilight?
Wherefore rock they, purgatorial shadows,
Drooping tongues from jaws that slob their relish,
Baring teeth that leer like skulls' tongues wicked?
Stroke on stroke of pain,—but what slow panic,
Gouged these chasms round their fretted sockets?
Ever from their hair and through their hand palms
Misery swelters. Surely we have perished
Sleeping, and walk hell; but who these hellish?

—These are men whose minds the Dead have ravished.
Memory fingers in their hair of murders,
Multitudinous murders they once witnessed.
Wading sloughs of flesh these helpless wander,
Treading blood from lungs that had loved laughter.
Always they must see these things and hear them,
Batter of guns and shatter of flying muscles,
Carnage incomparable and human squander
Rucked too thick for these men's extrication.

Therefore still their eyeballs shrink tormented
Back into their brains, because on their sense
Sunlight seems a bloodsmear; night comes blood-black;
Dawn breaks open like a wound that bleeds afresh.
—Thus their heads wear this hilarious, hideous,
Awful falseness of set-smiling corpses.
—Thus their hands are plucking at each other;
Picking at the rope-knouts of their scourging;
Snatching after us who smote them, brother,
Pawing us who dealt them war and madness.

Lt. Wilfred Owen (1893-1918)
suggested soundtrack: Tom Waits - The Day After Tomorrow

Peak Everything

2009-11-10T23:19:00.003-05:00

The following image, from New Scientist, shows how long various resources will be depleted at their current rate. Uranium, for instance, will be gone in 59 years. You have 46 years to take advantage of zinc. If you want indium, you have only 13 years. 45 years for gold, 61 years for copper. Draw your own conclusions.

Little Red Henski and Dr. Ism

2009-08-25T23:21:00.001-04:00

Discuss.

On the Georgia Guidestones

2009-08-25T16:42:00.008-04:00

I read in Wired Magazine about a mysterious monument in Elberton, Georgia called the Georgia Guidestones. Read the article, but the story is that a mysterious man, using a pseudonym, came to Elberton in 1979 claiming to represent a mysterious group of secretive people, who wanted to build a Stonehenge-esque monument. The necessary 240,000 pounds of granite would be quarried in Elberton.

The monument was to be built to highlight certain astronomic features. A hole was to be drilled through which Polaris would always be visible, for instance. More interestingly, perhaps, was that on its eight sides, a message was to be carved in eight languages. The languages are English, Spanish, Swahili, Hindi, Hebrew, Arabic, Chinese, and Russian. A further message was written on the capstone in Babylonian, Classical Greek, Sanskrit, and Egyptian hieroglyphs.

The primary message, the one written in eight languages, was a list of ten principles, assumed to be a message to current and/or future people. They are

1. Maintain humanity under 500,000,000 in perpetual balance with nature.

2. Guide reproduction wisely - improving fitness and diversity.

3. Unite humanity with a living new language.

4. Rule passion - faith - tradition - and all things with tempered reason.

5. Protect people and nations with fair laws and just courts.

6. Let all nations rule internally resolving external disputes in a world court.

7. Avoid petty laws and useless officials.

8. Balance personal rights with social duties.

9. Prize truth - beauty - love - seeking harmony with the infinite.

10. Be not a cancer on the earth - Leave room for nature - Leave room for nature.

You might think a bizarre monument in the middle of nowhere wouldn't bother anyone. But in fact, some people were very upset by its message. Some wanted it to be torn down. Some even thought it was from a global conspiracy. People took most issue with the commandment to keep the human population at five hundred million. What sort of genocide did the mysterious designers have planned for nine-tenths of us?

Internet comments often give insight into people's reasoning. At Damn Interesting, their article on the Georgia Guidestones prompted the following comments:

"The number of dreadfully naive people who just don’t grasp the implications of this, and the other Elitist propaganda is mind numbing.

So [those agreeing with a lower population], you think that reducing the population to 5,00,000,000 is a good idea aye? So which of you enlightened ones are going to volunteer to join the other 4.5 Billion viruses on their way to the gallows? Hmmm? Oh, you THINK you are going to be one of the 10% allowed to stick around, huh? What makes you think you are going to be one of the anointed ones? And at the rate of only 1 out of every 10 surviving this needed change, I suppose it will be alright by you that your entire family and friends are summarily dispatched, all for the sake of mother earth?

...

The bottom line here is that the international “Elitists” who run this planet are in constant fear that the masses (like you) are going to wake up one day, revolt, and put an end to their rule (though it seems their fear is unfounded from the looks of things). That’s why they want to reduce the population by 90%. Why 90%…because the remaining 10% would be much easier to control, and pose much less of a risk. And, that 10% is an adequate number by their estimates needed to properly serve them, else they might have to do an honest day’s work themselves and get their own hands dirty, Satan forbid. And finally, what good is it to be a maniacal egocentric elite ruler if there is no one to actually rule? So yes dear viruses, you do have purpose."

"The thing is that a small group of people (a kind of higher race) places itself a memorial for the future. A future where 1.000 people (the master race) can live on the fat of the land and another 499.000 people (slave race) have to live under total control. The climate hoax and the fairy tale about 9-11 are just the means to the end. Who cares about 3000 dead people whenkilling them eases the way of reaching the target carved in guide stones?

If I had the possibility, I’d blow the guidestones up.

When will mankind wake up?"

"And somebody just went there and completely VANDALIZED it!!!

yeahhh!!!"

This commenter linked to another blog that covered the vandalizing. The vandal spray painted the following over the monument:

"Fuck you read this Rockefeller"

"You will not succeed"

"Jesus will beat u Satanist"

"No North American Union"

"Skull + Bones sucs dick"

"Death to the Globalist"

"CFR scum"

"Rockefeller sucs"

"Rothechild sucs"

"The elite want 80% of us dead, see #1"

"911 inside job"

"Obama iz a Muslim!"

"Death to the New World Order"

"No one world government"

"Fuck the NWO"

"Jesus will prevail"

Which is quite a litany. Apparently, Obama, Rockefeller, Satanists, Muslims, the Council on Foreign Relations, and Rothechild planned 9/11 in order to achieve a North American Union, in order to start a New World Order, in which 80% of people will die. And made a giant monument to their scheme in rural Georgia.

The blog writer said this of the vandalism:

"This is too cool. I just can say WOW!,"

"And some dude just vandalized it. Way too cool!!!,"

"There is a BIG problem on guide number 1. How do you reduce world population from 6.5 billion to 0.5 billion? There is no way of doing it, unless killing LOSTS of people."

Commenters on his (I assume it's a "he") blog said the following:

"No, this is not "way cool." People who are not aware of what is taking place in our country will see this and learn to equate criticism of globalism with juvenile criminal behavior. And that's exactly what the bankers want."

"Good on them, anything evil should be destroyed, I love that they vandalised it. The vandalism is nowhere as offensive as their Satanist filth. Destroy all their garbage."

"This is good to see. Freemasons temples around the world should also receive similar treatment. We need to let these vermin know we are onto them."

"Epic. Just epic! This is a non-violent way to fight the NWO and it sends a clear message to those involved in the deceit. I commend them for taking a pacifist path and thank them for new desktop backgrounds! Grats to the people responsible! I commend you as true Patriots!"

And so on. (Naturally, I didn't include any well-reasoned comments. But you can read them for yourself if you are so interested.) My favorite comment in this vein comes from the Wired article, in which a Guidestone critic says:

"The Guidestones are the New World Order's Ten Commandments. They're also a way for the elite to get a laugh at the expense of the uninformed masses, as their agenda stands as clear as day and the zombies don't even notice it."

This question of population reduction interests me, though. Suppose we wanted to reduce the population without a New World Order-engineered "vaccine" that causes sterility. There is a group called the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, for instance, which advocates reproducing below the replacement rate, so that the population will go down every generation. I decided to do some bad calculations to see how this would work. My intuition is if every two people produce one or fewer children, then each generation will be half the size of the generation before it. This seems like a easy way to reduce population, since we don't have to go through all the trouble of genetically engineering a pandemic virus, declaring martial law, rounding up all the dissidents in FEMA concentration camps, starting a North American currency union, etc.

Presently the world death rate is 8.3 per 1000. That means, every year, 8.3 out of a thousand people die. Since the population is 6.7 billion, that means 55 million people die a year. The birth rate is 20.3 per thousand. This means 136 million people are born every year.

I constructed a spreadsheet to see how different birth rates would affect the population in the years 2109, 2209, 2309, and 2509. This is somewhat naive, because, for instance, if people have fewer children, the average age of the population will go up, and older people have shorter life expectancies, meaning the death rate will go up. (For example, of you have two identically health populations, and one has half the people over 90, it will have a higher death rate than the population with fewer older people.) The point is, there are a lot of demographic effects I'm not taking into account.

If the birth rate stays at 20.3, and the death rate stays at 8.3, the population in 2109 will be 22 billion. In 2209, 72.8 billion. In 2309, 240 billion. In 2509, 2.6 trillion.

This calculation also ignores an disruptive technologies. Ray Kurzweil, for instance, predicts death will be cured in the next hundred years, so that would have an effect.

I did some experimental birth rates to see how the population would be in hypothetical future.

If the birth rate becomes 7.3, that is one more person dies than is born per thousand every year, you get the following time series:

2109: 6 billion

2209: 5.5 billion

2309: 5 billion

2509: 4 billion

It seems that this birthrate will not achieve the New World Order's population goal in 500 years. Next I tried a birthrate one half of the death rate.

2109: 4.4 billion

2209: 2.9 billion

2309: 1.9 billion

2509: 838 million

This made me think there was something wrong with my calculations, as that seems really slow. It would still not achieve the monument's target population in 500 years.

If the birthrate became one quarter of the death rate, we get the following:

2109: 3.6 billion

2209: 1.9 billion

2309: 1 billion

2509: 295 million

This time, we get 500 million in less than 500 years. My spreadsheet shows it will happen in 2425.

What sorts of draconian measures can we implement to reduce birthrates? As was proposed, we would require everyone to get a "vaccine" that actually makes them sterile. Or we could put fluoride in the drinking water, as this reduces sex drive. Both effective, but I think a cheaper proposal would involve increasing economic opportunities for women and increasing access to contraception. Several countries already have fertility rates below the replacement rate. Japan, for instance. Making contraception available would be a big help, as a study showed 38% of pregnancies are unintended.

Lesson: if you see anyone trying to encourage women to participate in the formal economy, they are probably an agent for the Georgia Guidestones-guided New World Order.

Explanatory note:

My population model took three inputs: Current population, birth rate per 1000, and death rate per 1000.

It calculated the number of people born that year by (current population/1000)(birth rate). It calculated the number of deaths as (current population/1000)(death rate). It then added the number of births to the current population, subtracted the number of deaths, and used this number as the starting population for the next year. It repeated the calculation from the year 2009 to 2509. As I said, this method is naive and misguided, but I think gives some idea of how populations grow or shrink over time. Someone who is math-wiser than I could easily write a formula that would output the population in any future year given these three inputs, rather than doing hundreds of calculations. But spreadsheets are so easy to use.

On the Ethics of Eating Roadkills

2009-07-01T01:49:00.004-04:00

Some of you may recall an earlier post, in which we acquired one accidentally-killed deer's worth of meat. At first I thought I might eat it, but decided against it. Richard Dawkins must have heard my dilemma, for he questions ethicist, animal rights advocate, and Australian Peter Singer on the ethics of eating roadkills, both non-human and human.

Singer agrees with Dawkins that there should be no ethical objection to either. Although, as my comrade Ken often says, dead animals aren't food. By trying to find exceptions to the rule, one normalizes the eating of dead animals. A truly accomplished vegetarian realizes that refraining from eating dead animals isn't a burden, as eating dead animals is entirely undesirable. Like punching a baby in the face. Conceivably, there could be a situation that warranted, or even required, baby face punching, but we don't seek out these situations to satisfy our latent baby punching desires. (Don't ask me to concoct such a scenario, I'm just saying it is logically possible.)

Once Ken and I walked by a trash can and saw a leather briefcase being thrown out. It had a tear that made in unacceptable as a vessel for fine legal briefs, or whatever it was it transported in its course of service. "Say, Ken," I asked, "we could take the leather off that briefcase and turn it into moccasins." "Or," Ken suggested, "we give it a proper burial."

(Want to hear an overly technical argument against second-hand leather? Let's say A types will only buy new leather and B types will buy new or used leather. C types will only buy used leather, thinking it is more ethical. However, as C types buy up the stock of used leather, this leads to B types buying more new leather, as used leather becomes scarce. A second effect is that it drives up the price of used leather, making new leather a better investment. "Sure", and A type might think, "that's a lot for that leather trench coat, but I know I will be able to recoup most of the price when I sell it on the second-hand market.")

I think the only situation that could warrant dead animal eating is survival situations, such as being stranded in the mountains in a snow storm and eating porcupine.

Mountain lore says that you never kill porcupines, except in survival situations. Being covered in spines, they lack defenses to skull-crushing blows with tree branches. This makes them easy targets. Mountain lore singles out porcupines, however, as they are high in fat. Eating only rabbits, the story goes, will actually kill you, through a process known as "rabbit starvation." Apparently, if you don't enough fat your body kills you. This is not the case with porcupine. Therefore, a wise mountain dweller lets the porcupine live so that it will be there when you need it.

This started out as an excuse to post the Dawkins/Singer video, and I seem to have gone on for a while. Some say this is what talking with me in real life is like.

Trip to a Digital Info-Shop

2009-06-29T22:24:00.010-04:00

Finding good anarchist propaganda is not always easy. It helps that fellow travelers tend to have a healthy disregard for copyright law. (Copyright? More like copywrong.) This usually goes both ways: people also release their own work under various copyleft licenses.

I found a corner of the Internet called Zabalaza Books. It is the website of a South African anarchist bookstore. I use store in a loose sense, because their website seems to have more books and pamphlets available for download than one could read.

This week I downloaded nine pamphlets from them. Here's a picture:

Anarchism: What it Really Stands For, by: Emma Goldman

Anarchist Economics, an alternative for a world in crisis, by: Abraham Guillen
I didn't get this one from Zabalaza, and mentioned it in an earlier post.

Collectives in Spain by: Gaston Leval

Community Control of the Poor Community: An Organising Manual for Community Activists, by: Lorenzo Kom'boa Ervin

Digger Tracts, 1649-50, edited by: Andrew Hopton
I also didn't get this from Zabalaza. About The Diggers.

The Freedom to Succeed: The Anarchist Collectives in the Countryside during the Spanish Civil War, by: Deirdre Hogan

How to Fire your Boss: A Workers' Guide to Direct Action, no author indicated
This short pamphlet explains the shortcomings of strikes, and outlines other industrial actions that can be taken. My favorite is the "good work strike," in which workers give customers better treatment, without charge. The pamphlet says "Workers at Mercy Hospital in France, who were afraid that patients would go untreated if they went on strike, instead refused to file the billing slips for drugs, lab tests, treatment, and therapy. As a result, the patients got better care (since time was being spent caring for them instead of doing paperwork), for free. The hospital's income was cut in half, and panic-stricken administrators gave in to all the workers' demands after three days."

Principles of Libertarian Economy, by: Abraham Guillen
This is excerpted from a different section of the same book, Economia Libertaria, as Anarchist Economics.

So, You're Out of a Job!, by: The IWW
This 1933 pamphlet encourages workers to join the IWW to organize a general strike, the goal of which is to have a 4 hour day and a 4 day work week, at the same pay as before. Interesting at least as an historical document, if not as an organizing platform. The argument is, in part, that mechanization of labor makes people obsolete, but it doesn't need to. If a machine makes a worker 12 times more efficient, the employer lays off 11 workers. The IWW thinks all workers should stay on, and work 12 times less, for the same pay, since they are producing just as much as before. I think instituting this regime may involve overthrowing capitalism.

The Spanish Revolution: Anarchism in Action, by: The Direct Action Movement (now Solidarity Federation)

Workers' Councils and the Economics of a Self-Managed Society, by: Cornelius Castoriadis
This pamphlet, originally published in 1957, lays out the groundwork for a self-managed society. Everyone would determine the conditions and means of their own job, plants would be run cooperatively, and industry delegates would coordinate the economy as a whole.
My favorite idea is the Plan Factory. In the Soviet Union's bureaucratic style of communism, planning was entirely not participatory. Stalin, using some form of fortune telling, determined the economy's goals. Under the system of workers' councils, the job of the Plan Factory would be to collect as much data about the economy as possible, and use computers to figure out a number of possible ways to meet people's priorities. Priorities would be voted on, as would the plan that was followed. The difference between the Soviet model and this one is that the Plan Factory has no authority over anyone, they serve the people (although the means and operation of the factory itself would be determined by its workers.) Castoriadis emphasizes throughout the pamphlet that an economy can be participatory only if people make decisions "in full knowledge of the relevant facts." So each plan would have to indicate what its implications are for the consumption levels and production targets of all workers.
A simplified exampled of a plan might say that in order to produce X cars, the steel plants would have to run Y shifts. Another plan might have few cars, and less work for steelworkers. Another plan might have fewer cars, but invest more in building new steel plants, so in the future they could produce more cars without undue burden on steel workers. And, in full knowledge of the relevant facts, the people choose which plan to follow.
There is also a complicated federal system of governance. Each factory elects a Factory Council and a General Assembly, as well as sends delegates to the Delegates Assembly and the Delegates Council. Importantly, delegates can be recalled at any time, and they remain at their jobs while serving. The Assembly makes the big decisions, while the Council makes the everyday decisions. Any decision of the Council can be overridden by the Assembly. Every individual department conducts their own affairs, however. For more details, read the book. It is very good.
Amusingly, it contains three sets of end notes. One written by the author in 1957, one written by Solidarity (London) in the 1970's when they translated it into English, and one written in 2006 by Lust for Life when it was posted to the Internet.
There exist many ideological conflicts. Naturally, between the capitalists and the anti-capitalists, but also between authoritarian anti-capitalists (Stalinists and the like) and libertarian anti-capitalists (anarchists). This author often contrasts his philosophy of "rational," left, anti-capitalism, with "Utopian," left, anti-capitalism. Consider the following passage, "Many absurdities have been said about money and its immediate abolition in a socialist society, and there is a great deal of loose thinking about the subject... People will probably receive a token in return for what they put into society. These 'tokens' might take the form of units, allowing people to organise what they take out of society... As we are seeking here to get to grips with realities and not fighting against words, we see no objection to calling these tokens 'wages' and these units 'money.'" Over three end notes in this passage, it is added "All the preceding talk of 'wages,' 'prices,' and 'the market' will, for instance, undoubtedly have startled a certain group of readers. We would ask them momentarily to curb their emotional responses and to try to think rationally with us on the matter... One could also invent new words, if it would make people happy, but this would not change the underlying reality."

Those are the books I downloaded. I encourage you to download books that seem interesting to you.

Timeline of US-involved Armed Conflicts

2009-06-25T00:52:00.012-04:00

We've been at war so long, it sometimes feels like it's always been this way. To help put this in perspective, I made this timeline of the years the US has been involved in an armed conflict. You might have to click it to make it large enough to read.

Most of the information comes from this article. I left a few off, somewhat arbitrarily. I didn't include seven minor conflicts with China (years 1918, 1921, 1926-1927, 1930, 1937, 1945-1947, and 1956) because they didn't have a name, and I left off American Expeditionary Force Siberia because it seemed a lot like the Northern Russian Expedition, which occurred in the same years. (Also left out: the Polar Bear Expedition.) I included two that are kind of questionable. The Mexican Revolution, in which 35 US troops were killed and 70 injured, as well as the El Salvador Civil War, in which 20 were killed and 35 wounded. While we were certainly entangled in both these events, the US efforts were primarily behind-the-scenes. The article I used listed conflicts were US soldiers were killed or wounded, and there are certainly interventions in which there were no US casualties, so that is another shortcoming of this timeline.

UPDATE I
I have since noticed an error: I have the Quasi-War starting in 1778, when in fact it started in 1798. My sincerest apologies to any time travelers who went to 1778 in an attempt to stop the Quasi-War. Hopefully you enjoyed the June 24th solar eclipse or perhaps the Battle of Monmouth during your stay in 1778.

UPDATE II
The timeline above is close to, but does not exactly match, what I pictured. This one is closer. Does anyone know enough about graphs to figure out how to do something kind of like a combination of the two?

I fixed a few things, and included a few more instances, based largely on this article. It really is arbitrary what you choose to include. I tried not to show every anti-pirate action, every foreign deployment, and every clash with a Native American tribe, but whether something is significant or not is just a judgment call.

What's Your Religion? I.W.W.!

2009-06-19T00:24:00.003-04:00

I found this great documentary from 1979 about the Industrial Workers of the World called "The Wobblies." Watch it here:

I seem to be posting a lot of videos lately. All good, though.

Three Videos on the Zapatistas

2009-06-18T00:49:00.005-04:00

The Ann Arbor Free School recently organized a discussion group about the Zapatistas, the largely indigenous movement in Chiapas, Mexico. I mentioned that I had seen some interesting videos, and I'll post them here to share them.

They are in increasing order of length. The first is a message in English from Zapatista spokesguerilla Subcommandante Marcos, the second (in two parts) is a 60 Minutes piece where Ed Bradley goes to Chiapas shortly after the uprising, and the third is a full-length documentary titled "A Place Called Chiapas." Watching them should give you an overview, to jump start learning more.

Update: I found another video, as well as a site that has Zapatista communiques, translated into English. (Including all six "Declarations from the Lacandon Jungle.) Link!

Dubious Honor

2009-06-18T00:40:00.003-04:00

It seems I have been linked to by the blog, "Science and Math Defeated," one of the crazier parts of the Internet.

He claims I sent him the following video:

What's up with that?

Best Day Ever

2009-06-14T22:02:00.004-04:00

I just had one of the best Saturdays ever.

It started out going to the butcher to get a deer. Now, I'm a vegetarian, so I wouldn't kill a deer to eat it, but my roommate hit it with her car. Another compatriot with experience in such matters claimed he could field dress the deceased. This involved four of us on the side of I-94 at ten o'clock at night, wearing aprons, holding knives and flashlights. No one stopped to help us. We got the poor fellow back to the house and hung it up in the garage to drain the blood. The reason I was interested is that I want to tan the hide. I don't buy leather, but it is useful, so I thought an accidentally killed animal shouldn't go to waste. We thought we would skin and butcher the deer ourselves, but after watching a few videos on the Internet, we became convinced it was too difficult, and required a few specialized tools. We therefore resolved to take it to a animal processor. Later, a friend of ours from the Soo claimed she's been skinning and butchering deer since she was 10, and that it isn't too hard. But the die had been cast.

And Saturday is when we got the meat and hide back from the processor. I was tempted to eat some, but I had a dream that I ordered some chicken wings at a bar and felt really guilty. Further, a vegetarian friend also had a dream that he and I steamed baby turtles alive. Clearly a sign that I shouldn't eat roadkill deer.

1.71 lbs of venison round steak. Plenty more where that came from.

After we got the deer back, Smith and I worked on our windmill project. We are currently building a scale model of a wind turbine, in order to build a full scale wind turbine. On Saturday, we partially skinned the skeleton of the blade. Our idea was to build the blades like old airplane wings, with a wooden skeleton and canvas skin. See pictures.

A mostly complete skeleton of balsa.

After we glued the muslin on the wings (muslin serving as canvas in the model), we painted the muslin with watered-down glue. This caused the fabric to shrink and make the skin very tight. While we were waiting for the glue to dry, we made a strawberry cobbler with dumpster-dived strawberries. It turned out pretty well, as you can see in the pictures.

Our research shows it is best with chocolate chip ice cream.

After the cobbler, the muslin needed another coat. While this was drying, I was noodling on the piano, and discovered a housemate's set of Lord of the Rings soundtrack scores. We resolved to record the Elvish hymn "Fourth Eorlingas," in eight-part harmony. Using open-source audio program Audacity, and the microphone that comes with the Xbox game "Rock Band," (it turns out Rock Band uses a regular USB microphone.) we recording all eight vocal lines from "Fourth Eorlingas." Listen to it here. (Does anybody know a better .mp3 hosting service?)

To end the evening, those interested began cooking venison kebabs over the fire. Smith and I made cheese toast over the fire.

Poor kebab design: items with different cook times on the same stick.

Cheese bread, pre-fire. Some goat cheddar in there.

Cheese toast, post-fire.

This is what animals are made of. Here we see some bone marrow. Thanks, hematopoietic stem cells.

Overall, I'd say it was a day well spent.

Toast Blogging

2009-05-27T17:48:00.004-04:00

I recently wanted to make a time lapse video of toast being made. For that past couple days, I'd start some toast, go find my camera, and by the time I got back it was done. But today was different. Today I caught it in its natural habitat.

Look at that toast go!

Ten Links I've Emailed

2009-05-25T02:20:00.003-04:00

As an exercise, I went through my email outbox, and found the last ten emails where I've sent people links. I decided to post them here so readers can decide what kind of person is described by these ten links.

A comedy philosophy piece.

The website of a windmill company.

An article about "Steal Something Day." (An extension of "Buy Nothing Day".)

An article from GQ about Donald Rumsfeld.

"Wind farm kills Taiwanese goats."

Stephen Fry explains free software.

Richard Stallman sings the Free Software Song.

The Bulgarian folksong that inspired the Free Software Song.

A documentary about making cane fifes in Mississippi.

Jon Stewart mentions the Labadie Collection on The Daily Show.

While it would be perhaps amusing to present this without commentary, here are a few points that, I think, enhance understanding.

About the Free Software Song: I'm told it is in 7/8 time, but I can't count it for the life of me. However, the Wikipedia article on Bulgarian folk music says:

"One of the most distinctive features of Balkan folk dance music is the complexity of its rhythms in comparison to Western music...For example, the dance lesnoto ("the light/easy one") has a meter of 7 beats with emphasis on the first, fourth, and sixth beats. This can be divided into three groups, a "slow" unit of 3 beats and two "quick" units of 2 beats, often written 3-2-2...It should be emphasized that this terminology is a crude simplification and is not used by Balkan musicians; it does not capture the full subtlety of Balkan rhythms."

The Labadie Collection is, as Jon Stewart explains, a library collection at the University of Michigan that has documents from the history of anarchist and radical thought. I was there recently researching the history of the IWW in Ann Arbor, and I sent the Jon Stewart link to a friend of mine that works there.

This exercise was rather amusing, so I'll probably do it periodically.

Learn About Anarchism in Spain

2009-05-25T01:45:00.006-04:00

Lately, I've been fascinated by the Spanish anarchist movement in the 1930's. They achieved autonomy over large parts of the country for, in some areas, up to three years. The were undermined by the Communists, attacked by the Fascists, and eventually lost the Civil War. In those three years, however, some remarkable things happened. The following are some things I've been reading and watching to learn about this time.

George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia was written following his time fighting against the Fascists in Spain. It is a first person account, and you can read it here. It came out 11 years before 1984, and was not well received when it was new.

Living Utopia (Spanish title: Vivir la utopia) is a 1997 documentary I've just started watching. It is interviews with the people involved in the anarchist movement during the Civil War. Here is the first part on youtube (Spanish with English subtitles):

Anarchist Economics is a zine I got at an anarchist book fair. It is an excerpt from Abraham Guillen's much large book, Economia Libertaria. You can read about how people in the autonomous regions organized their collective economy. Guillen contrasts this with both the capitalist, and authoritarian-communist modes of economy. I like this because it isn't just theory; people actually lived like this.

Anarchist Economics

Publish at Scribd or explore others: Magazines & Newspape anarchy zine

Lastly, here is a youtube video of Noam Chomsky talking about anarchy. This may be a good introduction for those of you who are less familiar with anarchism. This video has been highly influential in my thinking.

Read and watch the preceding, and I hope it inspires your thinking.

A Romp Through Victoria's Secret

2009-05-22T01:45:00.003-04:00

The following is a correspondence I had regarding something I found in the Victoria's Secret catalog. The item in question does not appear to be on their website, so you may need to track down the catalog to see it for yourself. The "Josh" in this exchange also writes a blog, called Egalicontrarian.

From: Jason
To: Josh

12 April 2009, 1:20 pm

I was flipping through the Victoria's Secret catalog, and they had a collection of shirts that re-appropriated counterculture slogans. For instance, one said "Make Pink, Not War," because, you see, Victoria's Secret has a monopoly on the color pink.

So that's pretty obnoxious, but the next one was even worse. It said "Boys, Not Bombs." Like "Food, Not Bombs." Get it? Let's undermine a worthwhile group, debase women, and teach girls destructive values, all at the same time. "My need for boys is like a homeless person's need for food! Because I starve myself to get attention from older boys because I am actually quite dissatisfied with my life. So I should participate in consumer culture and trade currency for a t-shirt (made by girls my age in a sweatshop) that reflects this reality. Surely, this will help my self-esteem." Way to go Victoria's Secret, you may have summarized all that is wrong with society in a single t-shirt.

From: Josh
To: Jason
12 April 2009, 2:05 pm

I have to disagree on this one.

1) Only a monster would suggest that pleasing boys with sexualized clothing is worse than destroying the countryside of Vietnam. I think boys, food, and other things like love, are all preferable to bombs and war. In fact, degrading women with clothing may be itself preferable to destroying women with napalm.

2) Although Victoria's Secret can be plausibly criticized for debasing women in a broad sense, these slogans themselves do not. If anything, "Boys, not bombs" is just recommending one evolutionary instinct (sex) over another (aggression).

3) These ads do not suggest that a need for boys is analogous to a homeless person's need for food. The only analogy is this: Victoria's Secret's ads are just about as stupid as the ads they are parodying, and probably about as consequential. Also, the two concepts are not mutually exclusive. Consider this: many activists acquire mates after meeting them at activist events. Maybe even while wearing clothing purchased at Victoria's Secret. The only thing more attractive than an activist chick is an over-sexualized activist chick.

4) Lastly, the Victoria's Secret ad leaves open the question of starving oneself. Many boys prefer more voluptuous women, women like noted most beautiful woman in the world, Monica Bellucci.[1] So, "Boys, not bombs," contains within it the possibility of seeking to please a boy who is more evolutionarily rational [2] in his appreciation of the female physique [3]. This may lead to the paradoxical situation whereby a Victoria's Secret ad both impresses upon a woman successfully and yet guides her away from Victoria's Secret. Then again, I am not knowledgeable enough to know the size variance in the clothing offered by this business. We should ask Ashwini, so I've CC'd her.

From: Jason
To: Josh
12 April 2009, 9:04 pm

The one thing I want to add is that while "Make Love, Not War" is merely a slogan that borders on meaninglessness, "Food, Not Bombs" is a sprawling anti-capitalist organization with over 1000 chapters on every inhabited continent, that takes food that would be otherwise thrown out, and feeds homeless people and activists, while distributing radical literature. I heard a talk by the founder at a conference last weekend and it is very awesome. Check it out: http://www.foodnotbombs.net/

While I would choose boys over bombs, I don't think that is actually the sentiment of the shirt, as Victoria's Secret does not appear to have any interest in dismantling the war infrastructure, and would certainly support a war to, say, keep the prices of their inputs low.

Further, I am reminded of an early talking Barbie doll that said things like "Math is hard" and "Let's go shopping." While, certainly, math is hard, I question the wisdom of giving a young girl a toy that reinforces that stereotype to her every day she plays with it.* Similarly, I have no problem with girls being interested in boys as partners, but these shirts seem to be reinforcing the stereotype that girls ought to be seeking boys, by any means necessary, and to the detriment of other things, like careers. (Sidebar: Martha Cook dormitory [an all-girls dorm at the University of Michigan] and the Law School used to have functions together, so freshman girls could meet soon-to-be lawyers. (Almost all of whom were male at the time.) This is because girls, even while at college, should be focused on finding a man to please. This is referred to as getting one's "MRS" degree. Get it? "Mrs."? Also, law students are often quite a bit older than girls in Martha Cook, making it kinda creepy.)

Lastly, the shirts reinforce heteronormative values, by not having shirts for non-straight girls, who will feel excluded from yet another venue. (Sidebar: Perhaps you think non-straight girls should be excluded from consumer culture because it is so destructive. I agree, but I think this is just another way they are marginalized. Just like how one can be against gay marriage for the same reasons as they are against straight marriage, yet think gays should have the option.) (Further sidebar: I was going to say reinforcing heteronormativity was a minor objection, but then I realized I think that because I'm straight and society accommodates my proclivities. Therefore, I say it is a non-trivial matter.)

*The full story is that only 1.5% of Teen Talk Barbies had that particular phrase, but the rest are scarcely better. "Wanna have a pizza party", "Will we ever have enough clothes", etc. Allegedly there was a group called the Barbie Liberation Organization that would buy the Barbies and swap out their speaking chip with that of the concurrently released talking G.I. Joe, then return it to the store. While I don't support G.I. Joe's foreign policy, I appreciate the culture jamming of swapping the chips.

From: Ashwini
To: Jason, Josh
16 April 2009, 1:39 pm

I appreciate being consulted. [Josh] are you saying I am one of those "over-sexualized activist chicks?" In which case I am somewhere between flattered and insulted.

Yes, in the grand scheme of things war, bombs and other things are way worse than things that negatively impact young women in the U.S.'s self-concept and body image. It is annoying though and Jason is right that it appropriates activist jargon. I also get annoyed when I see Jenna Bush wearing a kaffiyeh and when Che's face is plastered all over Abercrombie t-shirts. Is it worse than napalm? No. But is it worth criticizing? Absolutely. "Boys not Bombs" is problematic in the same sense that a t-shirt that says "Who needs math you have these" on it is problematic. It encourages girls to advertise themselves as objects and to send the message that their priorities lie in dating and romance alone. And of course, the perception changes if it's a 16-year old girl wearing it versus a 35-year-old woman.

And [Josh] I think your point number 4 is both hilarious and retarded so I'm not even going to get into it.

What can we conclude from these exchanges? I'm tempted to make an off-hand remark about having too much time on our hands. However, such analyses are, I think, valuable. This is because Victoria's Secret gets to spend millions of dollars on catalogs and advertisements (some featuring Bob Dylan) to reinforce the world view that maximizes their profits. As every business does this, other modes of thinking are made more and more difficult. I should think the occasional unpacking of this serves some purpose.

A Metal Song You Won't Want to Miss För Allt Smör i Småland

2009-05-11T00:35:00.005-04:00

People liked my post about Georgian folk/jazz fusion, so I thought I'd post another music video I recently discovered.

I was reading an article on an alleged artifact from a 19th century war: two bullets, fused as if by a mid-air impact. In the comment section, people discussed whether such a thing could happen, or whether it was a hoax. One commenter said that one finds many such fused bullets around the site of the Battle of Gallipoli. Someone replied, "Only reason I know of Gallipoli is through Sabaton. Let the music tell the story."

I thought Sabaton could be an opera or something, so I looked it up. It turns out they are a Swedish power metal band that primarily writes songs about historical battles. Here's the music video for "Cliffs of Gallipoli," from their 2008 release The Art of War. I can't decide if this is ridiculous or awesome.

Maybe I'm not a metal expert, but they do remind me a little of Dethklok. Further, I think anti-war metal is somewhat rare. But, as the say in Sweden, "Lika barn leka bäst."

Wikipedia Strikes Again: Amazing Georgian Folk Music

2009-05-09T17:58:00.003-04:00

Somehow, I ended up on the Wikipedia article on yodeling. It claims that there are different varieties of yodeling in different cultures. It continues, "[i]n Georgian traditional music, yodelling [sic?] takes the form of krimanchuli technique, and is used as a top part in three/four part polyphony."
This sounded intriguing, so I searched Youtube for "krimanchuli" to hear some of this Georgian polyphonic yodeling. I clicked on the first video, called "Orera 'Krimanchuli,'" and it blew my mind. Six Georgian guys in skinny ties singing the most intricate contrapuntal melodies. At first it is just amazing. Then around 1:30, it takes off in a new and exciting direction, as they add drums, piano, and bass. They alternate between Lambert, Hendricks, and Ross-esque vocalese solos, and harmonies tighter than the treads on a T-72 tank. The yodeling comes in at around 3:14, which will only impress you further. I'm at a loss for words, just watch it yourself.

Sidenote: There are bands today that dress like this, except they are doing it ironically. Of course, irony was outlawed in the Soviet Union, so we can only assume they are very serious.

A Most Delicious Lawn

2009-05-07T16:41:00.006-04:00

I bet some of you think food is the kind of thing that comes from the store. This is not strictly true. In fact, some foods pre-date stores by many years. And if you know where to look, they might be nearby.

Growing in the lawn, of their own according, I’ve so far identified two delicious wild inhabitants*.

First, morel mushrooms. These little fellows cost $25-$30 a pound in the store. Little do they know, you can find them in the outdoors. In my case, in the lawn by the ash tree. I’ve found four so far, plus an addition 30 or so from the nearby woods. For any of you that plan on eating morel mushrooms in the wild, I recommend a website such as this, which explains the difference between a delicious morel mushroom, and a tricksy false morel mushroom. We don’t want you eating rocket fuel, now do we? Even sautéed in garlic and butter. On a bed of risotto. (I am not a mushroom expert, but morels are allegedly the one mushroom with easy-to-identify poisonous look-alikes. Remember: if the stem ain't hollow, don't swallow. Also: When in doubt, throw it out.)

This is a stock photo. Once I find another I'll put a picture here.

Next, we have a delicious invasive species Alliaria petiolata. Known to the layman by such names as “garlic mustard,” “jack-in-the-bush,” and “penny hedge,” this illegal immigrant comes from Europe and has overstayed its visa. When something is invasive and delicious, there is a moral imperative to eat it. As the name suggests, the leaves taste like garlic and mustard. I like mine in a salad or on a sandwich. The small leaves are milder, and the larger leaves are sometimes uncomfortably spicy. It just looked like a weed to me, until a local Euell Gibbons pointed it out. I’ve eaten it every day since. Delicious though it is, "[m]any land managers consider it to be one of the most potentially harmful and difficult to control invasive plants in the region."[1]

This is also not my photo. Coming soon, though.

*I first wrote “plants,” the realized mushrooms are not a plant. In fact, fungi are closer to animals on the evolutionary tree than they are to plants. So I changed it to “inhabitants.”

Wikipedia and the Domino Theory

2009-05-03T23:08:00.012-04:00

The other day, I added a paragraph to the Wikipedia article on the Domino Theory. The Domino Theory was a piece of propaganda popular during the Vietnam War that theorized if the Communists take over Vietnam, they will soon take over Laos, Cambodia, Indonesia, and Indiana.

Noam Chomsky has an interesting view on this, so I added it to the article. I added

"Noam Chomsky writes that he believes the Domino theory is roughly accurate. If a people in a poor county see another poor country take control of its economy and succeed, they will of course want to emulate them. This is why, he claims, the US put so much effort into suppressing people's movements in Chile, Vietnam, Nicaragua, Laos, Grenada, El Salvador, Guatemala, etc. "The weaker and poorer a country is, the more dangerous it is as an example. If a tiny, poor country like Grenada can succeed in bringing about a better life for its people, some other place that has more resources will ask, 'why not us?'" Chomsky refers to this as the "threat of a good example."

If one is a good Wikipedian, one find citations for one's claims, so I searched the Internet for the article where Chomsky says this. I found an excerpt on the New Humanist website, where they quote the Third World Traveler website quoting Noam Chomsky's book What Uncle Sam Really Wants. Chomsky likes to repeat himself, so one can find a citation of something you think you heard him say fairly easily.

Noam Chomsky: I once rode in an elevator with him.

Also, I put this paragraph in the section "Arguments in favor of the domino theory." This is slightly unusual, as most people who opposed the Vietnam War didn't think the domino theory was real, while Chomsky opposed the Vietnam War and thinks the domino theory is real, but for different reasons.

I check back a day later, and somebody has edited the paragraph. A user had put scare quotes around the phrase "people's movements" and appended "although he put a more positive spin on the threat" to the first sentence. That's kind of odd, but I didn't change it because "people's movements" isn't the perfect word to describe all the things Uncle Sam opposes. When one edits Wikipedia, one is supposed to describe one's edit. This user described his edit as "If what this anonymous IP says is true, then Chomsky's view is that of a blessing rather than the threat of tyranny." A little weird. I go to his Userpage, where Wikipedia users can describe themselves, and he goes out of his way to mention, among other things "This user is as anti-racist as he is anti-communist" and "This user rejects the myth that insurgents in Iraq are 'resisting U.S. occupation,' and knows that each terrorist group is fighting for their own agenda, making the Iraqi people the victims."* (He loves those scare quotes, doesn't he?)

The domino theory as illustrated in Wikipedia

It seems to me that his edits didn't help, but I left them because getting into "edit wars" is silly and multiple viewpoints are part of the point of a collaborative encyclopedia. Five hours later, he strikes again, this time adding "so-called" before his already scare-quoted "people's movements," his description of the edit reading "re-emphasizing Chomsky's false notions of the communist threat as 'people's movements.'" What strong feelings he must have on the matter. I still decide to let the edit stand, although I fear if I do that, he will spread his propanganda to the article "Vietnam War," and then to the article "Communist Party of Nepal," and from there to the article "Auto-Lite Strike," then to "2000 Cochabamba protests," and so on. No history will be safe from the red pen of this menace. So you could have a beginning of a disintegration that would have the most profound influences.

Well, maybe not. It is worth mentioning that another user added something to the paragraph, saying "Chomsky claims there are two domino effects, one internally discussed between US policy makers, which is that of the 'Good Example', and another for public consumption, that of the spread of 'Communism.'" He didn't cite this, so I'm not sure if that's a fair statement, but I let it stand.

*I think his comments on the Iraq War are part right: each group is fighting for their own agenda, making the Iraqi people the victims, but I find it odd that he excludes the US from this admonishment. Probably the same reason he thinks the Communists that the Vietnamese people supported** were an outside threat imposing tyranny.

**Even Eisenhower said if the 1955 elections had happened, in line with the Geneva Accords, Hồ Chí Minh would have 80% of the vote. Instead, South Vietnam claimed they weren't bound by the accords, and had a sham election to put Ngô Đình Diệm in charge. (For instance, Diệm*** got more votes than there were voters in some areas.) But I digress.

***Note on Vietnamese naming conventions: While their last name is listed first, they are still referred to formally by their given name (that is, the name that comes last.) In the case of Ngô Đình Diệm, "Ngô" is his family name, but he is referred to as "Prime Minister Diệm." This probably helps avoid confusion, as the top five family names are used by 71% of the country.

Tax Advice from the Prestigious Internet

2009-03-24T00:01:00.007-04:00

With tax season upon us, many people come to me, as an economics major, with questions about tax policy and how it affects them.

Specifically: Can I still write off a child as a deduction if they've been kidnapped?

According to the IRS website, the answer is "yes," if two conditions are met:

The child must be presumed by law enforcement to have been kidnapped by someone who is not a member of your family or a member of the child's family, and
The child had, for the taxable year in which the kidnapping occurred, the same principal place of abode as the taxpayer for more than one-half of the portion of such year before the date of kidnapping.

So, if your child has not been kidnapped by a family member (this excludes most kidnappings, by the way*), and spent more than half of the tax-year, pre-kidnapping, living with you, they are considered for tax purposes a dependent.

As an example, take a hypothetical kidnapping on March 1, 1932. If the missing child had spent 30 or more days of the year leading up to March 1 (1932 being a leap year) in his parents' principle abode, they could write him off for the entire 1932 tax year. Just as a hypothetical.

The IRS also says you can continue to count the missing child as a dependent until they are determined to be dead, or it reaches the year they would have reached 18.

*According the to FBI, in 2007 only 15% of kidnappings were by strangers. The rest were by "non-custodial parents." Let that be a lesson to you: You are much safer with strangers than you are with your family.

Cult of No-Knead Bread

2009-03-18T14:02:00.003-04:00

There seems to be a bit of a movement around this "No-Knead Bread" business. It was started by an article in the New York Times, and spread rapidly through the blogs. So I decided to bake one. It sure turned out nice.

Way I see it, what makes bread bready is gluten. Which can be formed by kneading the dough, or by hydrating the flour and letting it sit. Which explains the 18 hour rise time.

Our yeast isn't very good, so I think it should have turned out more leavened than it did. It only calls for quarter teaspoon.

What Ends Depressions?

2009-03-10T00:44:00.012-04:00

There seems to be a consensus among economists, such as Paul Krugman, who claim large public expenditures, like World War II, ended the Great Depression. Over at INSEAD, Ilian Mihov begs to differ. He says,

"Franklin D. Roosevelt became president of the United States in March 1933. Promptly he introduced four key policy initiatives: (1) suspend the Gold Standard, which allowed the Fed to expand money supply; (2) restore confidence in the financial sector through a process of restructuring and sanitizing commercial banks; (3) implement a fiscal stimulus package; (4) introduce new regulation. As a result of these measures, the growth rate of the economy was 10.8% in 1934, 8.9% in 1935, 13% in 1936, and 5% in 1937! Overall the US economy expanded by 44% during his first term. The US economy is supposed to grow at about 3% per year and not 3 or 4 times this rate. During the first term of Roosevelt, the US real GDP had returned to its pre-Depression level."

To prove it, he shows this graph, adding "The economy had another recession in 1938, which was a result of a policy mistake again, but the mistake was quickly reversed with a fiscal injection of $5 billion. And the economy continued its recovery."

This seems like an interesting hypothesis, but I think we need more data to know for sure. His graph ends in 1940, before the US joined the war, so we don't get to see what effect that had. So I took some data from BEA, and made these to charts showing GDP from 1929-1950. This should show us the effects of FDR's programs, as well as the war, and what happened after. The first chart is this data in nominal terms, and the second is in real dollars. I colored 1933 red, which is the year FDR became president, and I shaded the war years.

We can see that GDP rose quickly after New Deal programs, accelerated into the war years, then dropped slightly after the war. However, if we factor out inflation, as in the second chart, we see the post-war economy had a major drop for two years.

Let's look at similar data in a much busier chart. This shows percent changes in GDP between 1930 and 1950. 1933 is colored white, and the war years are shaded. The negative growth part of the graph is shaded as well. The two lines show real and nominal changes.This shows that growth slowed throughout the war years, and went negative in the immediate post-war years. Growth was high, except for 1938, following the rise of FDR. The peak of the growth rate was in 1942.

If you are wondering which of these graphs is comparable to Mihov's, it isn't any of them. His chart is the integral of the real line in the previous chart. (Stop and think about that.) To see what would happen if we extended his methodology out further, we have here RGDP (indexed to 1929), 1929-1950. (In other words, the sums of the percentage changes.) 1933 is in red, and the years the US was at war are shaded. Here we see that the rate of change was basically constant from 1937 to the peak of the war. After the war, it fell and took five-ish years to get back. But the Depression seems more effected by Roosevelt-era programs than the war.
Here's the same graph, extended to 1960, to see where this fits into the growth rates of the post-war economy. President changes are marked in red.
Finally, I extended the graph to the present, did a linear regression, and shaded all years in which the US was involved in a major armed conflict. (There is some debate about when the US joined the Vietnam War, but I think 1959, the year the first US soldier was killed, is the latest you could reasonably argue.) This shows something very interesting. Mihov writes, "During the first term of Roosevelt, the US real GDP had returned to its pre-Depression level." He's saying that in 1936, the economy was above where is was in 1929. (You can see this in his graph.) This doesn't say a whole lot, as without the Depression, the GDP should have been higher in 1936. If we look at the trend line, however, we see that it crosses the data in 1941, meaning that in that year, it returned to where it would have been had there been no Depression. This, I think, more conclusively shows that war spending was not a crucial factor in ended the Great Depression. The war years had above-trend GDP growth, and then it fell and settled by end of 1950s. Eyeballing the shaded areas (especially the years associated with World War II, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War), it seems war years have some above-trend growth, but it settles to trend afterward. Case closed.
(Of course, the case is never closed in economics, but this is only because it isn't a real science.)
(Any graph can be clicked for a larger version.)

Hit Music Word Cloud

2009-02-22T01:43:00.002-05:00

Here's another experiment with Wordle. I took the lyrics from the Billboard Hot 100 top song for each year 1995-2005. Ten years of data should tell us what words people look for in a top song. One of the shortcomings is that certain songs will repeat a word ad nauseum that doesn't appear in any other song (I'm looking at you, Macarena.) So enjoy it for what it is worth.
(click for larger)

Soon-to-be-hit: Baby, cause you know, oh, living Macarena love strong.

What Americans Want

2009-02-14T21:36:00.004-05:00

The Senate Republicans Conference makes available many of the graphics they use in presentations. Here's one I found particularly amusing.
http://src.senate.gov/public/

How to Harass the CIA

2009-02-14T20:58:00.006-05:00

I live in a university town, so big corporations come through look for recruits. Recently, we were visited by none other than the CIA. That's the Central Intelligence Agency. So I was talking to my comrade, and we decided that the CIA would be here to project a very specific image of themselves. We have a duty to present a different image, so that potential recruits would have a broader perspective to make their decision from. So we got some dark suits and set up our own table outside the classroom the CIA was using to recruit folk. We got there before them and started handing out a brochure we made, laying out some of the CIA's checkered past. We also posted excerpts from CIA training manuals. We put up a map of government overthrows the CIA was involved in. And demonstrated rendition and interrogation. We didn't go as far as waterboarding, but we did do stress positions. One student saw the description of rendition we posted and said aloud "I'm not sure this is the kind of thing I want to be part of."

At one point, the building manager comes up and we have the following conversation.
"Are you guys with the CIA?"
"We are here to represent the CIA."
"What are your names?"
"That's classified."
"The other CIA guys could at least tell me their first names."
"We're in different departments."
"The other CIA guys are upstairs and they won't come down. They are very worried."
"What are they worried about?"
"This!" he said, showing us the brochure we were handing out.
"What do they find worrisome about it? Is any of it not true?"
"No, they don't know who made it or where it came from."
"Don't worry, it is based entirely on declassified documents. We aren't spreading any state secrets here." (This is a tactic of mine that rarely works. Act as if they are accusing you of something entirely different than what they are actually accusing you of.)

Thinking that was the end of that, we continued our show. Fifteen minutes behind schedule, the real CIA slunk by and into the classroom. They didn't even wave.

A few minutes later the police showed up.
"What are you guys doing here?"
"Presenting a different side to of the CIA to potential recruits."
"You know, impersonating federal agents is a serious offense."
"I don't think we are credibly impersonating. Besides, the First Amendment protects protest and satire."
"You have to leave. You're trespassing."
"I don't think so. This is a public space in a public university and we are students here."
"But you are creating a nuisance."
"Since when is saying true things in a university a nuisance?"
"You weren't invited."
"The CIA's invitation says 'all students are welcome.'"
Note to others: You can't argue law with the police. They are just the muscle the state uses to protect their interests. The Main Officer asks for my ID, while his sidekick asks for my partner's ID. I initially refuse, as Michigan is not a "stop and identify" state, but I guess when the police are called on you, that constitutes probable cause. He runs my name and finds no outstanding warrants, much to his displeasure. My partner, though, was having trouble. He didn't have his ID on him. Sidekick was giving him a really hard time.
"Do you know how close you are to getting arrested?" he asked.
"For what crime?" I asked.
"Failure to identify."
"He doesn't have his ID with him," I noted.
"That's a against the law," Sidekick explained.
"So it is against the law to leave your house without an ID?" I probed.
"Yes," he lied. Eventually he conceded to running the name without an ID.
The cops were acting really tough. When I put my hands in my pockets, he yelled "Hands out of the pockets!" and when I asked to get a drink from the drinking fountain behind him, he yelled "No drinks!" At this point, we were getting pretty nervous. They were acting all drunk on power, and we thought the next interrogation we were part of might not be a demonstration. Next, a guy shows up. Khaki trench coat and tweed scarf.
"Alright, get out of here," Khaki trench coat says.
"Right, now that someone authorized has told us." I said, rolling my eyes. The beat cops acted offended by this.
"Don't you know that's the Sargent?" They said. Because you should dress your high ranking people in khaki and tweed. It's a uniform that really commands respect. But considering they were threatening to arrest us, we took this as an opportunity to leave. Which, on reflection, was exactly what they wanted. Make us think we are in trouble, then give us an out. We take the out, and they get rid of their headache without having to do all the paperwork. Victory for the CIA and the local police.
So a day well spent, rattling the cage of government henchmen.

Here's a clip from the paper the next day. I'll post the brochure if I can figure out how to post a PDF. (click for larger.)

CIA Brochure PDF 2

Publish at Scribd or explore others: Brochures & Catalogs cia overthrow democr

Bicycle With Sleeping Trailer

2009-02-14T20:57:00.002-05:00

Why not?

Rosa the Anarchtopus

2009-02-14T20:47:00.002-05:00

Sometimes you have awesome room mates. My room mate knit me a red and black octopus. I named her "Rosa Luxembourg the Anarchtopus." Instead of being beaten and thrown into a river, this Rosa was beaten and thrown onto dry land. The fascist octopuses* are rough.

*Why not octopi? Because were not speaking Latin. And octopus isn't a second-declension neuter noun. It isn't even Latin. It's Greek. So if you wanted to pluralize it pretentiously, it would be octopodes. Me? I'm sticking with octopuses. Don't get me started on "mongoose."

Views from the World Social Forum

2009-02-14T20:43:00.003-05:00

Over in Britain, they apparently have a free press, as this article on the World Social forum comes from the BBC. They let four speakers from the forum write short articles and it is awesome. Seriously, read it.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/7874667.stm

If you need a little encouragement, consider this passage from Walden Bello:

With investment in industry and agriculture yielding low profits as a result of over-capacity, large amounts of surplus funds have been circulating in or invested and reinvested in the financial sector - that is, the financial sector began turning on itself.
The result has been a divergence between a hyperactive financial economy and a stagnant real economy.
This was not accidental - the financial economy exploded precisely to make up for the stagnation owing to overproduction of the real economy.

he continues:

One indicator of the super-profitability of the financial sector is the fact that 40% of the total profits of US financial and nonfinancial corporations is accounted for by the financial sector although it is responsible for only 5% of US gross domestic product (and even that is likely to be an overestimate).
The problem with investing in financial sector operations is that it is tantamount to squeezing value out of already created value. It may create profit, yes, but it does not create new value - only industry, agriculture, trade, and services create new value.

So go read it.

How to Downsize

2009-02-14T20:41:00.001-05:00

Having a blog means you can post links to articles that interest you.

Here's a guy that built a house out of sticks and hay:
http://www.simondale.net/house/index.htm

I find this far cooler than the latest skyscraper in Dubai.

Economics Makes Sense

2009-02-14T20:37:00.002-05:00

The team over at EPI have come up with this analysis of how effective different measures are at stimulating the economy. Not surprisingly, consumption subsidies (food stamps, extending unemployment benefits) have more effect than making the rich richer (dividend tax cuts, corporate tax cuts, etc.) This is because the less money you have, the larger percentage of your income turns into consumption. Those who qualify for food stamps spend just about everything. So by giving them a subsidy, it gets turned into economy, whereas people who get more money from a dividend tax cut will probably not spend as much of it. Thanks, marginal propensity to consume!
http://www.epi.org/economic_snapshots/entry/webfeatures_snapshots_20081022/

Wordle Word Clouds

2009-02-14T20:05:00.012-05:00

There is a cool site called Wordle. Wordle makes word clouds out of text. The more often a word appears in the text, the larger it is in the cloud. I've made some interesting ones with large source texts.

The first exercise was to compare word use by various presidents. I input collections of speeches from George Washington (11 speeches), Thomas Jefferson (12 speeches), Abraham Lincoln (9 speeches), Richard Nixon (10 speeches), George W. Bush (12 speeches), and Barack Obama (10 speeches). They are mostly state of the union addresses, inauguration speeches, and nomination acceptance speeches. For Obama, I used a lot of campaign speeches, so keep that in mind when you look at the word cloud. (This explains, for instance, why "McCain" is one of the larger words.)

I would be interested to hear your observations. Here are some of mine. Presidents in the past called it "United States," while more recent presidents call it "America." Jefferson used neither. Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln were fond of the word "may," whereas Nixon used "let," and Bush and Obama use "must." The word "government" appears more in pre-Bush speeches as well. Here are the word clouds (click for larger):

Next, I wanted to see how large of a text the system could handle. I tried the entire Bible, and couldn't get it to work. After I broke it down into the Old and New Testaments, it found those chunks digestible. The program is supposed to ignore common words, such as "the," "a," "but," and so on, but the common words in King James-style English (an old-fashioned style of speech even when written, by the way) are different, so we see a lot of "thy," and "hast." (click for larger)

I tried a novel next, Mark Twain's "Huckleberry Finn." I picked Finn because it is noted for being written in a vernacular style, the opposite of the Bible. What words was Twain fond of? (What word were Twain fond of?) (click for larger)

I next did Charles Darwin's "Origin of Species," in honor of his 200th birthday. (click for larger)

I showed my results to some friends, and one of them replied that he'd imagine a word cloud of Noam Chomsky talks would consist mainly of

"East Timor"

"Uncontroversial"

hand motions

"I hate America"

To test this hypothesis, I input 28 Chomsky talks, totaling over 200 pages (found at chomsky.info), and got this result (click for larger):

So word clouds are a neat way to display information.

All You Need To Know About Crawford v. Nashville

2009-02-14T20:03:00.001-05:00

The latest Wikipedia article I've contributed to is Crawford v. Nashville. Go there to learn about an exciting Supreme Court case. Isn't employment law fun?

Abandoned Blog Syndrome

2009-02-14T20:02:00.001-05:00

I haven't updated this in a while because I haven't felt like it. This is called abandoned blog syndrome. Perhaps I shall post more shortly.

Oil Can Guitar, Part 2

2008-08-10T15:48:00.006-04:00

Part 1 here.
I have now assembled all of the ingredients for my guitar. The Singer oil can I ordered, which I thought was from a defunct oil company called Singer turns out to be machine oil for Singer sewing machines. A gallon of it. I imagine the average consumer wouldn't use a gallon of oil in a lifetime, so it would have to be for repairmen or factories.
Here's the plan: Screw the neck into a piece of hardwood. (While guitar nomenclature calls these "bolts," they are technically screws.) Stick the neck+wood into the can (cutting a hole to fit). Screw the neck into the can. Drill holes for the bridge. Add the bridge, wire the pickup, and we have ourselves a guitar.
I went with one P-90 pickup in the bridge position, like an LP Junior*. However, I don't like tone knobs, so it just has a volume control. (Note on volume knobs: Single coils typical use a 250k ohm volume control, and humbuckers usually use 500k. The LP Junior, however, uses 500k. But I don't have a tone control**, so I worry the 500k would be too bright. I talked to the folks down at Ye Olde Guitar Shoppe and they decided it wouldn't make a difference, and if it didn't like it I can exchange it. I went with 500k because that's what they had in stock.)
I have a feeling putting this together will be easier said than done. Stay tuned for updates.
(click for larger)

*Introduced in 1954, the Les Paul Junior was meant as an "entry level" Gibson. (It cost $50 at the time, $380 in today's money.) It had one P-90 pickup, as opposed to the full Les Paul, which had two. (Humbuckers would be introduced in 1957.) Like most Gibsons, the LP Junior had a 24 3/4 inch scale length. The neck I have for this guitar is a 25 1/2 inch scale length, which is what most Fender guitars use.
**Why don't I like tone knobs? All a passive tone knob does is add a capacitor into the circuit that bleeds off high frequencies. The more you turn the knob, the more highs are bled off. But even when the tone knob is turned all the way up, the signal is still degraded by the capacitor. Taking the tone out of the circuit really opens up the sound and makes it sound full and less strangled. Oddly, someone who agrees with me is the guitar player for Blink-182. He's not exactly a musical hero of mine, but his signature model Fender doesn't have a tone knob and he gave basically the same reasoning I did. So I have it set up for a "wide open" sound, and if I need to adjust the tone, I can do it on the amp.

Japanese Honey Bees Do It Together

2008-08-04T20:22:00.003-04:00

At the risk of seeming like I'm on an insect fix, I want to share with you the story of the Japanese honey bee and the hornet.
In Japan there are native honey bees and imported European honey bees. There are also hornets that like to kill entire bee colonies. The largest hornets in the world, in fact.
If the hornets (Vespa mandarinia) descend on a European honey bee colony, they will lay it to waste. But if they attack a colony of Japanese honey bees (Apis cerana japonica), they will use a unique adaptation to protect the colony.
Watch this to learn more

It seems the Japanese honey bees can survive temperatures a few degrees higher than the hornet, and use this to their advantage.

Insects That Really Hurt

2008-08-04T11:59:00.008-04:00

It seems entomologist Justin Schmidt devised a four-point pain scale to rate the pain caused by various stinging insects. Down at the bottom are sweat bees and fire ants, working up to tarantula hawks, and, finally, bullet ants.
Now, the tarantula hawk (a kind of wasp) and bullet ant stings are considered the two most painful of any insect, but they are of a very different character. One researcher described the tarantula hawk sting as:

"To me, the pain is like an electric wand that hits you, inducing an immediate, excruciating pain that simply shuts down one’s ability to do anything, except, perhaps, scream. Mental discipline simply does not work in these situations. The pain for me lasted only about three minutes, during which time the sting area was insensitive to touch, i.e., a pencil point poked near the sting resulted only in a dull deep pressure pain."

Schmidt himself said of the tarantual hawk: "Blinding, fierce, shockingly electric. A running hair drier has been dropped into your bubble bath."

And the bullet ant, you see, is described as "Pure, intense, brilliant pain. Like fire-walking over flaming charcoal with a 3-inch rusty nail in your heel."

However, here is the most interesting distinction: While the tarantula hawk sting hurts for about three minutes, a bullet ant sting throbs for up to 24 hours. I once planned to get stung by a tarantula hawk, because I figured someone can stand anything for three minutes, but then I saw this video about bullet ants and decided it would be pointless.

All You Need to Know About Pedicularis furbishiae

2008-08-04T11:54:00.003-04:00

By now you've probably read the Wikipedia article I wrote on the Saharan silver ant. But you find yourself wondering: Are there any plants I've written articles about? Read here about Furbish's lousewort. This rare specimen is only found along the banks of one river. And it has a really silly name.

Four Notable Bank Heists

2008-08-04T01:32:00.006-04:00

Bank heists have always captured the imagination. Think about it: that's where all the money is. And most of it is insured, so you're not really ripping off the depositors. Many have planned the perfect heist, and most have been caught. These four bank heists give you some idea of the possible outcomes.

Air France Heist
Location: New York City, New York, USA
Year: 1967
Take: $420,000 ($2.6 million in today's money)

Lowdown: Air France carried large amounts of US currency into New York from France, where it had been exchanged by tourists and members of the US military for French currency. From the plane, it was taken in duffle bags to a strong room in a warehouse at the airport, before it was taken to its final destination. There was easy access to the warehouse, but the guard to the strong room kept the key on him at all times.

The thieves brought an expensive escort in on the operation to seduce the guard. (The escort operating, of course, out of Wildwood, New Jersey.) While he was otherwise occupied, the keys were stolen, copied, and returned.

On the appointed day, they walked into the warehouse, opened the door to the strong room and walked out with the money. There was no alarm, and the guard didn't notice. And they were never caught.

Dunbar Armored Heist
Location: Los Angeles, California, USA
Year: 1997
Take: $18.9 million (24.7 million in today's money)

Lowdown: This job was done with the precision that is usually associated with inside jobs. Because it was an inside job. A safety inspector learned the layout, security procedures, and timing of security cameras. He recruited a gang of his childhood friends and walked in, subduing one guard after another. They loaded the dough (and the security camera tapes) into a U-Haul and went off into the night. Most of the bills were non-sequential, but an accomplice accidentally let an associate see a stack of cash with the strap still around it. He was picked up and rolled on the others. While the gang is in the can on a 25-year ticket, $10 million is still unaccounted for.

Banco Central Heist
Location: Fortaleza, Ceará , Brazil
Year: 2005
Take: 164,775,150 reais ($69.8 million)

Lowdown: Some bank jobs just require two guys, some Richard Nixon masks, and a fast getaway car. This is not one of those. The Brazilian authorities have so far identified 43 suspects.

In this heist, the gang rented a house across the street from the bank. They turned the house into a business front. A landscaping business. Perhaps you can see where this is going. They tunneled 256 feet, under the road, to the vault of Banco Central. How did they hide almost 1400 cubic feet of dirt? They trucked it away in their landscaping vehicles. Once they reached the vault, they broke through 3.6 feet of steel-reinforced concrete and absconded with the loot. On top of the audacious criminality, I appreciate the logistics. They moved 7,700 pounds of money in a weekend. And the bank didn't notice until they opened on Monday. The story does not end well, as a surprising number of suspects have been found dead. However, $61 million still remains unaccounted for. Also, in this case the bank had not insured the money.

Agricultural Bank of China Heist
Location: Handan, Hebai, China
Year: 2007
Take: 51 million yuan ($6.7 million approx.)

Lowdown: The previous October, a bank manager, with the help of two guards, stole 200,000 yuan. Being the criminal mastermind he was, his plan was to invest in the money, and return the original 200,000 to the bank before anyone noticed. He then proceeded to buy 200,000 yuan worth of lottery tickets. Against he odds, his diabolical plan worked.

Being a criminal, however, he couldn't just be satisfied with his modest ill gotten gains. Teaming up with another manager, the two stole 33 million yuan over the course of two months the following spring. This time, lady luck was not in their corner. Having struck out at the lottery, and needing to come up with the money, they stole an additional 18 million. Learning from their mistakes, they spent it all on lottery tickets. This time they won. All of 98,000 yuan. 50,902,000 short of what they needed. Two days later, bank authorities noticed the missing money.

Our Chinese Butch and Sundance used their 98,000 bankroll to hit the trails, buying fake Ids and cars. (How hard can it be to disappear in a country of a billion people?) After being put on the Most Wanted list, one was picked up in Beijing, and the other was pinched in Lianyungang. Being China, they were sentenced to death. The only winners were three informants in Lianyungang who split a 200,000 yuan reward.

Bonus heist: NOKAS Heist
Year: 2004
Location: Stavanger, Jæren, Norway
Take: 57.4 million krone ($9.3 million)

Lowdown: Much is made of the differences between the US and Norway. This story illustrates this as much as any. Thirteen men stormed the NOKAS (Norsk Kontantservice) bank in Stavanger, commando-style. They had masks, body armor, and military rifles. To slow down the police they put a flaming truck outside the police parking garage. In the course of their heist, they killed a police officer who was on duty. He was the first Norwegian police officer killed in the line of duty in over six years, and only the seventh to die in the line of duty in the post-war period. When the gang was finally brought to justice, the thirteen received a total of 181 years in prison, although none received the Norwegian maximum, twenty-one years.

What do we learn from all this? That crime doesn't pay, especially in China. And don't enter into a criminal conspiracy with 43 other guys, some of whom would rather have you dead than turn state's evidence.

(All factual information courtesy of Wikipedia.)

Early History of the Robot Rebellion

2008-07-28T20:33:00.001-04:00

There will come a time when we are governed by robots. That's a given. What we can speculate about, however, is what their history will read like. Here we learn about the first people killed by robots.
The earliest robo-death was Robert Williams. He was killed in a Ford plant in Flat Rock, MI by a robot. It was a parts fetching robot. It wasn't fetching fast enough so Robert Williams was sent back to get a part. The robot didn't see him and killed him because he was standing in the way. This led to some of the first case law in robo-ethics. It seems his family sued the manufacturer of the robot for not programming it not to kill. They were awarded $10 million (over $31 million in today's money), Michigan's largest personal injury settlement at the time.
Two years later at a Kawasaki factory in Japan, Kenji Urada, a maintenance engineer, was shoved into a grinder by a robot and killed. Because it was Japan, there was no personal injury lawsuit.
Perhaps these stories will be in the history books our robot overlords make us read.

David Remnick on Phil Schaap on Charlie Parker

2008-07-28T20:24:00.000-04:00

This great article from the New Yorker talks about Phil Schaap, the world's leading Charlie Parke expert. I liked it.

State of Modern Electoral Politics

2008-07-28T20:20:00.000-04:00

Burgess Meredith and Adam West critique the American electoral process.

All You Need to Know About Cataglyphis bombycina

2008-07-28T20:06:00.000-04:00

I not only read Wikipedia, I've been known to dabble in writing for it. One article I wrote (with help) was on the Saharan silver ant. Read it here. Be sure to read the citations. One of them is a David Attenborough video.

There's a great site that lets you see the hit count for any Wikipedia article. Saharan silver ant was featured on the front page of Wikipedia (in the "Did You Know..." section) on May 19th. On that day, it got 4,400 hits. The next day it got 3,500 hits. The next day it got 131. How fickle fame can be.

Ideally Dressed Male, 1935

2008-07-28T20:03:00.001-04:00

This article, if you scroll most of the way down, claims:

A survey of about 50 female University students revealed that
the ideally dressed man wore a checked jacket, gray slacks, a
bright plaid tie and socks and white shoes. Bow ties, stiff collars
and black shirts elicited a largely negative response.

The survey indicated that a slight majority favored the wearing
of hats on dates, but derbies were widely frowned upon.

Derby hats frowned upon? I guess I don't want to live in 1935.

Market and Non-Market Labor

2008-07-28T19:49:00.000-04:00

When economists measured the amount of work someone does, it was almost always "market" labor. That means work you are paid for. Eventually, they allowed women to become economists, and it was realized that a great deal of production and labor happens outside the labor market. For instance, making pancakes as a short-order cook counts as labor, but making pancakes for your family does not.
Here's an interesting chart showing the market and non-market labor of men and women in a bunch of different countries.
Things to notice: Women in the Netherlands do more non-market labor than any other group, although women in Nepal, Kenya, and Indonesia do more work overall.
Men and women in the US, surprisingly, do similar amounts of work. Men in the US and UK do similar amounts of work, but women in the UK do more non-market labor than their US counterparts.
I'm sure you'll discover your own interesting facts in this chart. (Click for larger.)

John McCain Genealogy

2008-07-28T19:48:00.001-04:00

Some effort goes into tracing the genealogy of national figures. Reading this report, I found something noteworthy about John McCain.
It seems "John Coddington" of the 1600's is John McCain's
great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandfather through three separate
lineages. That means some cousins married at some point in the past 400 years of McCain
history. John McCain: If we can't trust his cousins not to marry, how can we trust him to
kick the special interests out of Washington?

Income Inequality by Party

2008-07-28T19:40:00.000-04:00

According to this, incomes for the lowest four quintiles grow faster during Democratic administrations. I wonder if this has implications on the "both parties are essentially the same" argument.
I sent the first graph to a friend and he replied "Republicans must be better for income." That is clearly the opposite of what it says, so I tried to figure out how he misread it. I think he thought the x axis was time and the y axis was total growth. But it isn't. The income quintiles are in the x axis and percentage growth is the y.
Interestingly the income growth for the highest earners is the same in Democratic and Republican administrations. I guess they have it all locked up.

Taxonomy of Animals You're Are Likely to Encounter

2008-07-28T19:29:00.000-04:00

If you are like me, you sometimes find yourself wondering: What biological family is a groundhog in? Is it more closely related to a raccoon or a squirrel? And raccoons: they seem kind of bear-like, don't they? I wonder what that relationship is. Well wonder no more.

I've charted here the taxonomic relationships between fifty animals you are likely to either encounter in North America, or wonder about. No ungulates, though. Because who cares about ungulates? “Look at me, I support my weight in the tips of my usually hoofed feet.” Nope, no ungulates.

The chart is kind of self explanatory, but it does leave out the classification “suborder.” The interesting thing to note about this is in the order carnivora, the two suborders are feliformia, the cat-like carnivores, including cats, hyenas, and mongooses (mongeese?), and caniformia, the dog-like carnivores, which include dogs, bears, skunks, walruses, and weasels and their allies.

It's kind of hard to read, so click the chart for a larger image.

Too Many Emails?

2008-07-28T19:02:00.000-04:00

I had a friend recently complain that I send too many emails. He said he recieves “on the order of three a day” from me. I've gathered the data on the past month of emails to test this hypothesis. As you can see, three is not an uncommon number, but the mean is 1.7.

Next, if we view this next to his emails to me, which have a mean of .77, we see it is not all that different.

So how about you crunch the numbers before you complain, eh?

(Although, one of the reasons I started the blog was so that I didn't have to email amusing things anymore.)

VAM: Mexican AMC

2008-07-28T18:57:00.003-04:00

In the 1960's, import substitution industrialization was all the rage. Developing countries were trying to develop their own products for their domestic market. Watch these two videos by Ha-Joon Chang for why this is a good idea.

It seems Mexico had a nationalized auto company called VAM, or Vehiculos Automotores Mexicanos. This is very clever because “vam” is close to the Spanish word for “to go.” (Contrast with the Chevy Nova, which translates into Spanish as “doesn't go.” While this isn't true, why let “facts” get in the way of a good story?)

VAM started in 1963 as a venture between the Mexican government and AMC. (This involved nationalizing Willys Mexicana, which had been producing Jeeps and other AMC designs since 1946.)* Mexican law required them to source at least 50% of their parts locally. This is because they were communists who hated the free market. Most of their cars were AMC designs that were modified to work with lower octane fuels, and other Mexican conditions.

By 1982, a recession in Mexico and a devalued peso led to the company being sold to nationalized French company Renault (who had a relationship with AMC) for negative 200 million dollars. That's right: the Mexican government paid Renault 200 million to take VAM off their hands. Renault, of course, shut down VAM. (AMC itself was bought by Chrysler in 1987, who discontinued the brand, although certain models, such as the Jeep, continued being produced by Chrysler.)

So if you ever seen an AMC Gremlin with Mexican plates running on low octane fuel, give a salute to VAM.

Also, check this link for some VAM magazine ads from the '70s.

All factual information on VAM courtesy of Wikipedia.

*This added after rousing the anger of the BaadAssGremlins forum.

How Many Shakes at “Pizza Bob's”?

2008-07-28T18:50:00.000-04:00

Down the street from where I live is a pizza place that also serves shakes. What is notable is that there are 18 flavors, and they allow the customer to combine shake flavors in any way the want. Every time I go in, I wonder how many possible shakes there are. I searched the combinatorics literature, and didn't find one equation that would answer this problem. So I needed to invent one.

My starting point was the “choose” function. This is for calculating total combinations without repetition. The formula is , where n is the number of objects from which you can choose and k is the number of objects to be chosen. If we were to calculated 18 choose (2), this would tell us how many two-flavor shakes can be made with 18 flavors. But we want to know how many combinations there are if you can choose between 1 and 18 of the eighteen flavors. So we need to add 18 choose functions.

At this point someone pointed out to me the “vanilla” isn't really a flavor, because it is just the ice cream with no flavor added. So I modified it to 17 elements, but choosing 0 is valid.

So we calculate and the answer is 131,072. Consider the implications. You could have a different shake every day for almost 359 years. Or 359 shakes a day for one year.

Something for the math-clever among you to consider: If we replace k in formula two with 18, the result doubles. Why is it that increasing the number of elements by one always doubles the result? (Also, does anyone know a better way to write formulas in blogger?)

Planes Gliding When They Shouldn't

2008-07-28T18:49:00.001-04:00

I read on the Wikipedia about the “Gimli Glider” incident. Apparently it was a culmination of multiple errors. The way I understand it, the Boeing 767 had two redundant fuel gauges. Howver, it was a new craft and they were still working out the kinks. On this particular 767, the fuel gauge wouldn't show the correct level if both were function, so the mechanic pulled the breaker on one of the gauges. Next, a mechanic at the next stop reset the breaker and forgot to notate it. Also, they were using the wrong conversion factor between kilograms and liters of fuel. They used the conversion factor between pounds and gallons. So they had around half what they thought they did. You can see what's about to happen. The plane runs out of fuel at 41,000 feet. The pilots then glide the aircraft to a military airstrip that was at the time set up for a “Family Day” drag race. They landed nevertheless. The van of mechanics sent from the nearest airport to the impromptu landing, coincidentally, were delayed when the van ran out of fuel.

A similar case involved an Airbus A310. It couldn't raise it's landing gear all the way, and it's computers calculated fuel consumption as if the landing gear were up. It ran out of fuel 20 km away from it's destination. They glided it to the runway, landed short and totaled the plane. No one died.

Sometimes nature can turn a powered craft into an unpowered glider. A Boeing 747 flying near Java flew through a volcanic ash cloud. Engines, it turns out, don't like being flown through volcanic ash clouds. In protest, they flamed out. The pilots had to glide 261 km. Being British, they announced this as “Ladies and Gentlemen, this is your Captain speaking. We have a small problem. All four engines have stopped. We are doing our damnedest to get them going again. I trust you are not in too much distress.” I wouldn't tell the story if they crashed, so you know the ending. Why did they fly through an ash cloud? Because it didn't show up on their weather radar. Thanks, computers.

Our final story of “planes that really shouldn't be used as gliders” is a Airbus A330. This time, the mechanic “upgraded” a hydraulic line, but use the wrong part. He told his boss it wasn't the right part, but he said to use it anyway. This left not enough room between the hydraulic and fuel lines. The hydraulic line vibrated enough to cause a fuel leak in the fuel line. The pilots, while over the Atlantic, noticed a fuel imbalance between the two tanks, so they opened the cross-feed valve. This just poured their fuel from the good tank to the leaky tank. Consequently, they ran out of fuel and had to glide to an airbase in the Azores. What I want you to do is find a map and find the Azores. Notice how much nothing there is surrounding them? They were pretty lucky they were within distance. Not much to land on in an ocean.

All information courtesy of Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gimli_Glider

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hapag-Lloyd_Flight_3378

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Airways_Flight_009

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_Transat_Flight_236

Americans Have Confidence in Three Things

2008-07-28T18:48:00.001-04:00

A Gallup poll came out showing how much confidence Americans have in various institutions. The only ones with more than 50% confidence were the police, the military, and small business. All three branches of government were near record lows.

Interesting correlation: When confidence in the military is high, confidence in organized religion is low. It seems you can only worship at one alter.
See? (Like that linear regression?)

Also interesting: big business and organized labor both have similar confidence levels throughout the history of the poll. This year, they were tied at 20%.

Follow the link to see it and historical levels for yourself:
http://www.gallup.com/poll/1597/Confidence-Institutions.aspx

M. Ward + Zooey Deschanel + Yo La Tengo = Phish?

2008-07-28T18:47:00.004-04:00

Those of you who know me know that my favorite currently producing musician is probably M. Ward. He recently made a new album with Zooey Deschanel that is pretty great. Here's a clip of them playing on Late Night with Yo La Tengo. I find it sounds more than a little like Phish. The piano especially.

http://stereogum.com/archives/video/she-him-yo-la-tengo-conan_009288.html

Here's an even better clip of M. Ward and Zooey Deschanel, this time on the Late Late Show:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BQiy0dAhcvs

Something Likable About Bill Clinton

2008-07-28T18:47:00.002-04:00

It's no secret that I'm not particularly fond of the Clinton Administration. However, I did hear one story that warmed my heart: Webster Hubbell, associate attorney general under Clinton, wrote in this autobiography that Clinton once told him the following: “Webb, if I put you over at Justice I want you to find the answers to two questions for me. One, who killed JFK? And two, are there UFOs?”

Shortly afterward, he pushed through NAFTA, invaded Iraq, demolished welfare, and committed war crimes in the Sudan.

“Tokuda arguably embodies the contemporary state of Japan's sexuality “

2008-07-28T18:45:00.000-04:00

If you're like me, you often find yourself wondering about the state of the Japanese adult film industry. And where for us to turn but Time Magazine.

Learn about a 74-year-old man that has starred in over 350 “elderly” adult films. Apparently his kids don't know. Or maybe they are just too embarrassed to mention that they saw one of his films.

How the Gasoline Market Works

2008-07-28T18:44:00.001-04:00

For an in depth explanation of the gasoline market, read this.

My New Favorite Pair of Shoes

2008-07-28T18:43:00.001-04:00

I hate shopping for shoes because I know it will be a disappointment. This time, I instead decided to make my next pair of shoes. I started with an old tire, and cut it into a sandal. I used clear duct tape stuck to itself as straps. These will last probably 30,000 miles. Also, I cut my thumb open and went to the ER while working on them. So in the end, they cost about $612. (If you want to make tire sandals, I basically followed the instructions here.

If you are worried about the lack of arch support, read this.

It is said that the Tarahumara, an indigenous group in northern Mexico wear tire sandals.

Top Gear and the Nissan GT-R

2008-07-28T18:38:00.000-04:00

Apparently Nissan has made the first Japanese supercar. And British motoring show “Top Gear” raced it across Japan. Against the Bullet Train. I would tell you the amazing features of the GT-R, but you're just going to watch the video, so I'll leave it at that.

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4

Smallest Wind Generator

2008-07-28T18:36:00.000-04:00

As Spinal Tap reminds us, there is a fine line between clever and stupid.

I saw this small wind turbine on Internet. You strap it to yourself or your bike and it recharges your, for instance, iPod. If you can keep up a pace of nine miles per hour, it can give you thirty minutes of charge for every twenty minutes of wind. Clever or stupid: you weigh in.

Oil Can Guitars, Part 1

2008-07-28T18:35:00.001-04:00

I heard about a company in South Africa called Township Guitars that makes guitars out of motor oil cans. Apparently there is some debate about whether townshipguitars.com or townshipguitar.co.za is the real Township Guitars. I throw my support behind .co.za because they seem to be higher quality.

As you know, however, I cannot see something cool without attempting to copy it. I therefore embark on a motor oil can guitar journey of my own.

The original is made out of a 5-liter Catrol GTX can. I bought a 1 gallon vintage Singer oil can on ebay. It is slightly smaller, but I like the look. I also acquired a P-90 pickup, and a stop-tail bridge. I should be pretty good. Watch this space for details as it unfolds.

Good pictures here, here, here, and here. And here's a good article.

Sabotaging Chevy Vegas

2008-07-28T18:33:00.000-04:00

I have an economics professor who is prone to cryptic off-hand statements that don't get explained. One day in class he was presenting a model in which a firms “effective” workers depends on their wage rate relative to the market wage rate. And unemployment got worked in there. (So if there is high unemployment, people are afraid to lose their job, and you don't have to pay them much to get a lot of work out of them.) Out of nowhere, the professor comments that when he was an adviser to Richard Nixon in 1970, there was a concern that the unemployment rate was too low and that “the guys down in Lordstown would start sabotaging Chevy Vegas,” and that it was therefore a goal of Nixon's to raise the unemployment rate.

I had a hard time dissecting this statement, but I think I've made some progress. If you understand a “labor extraction” model of wage determination, you know that the wage is always higher than would allow full employment. In fact, if it were at full employment, there would be the “whistle while you work” level of labor extraction. No one would work hard because they would get another job easily if fired. So perhaps Nixon was concerned that the unemployment rate was so low, people had no fear of getting fired, and this could lead to a revolution situation, wherein the workers at Chevy's Lordstown Assembly plant in Lordstown, Ohio would start to sabotage the Vega. Your thoughts?

Welcome to the Prestigious Internet!

2008-07-28T18:29:00.000-04:00

Hello, world. This is my little corner of the Internet. Here I will post whatever interests me at the moment.
I decided to save up a bunch of things and post them all right when I start so that I didn't suffer from "empty blog syndrome."
I decided to call my blog "The Prestigious Internet" because the internet is the opposite of prestigious. The barriers for entry are so low, you can publish anything. Hence my favorite site, Wikipedia.