Gus Van Horn blog

1. Here's a great example of me telling my two-year-old daughter about something, only for her to floor me weeks later by demonstrating how well she rememebers things. A few weeks ago, I heard a familiar noise that had gone missing for the last few years: the buzzing of cicadas in the trees overhead. I was playng with our daughter in the front yard, and told her they were cicadas, and that the "babies" live underground for a very long time before they crawl out and fly away. I mentioned that they crawl up trees and, since their "skins" are too small, they take them off and leave them behind before they fly away. "When I was a little boy, I would find them on tree trunks and keep them in a drawer." (And yes, the drawer was full of them!) We then looked around, failing to find a shedded exoskeleton, but coming across an actual bug, which shortly flew away. The above picture shows our first "bug skin", collected from a tree in our front yard about a month later, after we got home from a park. While at the park, Pumpkin had suddenly started looking on tree trunks for bug skins. We came up empty there, but not at home, to my surprise. We found just this one. 2. For those of you who were wondering, here is a final crucial robin update. With the arrival of our new son just days before I took the last two shots, I am amazed that I even remembered to take them. As usual, click for full sized images. 3. Can red-green color blindness be cured by a six hundred dollar pair of glasses? Not quite, but tech writer David Pogue, "severely" color blind himself, was still quite impressed: Then I put on the glasses. Unbelievable! Now I saw two entire additional color bands, above and below the yellow arc [of a rainbow his kids had discovered --ed]. It was suddenly a complete rainbow. I don't mind admitting, I felt a surge of emotion. It was like a peek into a world I knew existed, but had never been allowed to see. The glasses require very bright light to function, and were designed to help physicians get "a clearer view of veins and vasculature, bruising, cyanosis, pallor, rashes, erythema, and other variations in blood O2 level, and concentration," 4. Reader Steve D. sends me a link to a story titled, "Drone Delivers Beer at Music Festival in South Africa", saying, "If this doesn't make everyone pro-technology, nothing will." -- CAV Link to Original

Via HBL comes a fascinating Wall Street Journal article about South Korea's hugely successful "shadow educational system", which it calls "as close to a pure meritocracy as it can be". Aside from some impressive national educational statistics and the millions some of its "rock-star teachers" make, what impressed me most favorably about the system was that it is quite open to innovation: Private tutors are also more likely to experiment with new technology and nontraditional forms of teaching. In a 2009 book on the subject, University of Hong Kong professor Mark Bray urged officials to pay attention to the strengths of the shadow markets, in addition to the perils. "Policy makers and planners should…ask why parents are willing to invest considerable sums of money to supplement the schooling received from the mainstream," he writes. "At least in some cultures, the private tutors are more adventurous and client-oriented." The tutors take full advantage of modern communications, placing lectures online and keeping parents apprised of progress through frequent text messages, for example. The whole thing is worth reading, although I do have a quibble with a rock-star teacher quoted within. "The only solution is to improve public education," the millionaire teacher says. (In his defense, he is not an economics instructor.) This quote is amusing, coming as it does from the same article as this: Under this system, students essentially go to school twice--once during the day and then again at night at the tutoring academies. It is a relentless grind. Improve? Or abolish? Imagine what these tutors could accomplish with students who hadn't had to waste an entire day in government schools before attending class. -- CAV Link to Original

John Stossel comprehensively demolishes the myth that the gap in earnings between men and women of comparable ages is due to sexual discrimination. I had heard that much of the gap could be attributed to the choice many women make to leave the workforce to raise children for years at a time, and that is implicit in Stossel's argument. But Stossel frames the argument differently, emphasizing what women are getting in lieu of higher pay: [Facebook CEO Sheryl] Sandberg's been criticized by feminists for this common-sense message. The critics claim she "blames the victim." But most women are anything but victims. Making a different choice, choosing a less career-driven life, may be why women have more friends and live longer. Many women don't want "corporate success," though it's politically incorrect to admit it, says Sabrina Schaeffer, executive director of the Independent Women's Forum. "I don't think that most women want what Sheryl Sandberg wants," Schaeffer told me. "In some recent studies, only 23 percent of women said that they would prefer to work full-time, let alone (have the) sort of CEO quality of life that Sheryl Sandberg is living." It may be technically correct to simply note that less time in a career equals less experience and, therefore, should come with the expectation of lower pay. Nevertheless, Stossel's approach does two more things. First, it underscores the justice of how the market sets compensation for those who make such choices. Second, it appeals to the women that feminists are pandering to, helping them realize that it is wrong to effectively demand "redress" for a choice that is already being rewarded in other ways. Salary numbers yanked out of all context, save sex and age, are insufficient evidence that sex discrimnation has occurred. (But even the occurrence of unjust discrimination in no way justifies rights-violating, prescriptive, and discriminatory "equal opportunity" laws.) On top of that, those numbers do not even reflect all forms of compensation one obtains from one's choices in life. Stossel deserves our thanks for showing just how thin a reed number-based arguments for egalitarian solutions really are. -- CAV Link to Original

My wife and I have had our two kids and are officially out of the pregnancy business. Nevertheless, after having to endure the laundry lists of rules my wife was subjected to while pregnant, I must say that I found economist Emily Osler's Wall Street Journal articleabout the same to be a breath of fresh air. Not one to confuse correlation with causation or to be bullied by precautionary thinking, she put her data analysis skills to work to consider first-hand what the actual evidence was for and against some of these rules. Regarding correlation vs. causation, Osler's thinking is very clear: The key problem lies in separating correlation from causation. The claim that you should stop having coffee while pregnant, for instance, is based on causal reasoning: If you change nothing else, you'll be less likely to have a miscarriage if you drink less coffee. But what we see in the data is only a correlation--the women who drink coffee are more likely to miscarry. There are also many other differences between women who drink coffee and those who don't, differences that could themselves be responsible for the differences in miscarriage rates. This realization caused Osler to look deeper into the literature on the risks posed by coffee drinking during pregnancy. She eventually concluded that it was fine for her to continue her three-to-four cups-a-day habit. Osler similarly also concluded that small amounts of wine were okay. Here is a look at part of that reasoning: One big worry about drinking during pregnancy is that it will result in child behavior problems later. One of the best studies of this issue was published in 2010 in the British Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology. What makes it a reliable study? The sample group was large (3,000 women), and the researchers collected information about maternal drinking during pregnancy--not afterward. The study also followed the children of these women through the age of 14 and looked at behavior problems starting at age 2. The other thing I liked about this study was that it was run in Australia, where recommendations on drinking during pregnancy are more lax than in the U.S. Because the rules are more permissive, Australian women who drink occasionally aren't necessarily the kind of women who go against medical advice; it's more likely that differences in drinking levels there are just random variation. Drinkers in the study were classified in five groups: no alcohol, occasional drinking (up to one drink a week), light drinking (2-6 drinks a week) and moderate drinking (7-10 drinks a week). [bold added] Notice the awareness of the risks. the critical eye cast on the literature, and the insistence on having a causal link between evidence, goal, and rule. Most people can see that completely ignoring medical advice is lazy, but so is accepting it uncritically. But it is also difficult to evaluate such advice really thoroughly. Although this article probably has enjoyed great popularity for questioning the current conventional wisdom on pregnancy and diet, it really deserves attention as an example of how difficult it is to weigh scientific evidence. We don't all have the time to do this with everything we hear, but this is what it would take. If you can't approximate what Osler did, you should be very careful about whom you trust to do so. -- CAV Link to Original

An article that touches on some of the cultural influences that have shaped the Brazilian style of soccer reminds me a little of Ayn Rand's 1972 "Open Letter to Boris Spassky", in which she argues that the Russian chess master was using the game as an escape from the conditions of his totalitarian society. This she did by means of a series of questions, such as: Would you be able to play if you had to play by teamwork--i.e., if you were forbidden to think or act alone and had to play not with a group of advisers, but with a team that determined your every move by vote? Since, as champion, you would be the best mind among them, how much time and effort would you have to spend persuading the team that your strategy is the best? Would you be likely to succeed? And what would you do if some pragmatist, range-of-the-moment mentalities voted to grab an opponent's knight at the price of a checkmate to you three moves later? You would not be able to continue? Yet in the living world, this is the theoretical ideal of your country, and this is the method by which it proposes to deal (someday) with scientific research, industrial production, and every other kind of activity required for man's survival. ( The Ayn Rand Letter, Vol. 1, No. 25) Later, she makes the following point: If--for any number of reasons, psychological or existential--a man comes to believe that the living world is closed to him, that he has nothing to seek or to achieve, that no action is possible, then chess becomes his antidote, the means of drugging his own rebellious mind that refuses fully to believe it and to stand still. This, Comrade, is the reason why chess has always been so popular in your country, before and since its present regime--and why there have not been many American masters. You see, in this country, men are still free to act. ( Ibid.) Most reminiscent of Rand's piece as how racial segregation and a "semi-feudal" social structure affected the game. ... When soccer first took hold, teams were racially segregated and, if a black player ever made contact with a white player - no matter the circumstances - he would be immediately penalized. And so Afro-Brazilian players developed techniques where through feints, shimmies, and extreme control, it was possible to fluidly move past a white opponent without ever making physical contact. ... What's more, it could be that Brazil's emphasis on individual tricks actually embodies a fantasy of social equality in a society which has traditionally been anything but: " n a semi-feudal setting, football is a powerful mechanism for subverting traditional hierarchies," Tim Vickery writes, "And when [a player] does a little shimmy and an opponent clumsily falls to the ground, the roar from the crowd can be almost as loud as a goal. Even if the opponent is quickly back on his feet and doggedly performing his marking duties, he has been publicly humiliated for that split second -- a hugely significant moment."Unfortunately, despite the author's perspicacity regarding soccer as a psychological outlet, the similarity ends there. In particular, he uses the term "equality" ambiguously to mean both (1) equality before the law, as the term usually meant early in United States history, and (2) equality of outcome (which can only be achieved by a government improperly coercing it), as altruist/collectivist egalitariansuse it today in the U.S. and Brazil. (This ambiguity also shows up in his regard of "inequality", regardless of how it arises (e.g., feudalistically or by merit) as bad.) Seeing Brazil's recent unrest as having a "noble goal" -- a perspective I do not share -- he mistakenly believes that it reflects a fundamental cultural change. He correctly sees that conformity would kill Brazil's style of play if imposed, say, by a coach. However, the author fails to realize that, should Brazil's "revolution" achieve success, it will have the opposite effect on the national level: Whatever opportunities there are under whatever modicum of capitalism there is in Brazil will disappear, and soccer will, like chess, represent one of the few ways men will have to display creativity and innovation. I don't think Brazil's style of play is in any danger from its "revolution". Sadly, life entails much more than a game played on a rectangle of grass. -- CAV Link to Original

The Stampeding Mutation Writing at Nature, Andrew Curry describes how a genetic mutation that allowed adults to tolerate milk helped the advance of civilization across Europe: During the most recent ice age, milk was essentially a toxin to adults because -- unlike children -- they could not produce the lactase enzyme required to break down lactose, the main sugar in milk. But as farming started to replace hunting and gathering in the Middle East around 11,000 years ago, cattle herders learned how to reduce lactose in dairy products to tolerable levels by fermenting milk to make cheese or yogurt. Several thousand years later, a genetic mutation spread through Europe that gave people the ability to produce lactase -- and drink milk -- throughout their lives. That adaptation opened up a rich new source of nutrition that could have sustained communities when harvests failed. Beer, along with a mutation that permits metabolism of alcohol, is also suspected to have played a similar role, but milk was first. Weekend Reading "Knowledge is not acquired causelessly, it is earned, and those who earn it have the right to act on it." -- Harry Binswanger, in "Insider Trading Is a Right: Don't Shackle the Knowledge-Seekers" at Forbes "[T]here's such thing as too much advice, and Dear Abby-style advice givers dispense their brand of counseling with reckless simplicity." -- Michael Hurd, in "When Therapy Is the Problem" at The Delaware Coast Press "Staying out is actually the more caring thing, because it respects the fact that your friend has a mind of her own." -- Michael Hurd, in "If You Care, Don't Interfere" at The Delaware Wave "If you're looking to crush a water, engineering, or other development project, look no further than the nearest endangered species." -- Amanda Maxham, in "Drinking Water: Save People, Not Mollusks!", part of "Water Supply Debate: To Divert or Not Divert", at Blue Ridge Outdoors My Two Cents Michael Hurd, through pieces that have made points similar to the central one in the second linked above, has helped me better understand why I find unsolicited advice particularly annoying. Conversely, Hurd has added a new dimension to my understanding, as an opinion writer, of the importance of respecting reader context. It is hard enough to get people to reconsider their opinions without, say, alienating them, or causing them to suspect you're trying to pull a fast one. Not Your Usual Trading Post Jesse Porter pokes funat Trader Joe's: Pardon me? No, sir, no hatchets. Nope, no pickaxes either. OK, listen, people, this isn't really that kind of place. It's always the same complaint: "Joe, you don't have any of the essential items that every other trading post has. Why don't you have saddles? Or gunpowder? Or basic tools?" Because I have soy chorizo, that's why! Because I have chocolate-covered peanut-butter-filled pretzels! Because I have parsnip chips! Try to find parsnip chips at any other trading post! Just try! You homesteaders are so predictable... Circa 1877. Heh! --CAV Link to Original

1. I have been to St. Louis for the greater part of a year, but having two very young children in the house has greatly slowed down a vital part of becoming acclimated to the area: becoming familiar with the local microbrews. I do have a really nice find, though: Ale Mucho Hoppo, an imperial IPA brewed by the Charleville Vineyard Microbrewery in Ste.-Genevieve. I have to agree with the folks at Beer Advocate, who rate it nearly as high as my two favorite beers in that style, Sierra Nevada's Hoptimum and Odell's Myrcenary. 2. My daughter now almost always drinks from sippy-cups, although we still allow her to use a bottle for milk. This week, on observing her use a bottle, I realized that I never blogged one of those cute things that could easily go down the memory hole: She holds her bottles with her pinkie finger extended. 3. There is now an airline, in California, that operates on an "all-you-can-fly" business model: Surf Air started flying in June, with service between smaller airports in Burbank, Calif., and San Carlos near Palo Alto, tapping into those who do business between Hollywood and Silicon Valley and would prefer to do so without the headaches of major airports. It added service last month to Santa Barbara, Calif., and is considering additional destinations by the end of the year. File this under "interesting, but not likely to impact my life any time soon" -- unless you're such a frequent flyer that the pricing is actually appealing. Membership is $500 and there is a $1,650 monthly fee. 4. Two cheers for criminal stupidity and absent-mindedness. Recently, we were victims of a car burglary spree. On preparing to leave for work one morning, my wife noticed that our glove box door was hanging open. A portable hard drive of mine that had been inside was the only thing missing. There was enough personal information on the drive that I had to assume we were wide open for identity theft. I'd forgotten to lock the doors the evening before. Mid-morning, while on hold with a bank, I got great news: a fellow victim a few doors down had found my hard drive discarded along the sidewalk. I also learned that the thieves had smashed the windows of cars that had been locked. From what I gather, they were looking for guns. Interestingly, I discovered that the glove box door was undamaged. (I am not sure how it occurred to me that it had been yanked open, and might work if I simply slammed it shut again.) Good news: no repair expense. Bad news: that thing is even less of a crime deterrent than I imagined. Oh, and the hard drive still works. I will be encrypting any portable storage media that will hold important information at the very next opportunity. I feel quite stupid about not having done this already. Lesson learned. -- CAV Link to Original

At the end of the day yesterday, between email and errands, I paged through this list of "12 Most Embarrassing Cars" and found that the third entry, the Hummer H2, had earned the following interesting distinction over all the rest: Immoral, eh? Most people purchase and judge cars for implicitly selfish reasons, although they buy into the moral-practical dichotomy, and so fail to see that being selfish is defensible on moral grounds, to say the least. Such things as being able to haul a trailer, making a good impression, and economizing on gas are actually moral considerations to a rational egoist. Keep this example in mind the next time you hear some conservative or other argue that Americans will come around and vote for more business-friendly politicians, once they see some leftist policy drain their pocketbooks. Even the most mundane daily economic decisions, such as what kind of car to drive, are hardly immune from abstract, philosophical considerations. Since the only thing most people regard as morality is altruism -- in fact only one possible type of morality -- it is safe to say that the kind of people labeling an H2 as immoral will also vote for the likes of Al Gore on such a basis. (By this false standard, the really moral ones vandalize such vehicles.) The news isn't all bad. The lead-in to the gallery reports that, "The top write-in suggestion for most embarrassing car was the very sensible [sic], very successful Toyota Prius." At least one comment exemplified what I suspect is -- for better and for worse -- a common, sense-of-life type of gut reaction to the Prius and to unalloyed altruism generally: Now, more than ever, implicitly selfish Americans could stand to hear that they are, in fact, right, to feel disdain for the Prius -- and that their pursuit of the most attractive, practical, and enjoyable car they can afford is actually the moral choice. Any guilt they might feel -- that might bubble up as anger over what kind of car some sucker might buy -- is completely unwarranted. In better days, such a car would have been laughed off the market the year it was introduced, if it ever even got to that point. -- CAV Link to Original

Walter Williams, having taken up the gauntlet thrown out by the left since the George Zimmerman verdict, has written another hard-hitting article about race. This time, he makes yet another couple of observations and raises a tough question: Born in 1936, I've lived during some of our racially discriminatory history. I recall being chased out of Fishtown and Grays Ferry, two predominantly Irish Philadelphia neighborhoods, with my cousin in the 1940s and not stopping until we reached a predominantly black North Philly or South Philly neighborhood. Today that might be different. A black person seeking safety might run from a black neighborhood to a white neighborhood. He goes on to note that, according to a 2008 government survey, "in instances of interracial crimes of violence, 83 percent of the time, a black person was the perpetrator and a white person was the victim." Considering this statistic and the deplorable state of education in today's desegregated schools, Williams throws down a gauntlet of his own: [T]here're blacks still alive -- such as older members of the Congressional Black Caucus, NAACP and National Urban League -- who lived through the times of lynching, Jim Crow and open racism and who remain silent in the face of the current situation. I have noticed the same thing, but Williams is in a far better position to raise this issue than I. I am glad to see that he has decided to call the left's bluff. -- CAV Link to Original

Remember how apoplectic the younger President Bush made leftists? And how he was hysterically labeled at some times an idiot and at other times an evil genius? Dana Milbank doesn't draw the similarity to frantic leftist swipes at Bush, but he does note a desperate inconsistency about GOP attacks against Barack Obama: [Paul] Ryan, in his brief commentary, protested that Obama is "interested in tax reform for corporations -- but not for families or small business." He further accused Obama of implementing health-care and regulatory policies that favor big businesses and big banks. That's rich. Ryan, after all, is the guy who just a year ago accused Obama of " sowing social unrest and class resentment," of supporting "a government-run economy" and of " denigrating people who are successful." He has charged the president with leading the nation toward "a cradle-to-grave, European-style social welfare state." [links in original] Most people regard government favors to "big business" as somewhat the opposite of socialism, so -- for the moment -- we'll go with the premise that these attacks are inconsistent. Milbank blames the problem on "their thought leaders" not "agree[ing] on the proper line of attack." Milbank is on the right track, but another example shows at once where he has yet to go, as well as why so many Repulicans are having trouble opposing Obama effectively: [House Speaker John] Boehner, asked at a news conference this week about Obama's series of speeches on the economy, replied: " If I had poll numbers as low as his, I'd probably be out doing the same thing if I were him." ... [bold added] Really? Since when was doing anything relative to the economy -- aside from getting out of the way -- the business of a government official? In a similar vein, since when has lowering taxes for anyone been "unfair" or the moral equivalent of a doled-out government favor? Well, I used to think that it was the Democrats who regarded lower taxes as a government expense and Republicans who regarded taxes as money taken from individual citizens. The reason Republican "thought 'leaders'" can't agree on how to attack Obama is that too many of them agree with him on the premises that running the economy is the government's job and that government looting of private citizens is okay. Too often, the "disagreement" amounts to how much interference and looting to do, and on details as to how to accomplish them. This is why Ryan's attacks differ only on which pressure group they are targeted for: Americans worried about the government running the economy, or voters who dislike large corporations. (At least in the eyes of politician who doesn't see a principled difference between these groups, would Americans who want the government to butt out of the economy be a "pressure group" to be pandered to. Also, lest you think I am being unfair to Ryan, remember that he wants to save -- not sunset -- Social Security.) Perhaps the acceptance of common premises among leftists and too many conservatives might also explain why Milbank himself doesn't see whyRepublicans can't agree on a line of attack: Actually, attacking government favors to big businesses (or any other group) and attacking socialism would be quite consistent, if done for the right reasons. Otherwise -- if the attacks merely appeal to what the politician regards as competing pressure groups -- they represent a grasping at straws at best. Even a parrot can "criticize" Obama for being a socialist. But words are meaningless without cognitive context and accomplish nothing without appropriate actions. No wonder so many GOPers are having a hard time attacking Obama: He got where they're going first! The GOP will change direction or die. There is no need or room for two entitlement state parties in America. -- CAV Link to Original

Recently, I noticed that the word "mankind" had been used in a nationally-broadcast car commercial and dared entertain the thought that the power of the leftist word police was on the wane. Maybe so, but these kooks still hold sway in Seattle, where an innocent phrase and an even more innocent word have recently come under fire: The folks at Legal Insurrection do a nice job of showing how idiotic banning the phrase "brown bag" is. It might have been even more entertaining to see them give "citizen" a similar treatment, but maybe they have some kind of ten run rule against such things. In any event, I agree with one Stephen Clark that, "These people are not normal, and they should be dismissed as such. In truth, they are paranoid cranks." Why? Because they are deliberately not paying attention to what is being said. Believe it or not, I have an even more blatant example from my own experience: Call what the city government in Seattle is doing "institutionalized context-dropping" if you will. Clark's gut reaction is correct, but this is why he is correct: This kind of nit-picking serves two functions for leftists: First, it allows them to see what they want to see about others and themselves, while pretending it is based on "evidence". Second, it gives them the kind of arbitrary power the most virulent racist could only dream of. When you can just sit and wait for the right word to fall from someone's lips, you don't even need to hold a paper bag up against his skin to find an excuse to treat him badly. Just ignore everything else he says and anything else you might know about him and associate whatever evil you wish with any term anyone else might have used differently at any time or any place. Perhaps the word police are on the decline: This is Seattle, after all, and the memo is being (rightly) ridiculed. Nevertheless, they still wield power in some places, and that is disturbing enough. -- CAV Link to Original

More Efficient than Death Panels Nat Hentoff, who owes two decades of his life to medical innovation discusses the ObamaCare "Death Panel" in lurid detail. For that alone, his column is worth a read, but he also notes ways that ObamaCare can shorten lives without even having to use it. On that subject, Henthoff quotes a Wall Street Journal op-ed: Coincident with the 2.3 percent tax, venture capital investment in medical devices has all but ceased ... Ask yourself two questions: Who would want to invest in a highly regulated, government-controlled industry that faces a unique tax? What startup medical device company can reach the magical break-even point with a (special) tax on its revenue? Again, read the whole thing. Weekend Reading "Changing thoughts and behaviors in a steady and consistent manner is the only permanent cure for social anxiety disorder." -- Michael Hurd, in "Break the Shyness Cycle!" at The Delaware Coast Press "One of the biggest wastes of time in my office is working with a client who wants me to validate his or her irrational emotions." -- Michael Hurd, in "A Therapist Is Paid Not to Care" at The Delaware Wave "[N]o one should assume that America is collapsing economically just because more women are working relative to men, especially when the combined employment rate is fairly steady, or - better yet - when work can decrease even as we increase or living standard." -- Richard Salsman, in "What's So Bad About Women Replacing Men in the Workforce?" at Forbes My Two Cents Salsman's piece is a good example of one way to react to sensationalism on the part of someone who might reasonably be taken as an ally: Refute it. In a battle of ideas over the future course of this country, leftists are going to pretend that whatever we say is garbage. Why allow mistaken or less-than-rigorous work allegedly for our side to go unchallenged, making such charges have any credibility whatsoever? Strange Loves Over at McSweeney's Internet Tendency is an amusing list of alternatives to Platonic Love. I like Heisenbergian Love: "Moving fast but you don't know where it's going." --CAV Link to Original

1. Here's the complete run-down of my two-year-old daughter's reaction to getting a booster shot yesterday: "Ouch!" A nurse had earlier commented that most other children her age do not sit still for their exams like she did. Lately, she's been starting to interact with other kids at the playground and play make-believe. The other day, she was "driving" the firetruck model installed at a park and told me so. "Well, where are we going?" "Magic House." 2. Have you ever found yourself flipping through the pages of a SkyMall catalogue during a flight? Have you ever subsequently wondered about the company behind the astonishing array of bizarre items? Go to town, then. 3. Have you ever done a double take when asked whether to opt in to (or was that out of?) an email list? Have you ever wondered why some setting on your smart phone was buried under six menu layers and governed by a radio button next to some mumbo jumbo? Welcome to the sleazy world of dark patterns. Suddenly disabling text selection makes sense. They want to discourage people from bypassing their paywall by copying the job description and pasting it into Google as a search term. They don't want people to get to the true source. In this case the job was published on bloomberg's [ sic] careers site where you can apply free. Cass Sunstein would be proud. (And Nick Corcodilos would probably say, "Par for the course", regarding the above example.) 4. I guess Item 2 of this list of "New Kinds of Anxiety the Internet Gave Us" (NSFW) explains the "Helvetica Rules" bumper sticker I found myself driving behind the other day. -- CAV Link to Original

A list of "20 Things 20-Year-Olds Don't Get" includes tthe following: Speak Up, Not Out - We're raising a generation of sh-t talkers. In your workplace this is a cancer. If you have issues with management, culture or your role & responsibilities, SPEAK UP. Don't take those complaints and trash-talk the company or co-workers on lunch breaks and anonymous chat boards. If you can effectively communicate what needs to be improved, you have the ability to shape your surroundings and professional destiny. It has always seemed to me that there is a subtle distinction between speaking up and speaking out, although not quite the narrow one made here. The closest thing to the above or to my own distinction that a cursory search yielded this morning was the following pair of definitions: speak up: to end one's silence and speak negatively and publicly about someone or something speak out: to say something frankly and directly; to speak one's mind Of the two, which many seem to regard as equivalents now, the first seems, at least to my mind, more old-fashioned, dignified, and without connotations of being unnecessarily confrontational. (I am dubious that it necessarily has to entail speaking negatively about something.) The latter has always seemed "noisier" to me. The one makes me think of conveyng information over noise, be it in a literal sense or figuratively, in the sense of overcoming a common prejudice. The other connotes shouting to me, including the possibility of being part of a noisy gang getting ready to intimiate any dissenters. The one overcomes noise, the other contributes to it. The one has struck me as courageous, but unassuming; the other as cowardly, but posturing. Perhaps this is just me overreacting to the predilection I have observed among rabble rousers for demanding that people "speak out" about the pet cause du jour. Is this all in my head or have you, gentle reader, observed the same? Either way, feel free to speak up about it in the comments. -- CAV Link to Original

A short time ago, I said: The current "civil rights" establishment does a better job than any racist hick ever could have of ruining the prospects for millions of young black Americans. It's probably safe to say that Walter Williams agrees with me. He has some interesting facts and figures on hand to to support such a point, as well as to refute the standard leftist narrative on race. First, weaken the black family, but don't blame it on individual choices. You have to preach that today's weak black family is a legacy of slavery, Jim Crow and racism. The truth is that black female-headed households were just 18 percent of households in 1950, as opposed to about 68 percent today. In fact, from 1890 to 1940, the black marriage rate was slightly higher than that of whites. Even during slavery, when marriage was forbidden for blacks, most black children lived in biological two-parent families. In New York City, in 1925, 85 percent of black households were two-parent households. A study of 1880 family structure in Philadelphia shows that three-quarters of black families were two-parent households. Most damning about the redistributive welfare state is that Wiliams doesn't even have to bring up the fact that it is wrong for the government to steal from citizens in the first place. The practice subjects us all to open-ended robbery, but its further consequences are quite devastating. The welfare state harms everyone, but black Americans in particular. -- CAV Link to Original

Writing for Forbes, author Michael Ellsberg explains why the myth of "passive income" is dangerous nonsense. Although its title might lead one to expect a short article, the piece is long, and carries on, full steam, from the end of the short list that lends its title to his piece. Before going on, I'll give summary statements of Ellsberg's four reasons the myth is doomed to fail in a business sense: You can't stay ahead of competition passively. You can't maintain a loyal tribe of customers passively. You can't lead great teams passively. You can't create meaning, passion, or purpose in your life passively It is on the last point that Ellsberg's piece really shines. Here is part of his reasoning: This is the basic mistake they've made: they've fallen prey to the belief that money and meaning are two totally separate things. They've chosen to make their money from something that feels completely meaningless to them (some business they care so little about, they just can't wait to get away from it and minimize their involvement as much as possible), which they hope will buy them the freedom to do something they actually care about. [bold added] Ellsberg looks at (1) the empty lives of a few people who actually have something like a "passive income", (2) the lives of a few "active" successful people, and (3) the ways the former fail and the latter succeed, in the process of showing how mistaken the fantasy is. Ellsberg also delivers a much more positive message about how good actual success is. I am not at all surprised at how well this all ties together, but I am very impressed with how well Ellsberg demonstrates it with his writing. Read the whole thing. -- CAV Link to Original

Columnist A. Barton Hinkle discusses a subject that has come up here before: licensing laws as violations of freedom of speech. This time, it is a syndicated psychology columnist who has run afoul of bureaucrats in Kentucky. But, as they used to say in more free-wheeling days, that's not all! Within the column, the following eye-opening side note reveals something only a little less disturbing: the astonishing (and growing) degree of control that the government exerts over our livelihoods through licensing. Nationwide, more than 100 occupations are licensed by some or all of the 50 states; roughly a third of Americans hold jobs that need a government license, up from 5 percent a half-century ago. [bold added] This kind of government control reminds me of a couple of things Ayn Rand had to say. First, there are her comments on guild socialism: The particular form of economic organization, which is becoming more and more apparent in this country, as an outgrowth of the power of pressure groups, is one of the worst variants of statism: guild socialism. Guild socialism robs the talented young of their future--by freezing men into professional castes under rigid rules. It represents an open embodiment of the basic motive of most statists, though they usually prefer not to confess it: the entrenchment and protection of mediocrity from abler competitors, the shackling of the men of superior ability down to the mean average of their professions. That theory is not too popular among socialists (though it has its advocates)--but the most famous instance of its large-scale practice was Fascist Italy. Certainly, if -- as Hinkle points out -- one can face criminal charges for saying something that is completely true (among other things), this is an arrangement taylor-made to hold down the best. Second, since there is little practical differencebetween government ownership of the means of production and government control of the same, I am also reminded of something Ayn Rand said about what losing a job meant during the Great Depression: In these United States of ours, we working women may fear we will lose our jobs. That is one fear we all have, to some degree at any rate. But when the job is gone, we don't feel at the end of our resources. We still can go out and get another. I know this well, for in my first years in this country I worked as a waitress, as a saleswoman from door to door, as an assistant wardrobe women in Hollywood, as a scenario writer, as a worker at a bewildering number of jobs. And when fired, I always landed somewhere else, eventually. But in Russia the terrific fear of the young girl worker is the fear of losing her job. Once it is gone, it is almost impossible for her to get another job, since under the collectivist state, the government is the only employer. And if the government has discharged you, it is rather unreasonable to expect the same boss to take you back again. The same boss seldom does. [bold added] Official unemployment figures, which grossly undercount the unemployed by such means as leaving out those who do not apply for government "benefits", have been hovering around ten percent nationally for some time. While the situation is hardly identical to that in Soviet Russia, licensing undoubtedly does prevent many individuals from, say, attempting to enter new professions or innovating within their old professions to achieve a competitive advantage. With one third of Americans needing bureaucratic approval to work, I can't help but wonder how many people are hindered in their job searches by licensing requirements, in one way or another. -- CAV Updates Today: (1) Removed "not" before "leaving". (2) Added a hyperlink. Link to Original

Theft by Semantics The kleptocrats who run Kansas City, Missouri, have found a new way to steal money from drivers: ... According to a recent change in the city code, running a red light in Kansas City is now treated as if the owner of the vehicle parked illegally in the middle of an intersection. "The violation is not driving into the intersection but owning a vehicle that is found in the intersection while the light is emitting a steady red light," a city memo said. The fact that this is a parking violation, not a moving violation, means that K.C. doesn't have to bother with figuring out who was driving. Of course, the justification usually given for red light cameras is safety, despite the fact that they often cause motorists to slam their brakes to avoid tickets, so the fact is that the word games have been going on for quite some time. Weekend Reading "Because obnoxious people can't get validation from within themselves, they seek reactions from others by being blowhards." --Michael Hurd, in "Handling Obnoxious People" at The Delaware Wave "[A]s a matter of general prudence, armed civilians should avoid unnecessary confrontations with others." -- Paul Hsieh, in "The Single Most Important Lesson Gun Owners Should Learn from the George Zimmerman Case" at Forbes My Two Cents Micheal Hurd, as always, explains the advice he gives. Regarding not showing a reaction when dealing with obnoxious people, I would imagine that would also entail suppressing the smirk one might make upon realizing that one is frustrating such a person. Ditching GMail Google's overall direction seems to be to abandon standard Internet protocols in favor of vendor lock-in and assimilation of any and all services it doesn't kill into a Facebook-like social network. Bearing that in mind, I am always on the lookout for how-to guides such as Max Maznick's "Switching from GMail to FastMail". --CAV Link to Original

1. Two years on, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker's changes to teachers' union rules appear to be in the process of wiping them out (HT: Amit Ghate). 2. This mosquito magnet is eager to try running a fan on the deck to ward off the pesky insects. I have been amazed at the abundance of mosquitoes here in St. Louis. 3. Yesterday, on my second day of solo duty with both kids, I took them to the zoo. The highlight was watching my daughter at the excellent hippopotamus exhibit, which allows visitors to view the beasts in a good re-creation of their natural habitat. It was a sunny day and the animals were particularly active, repeatedly swimming past the viewing window. This delighted my daughter, who would yell and flail her arms as she watched them go by. As I said to another parent, who smiled at her antics, "You know you've had a great trip to the zoo when your two-year-old starts shouting nonsense." 4. Canonical is forging ahead with plans to build a smart phone that can team up with a monitor and other peripherals to function as a desktop that runs its Ubuntu flavor of Linux: I won't be reserving one of these, but I would consider one as a successor to my current phone when the time comes to replace it: All my other computers run Ubuntu Linux. -- CAV Link to Original

I have many problems with the work of Ann Coulter in general, but will readily concede that she can be very good at exposing the vacuousness and malignity of the left. Today, I have to further concede that she has written something much-needed and long overdue. In her latest piece, Coulter considers the army of unsung heroes who have played integral parts in various highly publicized criminal cases, of which the Zimmerman trial is the latest; cases in which leftist media and politicians have been more than happy to fan the flames of what could aptly be called black-on-black bigotry: One neighbor testified that Jonah [Perry] told him the night of the incident that his brother was shot when they were mugging someone. Another neighbor said Jonah told her that night that he tried to beat up a guy who turned out to be a cop. This was in a courtroom full of rabble-rousers, amen-ing everything defense lawyer Alton Maddox said. They told the truth knowing they'd have to go back to the neighborhood . Whatever happened to them? Why aren't they the heroes? Where's their Hollywood movie? There was a movie about the Perry case. It was titled: Murder Without Motive: The Edmund Perry Story. (The grand jury had no difficulty finding the motive: The cop was being mugged.) [bold added, minor format edits] I do have one quibble with this otherwise excellent column: I wouldn't say that these witnesses were under pressure to "root for their race". Objectively, rooting for a race would entail generally feeling good will towards the individual members of that race, and wouldn't preclude doing so for members of other races. Put another way, that phrase lets the zero-sum, collectivistpremise behind race-based law off the hook too easily. When individual rights are protected by law, everyone who obeys the law has the opportunity to win, that is, to pursue his own happiness. To root for or against a race in the way Coulter used the phrase is to admit that one does not see othersor himself as an individual. I leave it as an exercise to the reader to consider whether something like happiness ever factors in to the thinking of such an individual. -- CAV Link to Original

Jonah Goldberg's obituary of Helen Thomas is on the money, justly indicating that too many others have been puff pieces. A lack of actual accomplishment and an animus against the United States and Israel emerge as the two dominant themes of Thomas's career: Still, as time went by, the awards poured in as Thomas became a Washington institution, with cameos in Hollywood movies and even The Simpsons. But the "odd thing about her awards and citations," [Jonathan] Chait noted, "is that they almost never mention any specific contributions she has made to journalism save for being female and, well, old." [minor format edits] And: Ironically, her views on Israel made the woman who knocked down doors quite eager to lock them behind her. It was widely rumored -- and reported by Slate magazine -- that she kept pro-Israel New York Times columnist Bill Safire out of the Gridiron Club for years until he turned 70. When Slate asked her about this, she replied, "I don't think I'll talk to you anymore," and hung up. [minor format edits] Goldberg claims he can come up with only one explanation -- that used by Delta House as its "defense" in Animal House -- for Thomas's plaudits:" But sir, Delta Tau Chi has a long tradition of existence to its members and to the community at large." He gets the laugh, and such a joke is surely what this person deserves. I thought at first that Goldberg could have been more explicit about the fact that Thomas's iconic status said much more about her promoters than it did about her, but I changed my mind on that: Simply pointing these things out will be enough for an independent thinker to figure this out for himself. Past a certain point, connecting dots can amount to helping an intellectual opponent pass himself off as open to rational argument. That is more than the perpetrators of this fraud deserve. -- CAV Link to Original

Lenore Skenazy writes of lawsuit-driven precautionary thinking run amok at a popular institution that many parents hope will teach their children how to swim: At some of the YMCAs around the country, a rule for free swimming is now this: If a child is under a certain age -- sometimes as high as 11 -- and has not yet passed a swim test, a parent must be in the water with him at all times, not more than an arm's length away, in the shallow end. And the child must be wearing a life vest. This is all in the name of safety, of course -- except that it constitutes the exact opposite. It is practically guaranteeing that kids do not end up learning how to swim. How could they? Whenever they've got time to practice, they can barely get their head underwater! In fact, a head's going underwater is precisely what a life vest is designed to prevent. [bold added] Skenazy compares this with her own experience and then suggests the tongue-in-cheek remedy of a class action suit against the Y for failing to teach children to swim. In the process, she reminds me of how I learned how to swim, despite a stupid rule our pool had in place for swimming lessons. Because I am negatively buoyant (See Items 5 and 6.), unlike most people, I do not float in water. The result of this was that I was unable to do the "belly float" at an early stage of my swimming lessons. This was mindlessly enforced, preventing me from progressing, and leaving me to my own devices for learning to swim, which I was able to do precisely because our pool did not impose a silly requirement to wear a float for all children below a certain age during free swimming time. I also recall hearing about how my childhood best friend's dad learned: by jumping into a pond with a rope tied around his waste, with his father holding the other end. While I would not use that last method to teach my own children to swim, it illustrates the ever-widening gap between our growing body of de factoprescriptive law and common sense. The gap is widening so much that more people are falling into it daily. -- CAV Link to Original

Writing in the Telegraph, Daniel Hannan notes a striking similarity between a recent description of Detroit in the Observer and Ayn Rand's description of Starnesville in her "dystopian" Atlas Shrugged. (He quotes each at length.) Not lost on Hannan is the fact that Detroit has hemorrhaged over a million residents since Rand's novel was published. After reporting that one native blamed his city's poor state of affairs on a failure of capitalism, Hannan further notes that capitalism is one thing Detroit hasn't had for half a century and correctly names statism as the culprit. Of Detroit's $11 billion debt, $9 billion is accounted for by public sector salaries and pensions. Under the mountain of accmulated obligations, the money going into, say, the emergency services is not providing services but pensions. Result? It takes the police an hour to respond to a 911 call and two thirds of ambulances can't be driven. This is a failure, not of the private sector, but of the state. And, even now, the state is fighting to look after its clients: a court struck down the bankruptcy application on grounds that 'will lessen the pension benefits of public employees'. Hannan, taking note of financial parallels Mark Steyn draws between the federal government and Detroit's, also warns that the United States as a whole is headed down the same path, ending on the following note: Oh dear. No wonder the president would rather talk about Trayvon Martin. If you want to see Obamanomics taken to its conclusion, look at Starnesville. And tremble. It is refreshing to see the truth spoken so plainly. It is too bad that, as a commenter here recently pointed out, that one generally has to go to a foreign news source to hear it. -- CAV Link to Original

Regulation as Strangulation VIa HBL, I learned that John Stossel has, once again, hit the nail on the head. His whole column is worth a read, but I found the following bullet list quite informative: Drug companies invented a vaccine against Lyme disease, but they won't sell it, because they're scared of lawyers. Fearful medical device makers often stick to old technologies because trying something new, even if it's better, risks a suit. Monsanto developed a substitute for asbestos, a fire-resistant insulation that might save thousands of lives, but decided not to sell it because the company feared it might be sued. Believe it or not, Stossel provides a particularly sickening example of this process in action before he even gets to these. Weekend Reading "If you're too stressed-out to think, then you need to rearrange things to make time for it." -- Michael Hurd, in "Take a Deep Breath and Think", at The Delaware Coast Press "I can't overemphasize the importance of making sure your goals are achievable and realistic." -- Michael Hurd, in "Planning Your Planning" at The Delaware Wave "Opponents of assisted suicide place sovereignty outside the individual and view individuals either as the property of a supernatural deity or mere vassals of the State." -- Amesh Adalja, in "Does the Right to Life and Liberty Include the Right to Terminate One's Life?" at Forbes "Gasland, Part II is a direct continuation of the original Gasland, which famously featured footage of a Pennsylvania man lighting his water on fire--a phenomenon that, unknown to many, is a frequent natural occurrence." -- Alex Epstein, in "Gasland II's Luddite Slander of 'Fracking' Is The Latest Technophobe Attack on Progress" at Forbes "usiness leaders are paid for their contribution - and paid well, we know - but precisely because their contribution is large." -- Richard Salsman, in "Americans Think Little of Business, and That's Bad for the U.S. Economy" at Forbes My Two Cents The Epstein piece does an excellent job of debunking the claims of the two movies that smear fracking. But there's a nice bonus: Epstein also describes the dishonest rhetorical tactics they (and similar Luddite attacks) employ. That can help numerous people notice when they are being used -- and they will be -- in the future, and perhaps be able to see through them. A Heroic Moment in Medicine Over at Futility Closet, Greg Ross relays the story of Evan O'Neill Kane, who wanted to show that some major surgeries could be performed under local anaesthesia: [O]n Feb. 15, propped up by pillows on an operating table, he cut into his own abdomen, using novocaine to dull the pain while a nurse held his head forward so that he could see the work. "Just say that I am getting along all right," he told the New York Times the following day. "I now know exactly how the patient feels when being operated upon under local treatment. … I have demonstrated the fact in my own case that a major operation can be performed by the use of a local anaesthesia without causing pain more severe than can be borne by the patient." [minor format edits] Ross notes that Kane was sixty at the time and would repair his own hernia similarly nearly a decade later. --CAV Link to Original

1. Patience paid off for the folks at Trinity College, who successfully filmed a drop of pitch falling after only sixty-nine years: Over several decades a number of drips did form in the funnel and fall into the jar, giving credence to the hypothesis that pitch is indeed viscous. However, the dripping was never witnessed or captured on camera, which would have definitively proved the theory. A number of weeks ago, scientists in the department noticed that a drip had formed. In order to finally and definitively end the experiment, they set up a webcam to video the experiment around the clock. Last Thursday, the drip finally dropped into the jar, and was captured on camera. If this sounds vaguely familiar, it should. (Scroll down to Item 3.) But that experiment, the longest-running in the world, never caught the event on camera due to technical difficulties. 2. Someone has argued that we now have scientific proof that charcoal grilling is superior to gas, at least in terms of flavor. So if you have two identical steaks, cooked at identical temperatures, for the same amount of time, where the only difference is that one is cooked over charcoal and one is cooked over gas, what will be the end result? The charcoal-cooked steak will taste more like bacon. Plus, we already knew that charcoal grilling does a better job of upsetting greens. So why am I on a gas grill these days? Time. (And safety will rear its ugly head during the next year or so.) When you have an infant and a two-year old, the time to build and tend to a fire, along with the ability to sit next to it in peace, go completely out the window. Nothing makes one appreciate a gas grill quite like the following alternative: Gas grilling or no grilling. And I'll do both when the kids grow up: There will always be times that convenience wins out. 3. Speaking of kids, my two-year-old daughter asked me a "How?" question for the first time this week. Also, after she objected to her car seat before a trip to the "Magic House" Children's Museum, I gave her the choice not to go. I reminded her, though, that we have to use the car to get there. (That was all I said this time.) On the way, she volunteered something like the following: "Magic House far away. Car fast." 4. Over at Slate, a college student tells us what it's like to have a photographic memory: Only a few of my friends know that I have this kind of memory, and they all ask me the classic: Why aren't you getting A grades all the time, in everything? The simple answer is that the "photographs" in my memory are so fragmented and so cluttered that it consumes a whole lot of my energy just to visualize one chosen memory.Interesting. And three cheers for having a regular memory! -- CAV Link to Original