Microkhan by Brendan I. Koerner

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Thwarted by Ocular Weakness

March 29th, 2010


If you have even a passing interest in the nuts and bolts of warfare, we highly recommend this thorough exploration of Afghan marksmanship. We’ve all heard how rural Afghan boys are essentially born with rifles in their hands, and that meme has led to a belief that Taliban soldiers are expert shots. But the reality is quite different, at least according to C.J. Chivers, and his piece goes to great lengths to analyze the reasons why.

At the end of the article, though, Chivers throws the floor open to commenters, asking for military vets to chime in with their explanations. Lots of good stuff down there, especially regarding the Taliban’s less-than-exemplary maintenance habits and their macho refusal to fire from the prone position. But the idea that struck us most was this one:

A substantial percentage of individuals world wide suffer from myopia, which probably is the case amongst the Taliban as well; in general, the developing world has a limited or nonexistent prescription eye ware use, and I think it’s generous to consider Afghanistan “developing”. I doubt the Taliban’s health care coverage, such as it is, has a very generous prescription policy. Additionally, the high altitude of Afghanistan increases the likelihood of cataracts due to increased ultraviolet exposure and again, there are probably limited cataract extractions, Ray-ban or Oakley options as well. Lacking extant shopping malls replete with optical shops and sun glass kiosks, and often squinting, half-blind, and sun burned, it’s amazing that the Taliban do as well as they do.

We’d never thought of this issue before—how something as taken-for-granted as proper eye care can have such major consequences. But we also wonder whether this commenter overstated the prevalence of ocular issues. Could it really be that a significant percentage of the world is cursed with vision just as bad as Microkhan’s?

As it turns out, the figures for myopia prevalence vary widely from country to country. The stock U.S. figure is about 20 percent, with roughly half of that among people under 18 years of age. Obviously, our military might benefits greatly from ready access to LensCrafters. But the prevalence rates are far lower in less developed countries, even when researchers control for lack of access to diagnostic tools. Check out this 2004 study from the Ecuadorian jungle, for example, where myopia affects less than 6 percent of the local population. The study’s authors concluded:

The prevalence of myopia among two different Ecuadorian groups, one indigenous to the Amazon
and the other a white-mestizo group from the Andes, is low, in agreement with other studies on populations with low educational levels or a nonurban lifestyle. In agreement with other authors, we believe that the prevalence of myopia may be attributed partly to the genetic background of the population and partly to environmental factors (especially near-work activity).

In other words, we have consigned ourselves to poor vision in exchange for attaining our First World comforts. A fair trade, no doubt—we certainly wouldn’t want to live in constant fear of malaria or dysentery just so we could ditch our glasses. In that sense, myopia and obesity have quite a lot in common—afflictions that develop in tandem with the society-wide accumulation of wealth. Everything in this world has consequences, even though the benefits may vastly outweigh the costs.

Update Another case in point: the ocular-fitness disparity between two groups of students in Chennai.

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A Nightmare Even Orwell Couldn’t Conjure

March 26th, 2010


Thanks a million for your forbearance this week. All deadlines shall be met by sundown, and we’ll hopefully be back to full-on Microkhaning come Monday. Let us kiss off this dismal week, however, with a very special Bad Movie Friday entry: The Apple, a baffling stab at trying to combine a dystopian nightmare with a musical comedy. The results? Not pretty.

Oddly, the music is credited to one “George Clinton.” Unfortunately, it’s this guy, not this guy.

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Gladiators on Four Legs

March 26th, 2010


Though this seems obvious when you really think about it, there’s nothing like an objective report to drive the harsh reality home: modern horse racing makes NASCAR seem like knitting:

Based upon a year’s worth of data beginning November 1, 2008, from 378,864 total starts in Thoroughbred flat races at 73 racetracks participating in the Equine Injury Database, 2.04 fatal injuries were recorded per 1,000 starts.

Um, wow. Let’s put that in perspective, shall we? If we assume that the average thoroughbred race is 1.5 miles—the same distance as the Kentucky Derby—and that a dozen horses participate in each race, that translates into a death rate of approximately one per 9,000 miles run. The mortality rate for sled dogs in competitive rates such as the Iditarod, by contrast, has been estimated at one per 1.3 million miles traveled.

So, pretty gruesome statistics, and something that the horse-racing industry will have to address—either through the increased use of synthetic tracks, which appear to cause fewer leg breaks, or tighter restrictions on drugs.

That said, we admit that the title of this post is a wee bit hyperbolic. The mortality rate for Roman gladiators? Nineteen deaths per 100 bouts. Take that, BASE jumping.

(Image via this excellent Flickr stream)

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The Liver Knows Best

March 25th, 2010


Of all the various methods that mankind has devised to foretell the future, none is quite as bizarre as the reading of entrails. We have no idea who first came up with the idea that a deceased animal’s innards could cast light on upcoming events, but the practice certainly dates back to the heyday of ancient Babylon. And though the Romans were the most celebrated users of haruspicy, this gruesome form of divination appears to have developed independently in several other corners of the globe. It is, in fact, still central to religious life on Sumba, as well as among the Me’en people of Ethiopia.

Although haruspicy “experts” have developed complex systems that give entrail readings the veneer of science, the practice really amounts to little more than prop-driven storytelling. History’s greatest readers can thus be thought of as among history’s greatest improv actors, taking lumps of tissue and turning them into coherent narratives—narratives which are tailored to an audience fixed in a particular place in time. A study of the Me’en’s use of haruspicy in the early 1990s gets to some more of the essence (albeit with a touch o’ jargon):

While it is obvious that entrail-reading obeys some basic rules, it would be fairly fruitless to interpret the practice as an instance of a well-structured language where the utterances would have a more or less predictable, translatable meaning. If the colours and form of the entrails had a standardized meaning, there would be no possibility of deducing a communicative intention of a reader…We have seen that certain physical traits of the intestines can receive different interpretations, depending not only upon their various combinations but also upon socio-historical changes within Me’en society and upon the quality of Me’en contacts with the wider society. These affect the assumptions about what they will see in the intestines. What the intestines reveal changes over time: they always reflect new problems which the community faces.

Or, in improv terms, you can’t keep telling Monica Lewinsky jokes forever.

Want to haruspicize, but don’t want to slaughter any livestock or pigeons? May we suggest an egg?

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“The Mortician Bangin’ Your Pistons…”

March 24th, 2010


Once again, thanks for your patience this week as we work through a host of deadlines. Makin’ good progress, so all should be clear starting Monday. This afternoon, though, as we grapple with a way of expressing our skepticism about fMRIs, please check out the ultra-rare Godfather Don cut above. The DJ Premier remix came blasting over our headphones this morning as we climbed the steps in Morningside Park, and it made for quite the enjoyable moment.

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Where Sugar and Spice Shall Soon Be Rare

March 24th, 2010


The financial crunch caused by Microkhan Jr.’s increasing appetite for food and Cookie Monster paraphernalia forced us to drop our Economist subscription this year, so we’re late to the mag’s report on the drop in female births throughout much of the world. But it’s essential reading—a disturbing look at a trend that could lead to serious economic and security woes down the line. Having experienced what it’s like to be a twentysomething male, we know firsthand that no good can come of condemning 20 percent of our Y-chromosome brethren to futures without any prospect of female companionship.

The Economist piece disappoints, though, in that it focuses almost exclusively on India and China. But what about the Caucasus, whose nations nearly top the tables in terms of male-female imbalance? Fortunately, some French and Georgian demographers are on the case, investigating why the Caucasian discrepancy jumped so markedly immediately after the collapse of the Soviet Union. They’re cautious about making sweeping conclusions, but they do seem convinced that the collapse of stingy state-run health care is partly to blame. Once in utero scans could be obtained on demand at market rates, rather than only with bureaucratic approval, couples had much more information regarding the genders of their nascent children.

The question now is whether how we incentivize Armenians, Azerbaijanis, and Georgians to resist the urge to selectively abort female children. National governments need to be very far-sighted to do this, as the consequences of gender imbalance won’t start to kick in until a decade or two down the line—when, presumably, those in power will have already ridden off into the sunset. And meddling from the international community may be unwelcome, given the sensitivity of family planning issues.

We actually fear that this is the sort of issue that won’t be resolved ’til the downsides become more palpable. In the meantime, please remind us to steer clear of Ladies Night at any Tbilisi bar over the next 15 to 20 years. Gonna be a crazy scene.

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As We Write

March 23rd, 2010


Once again, thanks for bearing with us this week, as we slog through three distinct deadlines that could well determine our clan’s ability to maintain its current existence. Promise this’ll all be behind us very soon, and we’ll celebrate by reviving our dormant First Contact series.

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Even Nilgais Get the Blues

March 23rd, 2010

Nature just hasn’t seen fit to color many terrestrial animals blue, which is why the mere mention of the concept usually makes us think exclusively of fictional beasts. But as it turns out, blue bulls are rather common in India, and they have recently been causing serious problems:

Led by Una district committee of Himachal Kisan Sabha, more than 1,000 farmers from Beet area participated in a massive demonstration against the alleged inept functioning of the state government and the district administration in “rescuing them from incessant attacks from wild animals, especially blue bulls.”

“The menace of blue bulls has also cost many night riders with their lives as the jump of the animal is sufficient to kill the rider. More than a dozen people have died because of this. The peasantry is forced either to not to sow any crop because of which large tracts of land is left barren or have to keep a vigil 24 hours to protect the sown crop. Even the cropping pattern has changed in the area,” a release stated.

The state government has now reclassified blue bulls as a sort of vermin, and legalized their selective killing. This predictably has raised the ire of both environmentalists and religious fundamentalists, the latter because they deem the nilgai sacred.

This is a tough call, as is usually the case when man battles animal for territorial rights. We could, of course, entirely wipe out any species we chose in order to make farmers’ lives easier. But we do not, because on a very primal level we realize the intrinsic value of life—even for living entities that lack our mental faculties. Yet we also expect animals to have some respect for human concepts like private property, which really isn’t feasible. (See: “The Scorpion and the Frog.”)

We’re gonna reserve judgment on the Himachal blue bull controversy until we learn more about the greens’ charges that the villagers are concocting their tales of woe because they want to eat the nilgais—or perhaps export the meat to the West, where it fetches quite a pretty penny.

(Image via The Bottle Cap Man)

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The Noble Effort

March 22nd, 2010


We need to invoke khan’s prerogative today and step away from the blog, on account of yet another brutal Wired deadline. In our absence, enjoy this archive of photos from the defunct League of Nations. The one above is of the Iranian delegation, circa 1920—we reckon that was the Golden Age of women’s fashion in Tehran, at least for the elites. We wonder what the lovely lady in the killer coat would think of the nation’s current attitude toward the female form.

Also worth checking out: the extremely unhappy bunch who comprised the League’s Opium and Social Questions Section. They don’t look like the sorts who might’ve been willing to ponder decriminalization.

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“You’ll Talk About Him Forever”

March 19th, 2010


In reading about Universal’s decision to nix P.T. Anderson’s The Master, a movie obviously inspired by the founding of Scientology, we found ourselves heartily agreeing with several of The A.V. Club‘s commenters: Perhaps what the world needs isn’t a flick about L. Ron Hubbard’s quasi-religious scam, but a Hollywood-style biopic about the even more fascinating (and still alive) Werner Erhard, the man behind EST.

You probably already know the rough outlines of Erhard’s remarkable tale: Used car salesman turns into spiritual guru, then sells his whole system for a fortune beyond belief. In delving into the man’s heyday, we were struck by his obvious genius for playing the media. Take, for example, this 1975 piece from Cosmo, which takes the concept of subjective journalism to new lows:

The very next day, back in my reporter role, I fly up to San Francisco to meet Werner Erhard. Like my est fellow travelers, I’ve moved from the position of believing he’s a charlatan to believing he’s set himself up to be a Godhead. I didn’t know then that I was following the usual route, and that the next step is to thinking he’s really God, then Robert Redford, then Daddy. Several weeks later I realized he was no longer any of those things to me and I was free to really dig him. Because, in fact, he is the most intriguing human being I’ve ever known, and when somebody in est said to me, “You’ll talk about him forever,” she was probably right.

The article also notes that the salaries for EST’s 160 employees ranged between $7,200 and $30,000. Erhard himself, of course, did a fair bit better.

More on his brief auto racing career here.

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The Seeds of Blowback

March 19th, 2010

The Chittagong Hill Tracts rarely make the Western news, unless they’re being invaded by wave after wave of hungry rodents. But there is a great deal of conflict in that remote corner of southeastern Bangladesh, an area traditionally inhabited by tribes that are ethnically distinct from the nation’s Bengali majority. As settlers have moved into the Tracts, violent clashes have ensued.

So why should Joe Sixpack care? Because the Muslim settlers who’ve been frustrated in their efforts to incur on tribal territory have been forced into resettlement camps. And those camps, aside from being terribly squalid, could be stirring up extremism:

The people in the camps have no social ties, are often divided along regional lines and have very little cultural and recreational activities. The only thing that has a fast growth is the population. The number of children running around in any camp draws one’s attention; most families have 5-6 children. More children means more ration, thus, the system encourages population growth rather than curbing it. There are hardly any schools, but there has been a proliferation of Quomi Madrassas and mosques financed by Islamic charities from around the world.

Keep in mind that Bangladesh is the third largest Muslim nation in the world, with a population of roughly 162 million souls. And at the moment, it is teetering between two future developmental paths—that taken by Indonesia, and that taken by Pakistan. It should go without saying which path would be more beneficial to global stability.

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Nothing Exceeds Like Excess

March 18th, 2010


Yesterday’s New York Times featured a piece on the lavish lifestyles of South African president Jacob Zuma and his fellow African National Congress bigwigs. The article was accompanied by a photograph of Zuma sitting on a gilded banquet chair, which bears a striking resemblance to a throne. (Note to Zuma’s handlers: If your boss is weathering corruption charges back home, best not to let him be photographed on anything throne-like while abroad.)

The photo couldn’t help but remind us of one of the most sensational episodes of megalomania in modern history: the December 1977 coronation of Jean-Bédel Bokassa as emperor of the Central African Republic. Bokassa actually crowned himself, and spent $22 million on the ceremony at a time when the CAR’s average per-capita income was just $122 per year. Blessedly free of any shred of self-awareness, Bokassa let Werner Herzog film the whole sad affair; if you only have a few moments to spare, we highly recommend you just check out the actual crowning, which took place atop a two-ton golden throne shaped like an eagle.

It probably goes without saying that Bokassa was wholly undeserving of his exalted title, though we think he is a strong candidate for “Worst Person of the 20th Century.” A Montreal Gazette reporter broke it all down on the eve of the coronation:

Tomorrow, Bokassa will be crowned at the Bokassa Sports Palace beside Bokassa University on Bokassa Avenue, hailed by thousands, many in clothing imprinted with the Bokassa portrait, waving Bokassa flags and gathered around the Bokassa statue in Bokassa square.

What we wouldn’t have given to see Bokassa duke it out in the Thunderdome with Turkmenbashi.

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The Cattle and the Mark

March 17th, 2010


The Amish generally prefer not to mess with the American legal system, but the Wisconsin left them no choice. Badger State authorities decided to make the Amish comply with regulations that made the registration of “livestock premises” mandatory. One farmer, Emanuel Miller, decided to fight back, claiming that the program infringed on his religious freedom. The Clark County Circuit Court saw it his way:

An Amish farmer in Clark County has won his fight against the state’s livestock registration law, which he argued violates his religious beliefs.

The case against Emanuel Miller Jr. of Loyal was the first in the state against an Amish farmer over refusal to obey the 2005 mandatory livestock registration law, aimed at controlling outbreaks of disease. It requires owners of premises where livestock is kept to register the location, number and type of livestock with the state.

Amish and other farmers around the nation have been following Miller’s case because of a fear that the law is the first step to the individual tagging of all livestock, a program once advanced by the federal government. Some Amish and others say such a numbering system would amount to the “mark of the beast,” which is referenced in the Book of Revelation as being related to Satan…If he registered his farm, Miller testified, he would be shunned by his church and risk eternal damnation.

The full ruling can be found here. This strikes us as sort of a big deal, since such arguments are likely to become more and more common as location-based technologies are rolled out en masse. A key to the Wisconsin court’s decision was its conclusion that Miller’s beliefs were genuine. We’re curious as to how other courts will determine if the similarly anti-technology views of non-Amish litigants are real, rather than a ruse to avoid supervision. How, exactly, do you look inside a person’s heart and make that distinction? Or can these protections only extend to people whose entire lifestyle amounts to one long act of devotion?

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Losing Teeth

March 16th, 2010


If all goes according to plan, today’s the day we finally finish the second draft of our next Wired bit—the one about addiction that we’ve been yammering on about for a good two weeks now. Tomorrow will then be all about edits, as we scramble toward our 5 p.m. PST deadline. (The editorial mothership is in San Francisco, so we always get a three-hour cushion.) Not entirely sure we’re gonna make it, especially since our trusty Vaio is on its last legs—it has come to resemble astronaut clone Sam Bell from Moon as he comes within days of his alleged journey home. Life is tricky without a close parentheses key.

As we work our royal fingers to the bone, enjoy some Brazilian funk. Back to full strength anon.

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The Last Beer Run

March 16th, 2010


The sign above, which features script that translates as “Attention: Drunks,” was briefly part of a safety initiative in the Romanian town of Pecica. The mayor was concerned that too many of inebriated pedestrians were getting mowed down by cars, and so sought to duplicate a series of warning signs that he had once encountered in Germany. All was going well until the international media caught wind of the story, and made the program out to be ridiculous. The poor mayor was forced to relent.

That’s a pity, because despite the humor of the signs’ graphic, the issue is a serious one—particularly in Central and Eastern Europe, where alcohol consumption is high and traffic safety a low priority. According to this 2009 study, for example, 36 percent of pedestrian deaths in Slovenia involve people with blood-alcohol levels in excess of 0.20. (The figure in the U.S. is closer to 25 percent.)

Banning drunken walking is obviously not feasible, so what is to be done? This fact sheet notes that most deaths occur not when drinkers are returning home from bars, but rather when folks partying at home decide to make a midnight trek to the store for beer or cigarettes. We must therefore decide what is more important to our society: the 24-hour availability of intoxicants, or several hundred (or even thousand) human lives per year.

We don’t mean to be flippant about that choice. We are obviously not in favor of anyone getting hurt—every death is a tragedy. But it is inevitable that some of our societal choices will lead to harm for those who choose to act irresponsibly. Coming to terms with that fact would greatly help our body politic make wiser decisions; in the absence of that revelation, emotion too often sways us toward the greater of two evils.

(h/t Erik Ness)

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The Yngwie Malmsteen of Kazakhstan

March 15th, 2010


Totally immersed in addiction science this afternoon, which means we’re giving ourselves permission to half-ass it with a highlight from one of Kazakhstan’s most beloved variety shows. We have no idea what this song is about, but we must admit, that one dude in the shiny shirt absolutely tears it up on the dombra. When the instrument inevitably becomes a part of American rock ‘n roll—perhaps as part of TV on the Radio’s inevitably awesome Beatles-in-India moment?—just remember that Microkhan recognized the genius first.

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A Lovely Place to Say Goodbye To

March 15th, 2010


There is plenty of statistical candy to consume in the CIA Factbook‘s latest net migration figures. We had no idea, for example, that people were actually flocking to strife-torn Cyprus, or that Grenadians were so hot to leave the erstwhile Isle of Spice. But what really struck us was a stat that harkens back to a topic of discussion last week: the sheer magnitude of the Guyanese diaspora.

According to the CIA, Guyana’s net migration rate last year was an astronomical -17.31 per every thousand residents. Only a few South Pacific specks saw people flee at a greater clip, though those nations’ figures are obviously skewed by their tiny populations. If we confine ourselves to looking only at countries with populations in excess of 100,000, then Guyana is the undisputed king of exporting human beings.

As this report from the Migration Policy Institute shows, Guayana’s population would swell by over 54 percent if all of its departed citizens returned home—and that doesn’t count the children those Guyanese migrants have had abroad. It’s also worth noting that the most educated Guyanese citizens are the one most likely to skedaddle; 85.9 percent of those with college degrees vote with their feet to move elsewhere.

The departed send plenty of money back home, to the point that remittances form 22 percent of GDP. But the figure on the chart above that really caught our eye is the one comparing remittances to foreign direct investment. As you can see, remittances dwarf the amount of cash that foreigners pump into Guyana’s economy, which strikes us as a very big problem. Investors see Guyana as a hostile place to do business, largely due to major governmental corruption and a lack of adequate policing. Yet unlike other nations bedeviled by similar problems, Guyana has a relatively quick and easy immigration pipeline to the U.S. and Canada, two of the most prosperous nations on Earth. (Some of this human traffic is legal, but illegal movement is common across the border with Suriname.)

At this rate, we do wonder if Guyana will essentially be devoid of people by 2050—a Central American version of North Dakota. Maybe the snazzy new Turkish-run casino will help turn things around.

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“An Alligator Half That Size Would Starve in a Week”

March 12th, 2010


We’re a bit embarrassed to admit this, but we once wrote a magazine piece that seriously examined the physiological feasibility of Godzilla. We called various eggheads and asked them to assess whether a lizard-like creature as massive as Tokyo’s favorite monster could ever exist in the real world. The universal answer, of course, was nyet—Godzilla’s weight would instantly crush all of his internal organs. Not to mention the fact that he couldn’t possibly consume enough salarymen to satisfy his vast caloric needs.

We thought of that piece while watching the above trailer for this week’s Bad Movie Friday entry: 1980’s Alligator, which sought to bring the Jaws/Piranha/Orca formula to the streets of Chicago. As the professor type notes early in the clip, the titular creature could not possibly eat enough to stay alive—there’s a reason that modern alligators don’t max out at 36 feet. But the film never quite explains how its villain manages to survive, except to suggest that it’s just really, really adept at chomping on people.

We’ll forgive that plot hole, though, give that screenwriter John Sayles—yes, that John Sayles—did come up with a rather clever way of explaining the gator’s impressive size:

By now you may be wondering how a creature which normally grows to a size of 15 feet, 150-200 pounds in ideal conditions, can be transformed into a two-ton dynamo while living in the cold, murky, dirty sewers of Chicago.

The answer is hormones. An evil lab technician is trying to develop a serum which will accelerate the growth of animals. He experiments on dogs. This technician isn’t exactly another Jonas Salk, and he loses plenty of dogs. The dead dogs are secretly tossed in the sewer where they become, you guessed it, alligator food.

A clip from the final scene, in which the gator crashes a ritzy wedding, can be viewed here. Be forewarned: It features an obviously fake alligator eating several people, including a poor young thing in a French maid costume. A blood-like substance that may or may not be ketchup is visible. There is excessive, high-pitched screaming. And the old guy in the white tux is a loathsome human being.

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A Nation of Lushes

March 12th, 2010

So we’re starting the second draft of our addiction piece for Wired today, which means the majority of our mental bandwidth shall be dedicated to inebriation for the next six to seven days. A rough ride for us, as the topic is a beast—we’re still not entirely sure we understand what takes place in the mesolimbic pathway when a shot of Wild Turkey works its dark magic.

But the upside is that we’ll have plenty of great tidbits to Microkhan as we plow through, starting with this historical tidbit from the excellent Slaying the Dragon. While we knew that our American predecessors were fond of booze, we had no idea of the depth of their affection:

Between 1790 and 1830, America fundamentally altered its pattern of alcohol consumption. In 1792, there were 2,579 distilleries in the U.S. and annual per capita alcohol consumption was 2.5 gallons. In 1810, there were 14,191 U.S. distilleries and annual per-capita alcohol consumption had risen to more than 4.5 gallons. By 1830, annual consumption had risen to 7.1 gallons of pure alcohol per person. Problems of public drunkenness and disorder, and the impact of drunkenness on family life, intensified in the midst of this collective spree.

For comparison’s sake, today’s most drunken nation, Luxembourg, boasts a per-capita consumption rate of just 4.1 gallons.

Some obvious ideas pop to mind as to why early Americans were such prodigious drinkers. The lack of potable water in many areas probably made whiskey the safer bet, in terms of avoiding terrible diseases (save for cirrhosis, of course). Most lines of work involved heavy and dangerous labor, and alcohol dulled the monotony and physical pain. Leisure opportunities were few and far between, save for the easy-to-obtain pleasure of gathering with one’s comrades and knocking back a few jugs of XXX.

But we think there’s also something to be said for those decades as being America’s adolescence, a time when experiments in self-destruction are often integral to finding one’s way in the world. The excitement of being part of the American experiment obviously fed into a sense of overconfidence, bordering on hubris. (See: Manifest Destiny, The War of 1812, etc.) If America was fated to become such a great and mighty nation, then copious amounts of alcohol could only add to the fun without causing any real problems.

Eventually, of course, we grew out of this phase, to the point that our social values tilted too radically in the other direction. But nations are just vast collections of human beings, and humans change their minds several times over the course of their lives. In theory, a happy equilibrium is found after several missteps. We’re not too sure how close we are to getting there, though—the existence of Bud Select 55 makes us think our relationship to alcohol still needs to evolve a bit.

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Dyed by Their Own Hands

March 11th, 2010


For the umpteenth year in a row, we failed to take advantage of our Atlah locale and check out the annual Phagwah parade in Richmond Hill, Queens. But we got our Guyanese festival kick by checking out these shots, which amply demonstrate the splattery fun that was had by all.

More great photos of Phagwah parades past here. And you can read about the history of the parade here. We tried to find some info on the festival’s celebration in Guyana itself, but didn’t come up with much of interest. Perhaps that’s because Guyana is a nation whose culture flourishes most beyond its physical borders; the number of Guyanese living abroad far exceeds the motherland’s dwindling population.

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Ransom as Lifeblood

March 10th, 2010


For fairly obvious reasons, we find it unable to resist scholarly examinations of North Korea’s currency weirdness. Why would Dear Leader’s regime see fit to instantly vaporize what little wealth the Hermit Kingdom’s poor citizens have managed to scrape together? (We suspect the answer has something to do with the abuse of Hennessy, which has been known to spur some of Microkhan’s more foolish behavior.)

We hoped to find an answer to our question in this Japan Focus article. But we came away traveling on a whole different intellectual track, after doing a double-take at this line:

East Germany sold a total of almost 34,000 political prisoners to the West at an average fee of 90,000 Deutschmarks.

Whoa. That sounds like quite a bustling business, and our first instinct was to assume that the writer misplaced a comma somewhere. But sure enough, the GDR raked in substantial dough selling inmates to West Germany—a grand total of nearly 3.5 billion Deutschmarks between 1964 and 1990, presumably all in hard currency that the country so desperately needed. Considering that East Germany’s total annual exports didn’t top $3.5 billion until the 1980s, the ransom cash that the Erich Honeker regime raked in may well have kept the nation afloat during some mighty lean years.

So vital was the prisoner trade to East Germany’s fiscal health that the country snuck in bona fide crooks amidst the dissidents, just to glean some extra cash—or just to rid itself of troublesome citizens:

An internal note by Herman Kreutzer shows of the Ministry for Intra-German Relations show, for instance, that in October 1973 30 percent of the transports consisted of criinals and were therefore “extraordinarily bad.” This became a public issue in 1973, when a series of former prisoners committed crimes in the Federal Republic,and it was subsequently discovered that Bonn had paid for their release. The most spectacular case, causing a flood of letters requesting a stop to the purchases, concerned the “Taxi Murder in Hanau.” One month after their release, two former prisoners shot a taxi driver and stole 137 DM. Since the Federal government kept track of every transport, it turned out that the GDR sometimes just filled the coaches with ordinary criminals without receiving payment for them. Kreutzer almost desperately states in the file that it was impossible to send these people back since, according to the Federal constitutional law, they were West Germans, as were all Germans.

It also strikes us that the West vastly overpaid for these prisoners. The average ransom seems to have been several thousand dollars more than what private companies now pay when their employees are snatched in the developing world. The passions stirred up by the Cold War may have warped the market somewhat.

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The Comfort of Statistics

March 10th, 2010

For those suffering from a grave case of ursinophobia, we provide the following snippet from Bear Facts, an informational brochure produced by the Alaska Department of Fish and Game:

Many bears live in Alaska and many people enjoy the outdoors, but surprisingly few people even see bears. Only a tiny percentage of those few are ever threatened by a bear. A study by the state epidemiologist showed that during the first 85 years of this century, only 20 people died in bear attacks in Alaska. In the 10 years 1975-85, 19 people in Alaska were killed by dogs.

This stat may actually say less about the relative peacefulness of bears than it does about Alaska’s canine woes. According to this 2009 study, the state has by far the highest death rate from dog attacks, at 11.83 per 10 million people. (Yes, we realize that Alaska has well under 1 million residents. The paper expresses everything in that unit.) Similarly tiny and rural North Dakota, by contrast, didn’t have a single dog-bite fatality between 1979 and 2005.

See the full map of dog-bite fatalities by state here.

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Essential Egg Tech

March 9th, 2010


Since far more learned organizations have the whole gadget scene locked down, we here at Microkhan rarely wax rhapsodic about the electronic toys that wow us. But we just couldn’t help ourselves upon coming across the Egg Shell Thickness Gauge, which now sits high atop our wish list. How many hours have we spent fraught with worry that our eggshells are several millimeters short of what we truly desire? Once we save up enough loot to purchase an ESTG unit, that anxiety will be a thing of the past.

More gadgets for eggheads here. And don’t miss the site’s definition of a Haugh unit, which is used to measure “the internal quality of an egg.”

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Gaming the System

March 9th, 2010

When conducting business deals with their fellow private citizens, people basically tend to be honest. Perhaps this is because we all secretly fear retribution and punishment, no matter how unlikely the consequences. Or maybe it’s just that we’re wired to realize that society can’t function if we’re constantly preoccupied with suspicion. Whatever the explanation, the bottom line is this: When you purchase something from a stranger, you can be reasonably certain that he or she will make good on their obligations.

But the equation changes a whole bunch when the transaction isn’t between two citizens, but rather between a citizen and the government. In such a scenario, people tend to work the angles as much as possible, even if the consequences of getting caught can be dire. We were reminded of this curious fact upon reading an account of the Indonesian government’s efforts to rid a Borneo district of bird flu:

To protect local residents from the worst possibilities, a total of 7,000 infected chickens were culled.

Local authorities paid the owners a compensation of Rp12,500 (US$1.40) for every culled chicken, Endang said.

However, not all people welcomed the amount of compensation. Instead of giving up the positively infected chickens for culling, they hid the poultry and just handed over small chickens, he said.

As a result, the efforts to control and halt the spread of bird flu in Garut district were not so successful.

The first American parallel that popped to mind was the gaming of gun buyback programs, which have often been undermined by people who swap near-worthless firearms for disproportionate sums.

The main problem here, of course, is cynicism—a feeling among citizens that if there is no upside to playing by the government’s rules, since corruption or incompetence will ultimately cancel out any deal’s good intentions. That’s not an easy feeling to counter, especially since it’s often justified. (Eminent domain, anyone?) So maybe the only solution is to outsource buyback programs to private enterprise, who at least might be better equipped to determine fairer pricing than government bean counters. $1.40 per chicken strikes us as pretty low.

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The Danites Are Coming

March 9th, 2010


While we’ve always been vaguely aware of the Mormon film industry, we never realized that its history could be traced back to the very dawn of popular cinema. Nor were we particularly familiar with the brief silent-era vogue for movies that cast Mormons as archvillains, which BYU film historian Gideon Burton identifies as part of the industry’ s “First Wave.” The full knowledge on cinema’s Mormon exploitation movement can be found here, via BYU Studies. (Warning: Massive PDF file.) Our favorite snippet, regarding this over-the-top gem:

Anti-Mormon films reached their zenith with the 1917 A Mormon Maid. Produced by Famous Players-Lasky, the film opened on Valentine’s Day at New York’s Strand Theater. It ran sixty-five minutes on five reels and was described as the most advertised film in the history of cinema up to that time. Such a high-profile production, with a familiar plot featuring Danites and polygamous intrigues, could no longer be justified by anti-Mormon sentiment; rather, motivation now came from within the industry itself, as the film was a blatant attempt to capitalize on the success of D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation two years earlier. The connection between the two films cannot be overemphasized, particularly in the fabricated connection between the Ku Klux Klan and the Danites; one intertitle even tells us that the Danites’ hooded costume (historically nonexistent) was the direct predecessor of the KKK’s. The strategy worked, as critics lauded the film and audiences flocked to it across the nation.

The trailer for another infamous Mormonsploitation film, Trapped by the Mormons, is available here. Back then, it must have seemed terribly unlikely that a Mormon-made film could ever snag a bigtime Hollywood star. But Anne Hathaway eventually proved the conventional wisdom wrong.

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T Minus

March 8th, 2010


Mere hours to go ’til the Wired deadline, and we’re scrambling. Really scrambling. Haven’t cut it this close in ages, due to the sheer complexity of the material (which is heavy on neuroscience, psychology, and junkie horror stories). More Microkhan’ing as soon as we’re able; in the meantime, watch the above and keep the ailing Guru in your thoughts.

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The Nollywood Math

March 8th, 2010

As the late Art Buchwald would have been happy to tell you, Hollywood’s accounting practices tend to be garbled at best, and borderline criminal at worst. Studio bean counters are masters of obfuscation and misdirection, with a knack for making blockbusters seem like middling hits, and profitable B-movies appear like money losers. Figuring out how everyone in the entertainment biz is able to afford endless Botox and Kabbalah lessons is a task well beyond our mental powers.

It was refreshing, then, to come across this detailed breakdown of exactly how much Nollywood filmmakers stand to earn each time they commit their vision to Video CD. As you might have already guessed, budget control is key to preserving any semblance of a profit margin:

An average producer spends between $15,000 and $25,000 to produce a Nollywood film. Some people may find this level of investment commitment ridiculous, accounting for the apparent low quality of the film products, but indigenous film producers in Nollywood argue that based on the present available distribution opportunities any increase in the production budget renders the project non-viable.

Theatrical release revenue for a “good” film released through the present theatre route in Nigeria, Ghana and Kenya combined is approximately N10 million. Less cost of advertising and other distributor’s incidentals, a producer can expect about N6 million ($40,000) from the distributor. Local DVD (Video CD) distribution in Nigeria and Ghana revenue is an additional $15,000. United States distribution rights are bought for a maximum of $15,000 by the “Big Three”: Sanga Entertainment, Executive Image and Franco Films.

European rights usually go for a maximum $5,000. Therefore a “good” Nollywood film can net $75,000.

That net could easily double if the Nigerian government was more aggressive about going after pirates. So far, though, Lagos-based authorities have been lackadaisical about enforcement.

If you want one last Nollywood jolt before starting your day proper, we recommend Pieter Hugo’s series of interpretative portraits. But be forewarned: Some of ’em are pretty graphic, especially if you love cattle.

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A Smirking Humanoid Named Sherman

March 5th, 2010


Ttaubotneanauayean for your patience this week, as we eased up on the posting in order to tackle our crushing Wired gig. All will resume to normal on Tuesday, after we’ve hit our deadline.

To reward your steadfastness, we’d like to offer up a very special Bad Movie Friday entry: 1989’s Millennium, starring the truly mismatched pair of Kris Kristofferson and Cheryl Ladd. We distinctly remember catching this at our local omniplex as junior-high students; it was one of the first times we ever left a theater and thought to ourselves, “Is it possible that some movies are just a complete waste of time?” Stephen Holden dug the knife in with glee:

Long before Winston Churchill is invoked by a smirking humanoid named Sherman at the conclusion of ”Millennium,” Michael Anderson’s film about time travel has proven itself worthy of admission into the pantheon of movies that are so awful they keep an audience in stitches. The movie is so inept in almost every particular that even its love scenes, when a grimacing Kris Kristofferson mashes his grizzled face against an impassive Cheryl Ladd, are likely to produce giggles.

The nickel-and-dime pyrotechnics consist of unspectacular showers of sparks and billows of phony-looking smoke. When the time travelers enter and leave a scene, they step in and out of an animated blue-and-white funnel of the sort one might expect to see in a cleanser ad.

Poor Cheryl Ladd. The ’80s just weren’t her decade.

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Pining for Convenience

March 5th, 2010

Living as we do in the heart of Atlah, we often take for granted the notion of easy access to groceries. Whenever we find ourselves lacking a can of beans or coffee filters, no big whoop—that situation can be rectified in a manner of minutes, simply by strapping on our sneakers and walking down to the nearest bodega.

The situation in Nunam Iqua could scarcely be more different. Residents of the Alaskan village have to go out of their ways to stock up on victuals—bigtime:

Shopping trips to the nearest villages – Alakanuk is the closest neighbor at 13 miles away – can be dangerous. To get groceries, travelers sometimes snowmachine over thin ice or boat across the lower Yukon with its shifting sandbars.

Ann Strongheart wrote of a shopping trip to Emmonak last winter with her now-deceased husband. They hired a sitter for their baby daughter, hauled a plywood sled and doubled up on a single snowmachine because gas prices were too high to take separate vehicles.

“When we got on the Yukon, my husband had to keep a close eye out for overflow,” she wrote, adding that it can leave deadly holes in the ice.

At Emmonak, the next closest village, the couple bought 34 items. Diapers cost the most, with 144 totaling $82.55. Six fruit cocktail cans went for $17.34, and a bag of generic Cheerios cost $6.99.

The 50-mile round trip exceeded $500 when Strongheart included the 12 gallons of gas.

We will doubtless keep Ms. Strongheart’s struggles in mind the next time the Grand Empress sends us to the corner for a couple of Dragon Stouts.

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Oh, My Aching Hands…

March 4th, 2010


Sad to report we’re struggling mightily with our current Wired opus. Can’t quite get the lede to sing, and we’re getting lost in the weeds on Section One—so much controversial history to pack into just a few hundred words. Plus we’ve got one last interview to nail down, without which this piece might never gel. So please excuse us while we attend to pressing matters; we’ll be back here as soon as we’ve broken through the haze.

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