We here at Microkhan are avid fans of Robert Young Pelton’s World’s Most Dangerous Places series, in part because we never cease being amazed by the man’s utter ballsiness. (Algeria sans security in the thick of civil war? Really?) But the lure in Pelton’s work isn’t just his bravado—it’s his frankness about which travels threats are overhyped, and which should truly strike fear into a wanderer’s heart. And high atop Pelton’s list is none other than the humble minibus, the sole means of motorized transport for millions upon millions of denizens of the developing world. Such vehicles, he warns, are far more hazardous to a traveler’s health than more reviled perils such as yellow fever, thieves, or cobras. Just check out the frightening WHO statistics: 1.2 million people die each year in traffic accidents, and another 50 million are gravely injured. And the worse a nation’s roads and law enforcement are, the higher your odds of meeting a grisly end while motoring.
But what determines the lethality of a nation’s ground transport? The poorest countries are not, in fact, those with the highest traffic fatality rates, due to the fact that they have limited cars on the roads. No, the worst offenders are those nations just wealthy enough to have lots of vehicles, but poor enough that little money is spent on safety. And according to a 2006 study, things don’t get better until per-capita income exceeds $11,500 (PDF):
We argue that as a country moves through the various stages of development it can be expected that, beyond some threshold level of per capita income, increases in per capita income will tend to push down the traffic fatality rate as the rate of decline in fatalities per vehicle begins to fully offset the rising motorization rate. Regardless, for any given level of per capita income, the rate of traffic fatalities can be expected to be greater the more unequally distributed is a country’s national income both because relative inequality makes it more difficult for a society to agree on a distribution of the tax burden necessary to fund traffic safety interventions and because inequality of income causes the different segments of a society to enter the roadways in different fashions.
According to the $11,500 Rule, then, Kazakhstan must be a truly dangerous place to go a-drivin’. Can anyone confirm or deny?
Speaking of Karōshi, we’ve been feeling a might frazzled by our workload as of late—not to mention the daily stresses of tending to Microkhan Jr. as he masters his use of the word “no.” So we’re looking forward to a few days in the Massachusetts hinterlands, where a longtime pal’s getting hitched over the holiday weekend. As such, we’re checking out ’til Tuesday; enjoy the epic Bollywood clip above as a special Labor Day treat, and see you back here after a few days of alcohol and night swimming.
As you’re stuffing your face with sweet sausages and Budwesier Chelada this holiday weekend, we hope you’ll pause for a brief moment to remember those who really could have used a Labor Day respite: victims of karōshi, who remain far more numerous than they should be.
Karōshi translates from the Japanese as “death from overwork,” and it’s been a serious problem in the world’s second biggest economy for decades now. In fact, the Japanese government started keeping karōshi stats since 1987, in an effort to understand how best to prevent such fatalities. But despite media efforts to highlight numerous egregious cases of karōshi, there has actually been a noticeable uptick in cases over the past few years, perhaps due to worsening economic conditions in Japan. When prices are rising, wages are stagnant, and new jobs rare, it’s terribly hard to deny your boss’s request for an extra 20 hours of unpaid overtime per week.
What struck us most about the latest statistics is that they’re gleaned solely from data related to workman’s compensation cases—that is, karōshi is only karōshi if the government rules that a fiscal penalty must be paid. But given that these payouts have not deterred instances of death by overwork, doesn’t that indicate that employers are getting off way too easily? Have they calculated that an occasional worker lost to karōshi is worth it, given the extra productivity they’re able to squeeze out of their other miserable (though alive) employees?
Also, note this ominous line at the top of the latest stats:
JICOSH was closed in 2008.
In other words, our only reliable source for karōshi data has gone bye-bye. That’s certainly one way to minimize bad news about your country’s labor force.
Sorry, didn’t mean to bum you out too much so close to the holiday. Please enjoy this karōshi-themed Flash game with out joyous compliments.
Sorry ’bout the lack of posts this morning. We’re scrambling on a million things, both pre-Africa and pre-holiday weekend. Please go check out our take of yore on Grover Cleveland’s desperation, and we’ll try to circle back to y’all once more before our all-too-brief vacation kicks in. Danke sehr, dear readers.
Apologies for the light posting today, a phenomenon which is sadly sure to repeat itself between now and Labor Day. We’re scrambling to prepare for two major reporting trips—one to East Africa, the other to the American Heartland. On top of that, we’ve got a lecture to prepare for—next Tuesday, we’ll be regaling Brooklynites about the history of Zima (the clearmalt beverage, not the Elm City-born actress).
We did want to note, however, that we’ve recently come into temporary possession of a copy of Klaus Kinski’s hard-to-find autobiography, Kinski Uncut. It was actually loaned to us by a loyal Microkhan reader, who has thus earned our eternal gratitude. Though we’re not looking forward to next week’s whirlwind travel to the Midwest, we’re comforted by the prospect of digging into Kinski’s sure-to-be-insane tome. We’ve actually been entertaining ourselves by opening to random pages and reading out-of-context passages. We kid you not, this is what we just stumbled across:
When she cooks, she wears nothing but an apron, which exposes her naked ass. Even when her upper body’s all spiffed up and she’s wearing garters, stockings, and high heels, and even some horrible hat, she sticks out her naked ass toward me. Everywhere and always her hairy naked ass, which glares at me like an order, like a command that I can’t resist.
Kinski Uncut is 322 pages long. Wish us luck—and courage.
Not that we expect any of y’all to remember this, but we left you hanging a couple of months back. See, we dug up a copy of Lee Mason’s “Shady Blues”, which we first fell in love with as a much-used hip-hop sample. And at the conclusion of that long-ago post, we promised to “follow up soon with a couple of posts on contemporary cuts that rely on Mason’s lazy groove.”
But as is our occasional wont, alas, we forgot all about that promise—we blame an overly hectic summer of work, work, work. But now that we’re enjoying a pre-Labor Day lull, we thought we’d make good on our vow by sharing Pacewon’s “I Declare War.” If you’re more of a visual sort, the somewhat odd video can be viewed here. Be forewarned that the music in the vid doesn’t kick in until the one-minute mark, and that it features an inexplicable appearance by Jon Lovitz.
We’re not done with “Shady Blues,” by the way. There’s a great Lootpack tune that borrows Mason’s riff, too. We’ll have it to you at some point in the not-too-distant future. Promise.
Every once in a while, we stumble upon an online resource that makes us wonder how we ever managed to get along without it. Such is the case with the clunkily named First World War Digital Poetry Archive, which features even more interesting historical tidbits than advertised. The main focus here, of course, is one the men of letters who found themselves ensconced in the trenches, and attempted to maintain their sanity by recording their experiences on paper. That means the there are plenty of goodies like Wilfred Owen’s first draft of Dulce et Decorum Est, or the notebooks of Ivor Gurney. (If you can decipher the man’s cryptic handwriting, his lyrical account of the Battle of Ypres may well rock your world.)
But the more immediately gratifying treats here are in the audio/visual realm—especially these early films produced by Britain’s War Office. Gearheads in the audience will take particular delight in the footage of primitive tanks inching their way across the wire-strewn No Man’s Lands of the Western Front.
All of the material is not only an educational time suck; it’s also a reminder of how thankful we are not to have been, say, an 18-year-old British male in 1914. Those were some dark times.
Legal wolf hunting has finally returned to the Lower 48, ostensibly as a way to control the species’ population while also earning Idaho’s state government a few bucks. The program obviously has some folks in a lather, as history shows that rapacious hunting was responsible for the gray wolf‘s longtime residency on the endangered species list. And that hunting was egged on by publicly funded bounties, which paid a tidy sum in exchange for each lupine scalp.
But, rather ironically, the gray wolf might have vanished entirely if not for the hunters’ use of cost-benefit analysis. As early as 1881, it seems, many hunters figured out that it was more cost effective to raise wolves in captivity and then kill them than it was to go out in the wild. That’s largely because the bounties were miscalibrated, or offered by too many separate tiers of government. This 1902 article (PDF) from Nebraska explains the scam:
The large number of claims coming into the State Auditor’s office for bounties on wolves and coyotes has led that official to make an investigation, and he has arrived at the conclusion that the farmers and ranchers in the western part of the State have gone into the business of breeding these animals for the bounty market. In one instance it was found that one farmer had raised more than 100 wolves last Summer from several animals he had trapped and penned up for that purpose.
The State law authorizes the County Clerk to pay $3 from the county fund for each coyote or wolf scalp presented, and he certifies the fact of payment to the Auditor, who pays $1 additional, making $4 for each wolf or coyote. The State Auditor declares that this pays better than hog raising, and naturally the farmers have turned their attention to this industry.
Four bucks in 1902 is equivalent to roughly $95 in today’s dollars. Had the government been more stingy, the wolf breeding would have been less profitable, and the species probably would have been hunted to extinction before it could be declared endangered in 1973. Which actually makes us rather grateful that the public servants of yore weren’t too good at structuring incentives.
It gives us immense pleasure to announce Microkhan’s favorite rapping competitive eater, Eric “Badlands” Booker, is back with his fifth album, Extended Play. As always, Booker’s lyrical content focuses on his gustatory dedication, as well as the perks of being a minor celebrity. The cut above does an excellent job of conveying both the stress and glamour of life on the eating circuit, where Booker continues to hold seemingly unassailable records in both the burrito sprint (15 burritos in 8 minutes) and the corned beef hash throwdown (4 pounds in 1 minute, 58 seconds).
Also, please note the Yosemite Sam shout-out in the second verse, courtesy of guest star (and International Federation of Competitive Eating announcer) Roscoe Manning.
We’re currently prepping for a work-related trip to East Africa, which means we now get to spend lots of time being freaked out by ominous Centers for Disease Control warnings. (According to the CDC’s literature, setting foot in half the countries on the planet appears to be a recipe for gory death.) It also means we’ll be dedicating a lot of mental bandwidth to public health in the developing world, particularly that old bogeyman malaria. We’ve taken a keen interest in the disease ever since working on Now the Hell Will Start; our research for that book revealed that the malaria rate along the Ledo Road during its construction was a gobsmacking 995 cases per every 1,000 man.
So we couldn’t help but highlight this potential silver-bullet solution, just recently announced by a team at the University of California at Riverside:
Anandasankar Ray, a Yale-trained neurobiologist and Stephanie Turner, a graduate research assistant, have confirmed that two common odor-causing chemicals will deaden the acute nose of malaria causing mosquitoes.
The discovery will likely result in a new class of mosquito repellants which will not need to be applied to the skin, said Ray, an assistant professor in the entomology department at UCR.
Ray said that he and Turner found that hexanol and a related odor, butanal, were strong inhibitors of carbon dioxide sensitive neurons in Culex mosquitoes, a subspecies that carries West Nile virus and filariasis, a lymphatic disease affecting 120 million worldwide.
In other words, it’s a variation on the citronella candle approach. Sounds promising, but we always have to ask—how does this method compare to the wider distribution of bed nets, both in terms of cost and efficacy? Because the more we read about antimalarial tactics, the more we become convinced that nothing can match bed nets in terms of bang-for-the-buck. So just as all human medications must be tested against placebos, so must all those fancy malaria solutions be tested against bed nets.
We do think, however, that messing with the mosquitoes nostrils seems to make more intuitive sense than pouring billions into transgenic insects.
Ordinarily we’d save Lockjaw: Rise of the Kulev Serpent for our weekly Bad Movie Friday feature. But, honestly, we don’t think we can sleep too many more days without knowing exactly what star DMX mumbles in the middle of this trailer. We think his closing line is, “The only thing you have to look forward to is the stomach acid,” but that just makes zero sense. Can somebody with sharper ears than ours please advise?
Also, DMX—what happened to your thespian chops, good sir? You were actually damn solid in Belly—love that whole episode down in Jamaica with Louie Rankin. You even had your moments in Never Die Alone. So why the descent into Z-grade schlock in recent years? A little Shakespeare in the Park may be just what the doctor ordered—we think you’d make a fine General Alcibiades.
Left-of-center politicians are often demonized for simply “throwing money at a problem” instead of concocting a more innovative solution. But there are, in fact, instances in which direct cash incentives are by far the most efficient tact. Such appears to be the case in India, which continues to have a serious problem with female infanticide, especially among the rural poor. As Delhi’s government is discovering, the best way to address this problem is not through education, but rather a thoughtfully structured series of bribes:
Currently, the Delhi Government’s Ladli scheme to counter the bias against the girl child seems to have borne fruit, with the latest data showing that 19,000 more girls were born in 2008 than in the previous year. The sex ratio apparently is 1,004 girls for 1000 boys. The number of female babies exceeding males in Delhi is unprecedented in recent years…
Some officials credit it to the financial incentives offered under the Ladli scheme. These, briefly, are that the Government deposits a sum of Rs 5,000-6,000 for every baby girl, born to a family with an annual income below Rs 100,000. Subsequently, in a bid to ensure that the child goes to school, the Government deposits Rs 5,000 at the time of admission, and when the girl enters Class I, VI, IX, X and XII. These sums mature in a fixed deposit till the beneficiary turns 18. She can then claim the amount.
We’d be interested to see the calculus on how a more balanced gender ratio affects GDP. Certainly no good can come of a society in which, as the article notes, some villages have only a dozen girls for every 250 boys—a situation which leads to skewed marriage markets, not to mention a lot of psychological distress for lonely male hearts.
According to WordPress’s handy dashboard counter, the words you’re now reading constitute my 500th blog post. So what better time to temporarily drop the royal we and think aloud regarding what this whole blogging deal has taught us—and, perhaps more importantly, why we keep at it despite the ludicrously imbalanced labor-to-reward ratio.
When I launched Microkhan in early February, I did so for a few reasons—some of them craven, some of them a tad more honorable. I’d be lying if I said there wasn’t a self-promotional aspect to all of this—I’d seen how blogging had helped my pal Ta-Nehisi become a household name, and thus sustain our shared quixotic writing dream that much better. Plus, of course, I had a paperback to promote, not to mention various magazine features. Given the way this writing business is heading, I thought it best to take some initiative in terms of, uh, building the brand that is you.
But there were creative reasons for building Microkhan, too—I needed an outlet for the zillion trifling brainstorms that fill my hard drive. Plus I had this notion that blogging about my admittedly esoteric interests might help me unearth stories worthy of deeper treatments—perhaps a post here or there might someday germinate into an article, book, or other long-term project. And, lastly, by forcing myself to post every day, I’d inject some fresh discipline into my working life. I’m the sort who functions best when my plate is more than a little overflowing; if I don’t have enough projects going at any one time, my work simply expands to fill the time allotted.
So, how has the reality matched the expectations? [Read more →]
Not that we’re insensitive louts or anything, but we generally fail to get riled up by charges of religious blasphemy. As such, we really can’t say we understood the recent, rather obscure to-do over the photo above, in which a Burmese film star named Min Maw Kun was accused of disrespecting Buddhism. No, what made our eyebrows rise was the revelation that Burma has its own movie-celebrity culture—Yollywood, as we’d like to dub it. And it comes complete with annual Oscars-style shindig, as well as US Weekly-like intrigue over the stars’ loves and losses. All this despite the fact that the nation’s per capita GDP places it between Mali and Zambia on the United Nations’ human development index.
As with everything else in Burma/Myanmar, of course, artists in this world make a Faustian bargain in order to attain their junta-approved celebrity. Outspokenness on political matters is obviously forbidden; we wasted a good chunk of the morning looking for any political statements that Min Maw Kun may have made, for example, but came up snake eyes. (If any Microkhan readers can point us in the right direction, we’d be much obliged.) Instead, we only found videos from his former career as a milquetoasty singer, as well as this highly entertaining compendium of his movie posters.
Yet don’t take this post as a condemnation of Min Maw Kun. We actually sympathize with his plight, and realize that we view his passivity through decidedly Western glasses. We spend so much of our waking hours struggling for creative success; if that success were dangled before our eyes, and we were only asked to refrain from commenting on politics, would we be able to resist the deal? We know what we’d like the answer to that question to be, but hypothetical words are always hollow.
Given the nature of our profession, we’re naturally inclined to side with our fellow ink-stained wretches. But even the most hardened media cynic should be incensed by the flimsiness of the charges against Tissainayagam. The meat of the government’s indictment can be found here; Tissainayagam’s main crime seems to have been the accusation that the Sri Lankan army was committing atrocities. Here’s a few lines from a November 2006 North-Eastern Monthly article that particularly riled the regime:
“Such offensives against the civilians are accompanied by attempts to starve the population by refusing them food as well as medicines and fuel, with the hope of driving out the people of Vaharai and depopulating it. As this story is being written Vaharai is being subject to intense shelling and aerial bombardment.”
Hyperbolic? Perhaps—though, given the Sri Lankan military’s alleged behavior during its endgame versus the Tamil Tigers, it doesn’t seem outside the realm of possibility. But the veracity of Tissainayagam’s claims should be a matter for public debate in Sri Lanka—such is the nature of a free press. There exists no doubt in our minds that simply accusing one’s government of misconduct should be considered tantamount to aiding and abetting a terrorist organization. Yet Tissainayagam was prosecuted and punished as if he’d openly called for his fellow Tamils to slaughter government troops.
We are under no delusion that most of our fellow countrymen give two figs about Sri Lanka. But if ever a case called for folks to take a keener interest in the erstwhile Ceylon, this is it. Learn more about Tissainayagam’s plight here and here. And check out a translation of one of his article on Tamil child soldiers here.
After an insanely hectic five weeks of virtually non-stop mental toil, we can proudly state that we hit our deadline. The second draft of the Now the Hell Will Start screenplay is safely in our boss’s hands, which means it’s time for us to enjoy a rare moment of peace—a moment that’s sure to include copious quantities of this. In keeping with Microkhan tradition, we’re posting the video for one of the most triumphant tunes known to man. Lazy of us? Sure, especially considering that we posted the exact same clip to celebrate the completion of draft one. But, please, understand that we’re mentally drained, and a little superstitious to boot.
And know that, as promised, we’ll be back to full strength on Monday. Plenty of goodies tk in the next few days, including more Murder Project, more First Contact, and our milestone 500th post. Hope you’ll twist the dial back in our direction after an appropriately raucous weekend.
For all of mankind’s scientific advances in recent centuries, many elemental mysteries still persist. Among the most puzzling is the reason that right-handers far outnumber their southpaw peers. There’s a bevy of theories as to why this is the case, but no single one seems ironclad. So in the absence of a definitive explanation for why this is a right-hander’s world, we prefer to cast our lot with the theory we deem to be the most entertaining—the one that traces the handedness schism back to mankind’s zeal for hand-to-hand combat:
If it is accepted that social habits have as their goal the survival of the group, warfare may have played an important role in the differentiation between the two hands. Pye-Smith (1871) suggested the primitive fighting with club or spear led man to the selection of the right hand. Carlyle, in the same year, after the paralysis of his right arm, wrote in his diary that right-handedness probably arose in fighting and that the left was used in carrying the shield to protect the heart. Sawyer (1900), Harmon (1905), Gould (1908), Woodruff (1909) and others have added their support to this idea, ascribing the selection to the greater survival of right-handed fighters who protected the heart region. Then followed the gradual learning by experience of the advantages of this selection, and finally the propagation of this preference through custom, imitation, and precept.
The big hole in this theory, of course, is that the shield is a relatively novel development in martial history. Have enough centuries elapsed for natural selection to change our species from predominately ambidextrous to mostly right-handed? Especially since, given the heart’s very minor off-centeredness, the advantage of being right-handed doesn’t seem all that spectacular? Probably not, but at least the warfare theory is slightly more convincing than the one about ultrasound.
We’re getting down to the wire on a major, major deadline, and thus don’t have even a neuron to spare for poor Microkhan this afternoon. As previously promised, we’ll be back to full strength on Monday. Thanks for bearing with us as we toil elsewhere.
As a small token of our immense gratitude, please enjoy the Italo-pop nugget above—quite possibly the most ’80s thing we’ve ever encountered. Yes, even more than that Saraya tune we dug up a while back. My, what a sonically gaudy decade we came of age in.
Inspired in part by the “Meat is the new bread!” daring of the much maligned KFC Double Down, we recently found ourselves keen on learning more about the history of America’s love affair with flour. There is, of course, good reason that one of our most patriotic songs goes out of its way to shout out those “amber waves of grain”—namely, the fact that bread-y products have long been a centerpiece of our diet.
But as demonstrated above, our current grain consumption pales in comparison to that of our turn-of-the-century ancestors. And therein lies a rather fascinating tale about the way in which extremely clever marketing altered the American diet:
Historically, economic development has been accompanied by the substitution of meat for grain in the diet, and this was true in the United States starting in the 1870s. However, breakfast-food manufacturers promoted the opposite for breakfast. They convinced people to substitute highly processed grains for meat as healthy and convenient.
John Harvey Kellogg began experimenting with breakfast cereals in the 1870s, introducing a whole-wheat breakfast cereal in 1880 as a health-food product. This breakfast cereal was eventually named granola. Later, the Kellogg brothers created a wheat-flake breakfast cereal, called Granose, also as a health-food product. C.W. Post developed Postum in 1895 and then Grape-Nuts in 1898.
Cooked grain (porridge) was a common dish among the European immigrants in America in Colonial times. The Quaker Oats Company produced oatmeal, the first successful ready-to-cook cereal, in the 1870s. Later, Thomson Amidon discovered coarsely ground wheat could also be cooked into a breakfast cereal. Because of its color, he called it Cream of Wheat.
With new technologies, new products, and improved infrastructure—and the resulting lower costs—flour consumption rose during the 19th century. During the closing decades, consumption remained at very high levels as new and improved wheat products were introduced.
It took the advent of mass refrigeration to steer folks away from wheat-based foods, and toward the meat and dairy that have expanded our collective waistlines to a rather shocking degree. Noting the squiggles in the graph as the line moves toward modern times, however, we find ourselves wondering how closely wheat consumption tracks with economic cycles. Do we invariably eat more wheat as the needle swings toward fiscal gloom?
And beyond that, how does this chart compare to what’s taking place in the superpowers of tomorrow—specifically India and China. Perhaps we can tell a lot about a country’s development based on the ebb and flow of its grain consumption. Though, as the American experience reveals, the curve can be altered from its natural course by men of John Harvey Kellogg’s ilk.
As noted yesterday, we’re absolutely swamped with paying gigs between now and Friday, so posting here will be lighter than usual ’til Monday. In the name of picking off some low-hanging fruit as we scramble on multiple deadlines, we’re posting the above classic Big L vid—a tune we never tire of, in part of because of the late Mr. Coleman‘s unparalleled knack for rhyming couplets. (We’ll forgive him the Swiss flag overalls—the mid-’90s were strange, fashion-wise.) There’s a news peg here, too—the celebrated Big L mural will be officially dedicated this coming Sunday, not too far from Microkhan HQs. If we can recover from what’s sure to be an epic post-deadline drinking bout, we’ll try and be there.
Comments Off on “I Charm Freaks and Bomb Geeks…”Tags:Big L·hip-hop·music
The first hacker we ever wrote about, Israeli national Ehud “The Analyzer” Tenenbaum, could end up serving 15 years in federal prison after pleading guilty to bank fraud charges in New York. We wrote about The Analyzer’s odd career during Microkhan’s formative days, all the way back in February. He really had a chance to walk the straight and narrow while making money, too, but the dark side proved too great a lure in the end. Perhaps those Israeli PC endorsement deals aren’t all that lucrative.
Is it possible to ever tire of zootherapy research? We reckon not, and this study (PDF) from the Journal of Ethnobiology and Ethnomedicine supports our thesis rather strongly. The paper looks at the use of animals as medicine in a rural corner of Northeast Brazil. Our favorite listed remedy involves the Gray-breasted martin, known to the lab-coat set as Progne chalybea. The Brazilians surveyed swear by the animals’ effectiveness in treating alcoholism—as long as you’re willing to consume the entire bird, feathers and all.
We’d love to see some sort of controlled study that assesses the bird’s effectiveness versus that of Antabuse. Though we do think there might be some ethical complications in coming up with a placebo bird.
As of this very moment, we have a new life goal: becoming one of the scores of celebrated creative types with a Mercury crater to their name. Yes, we realize the odds of this happening are slim to none—we’ve got a long way to go before we join the hallowed ranks of Utagawa Kunisada or Theophanes. But let us have our pipe dreams.
Apologies, but posting will be a bit more sporadic than usual over the next few days. We’re in the homestretch on Draft Two of the Now the Hell Will Start screenplay, and we’d really like to avoid imitating the bloke above by blowing our chance at the end. We’re also swamped with an epic Wired piece that requires tracking down some folks in distant corners of the globe. The upshot is that time is pretty precious at the moment, and we find ourselves faced with that all-important choice between, y’know, stuff that pays (NtHWS, Wired) and stuff that doesn’t (Microkhan).
Don’t worry, we’ll still do our best to toss up a couple of posts each day. And we’ll be back to full-strength next week. But in the interim, please forgive us any apparent laziness—it’s only because we’re swamped, not because we no longer care about satiating your daily polymathism jones.
Eleven days ago, we questioned whether it might be immoral to keep certain animals captive in zoos. Our hunch is that a species’ ability to thrive in a zoo is based not only on its physical needs, but also its intelligence—animals who become aware of the limits of their existence will certainly suffer psychological stresses that can lead to early demises, or so our random thesis goes.
We’d like to pick this thread back up today by looking at one of the most intelligent animals ever held captive for Homo sapiens‘ amusement: the killer whale. As demonstrated by the chart above, taken from a German anti-captivity site, marine parks have gotten a whole lot better at keeping orcas alive since the early days of Corky. But there seems to be only so much humans can do to provide cetaceans with a comfortable existence:
Within in the initial years of killer whales in captivity there was substantial improvement in keeping the animals alive, but since the mid 70’s the situation has stagnated. Orcas in captivity are still far away from reaching their natural life expectancies. This is quite astonishing if you consider the amount of medical treatment and observation put into those animals. It is difficult to prove but the quality of life might be the deciding factor in this puzzle.
A more detailed study appeared in a 1995 issue of Marine Mammal Science. The conclusion was just as damning:
Survival of the wild population Olesiuk et al. studied, based on approximately 250 non-calves, was significantly higher than our estimates for non-calf captive killer whales (0.976 vs. 0.938, P<0.001).
As a commenter noted in our previous post, the decline in life expectancy should probably be weighed against less tangible benefits of captivity—particularly the raising of awareness among zoo-goers, who in turn may dedicate time or money to aiding wild populations. But is there any data to support the theory that zoo (or marine park) patrons are greater supporters of animal causes? If not, we suspect that killer whales may fall into the category of animals who really shouldn’t be kept in tanks for human entertainment.
There’s a list of all orcas currently in captivity here. And don’t forget that we recently touched upon our two-toned cetacean friends in an episode of Bad Movie Friday.
We admittedly do too many posts on ’80s nostalgia, especially now that Microkhan Jr.’s existence has us thinking a lot more ’bout our own formative years. But our worldview back during the Reagan Era was pretty American-centric, so we missed out on plenty of great, junky pop culture from more distant corners of the globe. Among the gems that apparently didn’t make it to Los Angeles is the above vide from Cameroon, purported to be one of the greatest kiddie hits of the 1980s. It strikes us as a cross between Weird Al Yankovic and MC Hammer’s “Can’t Touch This,” at least in terms of zany sensibility. And were these guys really in the Cameroonian army? If so, that force couldn’t have struck fear into too many hearts back in the day.
Oh, and free Microkhan mesh hat to whoever can explain the jack o’ lanterns on the singers’ uniforms. Really, we’re baffled.
With next year’s Census already sparking so much political heat, it’s worth looking back at one of Microkhan’s favorite-ever technology stories: the 1890 Census, the tabulation fiesta that have birth to (semi-)modern programming.
For the hardcore geeks in the audience, this is already a well-known tale, featuring one of the true rock stars of the field: Herman Hollerith, best known as one of the fathers of IBM. The quickie version of his 1890 genius goes like so:
After receiving his Engineer of Mines (EM) degree at age 19, Hollerith worked on the 1880 US census, a laborious and error-prone operation that cried out for mechanization. After some initial trials with paper tape, he settled on punched cards (pioneered in the Jacquard loom) to record information, and designed special equipment — a tabulator and sorter — to tally the results. His designs won the competition for the 1890 US census, chosen for their ability to count combined facts. These machines reduced a ten-year job to three months (different sources give different numbers, ranging from six weeks to three years), saved the 1890 taxpayers five million dollars, and earned him an 1890 Columbia PhD. This was the first wholly successful information processing system to replace pen and paper. Hollerith’s machines were also used for censuses in Russia, Austria, Canada, France, Norway, Puerto Rico, Cuba, and the Philippines, and again in the US census of 1900.
Hollerith’s original patent for the tabulation system, granted in 1889, can be found here. He would go on to modify his flagship tabulator in 1906, creating this monstrous bad boy—the first machine of its type that could be tweaked to perform different functions without having to be rebuilt—in other words, he made it programmable.
Much more on the history of Census tabulation machinery here. We particularly love the gargantuan FOSDIC.
Had Corvette Summer been blessed with a better casting director, perhaps it would have escaped the ignominy of our weekly Bad Movie Friday slot. But no—they just had to cast the 27-year-old Mark Hamill as a high-school student, and noted character actress Annie Potts as a Vegas sexpot (a far cry from her ideal role as the Ghostbusters’ sarcastic receptionist). As a result, the whole enterprise comes off as slightly askew—or, in the words of The New York Times reviewer, “There isn’t a line in Corvette Summer that doesn’t read better than it plays.”
We remember seeing this flick as first graders or thereabouts, and being deeply disappointed that no light sabers were involved. Upon more recent re-watching, that disappointment remains. But the desert car chase isn’t too shabby—though we don’t quite buy the notion that a single revolver shot could incinerate a wrecked StingrayTrans Am.
By the way, our favorite part of the above trailer comes at the 48 second mark. Acting! And, alas, Mark Hamill’s thespianic shortcomings in a nutshell. Good thing the voiceover career worked out for him.
In response to our post on athletic gender testing earlier this week, one of our most treasured commenters posed this stumper:
Are there no sports where being a woman might be a competitive advantage over being a man? Equestrian events maybe, or long distance swimming?
Tough one! We’ve long been familiar with some research vouching for the supposed superiority of women in ultra-marathons, but we’re not sure the totality of the sport’s results bears out that thesis. And certainly in the longest running event sanctioned by the IAAF, the brutal 100k, the male world record (by Japan’s Takahiro Sunada) is a good 20 minutes faster than its female counterpart.
But over at Metafilter, where a similar discussion is taking place, a commenter made an intriguing proposition: what about ski jumping? Would women have a natural advantage their due to weight and balance edges? (Keep in mind that there’s a good reason why the balance beam isn’t a part of male gymnastics.) The problem is, female ski jumping is still a very young sport, still lacking Olympic recognition. But as the sport gains new adherents, could female distances and overall scores someday surpass those of males?
Check out the site for the U.S. women’s ski jumping team here. Two of the members are pictured above, doing one of the sport’s core drills. We’ve quickly become fans of Baby Deer Legs.
To be quite honest, we have no idea whether or not Allura Red AC (aka Red 40) causes kids to become decidedly non-mellow. But we do know that the food dye’s advocates would be well-advised to spiff up their flagship website, which thousands of concerned folks certainly visit every day via The Google. For starters, the graphics don’t exactly impress. Nor does the matter-of-fact slogan: “Red Dye 40—It’s in Your Food.”
But the what really strikes us as off-kilter is the site’s “Editorial,” which makes the mistake of mentioning a certain unpalatable (albeit fictional) substance in its lede:
If you’re not familiar with the movie “Soylent Green” it’s about a future where the planet is overcrowded, resources are very thin and society is tightly controlled. Their food is even more highly processed than our food is today, partly in an attempt to extract every possible calorie to feed the masses. At the climax of the movie, the hero (Charlton Heston) discovers that the staple referred to as “Soylent Green” is made from reprocessed human bodies. He runs through the streets in horror shouting “Soylent Green is People!”
In our case, Soylent Red is Bugs.
Since Microkhan’s got a strong science-nerd streak, that factoid actually makes us more likely to pop a can of Strawberry Crush in the near future. But we’d imagine most Americans don’t share our particular strain of geeky madness.
We’re currently prepping for a work-related trip to East Africa, which means we now get to spend lots of time being freaked out by ominous Centers for Disease Control warnings. (According to the CDC’s literature, setting foot in half the countries on the planet appears to be a recipe for gory death.) It also means we’ll be dedicating a lot of mental bandwidth to public health in the developing world, particularly that old bogeyman 
Not that we’re insensitive louts or anything, but we generally fail to get riled up by charges of religious blasphemy. As such, we really can’t say we understood the recent, rather obscure 
It’s been ages since we’ve discussed 
For all of mankind’s scientific advances in recent centuries, many elemental mysteries still persist. Among the most puzzling is the reason that right-handers far outnumber their southpaw peers. There’s a 
Inspired in part by the “Meat is the new bread!” daring of the much maligned 
Is it possible to ever tire of zootherapy research? We reckon not, and 
Eleven days ago, we questioned whether it might be immoral to keep 
To be quite honest, we have no idea whether or not 
