Philip Greenspun’s Weblog » Would we still be the same country without our gun nuts?:

It is tempting to think that we could pick the best laws from various countries around the world and come up with some sort of optimized society, but perhaps it simply isn’t practical. The Japanese have a national character of craftsmanship. The French have a national character of enjoying rich food and wine. Maybe one aspect of our national character is that a lot of us need to be gun nuts.

Honolulu after Pearl Harbor: A report published for the first time, 71 years later – The Washington Post:

At the office there were frantic calls from all sorts of women — housewives, stenographers, debutantes — wanting to know what they could do during the day, when husbands and brothers were away and there was nothing left but to listen to the radio and imagine that all hell had broken out on another part of the island.

It was then that I realized how important women can be in a war-torn world.

There is a job for every woman in Hawaii to do.

I discovered that when I visited the Red Cross centers, canteens, evacuee districts, the motor corps headquarters.

There is great organization in Honolulu, mapped out thoughtfully and competently by women who have had experience in World War I, who have looked ahead and foreseen the carnage of the past seven days and planned.

The Too-Much-Running Myth Rises Again:

We are curious as to whether Wen and colleagues have data about long-term survival in individuals who did vigorous exercise for more than 50 min per day. Do the mortality benefits begin to erode away as the daily time spent doing vigorous physical activity increases beyond 1 h?

Wen and colleagues reply that yes, they do have data — and it doesn’t show what O’Keefe et al. hope:

By 120 min [per day], the hazard ratio for all-cause mortality was around 0·55 [which is better than it was for 60 min per day], with even better hazard ratios for cardiovascular diseases… The adverse effects of strenuous exercise for incremental efforts for more than an hour a day did not seem to outweigh the benefits. We were not able to identify an upper limit of physical activity, either moderate or vigorous, above which more harm than good will occur in terms of long-term life expectancy benefits.

This exchange took place before the recent spate of review articles about the dangers of too much exercise was published. And yet the study is still being cited as evidence that doing more than an hour a day of exercise is bad for you. As a subsequent letter to the journal from Michael Bubb of the University of Florida put it, “The interpretation of the data provided in the review by O’Keefe et al is misleading, particularly given the response of the authors of the original data.”

To reiterate, I’m not flipping to the other extreme and arguing that there’s no point of the diminishing returns for exercise, or even that there’s no possibility of heart damage associated with extreme ultraendurance exercise. These are open and legitimate questions. But this scaremongering about relatively modest amounts of exercise in favor of “hunter-gatherer” exercise is silly. We can speculate all we want about “potential” risks and benefits, but the real-world epidemiology is crystal-clear: if you exercise for an hour a day, you’re likely to live longer than if you exercise less than an hour a day.

The Average Place on Earth:

Projections for the year 2050 predict that most of the 8 billion people on the planet will live in megacities, with populations over 30 million. And these megacity clusters will form a network made up of smaller cities over 1 million in population. But these incredibly dense clusters will weave through a countryside that is emptying. It is already common to find entire villages in China, India, and South America abandoned by its inhabitants who fled to the swelling cities, leaving behind a few old folks, or often, no one at all.

This is the pattern on Earth. Extremely dense and vast populations in a network of megacities connected to each other with nerves of roads and wires, woven over an empty landscape of wild land, marginal pastures, and lightly populated farms.

By 2050 and beyond, Earth will be a urban planet, while the average place on the planet will be nearly wild.

Source: The Technium

David Simon | Stray penises and politicos:

But for those who love throwing stones, is it too much to ask that their aim be true? That they limit the target to Darwinian compulsion, to ordinary, and yes, at times, unthinking human desire.  That they not equip themselves to judge the totality of a public servant’s entire career and works solely with the details of whatever sexual misadventure we happen to discover.  Roosevelt was a smart guy.  So was Eisenhower.  Clinton might be the smartest president of my generation.  And David Petraeus saw and spoke to the folly of Iraq before the rest of America was cheering the fall of Saddam’s statue.  And he stayed long after that folly was evident to work at a remedy for and an extrication from that tragic intervention.

If we can judge stupidity by solitary lapses, then Roger Simon, by dint of this recent column could rightly be judged a moron.  And if we’re going to free associate stupidity with the public discovery of sexual misadventure, such vacuous shit as Mr. Simon just offered up virtually requires him to be caught unawares in a Nuevo Laredo whorehouse with a fistful of fifties.

What I just wrote is unfair of course.  I’m sure Mr. Simon has had better and meaningful moments commenting on our body politic, just as the general has had other, more meaningful moments as a public servant.  But given that Petraeus himself doesn’t seem to have done anything criminal, or failed in his public performance, one can surmise that his decision to depart as CIA director is predicated on what he will now endure from our stunted media culture.

Allen Dulles screwed his way through dozens of women as director of the CIA.  Dulles, by every fair historical assessment, was a Georgetown player and backroom bullshitter who led the agency into some of the worst intelligence failures in American history, then created an alternate myth of success for the agency.   Shame on the American press corps of those years for buying into the professional myth, of course, but hey, at least those then covering the intelligence community hadn’t reduced themselves to a copse of dour-faced, suit-and-tie-wearing Hedda Hoppers.  They didn’t give a shit who Dulles slept with. But David Petraeus can expect no such quarter, or — as Mr. Simon’s commentary suggests — even the smallest sense of proportion.

Of course he quit.

Petraeus: The Long Knives of November:

Let’s end by putting ourselves in the ill-fitting shoes of General David Petraeus. Although he certainly earned some of his stars for valor at press manipulation and self-flattery, he also provided the following services to the Bush and Obama administrations: he served three combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan; he devised a cover strategy for Iraqi withdrawal that saw President Obama through his reelection campaign; in Afghanistan he kept the Taliban out of Kabul long enough to suggest that, during the voting, the administration could talk up peace with honor; as CIA director, he presumably had a hand in finding bin Laden and bringing his rubout to a campaign spot near you; and in the Benghazi firestorm, he lent his considerable credibility to the wobbly administration cover story that the attack was spontaneous and unavoidable—all in the service of reelection politics.

Despite these efforts for the Obama team, General Petraeus now gets to look at pictures of his mistress on the front page of the New York Times; to hear that having a girlfriend made him “vulnerable to blackmail,” and to see his reputation dragged through the mud of the Tidal Basin, as though he had jumped in with Congressman Wilbur Mills and the Argentine Firecracker. Nor, in the fashion of Soviet show trials, does he ever get to respond to any of the allegations before they are blithely published or aired on television. “From Cy Young to sayonara,” as Graig Nettles said of similar politics on the New York Yankees.

If that isn’t enough gall to swallow in one sitting, General Petraeus also gets to time his public disgrace so that it happens in the same week that President Obama is celebrated on front pages around the world for his election triumph, his historic mandate, his charming family, his professional team, his brilliant handling of Iraq and Afghanistan, his killing of bin Laden, and his leadership in the Arab Spring.

Source: NYTimes eXaminer

If it looks random, it probably isn’t:

This same conditional-probability argument, though, also applies to the day after tomorrow.

There’s a 0.0001 chance of lightning tomorrow. But for the next strike to be the day after tomorrow then lightning must strike on that day, and not strike tomorrow. So the probability becomes 0.9999 for no strike tomorrow, times 0.0001 for a strike the next day. Which is 0.00009999.

This is only very slightly less than 0.0001, but it is less. The probability of the next strike – not any strike, but the next strike – occurring the day after tomorrow is thus very slightly lower than the probability of the next strike being tomorrow.

And the further you go into the future, the smaller the number gets. In a week it’s about 0.00009994, in a year it’s about 0.00009643, in ten years it’s down to about 0.00006943 – until it becomes ridiculously small, millions of years in the future.

So the most likely day for the next lightning strike – whether or not it actually even struck today – is tomorrow. It’s only a tiny bit more likely that the next strike will be tomorrow than that it will be the next day, but it is more likely.

At this point you may be wondering why I’m injuring your brain with this stuff. It’s because this is a really important thing you need to know about the world. This statistical bias for chance events to happen closer to each other than seems intuitively likely means that all sorts of chance phenomena have “clusters” that people naturally think don’t look very random at all.

We are surrounded at all times by things that have a somewhat random distribution in space and/or time. Computer hardware failures. Car crashes. Disease outbreaks. The distribution of stars in the sky. Individual kills, and personal and team victories, in all sorts of games, sports and real-world wars.

None of these things are entirely random – actually achieving true, robust randomness is surprisingly difficult. But all of them have a chance component. And the stronger that chance component is, the more clusters you’ll see, and the easier it’ll be to incorrectly attribute those clusters to some non-chance phenomenon.