Month: December 2010

The American Interest has created The Long Recall in honor of the Civil War's Sesquicentennial:

Our goal is to allow readers today to get a feel for what it was like to experience the conflict in real time, to hear the many voices trying to make sense of the conflict, and to sift through sometimes confused and misleading news accounts to try to discern what was actually taking place.

(Hat tip: Metafilter)

A reader writes:

I work in the entertainment side of the hunting/fishing industry, and I can tell you that one of the biggest fears by hunters, second only to accidentally shooting another human being, is wounding an animal and having it run away before they can finish it off. It is a nightmare scenario because the hunter knows they'll be in bed that night, wide-awake, knowing that suffering animal is still out there somewhere because they weren't skilled enough to make a clean shot, or they used poor judgment and took a shot that was beyond their abilities.

To that end, responsible hunters who are bringing new hunters into the sport for the first time – especially parents with eager kids – make the first-timers practice for hours and hours on a target range, and they won't let them go into the field to pursue live game until they've proven themselves as accurate shots. For the same reason, professional guides will usually test their new clients on a range before taking them into the field. I know you've praised Palin's dad, but he shares the responsibility here. He took someone out into the field who couldn't even LOAD THE GUN (!) and allowed her to take a shot at a live animal. That's an insult to the sport, and real hunters are going to be upset.

Arv at Street Carnage craps on Adbusters founder Kalle Lasn, the philosophy of the magazine, and its promotion of Buy Nothing Day:

I don’t know if Kalle realizes it, but a lot of people spend most of the year not buying anything. That’s partially why they do go out shopping on days like Black Friday: They’re preparing for a special occasion during which they buy things to give to the people they love. They spend every other day of their lives not buying shit, having Buy Nothing Days in practice because they either: a) don’t have any money; b) don’t have any time; c) aren’t pathological shoppers as Kalle appears to be.

Are hoards of Americans lining up at 4 A.M. outside of Best Buy or fighting for the last copy of Halo 7 in GameStop on Black Friday clues that our society is too preoccupied with material things? Yeah. But it’s still a lot better than a bunch of yuppies giving themselves congratulatory handjobs because they postponed their Christmas shopping.

(Image via ShopNothing by MBA student Jonathan Mariano)

David Zax interviews Israeli venture capitalist Jacob Burak, author of bestsellers Do Chimpanzees Dream of Retirement and Noise. Here Burak explains the demographic make-up of successful entrepreneurs:

Blood type B is found in a much higher percentage (four times as often) in self-made millionaires than in the rest of the population. On the other hand, many of the business CEOs and the United States Presidents are first-born children. Dyslexics compose about 9% of the population while they are 30% of the entrepreneurs (the reason probably being that they have to rely on others and delegate early on in their lives because of their handicap). 

Annie Lowrey reveals online retailer tricks:

Retailers read the cookies kept on your browser or glean information from your past purchase history when you are logged into a site. That gives them a sense of what you search for and buy, how much you paid for it, and whether you might be willing and able to spend more. They alter their prices or offers accordingly. Consumers—in the few cases they recognize it is going on, by shopping in two browsers simultaneously, for instance—tend to go apoplectic. But the practice is perfectly legal, and increasingly common—pervasive, even, for some products.

Jason Fried explains why the office isn't the best place to get things done:

 

Ted Williams reports on the absurd, expensive and increasingly popular sport of choosing the animal you're going to kill and shooting it in a predetermined, often captive setting:

In most canned hunts tame or semi-tame game species, reared in captivity, are placed in enclosures of varying sizes, and the gate is opened for the client, who has been issued a guarantee of success. Canned hunts are great for folks on tight schedules or who lack energy or outdoor skills. Microchip transponder implants for game not immediately visible are available for the proprietor whose clients are on really tight schedules. And because trophies are plied with drugs, minerals, vitamins, specially processed feeds, and sometimes growth hormones, they are way bigger than anything available in the wild. Often the animals have names, and you pay in advance for the one you’d like to kill, selecting your trophy from a photo or directly from its cage. For example, Rachel, Bathsheba, Paul, John, and Matthew were pet African lions that would stroll over and lick their keepers’ hands before they were shot in Texas.

"Gorgeous Surfaces" by Thomas Lux from the May, 1994 issue of The Atlantic:

They are, the surfaces, gorgeous: a master
pastry chef at work here, the dips and whorls,
the wrist-twist
squeezes of cream from the tube
to the tart, sweet bleak sugarwork, needlework
toward the perfect lace doily
where sit the bone-china teacups, a little maze
of meaning maybe in their arrangement
sneaky obliques, shadow
allusives all piling
atop one another. Textures succulent but famished,
banal, bereft. These surfaces,
these flickering patinas,
through which,
if you could drill, or hack,
or break a trapdoor latch, if you could penetrate
these surfaces' milky cataracts, you
would drop,
free-fall
like a hope chest full of lead
to nowhere, no place, a dry-wind, sour,
nada place,
and you would keep dropping,
tumbling, slow
motion, over and over for one day, six days, fourteen
decades, eleven centuries (a long time
falling to fill a zero) and in that time
not a leaf, no rain,
not a single duck, nor hearts, not one human, nor sleep,
nor grace, nor graves–falling
to where the bottom, finally, is again the surface,
which is gorgeous, of course,
which is glue, saw- and stone-dust,
which is blue-gray
ice, which is
the barely glinting grit
of abyss.

(Photo of a skier in Spitzingsee, Germany by Miguel Villagran/Getty)

Rob Dunn traces it:

The first air-breathing fish and amphibians extracted oxygen using gills when in the water and primitive lungs when on land—and to do so, they had to be able to close the glottis, or entryway to the lungs, when underwater. Importantly, the entryway (or glottis) to the lungs could be closed. When underwater, the animals pushed water past their gills while simultaneously pushing the glottis down. We descendants of these animals were left with vestiges of their history, including the hiccup. In hiccupping, we use ancient muscles to quickly close the glottis while sucking in (albeit air, not water). Hiccups no longer serve a function, but they persist without causing us harm—aside from frustration and occasional embarrassment. One of the reasons it is so difficult to stop hiccupping is that the entire process is controlled by a part of our brain that evolved long before consciousness, and so try as you might, you cannot think hiccups away.

(Hat tip: Hufford)