Random stuff that I find interesting
 

The Doomed Mouse Utopia That Inspired the 'Rats of NIMH'

Dr. John Bumpass Calhoun spent the '60s and '70s playing god to thousands of rodents.

By Cara Giaimo SEPTEMBER 14, 2016


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Calhoun inside Universe 25, his biggest, baddest mouse utopia.

On July 9th, 1968, eight white mice were placed into a strange box at the National Institute of Health in Bethesda, Maryland. Maybe "box" isn't the right word for it; the space was more like a room, known as Universe 25, about the size of a small storage unit. The mice themselves were bright and healthy, hand-picked from the institute's breeding stock. They were given the run of the place, which had everything they might need: food, water, climate control, hundreds of nesting boxes to choose from, and a lush floor of shredded paper and ground corn cob.

This is a far cry from a wild mouse's life—no cats, no traps, no long winters. It's even better than your average lab mouse's, which is constantly interrupted by white-coated humans with scalpels or syringes. The residents of Universe 25 were mostly left alone, save for one man who would peer at them from above, and his team of similarly interested assistants. They must have thought they were the luckiest mice in the world. They couldn't have known the truth: that within a few years, they and their descendants would all be dead.

The man who played mouse-God and came up with this doomed universe was named John Bumpass Calhoun. As Edmund Ramsden and Jon Adams detail in a paper, "Escaping the Laboratory: The Rodent Experiments of John B. Calhoun & Their Cultural Influence," Calhoun spent his childhood traipsing around Tennessee, chasing toads, collecting turtles, and banding birds. These adventures eventually led him to a doctorate in biology, and then a job in Baltimore, where he was tasked with studying the habits of Norway rats, one of the city's chief pests.

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Calhoun displaying scarring on the tail of a color-coded Universe 25 mouse.

In 1947, to keep a close eye on his charges, Calhoun constructed a quarter-acre "rat city" behind his house, and filled it with breeding pairs. He expected to be able to house 5,000 rats there, but over the two years he observed the city, the population never exceeded 150. At that point, the rats became too stressed to reproduce. They started acting weirdly, rolling dirt into balls rather than digging normal tunnels. They hissed and fought.

This fascinated Calhoun—if the rats had everything they needed, what was keeping them from overrunning his little city, just as they had all of Baltimore?

Intrigued, Calhoun built another, slightly bigger rat metropolis—this time in a barn, with ramps connecting several different rooms. Then he built another and another, hopping between patrons that supported his research, and framing his work in terms of population: How many individuals could a rodent city hold without losing its collective mind? By 1954, he was working under the auspices of the National Institute of Mental Health, which gave him whole rooms to build his rodentopias. Some of these featured rats, while others focused on mice instead. Like a rodent real estate developer, he incorporated ever-better amenities: climbable walls, food hoppers that could serve two dozen customers at once, lodging he described as "walk-up one-room apartments." Video records of his experiments show Calhoun with a pleased smile and a pipe in his mouth, color-coded mice scurrying over his boots.

Still, at a certain point, each of these paradises collapsed. "There could be no escape from the behavioral consequences of rising population density," Calhoun wrote in an early paper. Even Universe 25—the biggest, best mousetopia of all, built after a quarter century of research—failed to break this pattern. In late October, the first litter of mouse pups was born. After that, the population doubled every two months—20 mice, then 40, then 80. The babies grew up and had babies of their own. Families became dynasties, carving out and holding down the best in-cage real estate. By August of 1969, the population numbered 620.


Then, as always, things took a turn. Such rapid growth put too much pressure on the mouse way of life. As new generations reached adulthood, many couldn't find mates, or places in the social order—the mouse equivalent of a spouse and a job. Spinster females retreated to high-up nesting boxes, where they lived alone, far from the family neighborhoods. Washed-up males gathered in the center of the Universe, near the food, where they fretted, languished, and attacked each other. Meanwhile, overextended mouse moms and dads began moving nests constantly to avoid their unsavory neighbors. They also took their stress out on their babies, kicking them out of the nest too early, or even losing them during moves.

Population growth slowed way down again. Most of the adolescent mice retreated even further from societal expectations, spending all their time eating, drinking, sleeping and grooming, and refusing to fight or to even attempt to mate. (These individuals were forever changed—when Calhoun's colleague attempted to transplant some of them to more normal situations, they didn't remember how to do anything.) In May of 1970, just under 2 years into the study, the last baby was born, and the population entered a swan dive of perpetual senescence. It's unclear exactly when the last resident of Universe 25 perished, but it was probably sometime in 1973.

Paradise couldn't even last half a decade.

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Universe 25, forboding from the outside.

In 1973, Calhoun published his Universe 25 research as "Death Squared: The Explosive Growth and Demise of a Mouse Population." It is, to put it lightly, an intense academic reading experience. He quotes liberally from the Book of Revelation, italicizing certain words for emphasis (e.g. "to kill with the sword and with famine and with pestilence and by wild beasts"). He gave his claimed discoveries catchy names—the mice who forgot how to mate were "the beautiful ones"' rats who crowded around water bottles were "social drinkers"; the overall societal breakdown was the "behavioral sink." In other words, it was exactly the kind of diction you'd expect from someone who spent his entire life perfecting the art of the mouse dystopia.

Most frightening are the parallels he draws between rodent and human society. "I shall largely speak of mice," he begins, "but my thoughts are on man." Both species, he explains, are vulnerable to two types of death—that of the spirit and that of the body. Even though he had removed physical threats, doing so had forced the residents of Universe 25 into a spiritually unhealthy situation, full of crowding, overstimulation, and contact with various mouse strangers. To a society experiencing the rapid growth of cities—and reacting, in various ways, quite poorly—this story seemed familiar. Senators brought it up in meetings. It showed up in science fiction and comic books. Even Tom Wolfe, never lost for description, used Calhounian terms to describe New York City, calling all of Gotham a "behavioral sink."

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Calhoun in 1986, nearly forty years after his first experiments.

Convinced that he had found a real problem, Calhoun quickly began using his mouse models to try and fix it. If mice and humans weren't afforded enough physical space, he thought, perhaps they could make up for it with conceptual space—creativity, artistry, and the type of community not built around social hierarchies. His later Universes were designed to be spiritually as well as physically utopic, with rodent interactions carefully controlled to maximize happiness (he was particularly fascinated by some early rats who had created an innovative form of tunneling, where they rolled dirt into balls). He extrapolated this, too, to human concerns, becoming an early supporter of environmental design and H.G. Wells's hypothetical "World Brain," an international information network that was a clear precursor to the internet.

But the public held on hard to his earlier work—as Ramsden and Adams put it, "everyone want[ed] to hear the diagnosis, no one want[ed] to hear the cure." Gradually, Calhoun lost attention, standing, and funding. In 1986, he was forced to retired from the National Institute of Mental Health. Nine years later, he died.

But there was one person who paid attention to his more optimistic experiments, a writer named Robert C. O'Brien. In the late '60s, O'Brien allegedly visited Calhoun's lab, met the man trying to build a true and creative rodent paradise, and took note of the Frisbee on the door, the scientists' own attempt "to help when things got too stressful," as Calhoun put it. Soon after, O'Brien wrote Ms. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH—a story about rats who, having escaped from a lab full of blundering humans, attempt to build their own utopia. Next time, maybe we should put the rats in charge.

This made me think of Japan with its densely populated cities.
This in particular stood out to me, "As new generations reached adulthood, many couldn't find mates, or places in the social order"
Japan's birthrate per woman (2012) is 1.41 and falling.
As a comparison, the US and UK rates are 1.88 and 1.9 respectively.

Really interesting read.

The rats of Nimh was a personal favorite of mine, very interesting read! Thanks!

thanks for that. I really enjoyed it

Overcrowding has negatively impacted human social order as well - consider the ghettos, entitled brats, social justice warriors, vegans, gays, and democrats...

You just don't find those things in the country.

To be fair, you do find a lot of democrats in the bible-belt, as well as in the poorer rural regions of the western states. Not so many vegans and SJWs.

Anyway, while we're on the subject of rodents and places near to my heart. I'll be perfectly honest- I know this sounds idiotic, but I honestly do miss the rats... They were a part of the fabric of the city.


Just How Huge Are New York’s Rats?

March 03, 2016, Sarah Laskow

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Matt Combs, a doctoral student at Fordham University, studies rats, and the rat in the picture above is one of the largest he’s ever seen.

“I’ve caught rats all over the city, and I’ve seen the ones that I didn’t catch," he says. "I think it’s among the biggest that live in New York City."

In life, the rat weighed 675 grams, which is edging up on one and half pounds. There may be some rats out there in the city that are larger, maybe 700 or 800 grams, Combs says. Rats even bigger than that have been found, on occasion; the species of rat that lives in New York City, Rattus norvegicus, can grow as large as two pounds.

A 675 gram rat, though—that’s a big rat. One and half pounds is about the size of a two-month old Pomeranian or of a small adult guinea pig, so it doesn’t entirely make sense that a 1.5 pound rat should seem so big. But it does. A one and half pound rat is chunky, and compared to many New York City rats, even a 500 gram rat, just over one pound, is a big rat.

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Wild rats lives in colonies, but most people generally don’t see rats in the context of their fellow rodents. In New York, maybe you see a rat from a few feet away, while it’s poking around in the trough of a subway track. Maybe you see a dark blur scurrying across the sidewalk. Maybe you think: that was a big rat.

Rarely does anyone have the chance to juxtapose the size of rats that live in the city, as Combs did while he and Elizabeth Carlen, a PhD candidate in the same lab, were preparing rat specimens to send off to the Peabody Museum, at Yale University. They were able to directly compare a big New York City rat to a small New York City rat and to New York City rats of every size in between:

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Specimens of the New York City Rattus norvegicus, from small to large

These rats were just some of the hundreds that the lab Combs and Carlen work for has collected. They’re trying to understand how rats spread through the city and what makes rats succeed or fail when colonizing new areas. Primarily, the scientists look at the rats’ genes, which can show how a lineage of rats has dispersed as young rats move into new neighborhoods and try to establish new colonies.

The taxidermied rats that are heading to the Peabody, along with their skeletons, can show the particular, subtle characteristics, like color of fur or shape of bones, that might distinguish New York City Rattus norvegicus from R. norvegicus elsewhere. Combs, Carlen and their colleagues don't actually need whole rats to get genetic samples, but they do need whole rats to collect and examine the rats’ organs, in search of parasites.

If they can understand how rats spread across the city, they may be able to understand more about how disease spreads, and the parasites living in the rats’ insides are another clue to how rat colonies move and interact with one another.

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These rat specimens will be kept for future research

It’s standard practice to weigh specimens like these, and it’s possible that the researchers could see some patterns in the data collected—perhaps adult rats in one area of the city are heavier than in another. Most of the rats they caught, though, were on the small side, since the traps they use tend to attract juvenile rats.

The larger rats above were caught using trained dogs, and Combs remembers exactly where they were caught. Big rats tends to live really close to their food sources, because the less energy and the less stress they have to expend to get to their food, the more calories they can pack away.

“I was staring at the dumpster where the rats eat every day,” says Combs. “These are the laziest rats.”

They lived within 20 to 30 feet of an unending feast, and their lives consisted of ferrying back and forth that short distance between home and meals. That easy access to food made a huge impact on their size. According to the Combs, the average size of an adult rat caught in the study was around 200 to 250 grams. Those large rats, the 500 to 675 gram ones, were two to three times as heavy.

If you see a rat that lives next to a dumpster? That’s a big rat.

I feel like I'm auditing a rodent studies class.
Looking forward to your next lecture, Professor Perez.

:likecat:

I feel the same, first post was a good read.

http://i.makeagif.com/media/9-21-2015/-4TmGO.gif?

Has there been any falsification of the hypothesis that overcrowding fucks up the rat psyche?

This article reminded me of this thread.

A Modest Proposal: Let?s just cut the big cities loose ? AgainstCronyCapitalism.org

Thomas Jefferson:

"I think our governments will remain virtuous for many centuries; as long as they are chiefly agricultural; and this will be as long as there shall be vacant lands in any part of America. When they get piled upon one another in large cities, as in Europe, they will become corrupt as in Europe."

Clearly written by someone who is uncomfortable being around people...

I grew up in a rural area. I've lived in suburban areas, I've lived in midtown Manhattan, I've lived in upscale Carlsbad, CA, and now I live on the outskirts of Chicago proper.

Is everything great about city life? Of course not. But I'll tell you this- I vastly preferred living in Manhattan, where the taxes are high, but where I can walk (or take the train) anywhere I need to go and have all of the cultural and social amenities a person could dream of, to living in a place where I need a car to get pretty much everywhere, and where there are no street-food vendors, no Central Park, no old university campuses to roam around in, and generally, just no sense of life.

There's a reason that people of a certain intellectual leaning are attracted to city life. Cities are incubators of innovation and culture. Without New York City, we'd have no Wall Street or Madison Ave. Without Boston, we'd have no Internet. Without Silicon Valley, we'd have no personal computers. Without Atlanta, well...

Skip Atlanta.

But calling large cities "welfare states" ignores the fact that America wouldn't have become an industrial superpower in the first place without Detroit and Cincinnati, and wouldn't set the world's standards in fashion, music, and entertainment without LA and NYC. How do you quantify the global economic value of Hollywood, and compare that against the comparatively minuscule size of all entitlement spending in all of LA county combined?


Sure, you can argue that rural life is great. But rural life is dull and uninspiring. Not to mention that if America has remained a principally agrarian society, then The Man in the High Castle would have been a historical documentary, not a work of fiction.


People, cultures, and nations, aspire to build great cities. This has been so since the dawn of written history and modern civilization. Green Acres taught us that city life ain't for everyone, and I'm fine with that. But rural / suburban life ain't for everyone either.

Not to mention the bit about cities being "welfare states" is completely wrong. Look at what "red" states and their take of federal funding vs what the "blue" states put in.

That old argument is not nearly as compelling if you actually look at those states more closely.
Many "red" states actually have "blue" state legislatures and vice versa.
Those figures also include spending on military bases, whos distribution tends to be more heavily concentrated in red states.
There are shitty blue states and shitty red states.
I agree with most of what Joe said, but I don't find rural living to be dull whatsoever, but I am an outdoorsy self-sufficient type.
I totally understand the appeal of urban living, but I am happy to no longer be living in a city.

Obviously it's a personal-preference thing, and I didn't mean to sound judgmental. If you're the kind that prefers living out in the country, do that. If a white-picket suburb if your preference, go there. Personally, I prefer living right in the heart of it, and Manhattan was perfect for me.

The only reason I'm not there right now is that WGN offered me $30k more than I was making at WPIX, and my old station couldn't match that. It's unfortunate that, unlike most TV stations in town, WGN isn't downtown. We're located in what New Yorkers would call the outer boroughs, way uptown near Wrigley. I actually considered getting an apartment downtown in the Loop or River North, but then realized I'd be spending an hour and a half or more each day in my car, and that sort of defeats the whole point of city living.

Point is- absolute generalizations are usually incorrect. There are many who would argue that the development of the suburb was a harmful innovation in terms of resource allocation, economic distribution, and socialization. Many argue for a return to the dense urban lifestyle and the abandonment of the commute. This works fine for me, but I'm not so narrow-minded as to ignore the fact that there's a reason people moved out to the 'burbs after WWII in the first place.

The author of Jason's article doesn't seem to be able to think in those terms.

I didn't take it that way.
In fact, my time living in San Diego was very enjoyable.
I lament that I may never again get hit in the head by a beach ball thrown from a pool full of gay men on the walk home to my apartment next to Balboa park.

By the way, go eat at Grange Hall sometime. It seems to change every time I visit, but the food has never been disappointing.

Joe, hit up a restaurant near you called Uncommon Ground. Go there on a warm evening and sit outside. You're welcome.

See, that's what I love about city life- the diversity and unpredictability. Whether it's concert-grade string quartet performances in the train station, people boxing in the park, bouquets of dead rats hanging from a scaffold, or just some random asshole climbing the outside of the Trump Tower, it's an interesting and stimulating environment.

I also found the following excerpt from Jason's article interesting:
The author of this seems to be living in some kind of Maybury fantasy world. In NYC, most people are in fact friendly in polite. The daily life of a city dweller goes something like this:

1: Wake up, shower, leave the apartment.
2: Say "hello" to your neighbor on the elevator. Exchange some quick pleasantries with the doorman and the building super on the way out.
3: Hit the subway. Observe humanity at its most interesting.
4: Above-ground. Stop for coffee and a bagel from your regular morning food cart guy. He knows your name, and you have a quick chat.
5: Head into the office. Greet the lady at the security desk on your way into the building, exchange a few words about the weather.
6: Work.
7: Lunchtime. Head outside to the halal cart on the corner. Order lamb over rice, or a falafel, or whatever. This cart guy also knows your name. Chat briefly. Saunter over to the little park, and dine outside while observing more humanity.
8: Work again.
9: Leave, repeat the subway routine.
10: Stop by the deli on your way home to get some pastrami and a few rolls. The old Jewish guy behind the counter knows your name, and talks to you about his kids.
11: Stop by the fruit cart to get some $1 avocados and a few vegetables. Mr. Nungh doesn't really speak much English, but he recognizes you, and you know that when me manages to squeak out "have good day" that he's the kind of guy who genuinely means it.
12: Home. The evening doorman greets you by name, and hands you the package that arrived earlier.


Compare this to the life of the suburbanite:

1: Wake up, shower, walk out to the garage.
2: Get in car, leave house, drive directly to office. Interact with no one.
3: Park, enter office, interact only with co-workers.
4: Lunch goes from the freezer to the microwave, since there are no sidewalk restaurants within walking distance.
5: More work.
6: Leave office and see the outside for the first time since you got here this morning.
7: Get in car, drive to Costco. Still haven't interacted with a single human outside the office.
8: Load up cart, go to checkout, interact briefly with random minimum-wage person who doesn't know your name, and robotically says "have a nice day" as programmed.
9: Drive home, enter garage, get out of car, go inside. Total number of meaningful human interactions outside the office: zero.



Yeah... It's the city folk who don't know how to interact with people?

I was going to say, I've found NYC to be perfectly friendly the times I've visited. I'd love to find a way to live there, buy I don't have the type of job that would pay me enough to still maintain a car and decent place to live without a roommate like it does here in "flyover country."

You mock this with a personal experience of your own, but then say this in the same post.
Shame on you Joe.

I'm afraid I'll need you to translate that for me, or at least provide some clarification.

Both sets of experiences were drawn from personal experience. The only part where I enhanced the truth was when I said "Costco." I've never had a Costco membership so I have no first-hand experience with what goes on in one. But I've heard a lot of co-workers talk about it, so I assume that they're quite popular, and probably not a great deal different from a Wal-Mart in terms of the degree of social interaction which occurs therein.

In just saying that you mock the author of that horrible article with your own personal opinion. You're doing the same thing he did.

If you could live in my shoes for a month I can assure you it would be much different than you described your experiences have been. Much like if the author of the article lived in your shoes for a month he may get a better taste of what city living Is like.

​​​​​​

And that might be.

I'm well aware of the fact that there are still places like Mayberry around, where you can walk to the local grocer / post-office combo, chat with Doris, have a cup o' Joe at the diner and shoot the bull with the locals, etc.

But that's no longer the reality for the majority of Americans. Economic forces (proximity high-paying jobs, ability to afford larger homes and multiple cars) combined with a changing view of the American Dream (3 bed / 2 bath house with a picket fence around the big back yard), have caused a dramatic shift in the non-urban landscape since WWII, with more and more families electing to move into suburban areas in which life closely resembles the narrative I gave.

I lived in Mason / Maineville, OH (suburb of Cincinnati) from 2000-2004, Carlsbad, CA (suburb of San Diego) from 2005-2008 and 2010-2013), and Beacon, NY (extremely distant suburb of NYC) from 2014-2015. All three of those were car-to-work-to-car-to-Walmart-to-car-to-home experiences entirely.

Contrast that to Hoboken, NYC, and (to a lesser extent) Chicago, and there's just no comparison.

The worst part about living where i do.
At the age of 25 and one speeding ticket for under 10mph. I can not get(halfway decent) car insurance for less than $1,000 - 6/mo(combined NA and NB). I can get the bare minimum for like $900-960.

:nuts:

F that dude.... Who do you have?

Esurance

I pay something like $1200 every 6 months for car insurance. I have 4-5 cars on it at any given time, and about the highest amount of coverage values for everything. You sir are getting screwed for just 2 cars.

No kidding. It's because I'm in the 313. If I was in the 248 or 734 it would be way cheaper.

You realize how many things affect the cost of your insurance, right?

And then when you look at the BIG insurers (State Farm, AllState, etc) many quarters they lose money on premiums but make their profits by investing your premiums.

​​​​​​​I am well aware of how many thing can affect the cost. Moving from the zip code I was originally in here in SC to where my house is and my insurance went up $40 a month. I just think it is crazy for it to be that expensive for 2 cars where he lives. I know I could have mine for less then $100 a month if I dropped down to 2 cars instead of the several I have. I also have USAA so they tend to be decent price wise. I also don't live in shitty ass detroit.

Car insurance is weird...

Last year, I owned a 2004 Mazda Miata, which was parked in Wappingers Falls, NY, a small semi-rural town about 10 miles south of Poughkeepsie. I had comprehensive & collision coverage, with a 300/500 liability limit. I paid $370 / 6mo with Geico.

Last month, I moved to Chicago. Not the 'burbs, but Chicago proper, where the traffic is horrible and crime is non-trivial. My policy here, same car, same company, is $256 / 6 mo, despite the fact that I upped the liability to 1M/1M.

Car insurance is weird.

Yes, it is.

Here in OK (thanks to our insane weather that includes strong winds and hail regularly throughout the year) it's one of the most expensive states in which to insure a home or automobile in the country.

Betcha a big part of it is due to differences in state insurance regulations. Insurance is a heavily regulated industry.

True. As far as vehicle/homeowners, basically all they do is mandate what the MINIMUM provided coverage has to be. Whether you choose to buy additional Coverage A/B for a home or liability/unisured for your vehicle is up to the consumer. And you're particular insurance company may offer more than the minimum for a higher cost as well because their actuaries have determined that is what's most profitable for their business model.

(Ex-State Farm claim rep here)

The Fall of the Faculty: The Rise of the All-Administrative University and Why It Matters

As status-seeking managers multiply, they pervert the university's core mission, Alan Ryan laments

December 1, 2011

Benjamin Ginsberg is a very angry man, and with good reason. The university that he joined in the early 1970s, which was a place where decisions were largely made by academics in the interests of teaching and research, has become a place where decisions are made by administrators. And on his account of things, those decisions are largely made with a view to enhancing the pay, prestige and numbers of administrators. Ginsberg is a professor of political science at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, and is uninhibited in his criticism of his own institution, but the phenomenon he describes is system-wide, both in the US and in the UK.

The figures tell the story. In the two decades from 1985 to 2005, student enrolment in the US rose by 56 per cent, faculty numbers increased by 50 per cent, degree-granting institutions expanded by 50 per cent, degrees granted grew by 47 per cent, administrators rocketed by 85 per cent and their attendant staff by a whopping 240 per cent. The obvious question is - why? Have students become so needy that a university needs not only a "dean of student life" but several associate deans, assistant deans and a plethora of deanlets - Ginsberg's coinage of the term "deanlet" is wonderfully offensive - to cater to their whims and shield them from the temptations of booze, drugs and illicit sex? Have we become so trapped by information technology that we need an IT officer apiece in order to function?

A common explanation of the growth in administrative numbers, both in the US and the UK, is that government demands for information and an increasingly complicated regulatory environment make it impossible to manage with fewer administrative staff than institutions actually employ. Ginsberg doesn't deny that some growth in numbers could be accounted for in this way, but he argues, I think rightly, that most cannot.

Because the US has a genuinely private and a genuinely public higher education sphere, it's possible to compare administrative growth across the sectors; and because public universities and colleges are vastly more tightly regulated than private universities and colleges, it ought to be the case that they have added far more administrators. In the 30 years from 1975 to 2005, the reverse was true. Administrative and managerial staff grew by 66 per cent in the state sector against 135 per cent in the private sector.

Ginsberg's view is Malthusian. Administrators breed unless checked. The process is familiar, and both Peter Oppenheimer at the University of Oxford and Iain Pears at King's College London have had something to say on the subject in a British context. Academic prestige comes from publishing, winning awards for excellent teaching, getting research grants and doing interesting research. Administrative prestige is measured by the number of "reports" an administrator has, which is to say, how many people report to them. Deans need associate deans, assistant deans, deanlets and a bevy of secretarial staff, less to achieve anything truly useful than to enhance their prestige - and their salaries, because one's pay goes up in proportion to the number of staff one directs.

It would be bad enough if the administrators were simply unproductive. As Ginsberg says, given the high cost of tuition and board and lodging in US universities, wasting money is a sin against students and their parents who foot the bills. But The Fall of the Faculty regards many presidents, provosts, deans and their underlings as positively dangerous to the academic enterprise of teaching and research. Because he has had a very good time digging for dirt, he doesn't perhaps distinguish as carefully as he might between what goes wrong when administrators engage in criminal behaviour and what goes wrong when they behave impeccably. So far as the first goes, lying on a resume is the most common offence, followed by misappropriating funds and buying real estate on the university's penny. Assorted sexual peccadilloes have been in the news lately, but Ginsberg doesn't stray into News of the World territory. He hardly needs to, as there are plenty of non-prurient but jaw-droppingly awful tales to tell.

The real unhappiness of The Fall of the Faculty is over what the "administrative university" will look like. What administrators hanker after is a university run like any other business. That leads them to view the rambunctiousness of faculty with deep suspicion: a Ford worker who bad-mouthed his boss would be sacked, so why should faculty be able to criticise their department chair's views on the curriculum, the dean of the faculty's views on hiring, or anything else? There goes academic freedom. Since academic freedom is essential for innovation in research or teaching, there goes the core mission of the university. Lip service will be paid to academic freedom, but deanlets and deanlings are everywhere drawing up codes of civility and respect so that administrators can squash any real resistance to their decisions.

The difficulty is not that resistance is futile, but that the real remedy is for universities and colleges to be self-governing communities where academics themselves do most of the administrative chores. And anyone who has had to twist his colleagues' arms to help with such things knows that our own unwillingness to take back the institutions that employ us is one of the major reasons for the deanlets' population explosion.


https://www.timeshighereducation.com...418285.article

Wow. College degrees are much more expensive now, so it is mostly administrative bloat causing a lot of it? And they are devalued by the dumbing down of our curriculum in both HS and college. I had a conversation with someone last year who worked in a large corporation. He said that a liberal arts degree was the new HS diploma. Unless you had a B of S, it wasn't worth the money. He said having a HS diploma was nearly as prestigious as being a dropout, lol.

Bureaucracy begets more bureaucracy. Bloat creates bloat. Middle management creates middle management, and so on.

I think a lot of the problem with the misguided importance of xx degree, outside of a technical degree, comes as people rise in any organization the likelyhood of them considering someone with a "lower" degree for a position is less.

So, over time the basis point for a degree rises until you get to the stage where if a candidate doesn't have that advanced degree he/she can't be qualified because the hiring person needs to justify his/her degree at least inwardly.

Another trend I see, especially in bigger institutions including public companies is the need to make people feel more important by calling them some sort of "manager". Maybe that stems from the "everyones a winner" mentality.

A lot of the cost increase came when schools realized parents would basically write blank checks and loans were super easy to get.

The county college I go to, for the basic classes and even some of the higher level classes, is just as good as anywhere else and total costs come to $3000 or so per semester if you are taking a full course load. But for some reason, at a state college, that will run you $6000-8000, and a private one is going to be even more?

Banks will often have 4 to 8 vice presidents at each location. Titles don't mean anything but customers feel more important and feel like they get special service if they are being handled by a VP, or at least that's what I was told was the reason.

No doubt... In sales it's become typical to call someone a Territory Manager, Regional Manager or Account Manager where there are no direct reports and by all accounts the person is the only salesperson in the area for that company. They functionally have no more authority in the decision making process other than to get dressed in the morning.

Seems like a lot of VP's of sales.

A few years ago, New York made it illegal to have the title without the corporate responsibility for realtors.

Real Estate Professionals Lose Some Curb Appeal - The New York Times

The Joy of Pronking

By Sarah Laskow July 25, 2016


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Eadweard Muybridge’s study of a deer in motion.

The other day, I was driving along a road in upstate New York when I saw a deer. This isn’t an unusual sight in itself, but this fawn, young enough to still have was still spots, was bounding, flying, across the lawns beside the road, so fast and heedless that my husband worried it would jump right into a car and die.

What was even more striking than its speed, though, was how high it seemed to get, as it left the earth and almost hovered, for a moment, in the air, over and over again. It look something like this, but even more dramatically air-borne:



So effortless, so much air. Why couldn’t I do that?

In theory, say some experts, jumping should not be just the provence of a few lucky animals. One evening in 1949, after dinner at the Royal Institution in London, a scientist named Archibald Vivian Hill delivered a speech in which he argued that, based on the basic properties of muscle and on simple dimensional reasoning, “similar animals of different size should be able to jump the same height.”

Jumping relies on basic physics: any animal that jumps is using energy to leave the ground. This is true whether they are bounding, leaping, high jumping, jumping straight up into the air, or lifting all four feet off the ground while “stotting” or “pronking.”



Jump from a running start, and you have horizontal energy to put into it. Jump from a standstill, and you only have the energy your body can create from that state of rest. No matter what, though, the aim of a jump is to lift the center of gravity from the ground, as high as possible.

You’d think that a smaller animal might get less air, since it has less muscle and shorter legs and can create less power. But it also has less mass to move. Hill noted that in the standing long jump, kangaroo rats and humans could jump about the same distance. As a rule, animals with equal proportion of the muscles used for jumping can cover about equal heights or distances.

The idea that all animals should jump the same distance had been around for centuries before Hill outlined it, but, of course, it’s not that simple. Think about it this way: small animals have shorter legs, which means that as they bend their legs and push off their ground their muscles, even if they were incredibly strong, don’t have much time to do the work of jumping. They basically can use only one of two tricks to improve their jumping prowess, explains Jim Usherwood, a senior research fellow at the Royal Veterinary College’s Structure & Motion Lab. They can extend the time in which they make the jump or increase its power.

Longer legs allow more time for muscles to gather energy before the animal leaves the ground. This is why good jumpers have disproportionately long or strong legs. And excellent jumpers, like fleas, locusts, and other insects, do not rely on the power of muscle alone. They have other tricks—their legs include catapult-like mechanisms that store energy and release it at the right moment.

Still, even accounting for these tricks, Usherwood points out that humans aren’t that bad. “I can jump higher than a locust, or frog, or flea is able to,” he says. In the end, it does matter how big you are to begin with.

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The tiny fawn didn’t have noticeably long legs, so I asked Usherwood if he could explain how it go so much air. We considered this image, by Eadweard Muybridge of a similarly airborne fawn:

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The front legs of these sorts of animals would have good, long tendons, Usherwood explained, which help it slow, right before the jump, and ping up its legs into the air. Then, it relies on its back, muscly legs, to kick off.

But part of this deer’s jump is just show. It’s pulled up its legs up towards its body, leaving an impressive gap of air beneath it. But the measure of a good jump isn’t actually how much air you can clear, so much as how high can you get your center of mass away from the ground. In other words, the deer wasn’t doing anything so special.

Humans are decent at this, although not great. We don’t run particularly fast, and we don’t have springy legs. But, really, there’s not much separating me from that fawn. In fact, in one of Hill’s examples, mule deer and humans were measured as jumping the same distances if they started from a run.

People are often impressed that deer can jump 8-foot fences, but humans can, too, if properly trained. The current high jump record for humans is just over 8 feet, and that’s under rules requiring jumpers to launch from one foot, a restriction that limits the height they can reach. Using two feet, and a series of energy-gathering flips, people have cleared bars even higher, of 9 or 10 feet. These are highly trained athletes, whereas among deer clearing a tall fence seems more commonplace. But the deer often have a stronger motivation for jumping fences (like access to a tasty garden). If the reaching best food required jumping 8 foot fences, we’d all probably be pretty good at it, too.

The Joy of Pronking | Atlas Obscura

The day I learned to high jump, I cleared 5 feet in jeans of the tightness common in the early 90s.

MUNCHIES in North Korea: A Visit to Pyongyang’s Newest Pizza Joint

November 2, 2016 / 12:00 pm BY JAMIE FULLERTON

When it comes to pizza, my favourite food, I’m not enormously fussy. But when I was served the pepperoni pizza I had ordered at Italy Pizza, the newest Italian restaurant in the North Korean capital of Pyongyang, I had to politely ask that the staff take it back and add some cheese, as it had been served with none. That’s me: the picky Brit abroad.

Italian food has only been a “thing”—and a niche “thing” at that—in the city since 2008, when the first Italian joint in North Korea opened. So it’s easy to forgive a few pizza production basics, such as putting cheese on them, occasionally going awry. It also seems a little crass to moan about such slights in a country in which the memory of the 1990s famine that killed around 2 million people is still fresh.

With the totalitarian country kept in chronic isolation by current leader Kim Jong-un, information about food infrastructure there is hard to verify. Numerous reports, however, suggest that much of the North Korean rural classes live hand to mouth. The middle and upper classes are usually granted the chance to live in cities, the most elite being Pyongyang, where an increasingly moneyed middle class has emerged over the past decade. This has fuelled the rise of Western-style restaurants in the capital.

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Pepperoni pizza at Italy Pizza. All photos by the author.

Now in Pyongyang you can find beer bars, burger restaurants and, perhaps surprisingly considering the North Korean regime’s attitude toward the country’s historic enemy of Japan, a sushi joint. Italy Pizza is the third Italian restaurant to open in the city, arriving in late 2015 as part of the opening of Mirae Scientists Street: a stretch characterised by pastel-coloured skyscrapers located next to the Taedong River that runs through the centre of the capital.


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Mirae Street.

As is the case for many of the Pyongyang hotels and restaurants foreigners are allowed to visit, the décor of Italy Pizza is 1970s cruise liner-level kitsch. Gloriously odd touches abound, such as this fish tank with no fish in it. Or water.

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Pizza dough is churned out in an open kitchen. Although most North Koreans are banned from travelling abroad, many Western-style restaurants in Pyongyang get permission to send their staff overseas for training.

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The restaurant was not very busy on my Friday evening visit, and I was told that this is typical. Many of the approximately 5,000 Westerners who visit North Korea as tourists each year have speculated online that venues such as these exist purely as showcases for foreigners. Simon Cockerell, general manager of UK-owned North Korea tour specialists Koryo Tours, said that this was unlikely.

Cockerell explained that while all North Korean restaurants will ultimately be state-owned, businessmen and women who operate within work units that manage them have a bit of leeway with regard to the style of venues that they open. “It’s easy to say there’s no profit motive, but costs versus income is still a ‘thing,’” he said. “They might be willing to lose money for, say, three years or something, but there is such thing as a restaurant closing in Pyongyang because not enough people went there. They are businesses.”

Italy Pizza does more to attract business than just serve pizzas. After my dinner was served, perhaps due to having few other customers to deal with, a waitress serenaded the room with an impressive karaoke session.

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The imagery on the karaoke screen was typical of that seen on TV in North Korea: fighter jets, guns, tanks, and the occasional nod to heavy industry.

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The pizza, meanwhile, was pretty good, with a pleasantly fluffy crust. The tomato sauce won’t be challenging Domino’s for tang factor any time soon, but it’s unlikely that many people will be in a position to make a direct comparison within the next few decades.

Most pizzas were priced at the equivalent of around $6 to $10 US each, making them unaffordable to most locals but not in the elite price range of fine dining in Pyongyang. I wondered if, by being exotic and pricey compared to local staples such as noodles and kimchi, eating pizza was a bit of a status symbol in the city.

Cockerell reckoned not. “There’s still this thing in North Korea where people don’t like to be seen eating in public,” he said. “You’d think that restaurants might have good views from their windows but often they have curtains over them. It is more socially acceptable now to have more money than someone else, but that mentality probably comes from a time when eating out was seen as showing off, and showing off is seen as bad. It’s innate conservatism.”

I’ll return to Italy Pizza, should I ever find myself in Pyongyang again. And next time I’ll go for the Fruit Pizza. If any dish flies in the face of innate conservatism, it’s got to be this thing.


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https://munchies.vice.com/en/article...st-pizza-joint

Itary Pizza sign made me laugh.

MUNCHIES in North Korea: Sinking Pints in Pyongyang’s Beer Bars

November 3, 2016 / 12:00 pm BY JAMIE FULLERTON


Pyongyang, the capital of hyper-isolated and totalitarian North Korea, might not sound like the obvious location for a beer-sodden knees-up with the jolly boys. Although we’re not quite at a stage where Pyongyangers are regularly getting massively pissed up and vomiting down their Mao suits, in recent years beer halls have become established, popular spots in the city, where locals can unwind after a hard day of work and repeatedly bowing to portraits of the Kim dynasty leaders.

The seven varieties of beer from the Taedonggang brewery are the tipples on offer at such places, with the rising popularity of the Pyongyang-made brews fuelling the launch of the city’s first ever beer festival last August. Production of Taedonggang began after the North Korean government bought and imported an entire brewery, Ushers of Trowbridge, in 2000. Now there are around five large Pyongyang beer halls serving it.

Last month I visited one of them, Mansugyo Beer Bar, maintaining the slim hope of lucking out and stumbling into a welcoming Pyongyang stag party until it became clear that the bar was not that kind of establishment. Sparsely decorated, lick-the-floor clean and with no music (the latter aspect perhaps being the one thing the pub had in common with J D Wetherspoon’s décor and brand concept), the venue is a touch more minimalist than your average Red Lion.


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A few propaganda posters on the terrace brightened the place up, though.


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As is the case at most of the beer halls in the city, customers stand at tables as they knock back pints that sell for the equivalent of about 50 cents US. The brews are named and numbered from One to Seven. The most conventional, lager-style offerings are on the lower end of the scale with more extreme tipples such as chocolate- and coffee-flavoured beers assigned the highest numbers.

Most people in the bar plumped for the conservative options. One (as in the beer named One) was an enjoyably crisp, golden, medium-strength lager-esque drink, while Two was a slightly lighter version that is also bottled and sold in many other places around the city. They were both pretty tasty.


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I gave the chocolate and coffee styles a whirl, but their mildly unpleasant bitterness gave an indication of why I was the only person in the bar doing so. They’re not tongue-troublingly bad, but Six and Seven are clearly just making up the numbers.


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My visit was at 5:30 PM on a Wednesday afternoon. The atmosphere was polite and subdued with the day’s first post-work drinkers, most of them male, providing a lightly bubbling soundtrack of glass clinks and murmurs. Pyongyang is where North Korea’s most privileged citizens live, and while the presence of the beer halls there is a result of the emergence of a wealthier middle class in the city, the relative low cost of the drink means that they are not refuges of the absolute elite. The liquor soju remains the most popular booze in the country, but draft beer is becoming more common and accessible.

“Beer is a bit middle-class in North Korea, but you never know who’s going to end up drinking at these places,” said Simon Cockerell, general manager of UK-owned North Korea tour company Koryo Tours, the firm I travelled to Pyongyang with. “I once went to a similar beer bar in the city and ended up talking to a table of very loud female gynecologists.”

I was told that the good-natured raising of voices is one of the few overt signs of drunkenness I was likely to encounter at a Pyongyang beer hall. The drinkers I was sharing the place with barely threatened to register even that; they seemed to be there for a couple of civilised rounds after work.


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“It’s a conservative society,” said Cockerell. “These bars aren’t open late. You see people who are more ‘sleepy’ drunk rather than passed-out drunk. That tends to be in parks, when people have had a soju-heavy picnic.

“In these bars, people just get a little bit rowdy sometimes; you never see anyone getting carried out and I’ve never seen a punch-up over a spilled pint or anything like that. They’re not open all day, so there’s not, like, an old guy perched at the end of the bar who’s been there every day for 40 years.”

With most able young men in North Korea conscripted to the army, the beer halls’ clientele tends to not be particularly young. “You do see the occasional young couple on a date here, though,” said Cockerell. “They’re called ‘donju dates’ —donju means new money people, the ‘masters of money.’ It’s a North Korean word that’s now also being used in South Korea, too.”

Sadly, there were no donju dates taking place during my fleeting trip to Mansugyo Beer Bar. Still, I’d happily take a lady for a pint of Two there, should the ban on foreigners freely roaming in North Korea be lifted in my lifetime. I liked it there; the bar offers a rare chance on Pyongyang’s rigid tours for outsiders to see the city’s locals relaxing, or at least appearing to. Sort a big drop-down screen for Super Sunday and they’ll be laughing.


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https://munchies.vice.com/en/article...angs-beer-bars

Is it weird that I've wanted to visit the country of "Great Leader" for a few years now?

Everyone loves to rubberneck at the scene of a car accident.

I think it's one of those things where you have to do it just because you were told not to.
Tell a kid not to do something and they can't help but do it.

My wife wants to hurry up and go to Cuba but I don't want to bring my money to enrich their government. Looks like I'm going to Cuba. It's not that I'm whupped, but that she's a really good wife who doesn't ask for much.

I understand the allure of the forbidden exotic place, but when you've been to Puerto Rico and to Cozumel you've seen what tin-pot corrupt governance and crumbling infrastructure look like in a Caribbean climate. I don't need to see it turned up to 11. I know what old cars look like. Ours are better than theirs. I know what beautiful tropical places look like. I also know what those places look like when they are clean and well governed. I'll probably get arrested. The old people are to blame. Either they were part of the revolucion or they didn't work hard enough to stop it.

Everyone I know that's been there raves about what an amazing experience it is to visit. I am hoping to go there myself soon before American influence becomes too evident.

For all us engineers:

Emotional Intelligence

Quote:

When emotional intelligence (EQ) first appeared to the masses, it served as the missing link in a peculiar finding: people with average IQs outperform those with the highest IQs 70% of the time. This anomaly threw a massive wrench into the broadly held assumption that IQ was the sole source of success.

Decades of research now point to emotional intelligence as being the critical factor that sets star performers apart from the rest of the pack. The connection is so strong that 90% of top performers have high emotional intelligence.

“No doubt emotional intelligence is more rare than book smarts, but my experience says it is actually more important in the making of a leader. You just can’t ignore it.” – Jack Welch

Emotional intelligence is the “something” in each of us that is a bit intangible. It affects how we manage behavior, navigate social complexities, and make personal decisions to achieve positive results.

Despite the significance of EQ, its intangible nature makes it very difficult to know how much you have and what you can do to improve if you’re lacking. You can always take a scientifically validated test, such as the one that comes with the Emotional Intelligence 2.0 book.

Unfortunately, quality (scientifically valid) EQ tests aren’t free. So, I’ve analyzed the data from the million-plus people TalentSmart has tested in order to identify the behaviors that are the hallmarks of a low EQ. These are the behaviors that you want to eliminate from your repertoire.

You get stressed easily. When you stuff your feelings, they quickly build into the uncomfortable sensations of tension, stress, and anxiety. Unaddressed emotions strain the mind and body. Your emotional intelligence skills help make stress more manageable by enabling you to spot and tackle tough situations before things escalate.

People who fail to use their emotional intelligence skills are more likely to turn to other, less effective means of managing their mood. They are twice as likely to experience anxiety, depression, substance abuse, and even thoughts of suicide.

You have difficulty asserting yourself. People with high EQs balance good manners, empathy, and kindness with the ability to assert themselves and establish boundaries. This tactful combination is ideal for handling conflict. When most people are crossed, they default to passive or aggressive behavior. Emotionally intelligent people remain balanced and assertive by steering themselves away from unfiltered emotional reactions. This enables them to neutralize difficult and toxic people without creating enemies.

You have a limited emotional vocabulary. All people experience emotions, but it is a select few who can accurately identify them as they occur. Our research shows that only 36% of people can do this, which is problematic because unlabeled emotions often go misunderstood, which leads to irrational choices and counterproductive actions. People with high EQs master their emotions because they understand them, and they use an extensive vocabulary of feelings to do so. While many people might describe themselves as simply feeling “bad,” emotionally intelligent people can pinpoint whether they feel “irritable,” “frustrated,” “downtrodden,” or “anxious.” The more specific your word choice, the better insight you have into exactly how you are feeling, what caused it, and what you should do about it.

You make assumptions quickly and defend them vehemently. People who lack EQ form an opinion quickly and then succumb to confirmation bias, meaning they gather evidence that supports their opinion and ignore any evidence to the contrary. More often than not, they argue, ad nauseam, to support it. This is especially dangerous for leaders, as their under-thought-out ideas become the entire team’s strategy. Emotionally intelligent people let their thoughts marinate, because they know that initial reactions are driven by emotions. They give their thoughts time to develop and consider the possible consequences and counter-arguments. Then, they communicate their developed idea in the most effective way possible, taking into account the needs and opinions of their audience.

You hold grudges. The negative emotions that come with holding on to a grudge are actually a stress response. Just thinking about the event sends your body into fight-or-flight mode, a survival mechanism that forces you to stand up and fight or run for the hills when faced with a threat. When a threat is imminent, this reaction is essential to your survival, but when a threat is ancient history, holding on to that stress wreaks havoc on your body and can have devastating health consequences over time. In fact, researchers at Emory University have shown that holding on to stress contributes to high blood pressure and heart disease. Holding on to a grudge means you’re holding on to stress, and emotionally intelligent people know to avoid this at all costs. Letting go of a grudge not only makes you feel better now but can also improve your health.

You don’t let go of mistakes. Emotionally intelligent people distance themselves from their mistakes, but they do so without forgetting them. By keeping their mistakes at a safe distance, yet still handy enough to refer to, they are able to adapt and adjust for future success. It takes refined self-awareness to walk this tightrope between dwelling and remembering. Dwelling too long on your mistakes makes you anxious and gun shy, while forgetting about them completely makes you bound to repeat them. The key to balance lies in your ability to transform failures into nuggets of improvement. This creates the tendency to get right back up every time you fall down.

You often feel misunderstood. When you lack emotional intelligence, it’s hard to understand how you come across to others. You feel misunderstood because you don’t deliver your message in a way that people can understand. Even with practice, emotionally intelligent people know that they don’t communicate every idea perfectly. They catch on when people don’t understand what they are saying, adjust their approach, and re-communicate their idea in a way that can be understood.

You don’t know your triggers. Everyone has triggers—situations and people that push their buttons and cause them to act impulsively. Emotionally intelligent people study their triggers and use this knowledge to sidestep situations and people before they get the best of them.

You don’t get angry. Emotional intelligence is not about being nice; it’s about managing your emotions to achieve the best possible outcomes. Sometimes this means showing people that you’re upset, sad, or frustrated. Constantly masking your emotions with happiness and positivity isn’t genuine or productive. Emotionally intelligent people employ negative and positive emotions intentionally in the appropriate situations.

You blame other people for how they make you feel. Emotions come from within. It’s tempting to attribute how you feel to the actions of others, but you must take responsibility for your emotions. No one can make you feel anything that you don’t want to. Thinking otherwise only holds you back.

You’re easily offended. If you have a firm grasp of who you are, it’s difficult for someone to say or do something that gets your goat. Emotionally intelligent people are self-confident and open-minded, which create a pretty thick skin. You may even poke fun at yourself or let other people make jokes about you because you are able to mentally draw the line between humor and degradation.

Bringing It All Together

Unlike your IQ, your EQ is highly malleable. As you train your brain by repeatedly practicing new emotionally intelligent behaviors, it builds the pathways needed to make them into habits. As your brain reinforces the use of these new behaviors, the connections supporting old, destructive behaviors die off. Before long, you begin responding to your surroundings with emotional intelligence without even having to think about it.

I suffer from a couple of those. Most principally "You don’t get angry." This is a problem when in a leadership role, and I sometimes have to actually pretend to be pissed off and rant a bit when shit's not getting done (or done right), as it's just not in my nature to huff and puff...

MISLEADING TECH: KICKSTARTER, BOMB SIGHTS, AND MEDICAL REJUVINATORS
Al Williams January 21, 2016


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Every generation thinks it has unique problems and, I suppose, sometimes it is true. My great-grandfather didn’t have to pick a cell phone plan. However, a lot of things you think are modern problems go back much further than you might think. Consider Kickstarter. Sure, there have been plenty of successful products on Kickstarter. There have also been some misleading duds. I don’t mean the stupid ones like the guy who wants to make a cake or potato salad. I mean the ones that are almost certainly vaporware like the induced dream headgear or the Bluetooth tag with no batteries.

Overpromising and underdelivering is hardly a new problem. In the 30’s The McGregor Rejuvenator promised to reverse aging with magnetism, radio waves, infrared and ultraviolet light. Presumably, this didn’t work. Sometimes products do work, but they don’t live up to their marketing hype. The Segway comes to mind. Despite the hype that it would revolutionize transportation, the scooter is now a vehicle for tourists and mall cops.

One of my favorite examples of an overhyped product comes from World War II: The Norden Bomb Sight. What makes the Norden especially interesting is that even today it has a reputation for being highly accurate. However, if you look into it, the Norden–although a marvel for its day–didn’t always live up to its press.


ABOUT THE NORDEN

The Norden could adjust for air density, wind drift, the bomber’s airspeed and groundspeed while controlling the bomber’s final run on the target. Carl Norden invented this analog computer and felt like it was a moral invention since it would allow bombs to hit their targets and not hit civilians.

The military was primarily interested in being able to hit ships and other pinpoint targets from high altitudes. In fact, because of technical limitations, the Norden didn’t work for low altitude bombing.

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A conventional bomb sight used a slide rule calculator and depended on the operator to make measurements. The operator didn’t have much time to make the measurements, so errors and inaccuracies were common. The Norden was a two-part device. The sighthead has a 20X telescope held vertical by a gyroscope. No matter how the plane moves, the telescope remains vertical. A mirror under the telescope rotates so that targets in front of the plane show up in the sight. The crosshairs (made of spider silk) marked the center of the scope.

A series of adjustments for airspeed, bomb type, and other factors means that once the target is in the center of the telescope and the other settings are correct the target will stay in the sight no matter how the plane moves. The other part of the device–the stabilizer–adjusts the plane’s motion to account for factors like the wind. In some versions, an indicator told the pilot what to do, but in many cases, the Norden flew the plane up to the bombing run.

The Army training video below gives an excellent explanation, but the main idea is that when correctly adjusted, the mirror under the telescope will rotate to keep the target in sight. When you are far from the target, the mirror’s motion will be slow, but the closer you get, the faster the mirror has to turn. When the rate of turn reaches a certain level, the bombsight automatically drops the ordnance, presumably hitting the target. The measurement of rate, rotating of mirrors, and the gyroscopes all required advanced analog computer techniques.

TOP SECRET

The secrecy surrounding the Norden was nothing short of amazing. The bombardiers swore an oath not to reveal any details of the Norden secret. The sight itself had a specially guarded box and was brought to the plane, installed, and then removed after each mission. A pyro device ensured the device would not survive a crash, although the bombadier was responsible for ensuring the destruction of the instrument, with his pistol, if necessary.

When it wasn’t in the air, the bomb sight resided in a vault. A highly-trained and highly-secret group maintained the device. Even though security relaxed a bit towards the end of the war, the public didn’t see the Norden until 1944.

The secrecy for the Norden was probably second only to the Manhattan Project. Like that project, espionage penetrated despite the security. The Germans had their version of the Norden which–interestingly–didn’t work any better than the American ones although it was simpler to use.

PICKLE BARRELS

The Norden worked great in trials. The official line was that the Norden could hit a pickle barrel from 30,000 feet. This may have been true, but it depended on a lot of conditions being just right. Clear sight of the target was the biggest problem. The Norden could not break cloud cover, a smokescreen, or fog. Also, flying fast (as you would want to do during combat) made the device less accurate.

Turns out, with a 20X telescope, a bombardier couldn’t see a pickle barrel from 30,000 feet, much less hit it. The Norden company claimed it could hit a 15 square foot target from 30,000 feet (a pretty big pickle barrel). That’s still pretty impressive.

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Unfortunately, in practice, accuracy was much less than advertised. At 15,000 feet, the accuracy was about 400 feet–not nearly good enough to hit a ship reliably. It wasn’t just environmental issues that hampered the Norden. It was difficult to operate from inside the cold plastic nose of a B17 (the bombardiers often wore silk gloves to prevent their skin sticking to the cold metal) and had lots of moving parts that could fail or go out of alignment, especially after a few hard landings. Accuracy got better as the war carried on, but at first it wasn’t really much better than other conventional sights. There were several reasons for the improvement. The Norden was difficult to manufacture (using special tools) and drawings and techniques doubtlessly got better over time. Also, operators simply got better, and even learned how far off their particular bombsight was and would compensate for that.

Don’t get me wrong: the Norden was an incredible piece of engineering. In clear weather and with other prevailing conditions, it was possible for it to be highly accurate. I say possible because so much depended on the skill of the operator. This observation led the Army to designate lead bombers with the most accurate bombardiers using the Norden and the others just dropping their bombs when the lead planes released.

Like the Segway, though, the Norden was the subject of a lot of hype. After the device became known publicly in 1942, the Norden company presented demonstrations of dropping a wooden bomb into a pickle barrel at Madison Square Garden. It was hard to evaluate how good it really was until after a lot of information became declassified, so if the company said they could hit a barrel from 30,000 feet, it was hard to refute it. The Norden, by the way, dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. It missed its actual target by 800 feet, which was of no consequence, but does make for a very large barrel of pickles.

The videos below show more about how the Norden did what it did. Today, you could probably set the whole thing up with a minuscule amount of off the shelf gear. But for its time, it was an electromechanical marvel.






Misleading Tech: Kickstarter, Bomb Sights, and Medical Rejuvinators | Hackaday

J Clin Pathol 2003;56:157 doi:10.1136/jcp.56.2.157

Historical perspectives

Molten gold was poured down his throat until his bowels burst

F R W van de Goot, R L ten Berge, R Vos
Department of Pathology, VU University Medical Centre, De Boelelaan 1117, 1081 HV Amsterdam, The Netherlands; frw.goot@vumc.nl

In 1599, a Spanish governor in early colonial Ecuador suffered this fate. Native Indians of the Jivaro tribe, unscrupulously taxed in their gold trade, attacked the settlement of Logrono and executed the gold hungry governor by pouring molten gold down his throat. 1 Pouring hot liquids or metals, such as lead or gold, into the mouth of a victim was a practice used on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean, by the Romans and the Spanish Inquisition among others. 2

Several sources mention the bursting of internal organs. 1–3 The question remains whether this is actually the case and, also, what the cause of death would be. To investigate this, we obtained a bovine larynx from a local slaughter house (no animal was harmed or killed specifically for this purpose). After fixing the larynx in a horizontal position to a piece of wood and closing the distal end using tissue paper, 750 g of pure lead (around 450°C) was heated until melting and then poured into the larynx. Immediately, large amounts of steam appeared at both ends of the specimen, and the clot of tissue paper was expelled with force by the steam. Within 10 seconds, the lead had congealed again, completely filling the larynx (fig 1).

After cooling, cross sections of the larynx were made, and formalin fixed, paraffin wax embedded slides of the laryngeal wall were observed under the light microscope. The laryngeal mucosa was found to be totally absent, and coagulation necrosis of the underlying chondroid and striated muscle was seen at a maximum depth of 1 cm (fig 2).

Based on these findings, we suggest that the development of steam with increasing pressure might result in both heat induced and mechanical damage to distal organs, possibly leading to over inflation and rupture of these organs. Direct thermal injury to the lungs may lead to instantaneous death, as a result of acute pulmonary dysfunction and shock, as shown by Brinkmann and Puschel. 4 Even if this is not the case, the development of a “cast” (once the metal congeals again) would completely block the airways, thus suffocating the victim.

In conclusion, we have shown that in the execution method of pouring hot liquefied metals into the throat of a victim, death is probably mediated by the development of steam and consequent thermal injury to the airways.


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Figure 1
Bovine larynx after being filled by melted lead.


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Figure 2
The laryngeal mucosa was totally absent and coagulation necrosis of the underlying chondroid and striated muscle can be seen.



References

1. Anthony HE. Indian headhunters of the interior. The National Geographic Magazine 1921, October: 328–333.
2. Wylie J A. History of the Jesuits. The tortures of the Inquisition (Chapter 11).
3. Hare JB. Hebraic literature, translations from the Talmud, midrashim and Kabbala.
4. Criminals and criminial punishments (http://www.sacred-texts.com/jud/hl/hl50.html).
   Brinkmann B, Puschel K. Heat injuries to the respiratory system. Virchows Arch A Pathol Anat Histol1978;379:299–311.

The Journal of Clinical Pathology, Volume 56, Issue 2

Saddam Hussein's Blood Quran
A 605-page Quran penned in the blood of a dictator is locked away in a mosque.

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Following an assassination attempt on the life of his son, Uday, the former dictator became a devout Muslim. Ironically though, with infinite resources it’s difficult to demonstrate your piety. In an attempted display of devotion, shortly after his 60th birthday Saddam had roughly 27 liters of his blood drawn and given to a calligrapher.

Over the course of two years the artist, Abbas Shakir Joudi al-Baghdadi, wrote some 600 pages of the Quran using the Iraqi president’s blood as ink.

Authorities don’t know what to do with the document. On the one hand, it is a significant, if gruesome, artifact of a particular era in Iraqi history. On the other hand, displaying it could cause it to be glorified by Saddam’s supporters, the Ba’ath Party. Additionally, some Sufi leaders have have called the macabre method of writing such a Quran “haraam,” or forbidden.

For now, the Blood Quran resides in a basement under strict lock and key. It was previously on display in Saddam’s “Mother of All Battles” Mosque. Now, that room is sealed by three vaulted doors, the keys to which have been distributed between a sheikh, the city police commissioner, and a secret third party. In order to even be considered for a visit to the Blood Quran, one has to submit to deliberation by a government committee. So for now, it sits in the mosque, growing more curious and grisly by the day.

Saddam Hussein's Blood Quran ? Baghdad, Iraq | Atlas Obscura

Very poignant read. Both the implications of the rat's behavior for social models and the process of how such an experiment unfolded to reveal its outcome are equally fascinating.

Opinion: The adaptation of predictive numerical models, statistical analysis, and metrics applied to govern human behavior so as to alter, minimize, or eradicate outliers in those models (brought about through freedom of choice, or in this case freedom of academic inquiry) is how corporate systems function. Personally, I despise academia equally with corporate ideologies but in this article they seem to be the sad protagonists. So, here they sit as bystanders to the infiltration of metric-minded administers indifferent to the basic freedoms required by academics because freedom cannot be predicted.

Edit: But the irony here is the same statistical modeling used in many fields of academic inquiry are the same methodologies now used to govern academia administratively. The very same principals of outlier-exclusion that form the academic canon are now reversed back upon them in a DELICIOUS turn of fate.

Cat Bombs:
To sink German ships


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The earliest examples of cats being used in warfare dates back to the Ancient Egypt during a war against Persia. The Persians, fully aware of the reverance that Egyptians paid to their felines, rounded up as many cats as they could find and set them loose on the battlefield. When the Egyptians were faced with either harming the cats or surrendering, they chose the latter.

During World War I, cats were used in the trenches as an attempt to keep the rat population down and some cats were used as poison gas “detectors”.

The most creative way to use a cat as a weapon happened in World War II. The United States' OSS (Office of Strategic Services, the precursor of the CIA) needed a way to guide bombs to sink German ships. Somebody hit upon the inspiration that since cats have such a strong disdain of getting wet and always land on their feet that if you attached a cat to a bomb and drop it in the vicinity of a ship, the cat's instinct to avoid the water would force it to guide the bomb to the enemy's deck. It is unclear how the cat was supposed to actually guide a bomb attached to it as it fell from the sky but the plan never got past the testing stages since the cats had a bad habit of becoming unconscious mid-drop.

Not to be outdone by its predecessor, the CIA also attempted to use cats but this time as a bugging device during the Cold War. Although a disaster as a guided bomb, the CIA thought that a cat would make the perfect covert listening device in a project known as Operation Acoustic Kitty. They attempted to surgically alter the cat by placing a bugging device inside him and running an antenna through its tail. The project took five years and $15 million dollars before the first field test hit a slight snag when the bugged kitty was released near a Russian compound in Washington and was immediately hit by a car while crossing the street. The project was ended soon after.





Exploding rats:
Rat carcasses filled with plastic explosives

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Exploding rats were a weapon developed by the British army in World War II for use against Germany. Rat carcasses were filled with plastic explosives, with the idea that when the rats were shovelled along with coal into boilers, they would explode, causing significant damage. However, the first shipment of carcasses was intercepted by the Germans, and the plan was dropped. The Germans exhibited the rats at top military schools, and conducted searches for further exploding rats.



9 Insanely Strange Weapons of War (strange weapons) - ODDEE