Via Just One Thing comes an excellent list of sports-related novels. The baseball list is especially noteworthy, highlighting quite a few fantasy-related baseball novels such as Robert Coover’s The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop..
Although I’d like to live forever, one method I am not planning to rely on to get there is cryonics. The idea, of course, is that at death your body is frozen on the off chance that at some period in the future technology might exist to revive you. Since the practice of freezing damages the body, even if someday nanotechnology is around that can revive dead bodies (which I doubt will ever happen — hey, I’m an optimist but even I have limits), I doubt a given person’s consciousness would survive the many changes to cells in the brain (see Pet Sematary for what might happen in such a situation).
But if people want to waste their money having themselves frozen, more power to them. Unless they live in France, apparently. Raymond and Monique Martinot spent a lot of money having themselves cryonically frozen. But French prosecutors claim this is strictly forbidden. The BBC quotes a prosecutor as saying, “What has been done is outlawed in France. In this country, bodies must either be cremated or buried.”
This is apparently common in Europe, and people wanting to freeze themselves after death generally depart Europe for the land where even the kookiest ideas generally have legal protection so long as they don’t harm others — the United States. Cryonics here is regulated by states and several openly permit the process.
I cannot imagine what the European objection to freezing is. The only thing I can think of are concerns that the company or other entity responsible for maintaining the cryonics facilities may become insolvent and leave the government or other third party with a bunch of dead bodies to dispose of, but that concern would be easily addressed through an insurance policy or similar mechanism.
Frozen couple sparks heated debate. The BBC, February 26, 2002.
Jonas Savimbi was killed on Feb. 22 by soldiers of the Angolan army. Savimbi waged guerilla warfare against governments in Angola for 36 years and became an ally of the United States during the 1980s when Ronald Reagan received Savimbi in the White House. Whatever else he was, Savimbi was skilled at public relations.
At that time, the Soviet Union and Cuba supported the government of Angola, while South Africa supported Savimbi’s UNITA (in fact, it is doubtful UNITA would have survived at that time without South African and then U.S. aid.)
After the Cold War, the United States lost interest in Angola and Savimbi proved once and for all that Washington’s bet on him as a supporter of freedom had been misplaced. In 1991, Savimbi reached a peace treaty in which he was supposed to abandon guerilla warfare in favor of democratic elections in Angola. But after Savimbi was defeated in those elections, he once again returned to guerilla warfare.
The BBC report on Savimbi’s death notes that he died with a pistol in his hand and that the Angolan army unit that tracked him down shot him no less than 17 times. Few people will likely miss him.
Source:
Obituary: Jonas Savimbi, Unita’s local boy. The BBC, February 25, 2002.
Savimbi ‘died with gun in hand’. The BBC, February 25, 2002.
Zimbabwe has elections coming up — elections that would almost certainly result in a loss of power for Robert Mugabe if they were fair and free. Mugabe’s got a problem, and this week a solution appeared in the form of a videotape supposedly showing opposition leaders plotting to kill Mugabe.
The setup is this: opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai recently met with Ari Ben-Menashe. That meeting was surreptitiously taped, apparently by Zimbabwe secuirty forces.
Ben-Menashe used to work for Mugabe, though was apparently passing himself off now as an independent consultant. At the meeting, the two discuss a variety of issues related to the upcoming elections until Ben-Menashe proposes assassinating Mugabe, at which point Tsvangirai claims he left the room and refused to have anything more to do with Ben-Menashe.
But Mugabe is selling a different story — that Tsvangirai proposed the assassination plot and Ben-Menashe turned the opposition union leader in, saying he was shocked when Tsvangirai proposed the political murder.
So how do we know that Tsvangirai’s version is correct — and that Ben-Menashe was working with Zimbabwe’s security forces to set all of this up? Because Mugabe’s government released a videotape of that meeting. An extensively edited videotape. No, make that an idiotically edited videotape. Here’s how the BBC sums up the problems with the edited video, citing the point at which Tsvangirai appears to agree to the murder of Mugabe,
Although this sounds like damning evidence, after each question or answer, the film suddenly jumps and the figures switch their seating positions, showing that the clip has been heavily edited.
The Media Monitoring Project of Zimbabwe has analysed the video tape and says that a version broadcast relentlessly on Zimbabwe television has a video timer on the screen, which also demonstrates “that the video had been cut and rearranged in a manner that appeared to suit the assassination conspiracy theory”.
“The timer… changed repeatedly from, 9.45am to 9.25am; and from 9.25am to 9.43am and then back to 9.27am; and from 9.52am to 9.44am,” says the MMPZ.
Mugabe’s security forces are so stupid they left the damn timecode stamp in the edited video the released to the public! Sure puts a better perspective on his mismanagement of Zimbabwe.
Source:
What lies behind Zimbabwe’s treason tape. The BBC, February 26, 2002.
New Scientist reports that researchers at Oxford University used one of those distributed computing screensavers to analyze 3.5 billion potential anthrax-fighting compounds and reduce that to a mere 300,000 potential compounds which will now be analyzed using a supercomputer. This sort of analysis would normally require several years.
Oddly enough, some people who ran the screensaver were angry because they were told it would be used to search for cures for life threatening diseases and thought that research on cancer was more important than research into anthrax. According to New Scientist,
But despite the near euphoria on the project, not everyone in the screensaver user community is happy. That is because 1.2 million of the 1.35 million people who ran the screensaver actually downloaded a program that seeks useful drugs for treating cancer.
Some downloaders have been offended by the way their PC was harnessed for use in a project that they did not sanction. Some, who have written to New Scientist expressing their anger, say cancer is a far bigger killer than anthrax, and they wanted their software to continue working on cancer.
Of course if they really want to have an enormous impact on life-threatening diseases, I would suggest malaria and dysentery which, along with AIDS, are the big killers outside of the developed world (and since malaria and dysentery tend to disproportionately kill infants and children, their impact on life expectancy is far greater than cancer’s impact in the developed world).
Source:
Anthrax screensaver finds promising new drugs. Paul Marks, New Scientist, February 19, 2002.
TechCentralStation.Com’s Ryan H. Sanger takes down George W. Bush for his recent statements linking farm subsidies, of all things, to the 9/11 terrorists attacks.
Sanger reports that at the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association meeting in Denver, Bush told the cattlemen that, “It’s in our national security interests that we be able to feed ourselves . . . This nation has got to eat.”
As Sanger notes, given the relatively high levels of obesity in the United States, no one seems in danger of going hungry anytime soon. The truly bizarre thing about U.S. agricultural policy, however, is that it encourages low prices for some commodities while encouraging high prices for others.
On the artificially low price side, Sanger correctly notes that the problem with farm subsidies is that they create an excess of supply which makes farming unprofitable — at which point farmers turn into beggars at the government trough demanding one handout after another.
But the other side of the coin is that the United States uses tariffs and other devices to artificially raise the price of some agricultural commodities. A prime example of this is sugar — tariffs on sugar imports are set at such a high level that sugar in the United States costs up to twice as much as it does elsewhere.
The people who make Lifesavers understand that reality. Until a few months ago the major North American plant producing Lifesavers was located in Holland, Michigan — just a couple hours from where I live. But the high sugar costs in the United States finally took their toll, and the company announced it would close the plant and move to Canada where sugar producers don’t have the same influence. Sugar costs about half as much as it does in the United States, even after the exchange rate is accounted for.
Ah yes, thank goodness those tariffs are there protecting American jobs.
Source:
Beast of burden. Ryan H. Sager, TechCentralStation.Com, February 20, 2002.
If you’re like me, you get 5 or 6 of these “419″ scam letters in which the con man tries to convince the mark that he has access to gold or other valuables from Nigeria which require a third party to move them out of country.
Buddy Weiserman strung along one of these scam artists for a couple of months and ?posted voice mails, emails and even a description of how he conned the conman into flapping his arms and legs like a chicken at Independence Square in Ghana. Hilarious.
A couple months ago I experimented with a Google ad for my animal rights site. Considering the site is largely noncommercial, the return on investment was very low. I paid something like $25 total for a few thousand text ads and the response rate was about what I’ve seen on ads I run on my own site — less than 1 percent.
Now, though, Google has followed that up with an excellent cost-per-click advertising system called AdWords Select. This lets people place text ads by keywords, but only pay on a cost-per-click basis.
Currently, for example, I have textads running on about 100 different search words. I’m paying $.05 per clickthrough and can limit the total amount per day per ad (so if I set a $1 limit, after the 20th click-through of the day, the ad will no longer be served until the next day).
Clickthrough rate is still about in the 1 percent range or so, but this is still a bargain basement promotion method (in fact, I’m less interested in clickthroughs than having my shortened URL appear on Google searches for topics like “animal rights” or “peta.”)
This is an incredible — and cheap — promotional tool.
The other day an e-mail from the National Organization for Women crossed my desk. The e-mail was outraged that Washington, DC, had granted Mike Tyson a license to fight and called for people to protest to city officials to have Tyson’s permission to fight revoked. Huh? Let Tyson fight already.
The NOW e-mail complained that Tyson was being investigated for rape. Fine, then lets see police arrest and/or indict him, but until then Tyson has just as much right as anybody to pursue his career and applying political criteria to decide whether or not to allow him to fight is obscene.
As George Getz puts it in a Libertarian Party press release on the Tyson controversy,
If Tyson is willing to fight; if an opponent is willing to step into the ring with him; if the bout is sanctioned by professional boxing organizations; and if fans are willing to pay money to see the fight — then no meddlesome government bureaucrat should have the power to veto it.
Exactly. I was trying to figure out what NOW was thinking with its idiotic e-mail. You’d think a group of feminists would be the last people in the world wanting to blacklist someone from working at his profession simply because he is unpopular or has a criminal record. As Getz said in the LP press release, “We don’t need Soviet-style economic commissars deciding who can work, and where they can work, and under what conditions they can work.”
Boxing commissions should be required by law to render fight decisions based solely on objective criteria as Getz outlines, not based on who NOW or other groups like or dislike. Let Tyson fight already.
Source:
Let Mike Tyson box in Washington: It’s a matter of economic freedom. Libertarian Party, Press Release, February 21, 2002.
MSNBC reports that less than a week after its IPO, PayPal has been hit with a class action lawsuit filed on behalf of people who claim that the company wrongfully denied them access to their money. PayPal is an interesting experiment, but in the long term I think it is doomed.
Quite a few people seem to have had bad experiences with PayPal, but most people seem to ignore the fact that PayPal’s behavior is also one of the reasons it can offer such relatively good terms — i.e., it keeps its costs per transaction and the amount of fraud in its system extremely low. The problem is that in order to accomplish this, PayPal resorts to a whole host of customer unfriendly policies.
In that respect, PayPal is a lot like a small commuter air company. It’s not that PayPal couldn’t be nicer or have more reasonable policies, but rather that the second it does it will no longer have much of a competitive advantage in its market. The lawsuit against PayPal concedes this point, arguing that,
As a result of its inability to set up an adequate and effective anti-fraud mechanism and its attempt to compensate for such inability, PayPal adopts an aggressive and grossly over-broad anti-fraud policy that persistently causes erroneous and wrongful restrictions of access to be imposed on user accounts — causing economic damage and financial loss to a significant number of innocent PayPal account holders.
Between lawsuits and attempts by state and perhaps even federal officials to regulate PayPal as a bank, PayPal will have to raise its fees and institute more selective criteria for the accounts it takes on — i.e., it will have to become more like a traditional bank. And at that point, traditional banks who have been busy working on their own competitors to PayPal will likely eat it for lunch.
Source:
PayPal sued over frozen funds. Lisa Napoli, MSNBC, February 21, 2002.
