Things That Make Kim Jong-il Smile

Things that make Kim Jong-il smile: orange buckets, his reflection, fresh sheet metal, North Korea's national fiber, rows and rows of brightly colored children's shoes, booze, nicely arranged group photos.

Things that make Kim Jong-il frown: everything else.

Nuts Allergy

These are particularly fine examples of the cake wreck genre.

Hat tip to my wife.

One is the Loneliest Number, Silver is the Saddest Medal

If you can't win gold, go for bronze:

"On average, bronze medalists are happier than silver medalists," said Victoria Medvec, a psychologist and professor at Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Managementv in Illinois.

The phenomenon is a case of counterfactual thinking - thoughts about "what might have been," she explained.

Third-place winners have upward thoughts ("at least I won") that increase satisfaction, researchers have found, whereas those who come in second tend to have downward "if only" thoughts that decrease happiness.

Ignore Your Food's Expiration Dates?

I heard Nadia Arumugan on Talk of the Nation today talking about her piece in Slate on the very thin evidence for the usefulness of food expiration dates.

These dates have no real legal meaning, either. Only last year, 7th Circuit Judge Richard Posner reversed the conviction of a wily entrepreneur who'd relabeled 1.6 million bottles of Henri's salad dressing with a new "Best when purchased by" date. Posner decided that the prosecutor had unjustly condemned the dressing as rancid, rotten, and harmful, when in fact there was no evidence to suggest that the mature product posed a safety threat.

In the world of hunger relief work, however, food expiration dates give us quite a bit of pause, mostly because the food supply chain is so long and winding (not to mention unknown in some cases) by the time an item ends up in our hands. If you're curious, here's what the USDA has to say on the issue.

Unhappy Hipsters

If you haven't subscribed to Unhappy Hipsters yet then get thee to the feed reader.

Increasing Disorder in a Dining Table

Via Deconcrete.

More at Edible Geography.

Titles of One Star Reviews for 'Runaway Bunny' on Amazon

"Psycho OCD Stalking Parent Book or better titled, "How to Wear Down a Child Into Submission"

"Not beloved by our family"

"This book is creepy"

"It's so scary..."

"beautiful in its creepiness"

"no more wire hangers!"

"A Smothering Tale"

"A Classic of Squashed Spirits"

"If He Wants To Go So Badly, Let Him Go"

"Psycho Rabbit Mom Stalks Her Own Baby"

"Bunnies do not talk."

Tough to argue with that last one. All reviews here.

Desire Lines

From Wikipedia:

A desire path (also known as a desire line or social trail) is a path developed by erosion caused by animal or human footfall. The path usually represents the shortest or most easily navigated route between an origin and destination. The width and amount of erosion of the line represents the amount of demand. The term was coined by Gaston Bachelard in his book The Poetics of Space.[1] Desire paths can usually be found as shortcuts where constructed pathways take a circuitous route.

They are manifested on the surface of the earth in certain cases, e.g., as dirt pathways created by people walking through a field, when the original movement by individuals helps clear a path, thereby encouraging more travel. Explorers may tread a path through foliage or grass, leaving a trail "of least resistance" for followers.

The lines may be seen along an unpaved road shoulder or some other unpaved natural surface. The paths take on an organically grown appearance by being unbiased toward existing constructed routes. These are almost always the most direct and the shortest routes between two points, and may later be surfaced. Many streets in older cities began as desire lines, which evolved over the decades or centuries into the modern streets of today.

A short piece in the New York Times entitled "Ploughing Detroit into Farmland" points to this nice post from Sweet Juniper that explicates the emerging desire lines around the vacant urban landscape of Detroit and which can be seen in the photo above, also from Sweet Juniper.

It's not a term that I was familiar with, though one that I'm now glad I know as I've always been a bit of an intrepid desire path follower. If you've spent any time in a developing country, and Africa in particular I think, you know that desire lines are as ubiquitous as feet and you've no doubt seen vast stretches of forlorn untrodden sidewalk as everyone wisely follows their own much more efficient and no less demarcated desire paths across, around and over it. My own favorite encapsulation of the difference between desire paths and paved roads always came when asking if I was following the right road from one village to another village in the Botswana bush, the reply would inevitably be: "This is a road but it is not the road."

Links: Random and Assorted

1. Add this to the list of things not to tell your children: bunnies being shot, frozen and burnt for fuel in Sweden. (via)

2. Uganda: A ticking population timebomb.

3. An Interview with Dr. Cruelty regarding the supervillian sense of humor:

No, I'm sorry, I still don't—

They're stuck in a pit! They can try to get out but they can't! They will surely die down there, poisoned by snakes! They're trapped!

Right, I understand that but—

It's hysterical, come on! They. Can't. Get. Out.

4. File away for New Years, how to make the McNuggetini (via and recipe)

5. In case you missed them: Gapminder added FAO agricultural data to their visualizer; the FAO's Hunger Report; IFPRI's 2009 Hunger Index.

6. Steven Rattner's behind the scenes account of the auto bailout is worth a read.

7. Charlize Theron one ups Bill Easterly and makes out with the highest bidder to raise money for Africa. Now there's a slippery slope . . . .

8. Coin toss not 50/50?:

Here's what the researchers concluded: Using a high-speed camera that photographed people flipping coins, the three researchers determined that a coin is more likely to land facing the same side on which it started. If tails is facing up when the coin is perched on your thumb, it is more likely to land tails up.

How much more likely? At least 51 percent of the time, the researchers claim, and possibly as much as 55 percent to 60 percent — depending on the flipping motion of the individual.

In other words, more than random luck is at work.

Comedians Solve World Hunger (Again)

Sarah Silverman makes a suggestion for solving world hunger. The NSFW should be a given, but if not, well, the language is NSFW.



Silverman, of course, isn't the first comedian, nor is she the funniest, to take aim at solving global hunger, here's the classic Sam Kinnison piece from the 80's.

Religion Matters in the Hood

While fatherhood hasn't left me much time to blog of late it has left plenty of odd moments (i.e., the wee hours of the night) to read blogs and one I've been especially enjoying of late is Tales from the Hood. Today's post is a good example why as it deals with a topic near and dear to my heart, the intersection of religion and development, here's an excerpt:

I am saying that we need to see religion as more than a curiosity or a barrier. I am saying that I see significant room in the aid industry to expand our understanding of the ways in which Religion affects people, broadly speaking, and the ways in which religions are powerful forces in the communities where we work. If the statistic is right and 85 percent of the recipients of aid that we deliver are religious (it’s actually probably higher than 85 percent), then we see a necessarily incomplete picture by sticking with the concrete, the tangible, the scientific. I’m not saying that we should all embrace religion (this is a very personal choice for everyone), but I am suggesting that we need to move beyond arm’s-length tolerance: It is not enough to simply know intellectually that communities in southern Laos are Theravada Buddhist: we need to know what that means specifically in the life of that community and in the lives of those who are to benefit from what we do there. It is not sufficient simply to know that recipients of aid in rural Afghanistan are Muslim; it’s not even enough to overtly make the link between that fact and what it means for us and how we structure and run programs there…

The aid programs that we design and implement and monitor and evaluate nearly always take place in contexts where religion is a central part of peoples lives. For us to be less than complete in our understanding of what that means necessarily limits our ability to fully comprehend the impact of those aid programs.

The whole thing is recommended. My previous posts in a similar vein are tagged under "religion matters."

2 Videos

Beautiful video of food prep at Alinea via Eat Me Daily:

Bill Streever was on NPR today talking about his new book Cold and talking about hibernating arctic ground squirrels. Full transcript isn't up yet but here's the gist:

"As [the squirrel] hibernates, he begins to cool off. In fact, he cools off to a temperature that's just below the freezing point of water, so around 30 degrees Fahrenheit," says Streever. "When he hits that temperature — when one would think this animal is, for all intent and purposes dead ... he spontaneously starts to shiver," and his temperature rises.

Of course, You Tube has you covered with this video of the process which is great on many, many levels:

The Million Dollar Book

From Eat Me Daily comes word of the planned publication of a book on wine expected to retail at a cool million dollars:

The book, weighing 66 pounds, will highlight the top 100 wineries in the world and come with six bottles from each winery, presumably driving up the astronomical price tag. But is it worth it?

Assuming the Wine Opus costs about the same amount as their other titles, it would cost approximately $2000 without the wine chaser. Divide what's left of the $1m between the 600 bottles of wine, and you get an average of $1663 per bottle. For comparison, the most expensive, standard-sized bottle on wine.com, a Dom. de la Romanee Conti La Tache Grand Cru 2004, retails for $1,579, but the second priciest, a Château Mouton Rothschild Pauillac 2005, is a comparative bargain at $749.

Feel free to browse the other titles available from Kraken Opus, the self-described maker of "the most luxurious series of publications ever created." Hint: the Prince one comes with an iPod - cha-ching!

Engineers are a Matter of Fact People

Names of telescopes:

The Very Large Telescope

The Thirty Meter Telescope

The European Extremely Large Telescope

The Overwhelmingly Large Telescope

The only conclusion can be that all the creative energy of astronomers goes into thinking about what aliens look like and therefore they have no time left over to think up names for their equipment. That, or space dementia. Gleaned from this little piece in the Economist on the future of astronomy and the possible implications of it being guided by computerized robots rather than the hunches of mere mortals in the line of Galileo, Kepler, et al.

Factbook eXplorer

The OECD released an interesting new data/statistical visualization tool: Factbook eXplorer. You know it's good because the "X" is capitalized.

AIDS, Religion and Development

Via Travis Kavulla's Twitter feed I see that he has a long and worthwhile essay in the New Atlantis touching on one of my favorite talking points, the necessity of recognizing the role of religious beliefs, systems and structures when engaged in development work on the African continent:

The Western public-health lobby, bred in a culture that preaches unconstrained freedom of the individual in the realm of sexual relations, is put off by talk of moralizing policies, or of any policy that de-emphasizes condoms. But it needs a dose of its own advice. It must stop imposing its own agenda on Africa. It must realize that HIV has a social dimension that must be addressed, that Africans are naturally wont to view this disease, which perversely inverts the life-giving act of sex, as a moral calamity. The sooner the donor community realizes this, and reorients its policies to fit African realities, the better.

There is much more to engage with there than I have the time to do at the moment so please give it a read.

Tips For Those Who Actually Want to Travel

As with all other areas of my life these days I'm a few days behind working through the old feed reader but when I finally got around to it I was happy to see this post from Erik Hersman in response to Nicholas Kristof's well meaning (?) primer on travel in developing countries. Erik's list along with those he's culled from the comments is worth bookmarking while Kristof's . . . . not so much.

My addition would be to buy, carry and read whatever local English language daily you can get your hands on. A little local knowledge and a few relevant talking points with the man/woman on the street can go a long way in establishing that first foot of insider good will.

Congo Importing Farmers

It's not colonialism if you are invited, right?  (Or, is it the refusal to leave when asked?)  As the article points out there are problems with this plan but it seems potentially more desirable (with the possibility for greater long term local returns) than the wholesale leasing of huge tracts of arable land to sovereign states.

Hiatus

Posts have been a bit scarce of late and will be more so in the next few days, as we just had a baby.  We are sleepy, we are excited, we are parents.  

PS - In the meantime If you missed Justin Timberlake on SNL, I'm up late these days, there are a couple of skits that are worth watching - I don't love his music but the guy has skills - that monologue was brilliantly done.  The Geithner opening was a couple minutes too long but funny:

Markets in Everything: Home Victories

With the usual apologies to Marginal Revolution, from the AJC:

Georgia, which has beaten New Mexico State by an average of 32 points in three previous meetings, will pay the Aggies $925,000 to come to Athens for another game.

The Bulldogs will play New Mexico State on Nov. 5, 2011, in Sanford Stadium.

Georgia is to pay New Mexico State the $925,000 — believed to be the largest payout UGA has made to a visiting team — by Jan. 31, 2012, according to the contract between the schools, obtained this morning by the AJC.

By my calculations that's an average margin of victory cost of $28,906.25 per point.  Memo to Coach Richt, pull the offense back in the second half and you could save a few hundred thousand dollars the next time contract negotiations come around.