Month: October 2012

Of Horses and Bayonets

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Last night, the topic of “horses and bayonets” lit up Twitter and the blogosphere after Barack Obama mentioned the phrase in the debate against Mitt Romney. Today, Bloomberg has a piece ascertaining the decline of horses but the (relative) stability of bayonets:

The U.S. Marines, though, remain fixed on bayonets.

In 2004, the Marines ordered some 90,000 OKS-3S new model bayonets from the Ontario Knife Co. in Franklinville, New York, a unit of Servotronics Inc. (SVT) of Elma, New York. According to a report on the Marine Corps website, the new “multi-purpose knife” is more durable than the old M-7 bayonet and also doubles as a combat knife.

Some elements of combat, however, never change. The 2004 article quotes Marine Major Allen L. Schweizer of the Marine Corps Systems Command as saying: “The Multi-Purpose Bayonet is best used on the enemy, and it causes physiological as well as physical damage.

And as for horses?

As for horses, although a few reappeared in the opening days of the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the special operations forces who rode them were carrying laser pointers to direct air strikes rather than sabers and lances to carve up the enemy.

While Obama was correct that the U.S. Army has fewer horses and bayonets than it did in 1916, as anyone who has seen the movie or play “War Horse” knows, the days of the cavalry charge and fixed bayonets were already waning in World War I. They were victims of machine guns and artillery.

While the U.S. Army still used horses for transport and supply duty, the last of them were traded in for trucks and Jeeps at the end of World War II.

Horses and bayonets became a meme very quickly indeed.

The Magic of the Em-Dash

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Writing for The New York Times, Ben Yagodo reminisces on the magic of the em dash (—):

To get a sense of some of the things a dash can do, take a look at these pairs of quotes.

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby”:

Thirty: the promise of a decade of loneliness, a thinning list of single men to know, a thinning briefcase of enthusiasm, thinning hair.

Thirty—the promise of a decade of loneliness, a thinning list of single men to know, a thinning briefcase of enthusiasm, thinning hair.

Henry James, referring to Henry David Thoreau:

He was worse than a provincial, he was parochial.

He was worse than a provincial—he was parochial.

Mark Twain in “Autobiography”:

…life does not consist mainly (or even largely) of facts and happenings. It consists mainly of the storm of thoughts that is forever blowing through one’s head.

…life does not consist mainly—or even largely—of facts and happenings. It consists mainly of the storm of thoughts that is forever blowing through one’s head.

Twain’s “Pudd’nhead Wilson’s New Calendar”:

Each person is born to one possession which outvalues all his others: his last breath.

Each person is born to one possession which outvalues all his others—his last breath.

In all cases, both versions make sense and are grammatically correct. But the ones with the dash (the ones the authors actually wrote) seem to live and breathe, while the others just lie there on the page. Like hitting the right combination of buttons in a computer game, typing two hyphens on the keyboard — and thereby making a dash — can give your prose a burst of energy, as if by magic.

Did you know the em dash is also known as a mutton?

The Worst of DRM

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This blog post offers a cautionary story on how Amazon can wipe out your entire account:

As a long-term writer about technology, DRM, privacy and user rights, this Amazon example shows the very worst of DRM. If the retailer, in this case Amazon, thinks you’re a crook, they will throw you out and take away everything that you bought. And if you disagree, you’re totally outlawed. Not only is your account closed, all your books that you paid for are gone. With DRM, you don’t buy and own books, you merely rent them for as long as the retailer finds it convenient.

One reason I still prefer to own physical books versus e-books.

The New Yorker Editors Endorse Barack Obama

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A very articulate message from the editors of The New Yorker in support of re-election of Barack Obama for President of the United States:

The choice is clear. The Romney-Ryan ticket represents a constricted and backward-looking vision of America: the privatization of the public good. In contrast, the sort of public investment championed by Obama—and exemplified by both the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act and the Affordable Care Act—takes to heart the old civil-rights motto “Lifting as we climb.” That effort cannot, by itself, reverse the rise of inequality that has been under way for at least three decades. But we’ve already seen the future that Romney represents, and it doesn’t work.

The reëlection of Barack Obama is a matter of great urgency. Not only are we in broad agreement with his policy directions; we also see in him what is absent in Mitt Romney—a first-rate political temperament and a deep sense of fairness and integrity. A two-term Obama Administration will leave an enduringly positive imprint on political life. It will bolster the ideal of good governance and a social vision that tempers individualism with a concern for community. Every Presidential election involves a contest over the idea of America. Obama’s America—one that progresses, however falteringly, toward social justice, tolerance, and equality—represents the future that this country deserves.

Read the whole thing.

The Life and Times of The MGM Lions

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Mental Floss has an interesting history of the famous lion that appears in the beginning of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) films. Actually, it’s not just one lion, but five:

Jackie was the first MGM lion to make his voice heard, thanks to the gramophone. He introduced MGM’s first sound production, White Shadows in the South Seas, with a roar. The lion came from something of an acting animal dynasty. His mother, Stubby, was part of a performance troupe, and his grandmother, Mamie, was one of the first animals to ever appear on film in the U.S. Jackie’s own resume went beyond roaring in a studio logo—he also appeared in 100+ movies.

Jackie had another claim to fame. He survived two train wrecks, an earthquake, a boat sinking, an explosion at the studio, and a plane crash that left him stranded in the Arizona wilderness for several days (pilot Martin Jenson left the cat with some snacks while he went in search of help). After all that, he earned the nickname “Leo the Lucky.”

Leo the Lion is the current iteration seen in MGM films, present since 1957:

Leo is MGM’s longest-serving lion and was also the youngest at the time his roar was filmed. In addition to his appearance in the logo, he appeared in several Tarzan movies, the Tarzan television adaptation, and other films. Leo may or may not have been the lion’s actual name, but after he was purchased from animal dealer Henry Treffich, the name was used by someone at the studio and stuck both there and in the public consciousness.

Read the rest here.

Jeff Bezos on People Who Are “Right a Lot”

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Interesting tidbit from Jason Fried on Jeff Bezos’s answer to the question: How are people who tend to be “right a lot” similar?

During one of his answers, he shared an enlightened observation about people who were “right a lot”.

He said people who were right a lot of the time were people who often changed their minds. He doesn’t think consistency of thought is a particularly positive trait. It’s perfectly healthy — encouraged, even — to have an idea tomorrow that contradicted your idea today.

He’s observed that the smartest people are constantly revising their understanding, reconsidering a problem they thought they’d already solved. They’re open to new points of view, new information, new ideas, contradictions, and challenges to their own way of thinking.

This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have a well formed point of view, but it means you should consider your point of view as temporary.

What trait signified someone who was wrong a lot of the time? Someone obsessed with details that only support one point of view. If someone can’t climb out of the details, and see the bigger picture from multiple angles, they’re often wrong most of the time.

So in order to be right (or perceived to be so), you should be flexible in your perspective. But I wonder whether that observation holds well for politicians, who may be described as flakes for changing their beliefs/policies too often.

Shane Bauer on Solitary Confinement and American Prisons

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Shane Bauer was one of the three American hikers imprisoned in Iran after being apprehended on the Iraqi border in 2009. He spent 26 months in Tehran’s Evin Prison, 4 of them in solitary confinement. In his latest feature for Mother Jones, Shane Bauer writes a powerful piece on his experience of solitary confinement in that Iranian prison:

“There was a window,” I say. I don’t quite know how to tell him what I mean by that answer. “Just having that light come in, seeing the light move across the cell, seeing what time of day it was—” Without those windows, I wouldn’t have had the sound of ravens, the rare breezes, or the drops of rain that I let wash over my face some nights. My world would have been utterly restricted to my concrete box, to watching the miniature ocean waves I made by sloshing water back and forth in a bottle; to marveling at ants; to calculating the mean, median, and mode of the tick marks on the wall; to talking to myself without realizing it. For hours, days, I fixated on the patch of sunlight cast against my wall through those barred and grated windows. When, after five weeks, my knees buckled and I fell to the ground utterly broken, sobbing and rocking to the beat of my heart, it was the patch of sunlight that brought me back. Its slow creeping against the wall reminded me that the world did in fact turn and that time was something other than the stagnant pool my life was draining into.

But then he goes to an American prison, and the experience is much, much worse:

Acosta, Pelican Bay’s public information officer, is giving me a tour of the Security Housing Unit. Inmates deemed a threat to the security of any of California’s 33 prisons are shipped to one of the state’s five SHUs (pronounced “shoes”), which hold nearly 4,000 people in long-term isolation. In the Pelican Bay SHU, 94 percent of prisoners are celled alone; overcrowding has forced the prison to double up the rest. Statewide, about 32 percent of SHU cells—hardly large enough for one person—are crammed with two inmates.

The cell I am standing in is one of eight in a “pod,” a large concrete room with cells along one side and only one exit, which leads to the guards’ control room. A guard watches over us, rifle in hand, through a set of bars in the wall. He can easily shoot into any one of six pods around him. He communicates with prisoners through speakers and opens their steel grated cell doors via remote. That is how they are let out to the dog run, where they exercise for an hour a day, alone. They don’t leave the cell to eat. If they ever leave the pod, they have to strip naked, pass their hands through a food slot to be handcuffed, then wait for the door to open and be bellycuffed.

You should read the entire story here.

The Embarrassment of the BlackBerry

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This New York Times piece on users dissatisfied with their BlackBerry phones is largely anecdotal; nevertheless, I enjoyed it (the quotes were hilarious).

The cultural divide between BlackBerry loyalists and everyone else has only grown more extreme over the last year as companies that previously issued employees BlackBerrys — and only BlackBerrys — have started surrendering to employee demands for iPhones and Android-powered smartphones.

Goldman Sachs recently gave its employees the option to use an iPhone. Covington & Burling, a major law firm, did the same at the urging of associates. Even the White House, which used the BlackBerry for security reasons, recently started supporting the iPhone. (Some staff members suspect that decision was influenced by President Obama, who now prefers his iPad for national security briefings. A spokesman for the White House declined to comment.)

Out in the world, the insults continue. Victoria Gossage, a 28-year-old hedge fund marketer, said she recently attended a work retreat at Piping Rock Club, an upscale country club in Locust Valley, N.Y., and asked the concierge for a phone charger. “First he said, ‘Sure.’ Then he saw my phone and — in this disgusted tone — said, ‘Oh no, no, not for that.’ ”

This was a very good dissenting comment:

Like people, one device can’t do everything we need. I use a Blackberry Torch for writing very quickly in full typo-free sentences and paragraphs. I use it to move text to and from legal documents. I write and send poetry and plays on it. I have created hundreds of macros to speed the typing of words and phrases. It’s also one of my phones. It does all of these things very very welll. I have an iPhone, which is terrific for many things, one of which is definitely not writing at length. I have an iPad for other terrific things. I am lucky to have a choice and to be able to afford it. If someone made fun of me for using my Blackberry, I would react as I would if they criticized my shirt or choice of coffee. I’m often on the Blackberry phone while using the iPhone. I have two hands. I use them both.

I was a BlackBerry user for about a year and a half. The biggest malaise was the Internet Browser, which took ages to load a webpage. The iPhone I have now is light years away from the BlackBerry device I used to own.

The Destruction of the 1 Percent

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Chrystia Freeland pens a brilliant essay on the destruction of the 1 percent. She begins with the rise of Venice during the Renaissance and its subsequent decline:

In the early 14th century, Venice was one of the richest cities in Europe. At the heart of its economy was the colleganza, a basic form of joint-stock company created to finance a single trade expedition. The brilliance of the colleganza was that it opened the economy to new entrants, allowing risk-taking entrepreneurs to share in the financial upside with the established businessmen who financed their merchant voyages.

Venice’s elites were the chief beneficiaries. Like all open economies, theirs was turbulent. Today, we think of social mobility as a good thing. But if you are on top, mobility also means competition. In 1315, when the Venetian city-state was at the height of its economic powers, the upper class acted to lock in its privileges, putting a formal stop to social mobility with the publication of the Libro d’Oro, or Book of Gold, an official register of the nobility. If you weren’t on it, you couldn’t join the ruling oligarchy.

The political shift, which had begun nearly two decades earlier, was so striking a change that the Venetians gave it a name: La Serrata, or the closure. It wasn’t long before the political Serrata became an economic one, too. Under the control of the oligarchs, Venice gradually cut off commercial opportunities for new entrants. Eventually, the colleganza was banned. The reigning elites were acting in their immediate self-interest, but in the longer term, La Serrata was the beginning of the end for them, and for Venetian prosperity more generally. By 1500, Venice’s population was smaller than it had been in 1330. In the 17th and 18th centuries, as the rest of Europe grew, the city continued to shrink.

She then makes a compelling argument that such a decline will happen in America. The only thing I found at fault with the essay is an unsympathetic jibe toward Apple and its Maps app in the latest iOS.

A Monopolist’s Dream: The Ambassador Bridge

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This is a remarkable statistic: more than 25% of trade between the U.S. and Canada goes over the Ambassador Bridge between Detroit, Michigan and Windsor, Ontario. The bridge, built in 1929, has since 1979 been owned by one individual — Matty Moroun. He also owns duty-free stores and sells gasoline that escapes taxes. The Bridge isn’t quite a monopoly—there is also a tunnel; but the Bridge is more convenient for a lot of traffic.

The Ambassador Bridge.

Hat tip for the post is here. Business Week had a profile of Matty Moroun earlier this year. It’s worth taking a look.