100,000
The 100,000 dead figure that’s being tossed around for civilian casualties in Iraq is much trumpeted, but seems to be on shaky ground.
Make no mistake: whatever the number, it’s grotesque; it’s unacceptable, and shocking, and unfortunate.
But 100,000 it’s not.
Fred Kaplan takes the 100,000 number to task in Slate.
(Quick aside: if you’re unfamiliar with it, just know that the 100,000 number comes from a study by a team from the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins; the article in which the number appears will be published in The Lancet, a British medical journal.)
The authors of the Lancet article write:
We estimate there were 98,000 extra deaths (95% CI 8000-194000) during the post-war period.
Kaplan translates:
It means that the authors are 95 percent confident that the war-caused deaths totaled some number between 8,000 and 194,000. (The number cited in plain language—98,000—is roughly at the halfway point in this absurdly vast range.)
…and editorializes:
This isn’t an estimate. It’s a dart board.
What’s most disturbing is the fact that the researchers felt they needed the 100,000 number to make a point.
Update: Daniel at Crooked Timber has a slightly different take on the matter of 100,000. It’s worth a read.
(Slate: “100,000 Dead—or 8,000,” by Fred Kaplan [October 29, 2004]; IHT: “Study puts civilian toll in Iraq at over 100,000,” by Elisabeth Rosenthal [October 30, 2004]; The Lancet: “Mortality before and after the 2003 invasion of Iraq: cluster sample survey,” by Les Roberts et al. [October 29, 2004])
Posted by Ben on November 1, 2004
https://www.swordbilled.com/100000/
Long Article, Long Tail. Big Idea.
Chris Anderson’s “The Long Tail” in Wired Magazine makes for a great read; it takes a stab at explaining a whole host of pop-culture phenomena by linking them together under a seemingly counterintuitive proposition: people’s tastes are not reined in by scarcity.
Put more simply, in a physical world—the one defined by movie theaters, book stores, and music stores, etc.—retailers are constrained by the need to carry material that can earn its keep, i.e., be snapped up in sufficient numbers by a local audience.
Generic Example: Say you’ve got a movie. Say there are 2 million people who want to see that movie. Say the density of this particular demographic is 5 people per square mile. Your movie ain’t gonna fly.
Anderson calls this “the tyranny of physical space,” saying “an audience too thinly spread is the same as no audience at all.”
Now when you start talking online distribution, this tyranny is turned upside-down. Probably the clearest example is Rhapsody, an online music subscription service:
Not only is every one of Rhapsody’s top 100,000 tracks streamed at least once each month, the same is true for its top 200,000, top 300,000, and top 400,000. As fast as Rhapsody adds tracks to its library, those songs find an audience, even if it’s just a few people a month, somewhere in the country.
This is the Long Tail. 1
Anderson’s exploration of the long tail and its implications for, e.g., online music subscription is interesting; but even if you care little or nothing about online music or what-have-you, you may want to stick around long enough to entertain his thoughts on hits vs. sales and the aforementioned tyranny, both of which generate some interesting (if not necessarily surprising) brain-fodder.
Like this, which I’ll leave you with to close:
[A]s egalitarian as Wal-Mart may seem, it is actually extraordinarily elitist. Wal-Mart must sell at least 100,000 copies of a CD to cover its retail overhead and make a sufficient profit; less than 1 percent of CDs do that kind of volume. What about the 60,000 people who would like to buy the latest Fountains of Wayne or Crystal Method album, or any other nonmainstream fare? They have to go somewhere else.
Notes:
1 Though another good example is Amazon, half of which sales are from books outside the top 130,000 titles.
(Wired: “The Long Tail,” by Chris Anderson [October 2004])
Posted by Ben on October 31, 2004
https://www.swordbilled.com/long-article-long-tail-big-idea/
Really scare the kiddies this Halloween
Printer-friendly patterns of John Kerry and George Bush at FabulousFoods.com.
(via This Modern World)
Posted by Ben on October 29, 2004
https://www.swordbilled.com/really-scare-the-kiddies-this-halloween/
Kubrick and Politics
Last night1, Turner Classic Movies kicked off a monthlong series called “Party Politics and the Movies,” in which senators are invited to choose and introduce their favorite films. John Edwards was the inaugural guest, and his selection was almost shockingly bold: Dr. Strangelove. … Edwards was bashful about drawing parallels, but host Ben Mankiewicz finally baited the hook for him: “Is there any message you would like President Bush or Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist to get from this movie?” Edwards’ answer, delivered in his usual courtly drawl, was a quiet little knife in the president’s ribs: “Human beings are fallible. They make mistakes … That’s why it’s so important to have somebody at the top of the civilian government who understands what’s happening and has good sound judgment.”
Next Thursday night, John McCain will introduce another Kubrick film, Paths of Glory… one of the most virulently antiwar movies of all time.
(Slate: “How John Edwards learned to stop worrying and love Dr. Strangelove,” by Dana Stevens [October 8, 2004])
Note:
1 Actually, October 7th.
Posted by Ben on October 29, 2004
https://www.swordbilled.com/kubrick-and-politics/
More Barbie
In related (but unrelated) news, [1] Barbie fell off the list of favored Christmas wish toys in Britain, while [2] yet another artist twists Barbie’s image to her own will.
All the gory details:
- “The Barbie doll has for the first time failed to appear on the list of toys expected to top British children’s Christmas lists, retailers revealed today.
“Younger rivals, such as the Bratz series and Dora the Explorer, have usurped the 45-year-old doll, which is manufactured by the US company Mattel, on the UK Toy Retailers Association’s top 10.”
(Guardian: “Barbie: the doll of Christmas past” [October 6, 2004])
- “There’s a cross-dressing male doll with long hot pink hair and a tight miniskirt. A “Jailbait Barbie” stands behind bars, wearing a pink and white striped uniform and an identification number. An eight-legged black widow doll crawls up a spider web, with Ken wrapped in her webbing.
…
“‘I always loved Barbie,’ she said. ‘I don’t know what led me to this. Barbie was too clean and she needed to be in the real world, so I put her in my world.'”
(AP: “N.C. woman sells naughty Barbie dolls” [October 4, 2004])
(FYI, this is “More Barbie” because a previous post here at nmb covered another perversion of the Barbie image, “Food Chain Barbie”)
Posted by Ben on October 29, 2004
https://www.swordbilled.com/more-barbie/
Wipe that smile off your face
Police in the battleground state of Pennsylvania are looking for a man who robbed a bank Thursday night wearing a George W. Bush mask.
(TSG: “Man Robs Bank Wearing George W. Bush Mask” [October 18, 2004])
Posted by Ben on October 29, 2004
https://www.swordbilled.com/wipe-that-smile-off-your-face/
Of course it’s not a bird, you ninny
It’s a bird. It’s a plane. No, it’s a bull moose hanging by its antlers from an electrical power line in the middle of the Alaska wilderness.
This is one of those truly bizarre stories that seems absolutely hilarious until you actually think about it, at which point it turns morbid and sad. (Check out the article for a surprising amount of detail regarding the moose and its unfortunate accident.)
“It’s just an unbelievable story,” said Gabriel Marian, president of City Electric Inc., the contractor erecting the power line to the mine. “The only unfortunate part is we had to shoot the moose.
“It would be more of a feel-good story if we had let it down and it ran off,” he lamented.
(Fairbanks Daily News-Miner: “Wired Moose,” by Tim Mowry [October 17, 2004])
Posted by Ben on October 27, 2004
https://www.swordbilled.com/of-course-its-not-a-bird/
Blind to the world (or not?)
This is very, very curious:
“We found neural activity that frankly surprised us,” says Michael Weliky, associate professor of brain and cognitive sciences at the University of Rochester. “Adult ferrets had neural patterns in their visual cortex that correlated very well with images they viewed, but that correlation didn’t exist at all in very young ferrets, suggesting the very basis of comprehending vision may be a very different task for young brains versus old brains.”
A second surprise was in store for Weliky. Placing the ferrets in a darkened room revealed that older ferrets’ brains were still humming along at 80 percent as if they were processing visual information. Since this activity was absent in the youngsters, Weliky and his colleagues were left to wonder: What is the visual cortex so busy processing when there’s no image to process?
…
This suggests that though the young ferrets are taking in and processing visual stimuli, they’re not processing the stimuli in a way that reflects reality.
Also, keep your eyes peeled for the part where brain professor Michael Weliky has a screening of “The Matrix” for the ferrets.
(University of Rochester: “Under the Surface, the Brain Seethes With Undiscovered Activity” [October 6, 2004])
Posted by Ben on October 27, 2004
https://www.swordbilled.com/blind-to-the-world-or-not/
Hitchhiker’s Guide to…
The old Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Infocom game is now jazzed up with graphics (graphics!) in a li’l flash thingamabob, courtesy of the BBC.
(For the uninitiated, the original Infocom game [and also the new Flash version] was basically a digital choose-your-own-adventure version of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy book. I actually remember having the Infocom game. I don’t remember ever making it out of the bedroom alive, which essentially means that I managed to get crushed by the bulldozers–or possibly obliterated by the Vogons–every single time. I never really put that much effort into it, but I also never figured out what you could or could not do. The idea was that you typed complete sentences into the computer, and it understood exactly what you meant; my experience was that the computer could never understand what I was telling it to do. I may have been too young, too stupid, or quite possibly both. You might have better luck.)
(via BoingBoing)
Posted by Ben on October 25, 2004
https://www.swordbilled.com/hitchhikers-guide-to-your-bedroom/