Now that idiot thugs are refusing disaster relief and rice shortage prophesies are being self-fulfilled, it won’t be long until famine starts to rear its head. While many people are busy dying, those that aren’t will be spreading blame around. Blame will fall on bad weather, bad crops, bad luck, even on Al Gore. But the truth will be none of these. While starvation is (obviously) caused by a lack of food, famine—that is, widespread starvation over a large area—is the result of bad government.

As far as food goes, governments fail their people in two ways: by failing to plan for bad times and by bungling (or, all to often, profiting from) crises when some external event triggers a food problem. Usually, famine involves both. In its 2002 coverage of Ethiopia entitled “Bad weather, and bad government”, the Economist said:

Bad weather is rarely enough, on its own, to kill large numbers of people. Famine usually
requires bad government, too…. In Ethiopia, the food crisis has been aggravated by the legacy of a senseless border war with neighboring Eritrea between 1998 and 2000. It killed tens of thousands, forced 350,000 to flee their homes, blasted both countries’ infrastructure and prompted foreign donors to freeze a lot of aid. In all, it cost Ethiopia an estimated $2.9 billion—almost a whole year’s output for every farmer in a country where 80 per cent of the population lives on farms. Such a monumental man-made disaster has made it harder for the country to cope with a natural one.

The millions of Chinese that starved from 1958 to 1961 also owe their deaths more to their government’s response to natural disaster than to the disasters themselves, even by that governments own admission. Research into other famines by Amartya Sen reached similar conclusions. Even black swan events, such as fungus unexpectedly killing potatoes needs bad government to become the Irish Potato Famine.

Our modern reaction to famine in other countries is to send relief aid and “keep them in our prayers”. This probably saves a few lives (at least in countries where the government isn’t stealing the aid), but treats the symptom, not the disease. You will continue to see famine in country after country until we change this “we sympathize” tune we sing into an accusation of incompetence against the government causing the problem, even our own (especially our own). Some, for example, are taking the World Bank to task, claiming it created policies that encourage governments to create famine. This is a step in the right direction, but a better step would be to also blame the governments themselves.

Art “Four Horsemen: Famine” by Greyskin666.

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The general reaction to the Eliot Spitzer “scandal” strikes me as an interesting stop along a fairly recent road toward a (sort of) more mature public treatment of sex. It wasn’t that long ago (say, a century or so) that nearly all of the public would have laid the blame for the whole scandal solely at the feet of the prostitute. Only recently has the “scarlet letter” mentality shifted to force men to bear the weight of their transgressions. Some parts of the world still stone prostitutes and adulteresses.

So, it seems encouraging to me that virtually no one has been trying to lay blame at the feet of the prostitute in this case or claiming that, somehow, Spitzer was somehow powerless to resist her feminine wiles. In fact, it seems that she has become something of a hero, with lots of people buying her music.

It seems like a good sign that the U.S. is starting to grow up a little bit, sticking a toe out from under the smothering history of Puritanical idiocy that has shaped so much of the region’s politics for centuries.

Of course, a nation that really had a mature attitude toward sex (and loves the free market as much as the U.S. claims to) wouldn’t be so bent out of shape about prostitution in the first place, so we still have a long ways to go.

Popularity: 6% [?]

As reported by Fake Steve Jobs, an article recently penned by Jaron Lanier makes an argument in favor of closed source development. This is not necessarily an anti-open source stance, as Lanier claims it has its place, but…

…a politically correct dogma holds that open source is automatically the best path to creativity and innovation, and that claim is not borne out by the facts.

Why are so many of the more sophisticated examples of code in the online world—like the page-rank algorithms in the top search engines or like Adobe’s Flash—the results of proprietary development? Why did the adored iPhone come out of what many regard as the most closed, tyrannically managed software-development shop on Earth? An honest empiricist must conclude that while the open approach has been able to create lovely, polished copies, ithasn’t been so good at creating notable originals. Even though the open-source movement has a stinging countercultural rhetoric, it has in practice been a conservative force.

A couple of years ago, my friend MV mentioned another, more encapsulated example of how closed source can build better solutions. I haven’t seen it mentioned much, so will repeat it here.

The example comes from the very early days of the graphical user interface. Once you start to build a system that has “windows” that can move around, you have to contend with the idea that these windows overlap. Even if each window is a rectangle, it doesn’t take many windows to make some complicated shapes. Even two windows can do so. Consider this image of an early Mac desktop from the Apple Museum:

The “System Folder” window is easy enough to represent, but how do you describe the shape of the visible portion of the “Mac System Software” window? What about the visible portion of the gray background? It’s just a collection of intersecting rectangles, but think about it for a second: how would you describe such shapes to a computer? Oh, and you only have 128K of Memory and an 8MHz, 16-bit processor. When building a GUI, you have to deal with this issue at some level. For example, something is painting the desktop background; how does it know not to paint over the windows? (For those that know a bit about graphics, double buffering doesn’t help you here, because a) you don’t have the memory and b) it is to slow on chips like this.)

The general concept for describing such shapes became known as “regions”. There are a number of different ways to implement regions. It was clear that Xerox PARC had one when the Apple team famously visited. It wasn’t at all clear what that implementation was, however, as it was closed source. Lacking access to Xerox’ methods, engineer Bill Atkinson took a look at the problem, figured out how they must have done it, and coded his version into the drawing system that would become QuickDraw.

It turns out, however, that Atkinson’s region code wasn’t really anything like Xerox’ code. It was much better. Better, in fact, than most other systems that came along, particularly the implementation used later by Windows. In an anecdote about Atkinson and regions, Andy Hertzfeld says that Apple “considered QuickDraw’s speed and deftness at region handling to be the most significant ‘crown jewel’ in Apple’s entire arsenal.”

This brilliant system (now supplanted by code that takes better advantage of modern hardware, particularly video cards) probably wouldn’t have happened if the Xerox code had been open source. Atkinson most likely would have started with their solution and refined it, and a bit of genius would have never been born.

Popularity: 9% [?]

Call me cynical, or maybe godless, but I’ve never really bought into the idea that suicide bombers are in it entirely for the 72 virgins, mercy from sins and eternal life in heaven. Though anathema to me, maybe that really does matter to some of them. I suspect that what matters much more, however, is the large quantities of cash that are promised to their families.

The average life expectancy in, say, Pakistan, is 62 years. If you take out, say, 15 years of that average life where working is nearly impossible (either to old or to young), you get an estimated 47 “working years”. Multiply this by the average yearly income ($690) and you get a loose estimate of lifetime earnings for the average person in Pakistan of $32,430. Given that 32.6% of Pakistanis (~54 million) live below the poverty line and 17% (~28 million) live below $1/day, quite a large number of Pakistanis will make significantly less than $32k over their life. To such people, $25k would be a lot of money, much more than they will ever see. Even to those with average incomes, it’s quite a lot of money. (Figure out how much you might make over you life, and decide what you’d be willing to do if someone offered you 75% of that amount at once.)

I don’t know if bombers are really responding to that financial incentive, but it is fairly powerful. I suspect it is at least a factor in their “vocational choice”, and probably an important one. If this is true, it suggests a method of prevention: make it clear that those who take such money don’t live very long.

By “make it clear”, I don’t mean that politicians should issue sternly worded warnings. I’m talking about assassination, with signs pinned to the body saying “profited from suicide bombing” written in English, Punjabi and Arabic in their own blood, and tapes sent to CNN and Aljazeera. Preferably, in large numbers all at once. If there really are secret satellites that can vaporize human targets from space, fire them up. Perfect targets. At the very least, send special ops to steal the money.

This probably wouldn’t stop all the bombing, but I bet it would help. It doesn’t score high on the morality meter, but it’s much more moral than killing civilians at random or with collateral damage. If you have a better plan, I’d love to hear it.

Popularity: 13% [?]

As you might guess from prior posts in my “religion” category, I don’t celebrate Easter with much enthusiasm, at least not of the religious sort. I did, however, watch King of Kings, a 1961 Technicolor™ film about the life of Jesus from Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. This is not the best film ever, but good enough to be an Easter classic. Plus, it contains juggling.

While watching it, the acting, sets and flavor immediately reminded me of “a comedy 3000 years in the making”. Mostly, though, I realized I can never watch anything containing Jesus or Romans without thinking of the Life of Brian (from which the title of this post comes). I mean, even the marquees of these two movies are similar:

The casting in King of Kings is a bit more interesting, however. (Maybe it was watching too many episodes of “Rome” back to back, but I kept wondering who in the cast was sleeping with who.) Orson Welles did the voice overs (which were apparently written by Ray Bradbury). Judas is played by a nearly unrecognizable (at least to me) Rip Torn. For some reason, this movie also more or less ended the short career of the surprisingly hot Brigid Bazlen, whose performance as Salome evidently drew an extremely vitriolic response from the critics at the time. (There is a story in there somewhere.) Through most of the film however, I was troubled by the semi-crazed, yet familiar look of the actor playing the white, blue-eyed Jesus. It was a pretty good performance, and something about how they shot it made him look beyond human most of the time, but I couldn’t quite place him until about halfway through. He was Jeffrey Hunter, who played the very first captain of the Enterprise, Christopher Pike. It’s not quite the same:

Popularity: 8% [?]

Back in the days of Macintosh System 6.0, Lamprey Systems (”software that sucks”) brought us “Your Own Personal Savior on a Floppy Disk”, but then He languished as technology outpaced Him. Now, He’s back, redubbed MacJesusX, promising Mac OS X goodness, “the Insinerator Sin-Removal Tool® and state-of-the-art 80’s programming techniques”.

The latest version, unfortunately, isn’t as fun as the System 7 version. I think one reason might be that it doesn’t use the hypnotic theme song from the earlier one. To restore it to its former glory, I’ve managed (not easily) to extract said theme and translated it into a short MP3. You pretty much have to listen to it on a loop to get the full effect. If you have QuickTime installed, hit play on the control below to see what I mean.

Popularity: 9% [?]

Most traditional holidays are syncretised perversions of even older traditions, which then get secularized into excuses to eat a whole bunch. Christmas falls, not coincidentally, close to the winter solstice, and borrows heavily from earlier winter festivals, featuring lots of gingerbread, candy canes, traditional hams and large family feasts. Thanksgiving, being largely a continuation of post-harvest feasts in Europe, has always been about eating. We have, of course, taken this to ridiculous extremes with turducken, a Thanksgiving dish prepared by…

…cramming a boneless chicken into a boneless duck, which is stuffed into a boneless turkey. Three kinds of stuffing are layered between the three kinds of meat and the monstrosity is cooked for a very long time. The end result, when cut, is a fantastic food rainbow that must be eaten to be believed.

Easter, which may or may not have been named after a pagan fertility goddess, falls conveniently close to the spring equinox, allowing the syncresis of rabbits, eggs and the rebirth of nature into a ritual about the slaughter and rebirth of God. Easter also now has been subverted into being about eating, though hasn’t yet been taken to the extremes of Thanksgiving turducken.

Until now.

Making Easter turducken is, fortunately, much easier than a traditional turducken, as it abandons all that pesky protein while fully embracing the empty carbohydrates and fat. While technically Easter turducken is a dessert and traditional turducken a main course, they should never be consumed in the same meal. That would be heresy.

As with traditional turducken, Easter turducken starts from the inside out. The core is formed with miniature Cadbury cream eggs:

Take an ordinary peep and make a large slit in the bottom, as deep as possible without going all the way through:

Stuff an egg into the slit, stretch the sides around it, and fold the peep’s tail down. Repeat with a few more peeps.

The outer layer finally makes good use of one of the more odious culinary travesties, the irritating hollow bunny. As a kid, nothing was more annoying that thinking you’d been given a huge block of chocolate, and it turns out to be empty. To get the egg-stuffed peep goodness into this abomination, first you must open the bottom. Anything worth doing is worth doing with power tools, so take a dremel and cut around the perimeter of the bottom:

Once the hole is made, stuff the now egg-bloated peeps into the bunny. Note that some hollow bunnies suck even more than others, and crack and fall apart really easily, so be careful. Once you’re done, put the bottom back on. The really ambitious might try re-melting the seam in the bottom closed with a crème brûlée torch.

Voilà, the loathsome hollow bunny is transformed into several thousand calories, as God intended. Many children wonder around Easter how it is that bunnies lay eggs. As a side benefit, Easter turducken illustrates clearly that this “theory” is wrong. Obviously bunnies lay chickens, which then lay the eggs. Mystery solved.

Now fully prepared, the Easter turducken can be eaten. There is probably some kind of psychological test about what part of the bunny you eat first. I always go for the neck. Since it is held together only by a cheap-ass hollow bunny, once you start eating your turducken, it will collapse rapidly. Be prepared for a mess.

Yummy. A guess at the nutrition information for a three peep turducken:

Nutrition Facts Serving Size:  1 Easter turducken • 98g Amount Per Serving Calories  456 Calories from Fat  158 % DV* Total Fat  18g 27%     Saturated Fat  11g 44%     Trans Fat  0g   Cholesterol < 15mg 4% Sodium  74mg 4% Total Carbohydrate  70g 24%     Dietary Fiber  0g 0%     Sugars  65g   Protein  6g 11%

Enjoy your Easter turducken. And bring lots of paper towels. And maybe a bib. Let me know how your own turn out.

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