Infographic: Lottery Odds

If the average American saw this, would there still be so many ticket sales?

Probably. We are terrible at assessing ourselves and making reasonable decisions. Daniel Gilbert wrote a whole book on the subject.

Gilbert has a serious argument to make about why human beings are forever wrongly predicting what will make them happy. Because of logic-processing errors our brains tend to make, we don't want the things that would make us happy — and the things that we want (more money, say, or a bigger house or a fancier car) won't make us happy.

A 2008 Carnegie-Mellon paper confirms the powerful allure of the lottery.

The study neatly illuminates the positive feedback loop of government-run lotteries. The games naturally appeal to poor people, which causes them to spend disproportionate amounts of their income on lotteries, which helps keep them poor, which keeps them buying tickets.

And finally, Daniel Kahneman's award winning book Thinking, Fast and Slow puts the icing on the cake:

the book highlights several decades of academic research to suggest that we place too much confidence in human judgment

Generalship and its Discontents

One of the more fascinating aspects of reading The Generals is that, as Brian Linn said, the book also reflects a practical tension with the commonplace idea of a strict separation of structure and agent levels of analysis:

First, are the U.S. Army’s post–World War II leadership problems essentially individual or systemic? Has the Army in the last half-century simply had a run of bad luck in the pool of senior officers available to lead its forces, or has its personnel system consistently proved incapable of generating superior wartime commanders? The book’s organization—each chapter devoted to an  individual general—tends to reinforce the thesis that failure is the result of having the wrong man in the wrong job, but much of the weight of Ricks’s analysis, as well as his recommendations for change, points to systemic problems.

Exum: Generalship and its Discontents

Website Hasn't Changed Since the Year 2000

A trip through the HTML time machine that is Warren Buffett's company's website.

You expect some weird things out of Berkshire Hathaway. Helmed by that quirky billionaire Warren Buffett, he of the 'Sausage McBuffett' and a deep commitment to value investing, the company has not been afraid to zig when others zagged. They are big on freight rail, for instance, and their sexiest holding is an industrial lubricant maker.

Ignatius on Technology

“The strongest emotion at the time of the moon landings was of wonder at the transcendent power of technology,” writes Pontin. That sense of awe has diminished, if not disappeared. There hasn’t been a human being on the moon since 1972.

Nov 28

Hobo Suitcase

Tote Your Picnic Lunch Like An Old-Timey Vagabond

Massif Collection, Fall

Massif Collection:

Clandestine ops are about blending in; fashion is often about standing out. The Massif Collection ($145+) brings military-grade construction to fashion-forward designs, creating a wardrobe of jackets, pants and shirts that work in the Hindu Kush and the cushy lounge.

Dr Seuss, Bug Doctor

The story of Dr Seuss and Gregor Samsa, the cockroach.  The fun starts at 7:35

NatGeo Photo Contest 2012

Gallery 1

Gallery 2

LED Belt glows for safer Biking at Night

A neat idea, the Halo is an LED belt that adds visibility to a biker at night. Just don’t count on it as your sole illumination if maximum visibility is a goal.

CyberCity defense range

Think of it as something like the mock desert towns that were constructed at military facilities to help American soldiers train for the war in Iraq. But here, the soldier-hackers from the Air Force and other branches of the military will practice attacking and defending the computers and networks that run the theoretical town. In one scenario, they will attempt to take control of a speeding train containing weapons of mass destruction.

Washington Post

TMQ: Notre Dame

There's an important aspect of the Notre Dame season that is being overlooked. Taking into account the latest NCAA graduation stats, last week Notre Dame became the first college football team to be ranked No. 1 in the polls and No. 1 in graduation success.

 Greg Easterbrook

Polonium-210

a victim would never taste a lethal dose in food or drink...Another assassin advantage is that illness comes on gradually, making it hard to pinpoint the event. Yet another advantage is that polonium poisoning is so rare that it’s not part of a standard toxicology screen...And finally, it gets the job done. “Once absorbed,” notes the U.S. Regulatory Commission, “The alpha radiation can rapidly destroy major organs, DNA and the immune system.”

 Yasser Arafat and the Mysteries of Polonium-210

Fix it

MAKE

Gmail Skills

Ten Tricks To Make Yourself a Gmail Master

5 Moments in Sauce History that changed the way we eat

Of course its on the list

Gift Guide - Outdoorsman

Gear Patrol 12 guys of Christmas

Maker's Row

Another addition to the list of things I wish I had thought of:

A Comprehensive Database Of American Manufacturers

Maker’s Row makes it easy to connect small businesses and U.S.-based manufacturers, facilitating stateside production.

The state of Army leadership

I never served under Sinclair but I can certainly relate--and corroborate the themes herein.

I served under Sinclair in Iraq -- and that’s a big reason I got out

...our battalion commander, Lt. Col. Rago, made a policy that we had to march everywhere we went and an NCO had to escort his soldiers everywhere. When we were staging for patrols we had to be in full kit or garrison uniform, no in-between. I was once yelled at by our S-3 for standing by my truck wearing a soft cap with IOTV. The officers became more concerned with our vehicles' wire mitigation system than with our soldiers' morale. The effects were profound on my generation of NCO's. We had all been through Baghdad together, we knew our shit. We were young, fit, and competent. However, we had a low tolerance for chicken shit. And that was something the Blackhawk Brigade excelled in producing. Most of us loved being Sergeants -- but none of us re-enlisted...

TAOM: Stocking Stuffers

50 Stocking Stuffer Ideas for Men

Skilled Labor

 In some cases a McDonald's manager makes more than a skilled welder. What's the deal?

The secret behind this skills gap is that it’s not a skills gap at all. I spoke to several other factory managers who also confessed that they had a hard time recruiting in-demand workers for $10-an-hour jobs. “It’s hard not to break out laughing,” says Mark Price, a labor economist at the Keystone Research Center, referring to manufacturers complaining about the shortage of skilled workers. “If there’s a skill shortage, there has to be rises in wages,” he says. “It’s basic economics.” After all, according to supply and demand, a shortage of workers with valuable skills should push wages up. Yet according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the number of skilled jobs has fallen and so have their wages.

NYT: Skills don't pay the bills

Business Casual

This Movember we stand on the shoulders of giants. Honor those who came before you.
The Best Facial Hair in the Civil War

Photos: The Best Facial Hair in the Civil War

Read more: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history-archaeology/Photos-The-Best-Facial-Hair-in-the-Civil-War.html#ixzz2DNX3uM7o

The Best Facial Hair in the Civil War

Read more: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history-archaeology/Photos-The-Best-Facial-Hair-in-the-Civil-War.html#ixzz2DNXA7DOP

Slow Popcorn

Oncle Sam, A Popcorn Machine That Pops One Kernel at a Time

Layered Cyber Defense

Keystroke-logger checks your identity as you type

The traditional password is notoriously troublesome as a way of keeping your devices secure. Many people use simple, easy-to-guess passwords like qwerty or 123456, or reuse the same one across multiple services, putting only one line of defence in front of their entire digital life.

David Hibler of Christopher Newport University, Virginia, and colleagues designed software called URIEL, which uses the average time between keystrokes as a surprisingly accurate way of identifying an individual. The software learns the user's typing style by measuring the time between key presses over 10 areas of the keyboard as a user types, and learns who they are as they type

Economic Espionage, a Foreign Intelligence Threat

In the FBI’s pending case load for the current fiscal year, economic espionage losses to the American economy total more than $13 billion...In just the last four years, the number of arrests the FBI has made associated with economic espionage has doubled; indictments have increased five-fold; and convictions have risen eight-fold. In just the current fiscal year, the FBI has made 10 arrests for economic espionage related charges; federal courts have indicted 21 of our subjects (including indictments of five companies), and convicted nine defendants. In the current fiscal year so far, we have already surpassed the statistics recorded for FY 2011 and expect them to continue to rise. With each year, foreign intelligence services and their collectors become more creative and more sophisticated in their methods to undermine American business and erode the one thing that most provides American business its leading edge; our ability to innovate.

C. Frank Figliuzzi Assistant Director, Counterintelligence Division, FBI

Reading and School Curriculum

English classes today focus too much on self-expression. “It is rare in a working environment,” he’s argued, “that someone says, ‘Johnson, I need a market analysis by Friday but before that I need a compelling account of your childhood.’ ”

The NYT: What Should Children Read?

Famous Writers' Daily Writing Routines

From the Atlantic: "Also, the Drink Helps"

 

TAOM: How to Make the Best Beef Jerky in the World

Beef Jerky:

Editor’s Note: This is an excerpt from Tim Ferriss‘ new book, The Four Hour Chef. 

An Introduction to Dehydrating Food

Dehydration is all about removing water from food. Doing this helps to preserve the food (bacteria need water) and concentrate flavor. It’s a common misconception that you need heat to dehydrate food. But low humidity, not heat, is the driving force behind dehydration. Warming the air surrounding the food helps keep it dry, but if the air doesn’t move, the food will stay wet. So when dehydrating food in the kitchen, make certain that air can freely circulate around it.
Sidenote: You can achieve the same preservation of dehydration by leaving the water in food but making it unavailable to bacteria. Just add substances like sugar and salt, which bind to water molecules and lock them away. Lox (salt-cured salmon) and salted butter are safe to keep at room temperature for this reason—but unsalted butter is not!

The Best Jerky in the World

Gear Patrol: The 10,000 Year Clock

Timekeeping: The 10,000 Year Clock:


When I was a child, people used to talk about what would happen by the year 02000. For the next thirty years they kept talking about what would happen by the year 02000, and now no one mentions a future date at all. The future has been shrinking by one year per year for my entire life. I think it is time for us to start a long-term project that gets people thinking past the mental barrier of an ever-shortening future.

– Daniel Hillis
“Time and tide wait for no man”, wrote Geoffrey Chaucer. We spend our days clamoring after bigger homes, nicer cars, the ultimate vacation spot — and time keeps ticking, someday getting the better of us. Death and taxes, as they say. Every so often, in the stillness of the night, we think about the legacy we’re leaving, about what will remain that has our name stamped on it long after we’re food for worms. Discomfortingly, it seems little will. Even in the world of architecture, with varied and vast creations across the globe, it’s a constant struggle to keep many historic buildings intact or to actually restore them to their original glory. Some survive, and many of those buildings aren’t even a century old. Others fall, their legacy continued only in photographs or history books.

TAS: Inside the NFL

Well said:

The art of informed conversation

What I appreciate about Inside the NFL is not the content but the form. I like seeing people talk with knowledge and passion about a subject they know well. The way they share their expertise is what informed conversation should be like. So often in American life we don’t have informed conversation. We have uninformed conversation, where we know a little and spin this for the purpose of getting along; or we have cheerleading conversation, where we all agree on something and simply state our shared agreement over and over; or we have antagonistic conversation, where we get mad and say personal things of little relevance to the point that we regret later. But we rarely have conversation like that on Inside the NFL–probably because we rarely get people together who know a subject well enough to talk about it in depth—to agree, disagree, compare ideas, close-read small aspects of the subject, and make informed predictions.

The Atlantic: Lincoln Reading List

"here's a look back at a selection of Atlantic writings by authors from Ralph Waldo Emerson to James Russell Lowell and Garry Wills—touching on everything from Lincoln's greatest accomplishments to his depressive tendencies and penchant for dirty jokes."

Mankiw: The U.S. has a flat tax (in effect)

The U.S. has a flat tax (in effect): The Congressional Budget Office has a new study of effective federal marginal tax rates for low and moderate income workers (those below 450 percent of the poverty line).  The study looks at the effects of income taxes, payroll taxes, and SNAP (the program formerly known as Food Stamps).  The bottom line is that the average household now faces an effective marginal tax rate of 30 percent.  In 2014, after various temporary tax provisions have expired and the newly passed health insurance subsidies go into effect, the average effective marginal tax rate will rise to 35 percent.

What struck me is how close these marginal tax rates are to the marginal tax rates at the top of the income distribution.  This means that we could repeal all these taxes and transfer programs, replace them with a flat tax along with a universal lump-sum grant, and achieve approximately the same overall degree of progressivity. 

When Julius Caesar Was Kidnapped By Pirates, He Demanded They Increase His Ransom

Daven Hiskey runs the wildly popular interesting fact website Today I Found Out. To subscribe to his “Daily Knowledge” newsletter, click here.

Getty Images
In 75 BCE, 25-year-old Julius Caesar was sailing the Aegean Sea when he was kidnapped by Cilician pirates. According to Plutarch, when the pirates asked for a ransom of 20 talents of silver (approximately 620 kg of silver, or $600,000 in today’s silver values), Caesar laughed at their faces. They didn’t know who they had captured, he said, and demanded that they ask for 50 (1550 kg of silver), because 20 talents was simply not enough.

How Israel's ‘Iron Dome' Knocks Almost Every Incoming Missile Out Of The Sky

A Mobile Iron Dome Missile Defense Battery NatanFlayer via Wikimedia

It's tough to hit a moving rocket with a moving rocket. Here's how Israel's new domestic missile defense system is doing it with unprecedented accuracy.
The clash between Israel and Hamas-backed fighters in the Gaza Strip continued over the weekend and into today, with the death toll in Gaza inching toward 100 (there were 91 recorded deaths as of Monday morning). But amid the troubling images and stark numbers trickling out of the conflict there, one set of numbers represents a rare bright spot: the number of Hamas rockets that Israel's "Iron Dome" missile-defense shield is knocking out the sky. Scattered reports from various Israeli officials and news media suggest that Iron Dome has intercepted more than 300 rockets fired at Israeli population centers since hostilities began, or between 80 and 90 percent of rockets targeted.

70 years without inflation

The story of Coke's humble beginnings is fascinating:

Prices change; that's fundamental to how economies work.
And yet: In 1886, a bottle of Coke cost a nickel. It was also a nickel in 1900, 1915 and 1930. In fact, 70 years after the first Coke was sold, you could still buy a bottle for a nickel.

How to Network & Socialize Effectively

A Comprehensive Guide:

This post is brought to you by Chivas Brotherhood What’s this?

Last month I was invited to attend a whisky-tasting event in Chicago hosted by Chivas Regal. As part of their Chivas Brotherhood, they have an 1801 Club in which members get access to exclusive, invite-only events at private venues in major US cities. I had the privilege of checking one out and hob knobbing with a bunch of folks I had never met before.
Now, despite the fact I write about style and own a custom clothier, I rarely go out and socialize. Being a father of three young children and living in a small Wisconsin town…well, it just doesn’t happen.

Paracord Storage Alternatives

Crocheting and Nesting Your Paracord for Storage Alternatives:


Over the years you’ve more than likely come to the conclusion that different tools you have around the house can be used for more than one purpose. Sometimes, we figure this out by necessity in an urgent situation and other times a light bulb goes off in our heads as we look at something and think up a new idea. The latter is what happened to me one day while I was looking at coiled Type 3 Paracord sitting on my desk.

Kill the Password

Why a String of Characters Can't Protect Us Anymore: You have a secret that can ruin your life. It's not a well-kept secret, either. Just a simple string of characters maybe six of them if you're careless, 16 if you're cautious that can reveal everything about you.

Strong Passwords Can't Save Us

The New York Times Is Wrong: Strong Passwords Can't Save Us: On Nov. 7, The New York Times ran a story called "How to Devise Passwords That Drive Hackers Away." Written by Silicon Valley correspondent Nicole Perlroth, the piece reigned over the paper?s Most Emailed List for a full week, and for a good reason: It's properly freaked out about just how vulnerable we all are ...

Muzzle Devices 101

Military Times

I promise you’d be shocked to learn about all the technology that goes into designing and producing a rifle barrel. If you are a student of the gun, then you’re familiar with the advances in barrel material, coatings, rifling profile, twist rates that have been made to produce accurate and durable rifle barrels.

TAOM: How to be an Awesome Uncle

Psychologists tell us that one of the most, if not the most important factor in our happiness is the number of quality relationships in our lives. Decades ago, such relationships were easy to come by. You were very likely to be surrounded by extended family who all got together often for loud and boisterous celebrations. As you grew up, you got to know your cousins, and your aunts and uncles as well. 

These days, many families live far apart, and family reunions are few and far between — often non-existent, it seems. But everybody still wants to feel part of a clan, and family ties are just as important as they ever were. 

In the role of uncle, you have a chance to forge those ties in positive ways with your nieces and nephews.

Cyberforensics

The Real Cyberforensics Used To Snoop On Petraeus (And You)

The Athlete Machine

On wounded warriors

This is from a PetreausGate commentary but it is much more important than that:

As a military spouse, I wish the spotlight would fall on the real tragedies and crises military families face every day. They don’t require FBI investigations or White House notification. Simply drive down the main road at Walter Reed Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Md. (or any local VA hospital), where a young man whose body consists of a head and a torso blows into a straw to steer himself through the crosswalk on the way into the hospital. This is where the reporters should be. Stop by the base post office, where a young man, face down on a stretcher, waits in a line for his mail. Step over to Dunkin Donuts, where another young man with four prosthetic limbs attempts to hand the cashier a $5 bill, which keeps slipping out of his metal claw.  Pass a young veteran in a wheelchair trying to push his infant’s stroller with one hand while wheeling himself forward with the other. In this city of amputees, and in the scores of American towns that will house and attempt to heal them for decades to come, the dirtiest secret of wartime is already out in the open, for everyone to see.

Soldiers or Generals?

Tom Ricks on General scandals:

The sudden departure of General David Petraeus from the CIA probably tells us more about the state of our nation than it does about Petraeus. President Barack Obama should not have accepted his resignation.
We now seem to care more about the sex lives of our leaders than the real lives of our soldiers. We had years of failed generalship in Iraq, for example, yet left those commanders in place. Petraeus' departure again demonstrates we are strict about intimate behavior, but extraordinarily lax about professional incompetence.
Americans severely judge some forms of private behavior between consenting adults, if one party is a public official. Yet we often resist weighing the professional competence of such officials -- even when they clearly are not doing a good job.
This is not, as some say, because we are a puritanical nation. Rather, our standards have changed in recent decades -- and not for the better.
We don't know precisely the relationship between General Dwight D. Eisenhower and his driver, Kay Summersby, during World War II. But it is evident that it was romantic in some ways, and, by her later account, quite intimate. If Ike were judged by today's standard, he would have been sent home in disgrace from Europe, and the war likely would have been worse without his calm, determined and unifying presence. He was not fired. But dozens of other Army officers, including 16 division commanders in combat, were relieved of command during the war -- for professional reasons.
Matthew Ridgway was another great American general, serving in World War II and Korea. Over a few months in 1951, in one of the best but lesser-known episodes of American generalship, Ridgway turned around our fortunes in the Korean War. Like Ike, Ridgway was fond of female companionship. He almost seemed to get a new wife for every war. In his personal papers on file at the U.S. Army archives in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, interspersed with discussions of how to improve combat leadership in the Korean War, there are some terse notes from his first wife's lawyer.
This change may have occurred in part because we as a nation no longer have much military experience and no longer prize military effectiveness, nor even are capable of judging it. In past wars, soldiers eager to survive would forgive their leaders a multitude of lapses if they believed those leaders knew their business.
We also may have changed because so few of us have "skin in the game," to use a phrase one often hears from the parents of soldiers. Certainly, if I had a loved one in a combat zone, I would care much more about the military skills of the people in charge than I would about their sexual lives.
Another reason we may also hesitate to judge professional competence is that it is difficult in small, messy, unpopular wars to know just what victory looks like. Yet ironically, in Iraq, Petraeus was one of the few clear successes we had among our top leaders -- first in commanding the 101^st Airborne Division Mosul in 2003-04, and then as the overseer of "the surge" that began extricating the United States from Iraq in 2007.
Our diminished standards speak to a lack of seriousness in the way we wage our wars. No, the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq are not existential, as World War II was. But a soldier blown up in Afghanistan this year is every bit as dead as one machine-gunned on Omaha Beach 68 years ago. Today's soldiers deserve to have the most competent leaders we can provide, just as the men of D-Day did.
Some of my friends in the military argue that a general who cannot keep his marriage vows cannot be trusted to keep his word. But we all fail in different ways throughout life. As Petraeus' revelations last week reminded us, he is human. We have asked much of him, sending him on three tours of duty in Iraq and one in Afghanistan. Yet when the time came for us to be generous in return, we were not.
I have known Petraeus for about 15 years, and his supposed lover, Paula Broadwell, for a portion of that time. I am not close to either. I do not approve of what they reportedly did. But I also don't think it is any of my business.
By contrast, taking care of our soldiers should be a concern of all of us. Where are our priorities?

Recommended Reading: Cocaine Incorporated

NYT: How a Mexican drug cartel makes its Billions

“Drug cartel,” it turns out, is a whopper of a misnomer; neither the Mexicans nor the Colombians ever colluded to fix prices or supply. “I wish they were cartels,” Arturo Sarukhán, Mexico’s ambassador in Washington, told me. “If they were, they wouldn’t be fighting and driving up the violence.”

Tesla Model S Named Motor Trend's Car Of The Year

Model S Tesla

The news prompted Elon Musk to mock Mitt Romney. Who's the loser now?
In a striking sign of the future to come, the car-kingmakers at Motor Trend magazine have for the first time named an all-electric vehicle their Car of the Year. The Tesla Model S is the first car without an internal combustion engine to win the coveted award. It's also much-loved by PopSci, FYI.
And for the first time since anyone can remember, the winner was a unanimous choice, according to Motor Trend. "Not a single judge had any doubts about the 2013 Motor Trend Car of the Year," the magazine said. The Model S--now Tesla's only offering after it ceased production on its Roadster--beat the Ford Fusion, the Porsche 911 and nine other finalists.

TMQ on the NFL playoffs

Baltimore Ravens: Something about Charm City puts a spell on opponents. Sunday, Torrey Smith blew past Oakland's Michael Huff, who was the seventh choice of the 2006 draft: Huff just stood and watched, not even trying to play defense, as Smith went 47 yards for a touchdown. Charming their opponents has helped the John Harbaugh-Joe Flacco Ravens to a 33-5 record in Baltimore. But they are just 23-21 on the road. Unless the Ravens win the first seed, write them off.

Evaluating a crowded playoff race

Neil deGrasse Tyson Quotes

“The good thing about science is that it’s true whether or not you believe in it.”

 

"Science is like an inoculation against charlatans who would have you believe whatever it is they tell you.” 

 

11 Badass Neil deGrasse Tyson Quotes 

Back to Basics (for the CIA)

Danger Room: Post-Petraeus CIA Should Kill Less and Spy More, Former Chiefs Say

Nearly every major international security concern facing Petraeus’ successors is, in essence, a question of intelligence: What is Iran’s nuclear capability, really? Which way will the Syrian civil war go? Why is China building up its Navy so fast? What the hell is Kim Jong-Un up to? “Those are things that you’re not going to learn through diplomacy or through press reporting. And that takes you to intelligence,” John E. McLaughlin, the CIA’s former acting director, tells Danger Room. ”The biggest challenge may be the sheer volume of problems that require intelligence input.”

Advice from WWII Vet

Advice From a 92-Year-Old Veteran of WWII on Getting Out of a Dark Place

"I took a two pound double bladed axe, walked a half mile up above where I lived. We had a field there, and I cut down big trees and cut them into fence posts. All I had was that axe. I made my own mallet and split those trees myself.I got me a half acre of ground, plowed it up, and had a field. That same summer I grew potatoes, corn, and beans. The whole summer I spent growing things I wanted to. I’d be out in the woods at daylight. I just worked like that and built myself back up.”"

Defending the Electoral College

Slate:

There are five reasons for retaining the Electoral College despite its lack of democratic pedigree; all are practical reasons, not liberal or conservative reasons.

Titan Crowned World's Most Awesome Supercomputer

Titan is on top. The new Oak Ridge National Lab supercomputer nabbed the top spot in the most-recent tally of the world's most powerful supercomputers, announced on Monday.

Video: Wounded Warrior Army 1st Lt. Nick Vogt, 24, does pushups without legs

On Nov. 12, Vogt, now a first lieutenant, will celebrate his first “Alive Day,” the anniversary of the day both his legs were shorn off by a makeshift bomb. He survived, receiving 500 units of blood, more than any other casualty survivor in U.S. history.
His story epitomizes the advancements in casualty care in the past decade and illustrates just how far the U.S. military will go to save one of its own.

 Video: Wounded Warrior Army 1st Lt. Nick Vogt, 24, does pushups without legs:


Read the rest here.

Listening Is So Much More Than Hearing

Gray Matter: Why Listening Is So Much More Than Hearing: Hearing, for the most part, is a no-brainer. When we listen, that’s when the neurons really fire.

MF: the U.S. Army

11 Things You Might Not Know About the U.S. Army:
D.B. Grady is covering each of the five branches of the U.S. military for Veterans Day.

Getty Images
This year, 79,000 people will walk into 1,600 recruiting stations around the country and join the U.S. Army. They will take jobs ranging from infantry to accounting, and fight battles everywhere from Afghanistan to cyberspace. Here are 11 things you might not know about the Army.

1. A majority of presidents wore the uniform.

WP's Lincoln Brigade

Surprise, surprise. In another commentary on the recent Petraeus broohaha, I learned the history of the Sosh department.
According to Fred Kaplan's piece in Slate (A General Lesson) the department was started by an innovative general officer who understood a thing or two about leader development.

The department, known as “Sosh,” was founded just after World War II by a visionary ex-cadet and Rhodes Scholar named George A. “Abe” Lincoln. Toward the end of the war, as the senior planning aide to Army Chief of Staff Gen. George Marshall, Lincoln realized that the Army needed to breed a new type of officer to help the nation meet its new global responsibilities in the postwar era. This new officer, he wrote to a colleague, should have “at least three heads—one political, one economic, and one military.” He took a demotion, from brigadier general to colonel, so he could return to West Point and create a curriculum “to improve the so-called Army mind” in just this way: a social science department, encouraging critical thinking, even occasionally dissent.

Baseball--like life--is random

Freakonomics post: Does the “Best” Team Win the World Series?

And in the case of one team’s having only a 55-45 edge, the shortest significant “world series” would be the best of 269 games, a tedious endeavor indeed! So sports playoff series can be fun and exciting, but being crowned “world champion” is not a reliable indication that a team is actually the best one.

FP: Covert Affairs

Foreign Policy:A short history of spies and their sex scandals.

The Science of Good Cooking

Your Scrambled Eggs Are Wrong, And Other Cooking Science Lessons From America's Test Kitchen:

Eggs 101 Cook's Illustrated

The food experimenters who publish Cook's Illustrated have put together a cookbook featuring 50 kitchen science lessons every home cook should know. We put some to the test.

PopSci: How Can I Permanently Delete My Computer Files?

Ask a Geek: How Can I Permanently Delete My Computer Files?:

Wiped Clean Thilo Rothacker

Make sure nobody will ever see your classified documents.
Before you sell, donate, or recycle your old computer, beware: You may be handing personal information to strangers. Simply restoring the operating system to factory settings does not delete all data and neither does formatting the hard drive before reinstalling the OS.
To really wipe a drive clean, users will need to run secure-erase software. For Windows, the best bet is the command-line utility SDelete (free), which writes over the space on the drive. SDelete runs from any bootable disk or from the hard drive of another computer connected with a device such as the Universal Drive Adapter ($39.99). Linux users can try the Shred command, which overwrites files in a similar fashion.
On a Mac, the Erase command included with the Disk Utility application securely erases drive contents. As with SDelete, first delete files from the drive, then use the erase free space feature. It offers three options, from fastest, which writes zeros over unused disk space, to most secure, which overwrites the drive at least seven times. The middle setting is probably secure enough for most home users.
There is, of course, one other foolproof way to render data unrecoverable: Drill two to three holes with a quarter-inch drill bit through the drive platters.

MF: Isaac Newton

Isaac Newton: 17th-Century London’s Dirty Harry:
The science titan wasn’t used to being outsmarted. But after two years of trying to shut down English counterfeiting, one underworld kingpin was still getting the better of him.

Getty Images
Back in 1695, England’s Royal Mint discovered a serious problem: A massive portion of the circulating currency was phony. As counterfeiting methods grew increasingly clever, the Mint turned to England’s brightest mind for a solution. Isaac Newton was appointed Warden of the Mint, a one-man army who waded through London’s underbelly to restore the currency’s integrity. Most counterfeiters were easy prey for Newton, but William Chaloner, a shadowy kingpin, kept eluding his grasp.

Berkey Water Filters

Berkey Water Filters Provide Clean, Fresh Drinking Water At Home and In Disaster Relief:

With bottled water and potable tap water both so readily available in developed countries, it’s easy to take clean drinking water for granted. But when natural disasters strike, one of the first things to sell out on store shelves is bottled water, and running water may be either turned off or compromised by pollutants. Domestic water purifying pitchers and faucet filters are perfectly fine for every day use, but most of them simply weren’t designed to filter untreated water like the kind you may need to drink in emergency situations.

2,000-Times-Faster Broadband

What Does 2,000-Times-Faster Broadband Look Like?:

It ain't just about pink pixels. From innovation to infrastructure, a new breakthrough from across the pond could have far-reaching, super-fast implications.

How fast is 2,000 times faster? Is that, like, Michael Johnson-with-a-rocket-strapped-to-his-back-while-running-downhill fast?
An idea that researchers at a Welsh university are busy working on goes a long way toward illuminating this idea--and what it means for the future of, well, nearly everything.
The Bangor University scientists have successfully increased broadband speeds by this amount using very similar tech to that currently in use, with limited cost impact. Let's count the (super-high-speed) ways this could change our lives.

First, a lightening quick history of Net data rates

Free admission to national parks Veterans Day weekend

Get outside: Free admission to national parks during Veterans Day weekend:

National Park fees, like at Yosemite National Park, will be waived on Veterans Day weekend. (AP photo)

The great outdoors will get a little greater over the Veterans Day weekend with free admission to all 398 national parks across the country.
From frontier forts to World War II battlefields, more than 70 national parks have direct connections to the military. Many parks will be offering special programs Nov. 10-12 in honor of those who served. Special veterans-only offerings include a free Boston Harbor Islands National Recreation Area cruise that will pass the USS Constitution and free entrance to the Gettysburg National Military Park museum.
For more information, go to www.nps.gov.

the busy British Empire

There Are Only 22 Countries in the World That the British Haven’t Invaded:

Getty Images
Of the almost 200 current member states (and one observer state) of the United Nations, the British have, at some point in history, invaded and established a military presence in 171 of them.
This is what British historian Stuart Laycock learned after his son asked him how many countries Britain had invaded. He dug into the history of almost 200 nations and found only 22 that the Brits hadn’t marched into. He talks about each one in All the Countries We’ve Ever Invaded: And the Few We Never Got Round To, released earlier this year.

Bearish on Apple, Blasphemy?

Why I’m Bearish on Apple:
Many people have made themselves look foolish by taking a skeptical line on Apple over the past five years, but the time has come for me to make that call. The problem isn’t the products—which still look great to me—but the people. I’m bearish on Apple due to the firing of Scott Forstall, the senior vice president in charge of iOS. It’s not that I hold any particular affection for Forstall personally or even take his side in the great skeuomorphism controversy that’s been roiling Apple circles for a while now. But a company doesn’t normally lose a key player for no reason, and Forstall’s baby—the operating system that runs iPhones and iPads—is what made the company what it is today.

More on Passwords

Tool Kit: How to Devise Passwords That Drive Hackers Away: It’s a good idea to be a little paranoid about password theft, and there are several ways to strengthen your defenses.

TAOM: Flashlights

How to Use a Flashlight in a Tactical Situation:

It’s late Friday night and you’re walking to your car after a fun evening with your friends downtown. As you turn the corner down an unlit side street, you see a shadow dart across the wall and hear footsteps. The hairs on your neck stand straight up. You quicken your pace, but the other footsteps speed up as well. You look around trying to make out shapes in the dark, when out of nowhere a fist connects with your cheekbone. The sucker punch takes you to the ground and you can feel your wallet being taken from your back pocket.
Before you have time to react, your assailant has disappeared back into the cover of darkness.
You really could have used a flashlight.

Gear: Portable Chargers for Your Mobile Gadgets

Portable Chargers for Your Mobile Gadgets:

A selection of battery packs with enough kick to charge a tablet, plus ways to get power when completely off the grid

Ubi: an innovative leap

After you read this, the Ubi will seem simple, intuitive, and obvious. Too bad you didn't think of it first.

 A Computer You Can Talk To Monitors Your Home And Helps With Chores:  The Ubi, a ubiquitous computer you plug into a socket, can do things like read you your email or tell you the temperature in the room. All you have to do is ask.

Sandy's Impact

According to a corporate communication from a major power company,

"More homes and businesses lost power as a result of Hurricane Sandy than from any other storm in U.S. history"

TBD on a theme of declining empires

The British lesson of the Industrial Revolution: The drawbacks to being 1st:

One of the drawbacks to being the pioneer in the Industrial Revolution, Paul Kennedy writes in The Rise and Fall of British Naval Mastery, was that the British, being first, simply were not accustomed to competition. Hence both their industrial and social practices were encumbered, he writes, by "complacency and inefficiency."

As a result, he continued, the British educational system failed to keep pace with the Americans and Germans in churning out engineers and technologists. And even when innovators surfaced, they did not necessarily succeed. Britain was a major innovator in the steel industry, he writes, but was surpassed because its wealthy did not back innovation with investments. 

I am amazed by the relevance of this historical account (emphasis is mine).

Freakonomics on Mass Transit

Can Mass Transit Save the Environment? Right Wing or Left Wing, Here’s a Post Everybody Can Hate:

(Photo: RJ Schmidt)

A major rationale — perhaps the major rationale — touted by supporters of mass transit is that by reducing our output of greenhouse gases and other pollutants, transit can help save the environment. The proposition seems intuitive and even obvious: by no longer encasing each traveler in thousands of pounds of difficult-to-move metal, surely transit is more energy-efficient. Plenty of analyses prove this. But then again, Aristotle, who was revered as the infallible font of truth for more than 1,000 years, proved that heavier objects fall faster than lighter ones and that women have fewer teeth than men. Might studies that demonstrate transit is greener be similarly wrong?

Convictonomics

The New Economics of Crime and Punishment: It now costs more than $70 billion a year to keep 7 million people behind bars, on parole, or on probation. The best way to address this problem is not with ad hoc political negotiations or by rehashing the age-old debate about retribution versus rehabilitation. What we need is convictonomics: a coldly rational economics-based approach to crime and punishment.

The Electoral College?

What’s Up with the Electoral College?:
The Electoral College is an anachronistic system used in the United States to elect our president. It was created to address a series of technical and political problems that were present in the early days of our democracy — most notably, the issues of slow communications (it took tremendous time and effort to get vote tallies back to Washington from distant states) and of suffrage (the idea of a pure popular vote was a hard sell when you had Southern states containing large populations of enslaved African Americans and unenfranchised women). But we’ve been doing this national election thing for a few hundred years, the suffrage issue is sorted out, and we have good telecommunications — so why do we still have the Electoral College? In a word: Federalism. There are actually lots of interesting arguments for and against the system, and a few are discussed in the videos below.
In this pair of videos, C. G. P. Grey explains the issues inherent in the Electoral College system, and points out examples of how it has caused arguably unfair results in the past — including three elections in which the candidate who didn’t win the popular vote did win the election. (To be clear, under the rules, those candidates won fair and square; the question at hand is whether the rules themselves are fair.) Take a look, and consider the question: Is this system really fair?



Also relevant: The Electoral College Survival Guide; How Do We Break a Presidential Election Tie?; and How Nate Silver Predicted Obama’s Win (the first time, anyway).

Tech Review: Computerized Cars

With Computerized Cars Ahead, GM Puts IT Outsourcing in the Rearview Mirror:
The Detroit automaker is bringing thousands of IT jobs back in-house as it seeks faster software innovation.
For a dramatic sign of the strategy reversal under way at General Motors as it moves on from its 2009 bankruptcy, look no further than the IT department.

When Randy Mott, the company’s new chief information officer, took the position in February, the company had been outsourcing its information technology work—just like countless other global corporations seeking to shed costs. A massive 90 percent of this work was being done outside the company.

The rewilding of the Northeast | Gene Expression

The rewilding of the Northeast | Gene Expression:

Lake Placid, credit: Wikimedia

If you accept the thesis reported by Charles C. Mann the great eastern forest which the American settlers turned into farmland was actually secondary growth. The consequence of the depopulation of vast swaths of North America of its indigenous population due to disease which preceded the expansion of Europeans (recall that until 1800 whites hugged the Atlantic coast, leaving the interior to indigenous people by and large). And yet by 1900 that great forest was gone. Now it’s back again. A piece in The Wall Street Journal highlights how incredibly robust the recovery has been, America Gone Wild:

…Since the 19th century, forests have grown back to cover 60% of the land within this area. In New England, an astonishing 86.7% of the land that was forested in 1630 had been reforested by 2007, according to the U.S. Forest Service. Not since the collapse of Mayan civilization 1,200 years ago has reforestation on this scale happened in the Americas, says David Foster, director of the Harvard Forest, an ecology research unit of Harvard University. In 2007, forests covered 63.2% of Massachusetts and 58% of Connecticut, ...

Recommended Reading: Inside the Mansion—and Mind— of Kim Dotcom, the Most Wanted Man on the Net

A classic comic book baddie millionaire, an ex-con expatriate German ex-hacker lording over his own personal Pirate Bay just 30 minutes north of Auckland. Kim Dotcom was presented as a big, bad man, larger-than-life, larger than his 6′ 7″, perhaps 350-pound frame. We saw him posed with guns and yachts and fancy cars. We watched him drive his nitrox-fueled Mega Mercedes in road rallies and on golf courses, throwing fake gang signs at rap moguls and porn stars, making it rain with $175 million in illicit dotcom booty.
His alleged 50-petabyte pirate ship was Megaupload.com, a massive vessel carrying, at its peak, 50 million passengers a day, a full 4 percent of global Internet traffic. Megaupload was a free online storage locker, a cloud warehouse for files too bulky for email. It generated an estimated $25 million a year in revenue from ads and brought in another $150 million through its paid, faster, unlimited Premium service.

 Inside the Mansion—and Mind— of Kim Dotcom, the Most Wanted Man on the Net

What's behind the cable bill?

Prisoners of Cable from The Atlantic

This is the best analysis I have seen on the war between the DIY tech innovators and the Cable TV establishment. I have been an obstinate cable customer for some time but I can appreciate the business side of the argument.

“The whole idea that there’s a lot of people out there that want to drop [cable] and just have a Netflix or an HBO—that’s not right.” And indeed, pay-TV services added 200,000 U.S. customers in 2011; HBO and Cinemax subscriptions grew by 7 million globally in the first half of this year...

Push to add drama button

Enjoy:

How the internet economy works: Guns, butter and bandwidth

How the internet economy works: Guns, butter and bandwidth:
Most people know certain things about the Internet. They know that cables run under the sea, that wires come into your homes, and that modems carry the digital signals to your devices.
But they’ve probably never heard of Internet Exchange Points, and that’s where the magic of the Internet really happens.

Humans Can't Be Empathetic And Logical At The Same Time

I've been saying this for years...

Humans Can't Be Empathetic And Logical At The Same Time:

Logic Versus Empathy Anthony I. Jack, Abigail Dawson, Katelyn Begany, Regina L. Leckie, Kevin Barry, Angela Ciccia, Abraham Snyder

Brain scans find that the two modes are mutually exclusive.
Logic and emotion tend to be considered as polar opposites. Think about the analytic CEO-his actions make sense in the science of profit, but when it means using cheap human labor or firing a couple hundred employees, there's an apparent lack of concern for the human consequences of his actions. Many choices are a struggle to compromise the two systems--and that may have to do with how our brains are wired.
A new study published in NeuroImage found that separate neural pathways are used alternately for empathetic and analytic problem solving. The study compares it to a see-saw. When you're busy empathizing, the neural network for analysis is repressed, and this switches according to the task at hand.

Watch This Amazing, 360-Degree On-Board Video of Red Bull's F1 Racer

Watch This Amazing, 360-Degree On-Board Video of Red Bull's F1 Racer: While immersive panoramic photos aren't anything new, a 360-degree video that's controlled through your mouse and keyboard is.

In a Race Between a Self-Driving Car and a Pro Race-Car Driver, Who Wins?

In a Race Between a Self-Driving Car and a Pro Race-Car Driver, Who Wins?:
Humans, but only by a few measly seconds.

AP
A self-driving car and a seasoned race-car driver each speed around Northern California's three-mile Thunderhill Raceway loop. Which car will get the fastest time?
Before you place your bets, a little setup: Send a pro out on a racetrack, and the driver will automatically find what is mathematically the quickest route around it. They navigate with such adept muscle memory that elite drivers can handle sudden changes in friction on the road without increasing cognitive workload.

Gear for the next one

In case of emergency (gear for this one or the next):
Some people in New York are fine, some are not. I don't know that this list of helpful emergency gear will be helpful this late, but I figure it's better than one more post about which smartphone rules.
(*By demand, most of this list in Amazon list form.)

5 talks on the state of democracy

5 talks on the state of democracy:

Rory Stewart opens this talk from TEDxHousesofParliament with a joke:
“Little Billy goes to school and his teacher asks, ‘What does your father do?’ Billy replies, ‘My father plays piano in an opium den.’”
But when the teacher confronts the father about his occupation, she gets a different answer. As Stewart finishes the joke, “The father says, ‘I’m very sorry, yes, I lied. But how can I tell an 8-year-old boy that his father is a politician?’”

Neil Sheehan reviews my new book, and my article in Atlantic tickles Special Ops

Neil Sheehan reviews my new book, and my article in Atlantic tickles Special Ops:

My book
on American generalship comes out today.
Here is Neil Sheehan's review
of it in the Washington Post. He
calls the Vietnam section "the best part of the book." (There also is a review
in the Wall Street Journal by Andrew
Roberts. He likes my writing more than Sheehan does but disagrees with my
conclusions.) 

I've been busy lately. Here is an article
I have in the current issue of the Atlantic.
Special Operators must get their copies early somehow, as I've began hearing
from them about it in the middle of last week. Also, an Air Force general
writes, "much truth in this article and it does not apply just to the
Army. The proclivity to promote non-risk taking, non-controversal, middle
of the road, do-nothings to senior general officer positions from
2008 to 2012 has really affected the Air Force in a negative way."

And here's a good interview that ran
this morning Steve
Inskeep of NPR about the book.  

How to grow a mustache

USAF's Youngest B-52 Now 50 Years Old

USAF's Youngest B-52 Now 50 Years Old:
The US Air Force's fleet of B-52 bombers soldiers on, showing no signs of retiring in the near future. The youngest aircraft, the last to leave the production line, tail# 61-0040, is now 50 years old, and based at Minot AFB, North Dakota. Of 744 B-52's built, around 75 'H' models remain in service, with some expected to last until 2040, when they will be an incredible 80 years old !
The picture shows 61-0040 on display at the McConnell AFB Open House last month.

More bad Generals

The Wash Post: Accusations against generals cast dark shadow over Army

The accusations leveled against three Army generals over the past six months are as varied as they are striking, the highest-profile of a growing number of allegations of wrongdoing by senior military officials...