Aborting black babies

William Bennett has been condemned for saying, on his radio show, that "if you wanted to reduce crime, you could -- if that were your sole purpose -- you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down." Bennett quickly added that such an idea would be "an impossible, ridiculous and morally reprehensible thing to do." But, he said, "your crime rate would go down."

What is the problem with this? He said it would be morally reprehensible. Is the disagreement a factual one, about demographics? Someone explain to me.

Wolfram Tones

Stephen Wolfram, you may know, is a genius who published his first scientific paper at 15, got his Ph.D. at 20, is the youngest recipient of a MacArthur Prize Fellowship, created Mathematica, and so on. He's really into the idea that extreme complexity can arise from very simple rules. He has used computer programs based on this to generate music for ringtones, that you can hear at http://tones.wolfram.com/generate/. Every time you click you get a completely original composition. It's not always good, but sometimes it is, and amazing considering it's just computer generated. Personally I think "piano" is best.

You can see really pretty fractals that are 3D slices of a Julia set using quaternions. I know fractals are so 1990, but they're still cool.

Why is the sky blue?

If you took physics, you may have learned that the difference between different colors is that they are different wavelengths of light. The white light of the sun is a mixture of all the colors, and they get separated in a rainbow or prism from the longest wavelengths (red) to the shortest (violet). The molecules in the sky scatter short wavelengths most strongly, making the sky look blue.

That's the standard answer -- but wait, you've seen rainbows. Violet light is even shorter than blue light. Why isn't the sky purple? For the same reason that when you mix red and yellow you get orange. Those molecules do scatter mostly violet, but also a lot of blue, and some green, and a little yellow, and so on, and the colors mix to look like sky-blue.

But wait -- why does mixing colors get you a new color? How come when we mix blue and red we get purple? If blue and red are different wavelengths, and you mix them together, how can you get a totally third purple wavelength? Well you don't. When you mix blue and red, you DON'T get pure purple light, you get a mixture of blue and red light. But our eyes can't detect every wavelength, we only have three kinds of color-detecting cells in there. Purple light doesn't get it's own, but purple light partly stimulates the red-detecting cells, and partly stimulates the blue-detecting cells, and when this happens, our brain sees purple. But that's why, when we see a mixture or red and blue, the same cells are stimulated and we see the same purple color even though it really isn't the same, there's no actual purple light there.

If you look really closely at your TV screen or computer monitor, you'll see that it's made of little pixels of red, blue, and green. How do these show all the colors if they only have three colors of pixels? Well, since our eyes interpret all colors with just three kinds of color-detecting cells, our monitors don't have to make all wavelengths of light. We can make our eyes see any color with different combinations of these three, stimulating those three color-detecting cells in any way we want to.

Dogs' eyes only have two kinds of color-detecting cells. That means whatever colors they see must be very different from us. And a mixture of blue and red, to them, will not look the same as straight purple light. So when they watch TV, it must look crazy off-color.

(Note: I've slightly oversimplified. For example, our eyes see colors like brown that are not in the rainbow; they exist only as combinations of colors, and don't have their own wavelength.)

P.S....
Myth: In elementary school we learn the primary colors are red, blue, and yellow. This is false, and that's why mixing these three never gives you black, just a mushy brown. The primary colors (for pigments) are red, blue, and green. (For light, they're cyan, magenta, and yellow.)
Myth: ROYGBIV. Even though there are millions of colors in the spectrum, Newton chose to list seven, for superstitious reasons. That's why he stuck that ridiculous "indigo" in there, which is just silly.
Myth: Color-blind people don't really see in black and white. Due to defects in some color-detecting cells, they see color differently that we do, and some different colors look the same to them.

TORTURE ALERT

3 in 82nd Airborne Say Beating Iraqi Prisoners Was Routine

Three former members of the Army's 82nd Airborne Division say soldiers in their battalion in Iraq routinely beat and abused prisoners in 2003 and 2004 to help gather intelligence on the insurgency and to amuse themselves...

In one incident... an off-duty cook broke a detainee's leg with a metal baseball bat. Detainees were also stacked, fully clothed, in human pyramids and forced to hold five-gallon water jugs with arms outstretched or do jumping jacks until they passed out, the report says. "We would give them blows to the head, chest, legs and stomach, and pull them down, kick dirt on them," one sergeant told Human Rights Watch researchers during one of four interviews in July and August. "This happened every day." ...

"As long as no [persons under control] came up dead, it happened." He added, "We kept it to broken arms and legs." ...

Captain Fishback, who has served combat tours in Afghanistan and Iraq, gave... his long account only after his efforts to report the abuses to his superiors were rebuffed or ignored over 17 months... "Despite my efforts, I have been unable to get clear, consistent answers from my leadership about what constitutes lawful and humane treatment of detainees. I am certain that this confusion contributed to a wide range of abuses including death threats, beatings, broken bones, murder, exposure to elements, extreme forced physical exertion, hostage-taking, stripping, sleep deprivation and degrading treatment." ...

Interrogators pressed guards to beat up prisoners... "He would always say to us, 'You didn't see anything, right?' " the sergeant said. "And we would always say, 'No, sergeant.' "

One of the sergeants... had seen a soldier break open a chemical light stick and beat the detainees with it. "That made them glow in the dark, which was real funny, but it burned their eyes, and their skin was irritated real bad," he said.

Earthbeat

I am scheduled as a guest on the WPFW radio show Earthbeat (89.3 FM Washington) on Tuesday, September 27, from 10:30 to 11 AM, to talk about my report. Isn't that cool?

You can listen online (click the "Listen Online" button).

Little Manhattan

I just saw the commercial for Little Manhattan. It reminded me of my ideal of what love is supposed to me... something pure and magical... why does it all get so corrupted as an adult? Or is it just for me?

(I saw the movie Broken Flowers. Really liked it. But didn't get what it was really about, it obviously wasn't really about his looking for his son. Ideas welcome.)

Gadzooks!

Did you know that "Jeepers Creepers!" comes from "Jesus Christ", for people not wanting to be sacriligious? So is "Jiminy Cricket!" which predates Disney. "Crikey!" and "cripes!" are from "christ", "gosh" and "golly" are from "God", and "gadzooks" is from "god's hooks", that is, nails on the cross. Even "drat" comes from "God rot".

Did you know that 40% of people believe in horoscopes? Scientists have let astrologers ask personal information from people and guess their sign, and they do no better than random guessing. Why do people believe this stuff? We now know what planets and stars are, and we understand the forces of nature and how they affect each other, so we understand that the planets and stars have no effect on our personalities or futures -- so why do people still think they do? And it's not harmless, people make life decisions based on this stuff -- President Reagan made national decisions based on it!

Interestingly, the reason people born in a certain part of the year are considered a Gemini or Capricorn or whatever is because when they were born, the sun rose through that constellation. Or, well, that was the case when they made up astrology, but since then the earth's position has changed, and now those dates are all different, but astrologers haven't changed the horoscopes at all. It's off by an entire sign -- if you go by the sun, all Capricorns are Aquariuses and so on.

Talk amongst yourselves

I'm giving some talks based on my report. Is that cool or what?

I'm totally stressing out though. I have to come up with a talk pretty darn quick...

Hog hell

A taste of the horror that is my job, some details from a pig farm in South Dakota. I wanted to cry. It was all caught on videotape, but authorities do nothing about it...

Gratuitous abuse of pigs was common. Workers would extinguish cigarettes or their bodies, beat them with rakes and shovels, kick them, stick poles in their stomach ruptures, strangle them, throw them into manure pits to drown, slit their throats to watch them bleed to death, and stick electric prods in their eyes, ears, mouth, vaginas, and anuses. These abuses were condoned by management.

Workers killed pigs typically by smashing their heads repeatedly against the concrete floors of metal rails, or by standing on their neck. Larger pigs were often beaten to death with hammers, rebar rods, and angle irons. Others had a water hose placed in their mouths until they burst. Animals thrown in the dead pile often remained alive for days.

Sick or injured animals were dragged out of their pens into the aisles, and left there for weeks until they died of hunger or thirst, in many cases resorting in desperation to eating feces. Others were left in pens where, unable to reach food, they starved to death or, when trapped under brooders, were literally cooked alive. Conditions were so bad that, every day, larger pigs would eat weaker ones alive. Hernias and stomach ruptures, some the size of volley balls, were common, and generally received no treatment.

Climate control devices were not in working order. Pigs often suffered subzero temperatures in winter, and temperatures as high as 120 degrees in the summer. The floors of pens were not cleaned during the entire six months of confinement, leaving floors covered with feces and urine, piling up along the backs of pens and rolling into alleyways. In many cases, clogs and non-functioning flush boxes would fill pens in sewage so deep that some would drown.

Please... have a heart... they only do this to as many pigs as you pay them to...

I haven't the heart to show you the gory footage, so here are some happy piglets.