Making Millions online with Wool

May 22nd, 2013

Hugh Howey’s success with Wool suggests that self-published e-books are on the rise — and fulfilling unmet demand:

These days, self-published authors such as Bella Andre and CJ Lyons regularly appear on New York Times bestseller lists. Self-published titles made up 25 percent of the top-selling books on Amazon last year, according to the Wall Street Journal. “The stigma of self-publishing,” Snow says, “has largely vanished.”

Howey believes self-published authors are succeeding because traditional publishers aren’t meeting readers’ demands for certain literary genres, particularly science fiction, romance and erotica. E.L. James’ three-volume erotic novel, “Fifty Shades of Grey,” is a prime example. Random House has sold more than 70 million print, e-book and audio copies of the trilogy, which began as a self-published book.

Howey understands why publishers are reluctant to lard their catalogues with these genres. “It would be jarring if half the Penguin catalogue was erotica,” he says. “I think their self-respect is more important than the bottom line.”

He says he also knows that many authors – more than the literary establishment realizes – are making a good living through self-publishing. Months ago, he did an informal survey, posting a message on an Amazon Kindle forum asking for examples of self-published writers earning $100 to $500 a month.

He got at least 1,000 responses, he says, with many people noting they were earning a lot more than the range he had posted. “I’ve heard from people making tens of thousands of dollars,” he says, “and I’ve never heard of their books.”

(Hat tip à mon père.)

Video of Woolwich Terrorist

May 22nd, 2013

This video of the Woolwich terrorist is surreal, as the youth casually apologizes to a camera crew — that our women had to see this — while still covered in blood and holding bloody knives:

“You people will never be safe. Remove your governments. They don’t care about you.”

I can’t imagine things going down quite this way in, say, Texas.

Phage-Filled Mucus

May 22nd, 2013

Animals use mucus as a protective barrier in places like the gut and lungs, and that mucus is full of bacteria-eating viruses called phages:

These protect their hosts from infection by destroying incoming bacteria. In return, the phages are exposed to a steady torrent of microbes in which to reproduce.

Microbial ecologist Forest Rohwer found that mucus contained four times more phages than the surrounding environment:

Mucus mainly consists of huge molecular complexes called mucins, which are made up of thousands of glycan sugars attached to a central protein backbone. The team showed that phages stick to these sugars, which Barr likens to a “large biological bottlebrush”.

The glycans are constantly changing and extremely variable, but the phages have equally diverse proteins in their coats, which allow them to cling to this inconsistent environment. The team showed that the presence of phages reduced the number of bacteria that can attach to mucus by more than 10,000 times.

Barr says he thinks that the phage strains found most often in mucus will be those that target the most common bacteria, providing a sort of ‘mucus memory’ against the most relevant local microbes. But because mucus is continuously being shed and replenished, these relationships are in constant flux. Barr, Rohwer and the team are now trying to simulate the evolutionary dynamics within this realm of mucus.

Sweden stunned by third night of rioting

May 22nd, 2013

Hundreds of “youths” have set fire to cars and attacked police and rescue services in Stockholm’s suburbs:

“We’ve had around 30 cars set on fire last night, fires that we connect to youth gangs and criminals,” Kjell Lindgren, spokesman for Stockholm police, said on Wednesday.

Yes, the key feature is that they are youths:

The riots appear to have been sparked by the police killing of a 69-year-old man wielding a machete in the suburb of Husby this month, which prompted accusations of police brutality.

I can see why the youths would feel such strong solidarity with a 69-year-old man and would be baffled by police brutality toward him for the simple act of wielding a machete.

So, what are the real issues?

While average living standards are still among the highest in Europe, governments have failed to substantially reduce long-term youth unemployment and poverty, which have affected immigrant communities worst.

Ah, long-term youth unemployment and poverty. Yes, yes, terrible that this youth unemployment is afflicting these immigrant communities:

Some 15 percent of the population is foreign-born, the highest proportion in the Nordic region. Unemployment among those born outside Sweden stands at 16 percent, compared with 6 percent for native Swedes, according to OECD data.

Among 44 industrialized countries, Sweden ranked fourth in the absolute number of asylum seekers, and second relative to its population, according to U.N. figures.

All this despite Sweden’s generous welfare benefits…

Time Passes Very Slowly

May 22nd, 2013

Paul Templar worked as a guide on the Zambezi river near Victoria Falls, and he knew the local hippos:

That day I’d taken clients out with three apprentice guides — Mike, Ben and Evans — all in kayaks. We were near the end of the tour, the light was softening and we were taking in the tranquillity. The solid whack I felt behind me took me by surprise.

I turned just in time to see Evans, who had been flung out of his boat, flying through the air. His boat, with his two clients still in it, had been lifted half out of the water on the back of the huge bull hippo.

There was a cluster of rocks nearby and I yelled at the nearest apprentice to guide everyone there, to safety. Then I turned my boat and paddled furiously towards Evans.

I reached over to grab his outstretched hand but as our fingers were about to touch, I was engulfed in darkness. There was no transition at all, no sense of approaching danger. It was as if I had suddenly gone blind and deaf.

I was aware that my legs were surrounded by water, but my top half was almost dry. I seemed to be trapped in something slimy. There was a terrible, sulphurous smell, like rotten eggs, and a tremendous pressure against my chest. My arms were trapped but I managed to free one hand and felt around — my palm passed through the wiry bristles of the hippo’s snout. It was only then that I realised I was underwater, trapped up to my waist in his mouth.

I wriggled as hard as I could, and in the few seconds for which he opened his jaws, I managed to escape. I swam towards Evans, but the hippo struck again, dragging me back under the surface. I’d never heard of a hippo attacking repeatedly like this, but he clearly wanted me dead.

Hippos’ mouths have huge tusks, slicing incisors and a bunch of smaller chewing teeth. It felt as if the bull was making full use of the whole lot as he mauled me — a doctor later counted almost 40 puncture wounds and bite marks on my body. The bull simply went berserk, throwing me into the air and catching me again, shaking me like a dog with a doll.

Then down we went again, right to the bottom, and everything went still. I remember looking up through 10 feet of water at the green and yellow light playing on the surface, and wondering which of us could hold his breath the longest. Blood rose from my body in clouds, and a sense of resignation overwhelmed me. I’ve no idea how long we stayed under — time passes very slowly when you’re in a hippo’s mouth.

The hippo lurched suddenly for the surface, spitting me out as it rose. Mike was still waiting for me in his kayak and managed to paddle me to safety. I was a mess. My left arm was crushed to a pulp, blood poured from the wounds in my chest and when he examined my back, Mike discovered a wound so savage that my lung was visible.

Luckily, he knew first aid and was able to seal the wounds in my chest with the wrapper from a tray of snacks, which almost certainly stopped my lungs from collapsing and saved my life.

By chance, a medical team was nearby, on an emergency drill, and with their help I stayed alive long enough to reach a hospital with a surgeon. He warned me he would probably have to take off both my arms and the bottom of my injured leg. In the end, I lost only my left arm — they managed to patch up the rest.

Evans’ body was found down river two days later. Attempts were made to find and kill the rogue hippo, but he seemed to have gone into hiding.

More Than Deliberate Practice

May 21st, 2013

Ericsson et al. found that top-tier experts differ from second-tier experts in the amount of deliberate practice they’d accumulated over the years. Famously, they found that it takes 10,000 hours of deliberate practice to master a skill like playing chess or playing a musical instrument.

Now Hambrick et al. have found that the cumulative amount of deliberate practice explains about a third of the variance in skill level between experts.

That leaves plenty of room for natural talent to play a role — but it also leaves room for quality of practice, coaching, etc.

Jamaicans think they’d be better off as a colony

May 21st, 2013

In a harsh indictment of nearly 50 years of independence, 60 per cent of Jamaicans surveyed believe they would be better off if they were still ruled by Britain.

(Hat tip to Buttercup Dew.)

Navy dolphins discover Howell torpedo off Coronado

May 21st, 2013

Howell torpedoThe US Navy trains dolphins and sea lions to find mines — something I noted, good Lord, over a decade ago! — and recently some Navy dolphins discovered a Howell torpedo off Coronado:

Until recently only one Howell torpedo was known to exist, on display at the Naval Undersea Museum in Keyport, Wash. Now a second has been discovered, not far from the Hotel del Coronado.

Meant to be launched from above the water or submerged torpedo tubes, the Howell torpedo was made of brass, 11 feet long, driven by a 132-pound flywheel spun to 10,000 rpm before launch. It had a range of 400 yards and a speed of 25 knots.

As a kid, I never wondered what propelled a self-propelled torpedo. The Howell torpedo used a flywheel, like a toy car, while its more successful competitor, the Whitehead torpedo, used compressed air:

The result was a submarine weapon, the Minenschiff (mine ship), the first self-propelled torpedo, officially presented to the Austrian Imperial Naval commission on December 21, 1866.

Maintaining proper depth was a major problem in the early days but Whitehead introduced his “secret” in 1868 which overcame this. It was a mechanism consisting of a hydrostatic valve and pendulum that caused the torpedo’s hydroplanes to be adjusted so as to maintain a preset depth.

After the Austrian government decided to invest in the invention, Whitehead started the first torpedo factory in Fiume. In 1870, he improved the devices to travel up to approximately 1,000 yd (910 m) at a speed of up to 6 kn (11 km/h), and by 1881 the factory was exporting torpedoes to ten other countries. The torpedo was powered by compressed air and had an explosive charge of gun-cotton.[5] Whitehead went on to develop more efficient devices, demonstrating torpedoes capable of 18 kn (33 km/h) in 1876, 24 kn (44 km/h) in 1886, and, finally, 30 kn (56 km/h) in 1890.

Royal Navy representatives visited Fiume for a demonstration in late 1869, and in 1870 a batch of torpedoes was ordered. In 1871, the British Admiralty paid Whitehead £15,000 for certain of his developments and production started at the Royal Laboratories in Woolwich the following year.

This was the crazy steampunk era of rapidly changing naval technology.

Treating one Disease by Causing Another

May 21st, 2013

Treating one disease by causing another is a mainstream therapeutic strategy, Bruce Charlton notes — especially in psychiatry:

Malarial Therapy of GPI (“General Paralysis of the Insane” — cerebral syphilis)

Patients with incurable and fatal GPI were deliberately infected with malaria. The very high pyrexia (temperature) killed the syphilis germ, but (hopefully) not the patient. The patient was then (hopefully) cured of their malaria using quinine.

Leucotomy/Lobotomy

Patients with chronic and incurable anxiety or tension were deliberately given brain damage, cutting off the frontal lobes of the cerebral cortex from the rest of the brain. This made the patients docile and indifferent – which was presumed to be an improvement. The procedure became so popular that brain damage was inflicted on patients with less severe and probably temporary anxiety and other conditions, too.

Neuroleptics/Antipsychotics create Parkinson’s disease (or, rather, Parkinsonism, which may be reversible) for the treatment of fear, agitation, delusions, hallucinations, and hyperactivity

Patients with a range of very distressing psychological and psychotic symptoms were deliberately made to suffer from Parkinson’s disease by giving them dopamine blocking drugs. As well as producing the physical symptoms of Parkinsonism (tremor, stiffness, movement disorders), the drugs produced the psychological symptoms of Parkinsonism – emotional blunting and demotivation. Patients could no longer be bothered to respond to delusions and hallucinations.

Unfortunately patients could no longer be bothered to do anything else, either and became asocial, withdrawn, idle, and without the ability to experience pleasure. Also, when treatment was sustained, the drugs were found to have a permanent effect (tardive dyskinesia) and to create dependence — such that withdrawal often caused a psychotic breakdown.

Crazy Ants Are Displacing Fire Ants

May 20th, 2013

Crazy ants are displacing fire ants — and people want their fire ants back:

The Tawny crazy ant invasion is the most recent in a series of ant invasions from South America brought on by human movement. The Argentine ant invaded through the port of New Orleans in about 1891. In 1918 the black imported fire ant showed up in Mobile, Ala. Then in the 1930s, the red imported fire ant arrived in the U.S. and began displacing the black fire ant and the Argentine ants.

The UT researchers studied two crazy ant invasion sites on the Texas Gulf Coast and found that in those areas where the Tawny crazy ant population is densest, fire ants were eliminated. Even in regions where the crazy ant population is less dense, fire ant populations were drastically reduced. Other ant species, particularly native species, were also eliminated or diminished.

LeBrun said crazy ants are much harder to control than fire ants. They don’t consume most of the poison baits that kill fire ant mounds, and they don’t have the same kinds of colony boundaries that fire ants do. That means that even if they’re killed in a certain area, the supercolony survives and can swarm back over the area.

“They don’t sting like fire ants do, but aside from that they are much bigger pests,” he said. “There are videos on YouTube of people sweeping out dustpans full of these ants from their bathroom. You have to call pest control operators every three or four months just to keep the infestation under control. It’s very expensive.”

LeBrun said that in northern Argentina and southern Brazil, where the ants are native, populations are likely held in check by other ant species and a variety of natural enemies. In the U.S. there is no such natural control.

Here the crazy ants can attain densities up to 100 times as great as all other ants in the area combined. In the process, they monopolize food sources and starve out other species. LeBrun said the crazy ants, which are omnivorous, may also directly attack and kill other ant and arthropod species.

I, for one, welcome our new insect overlords.

Antibiotics could cure 40% of chronic back pain patients

May 20th, 2013

Danish researchers have found yet another malady caused by bacterial infection — chronic back pain:

Specialists who deal with back pain have long known that infections are sometimes to blame, but these cases were thought to be exceptional. That thinking has been overturned by scientists at the University of Southern Denmark who found that 20% to 40% of chronic lower back pain was caused by bacterial infections.

[...]

The Danish team describe their work in two papers published in the European Spine Journal. In the first report, they explain how bacterial infections inside slipped discs can cause painful inflammation and tiny fractures in the surrounding vertebrae.

Working with doctors in Birmingham, the Danish team examined tissue removed from patients for signs of infection. Nearly half tested positive, and of these, more than 80% carried bugs called Propionibacterium acnes.

The microbes are better known for causing acne. They lurk around hair roots and in the crevices in our teeth, but can get into the bloodstream during tooth brushing. Normally they cause no harm, but the situation may change when a person suffers a slipped disc. To heal the damage, the body grows small blood vessels into the disc. Rather than helping, though, they ferry bacteria inside, where they grow and cause serious inflammation and damage to neighbouring vertebrae that shows up on an MRI scan.

In the second paper, the scientists proved they could cure chronic back pain with a 100-day course of antibiotics. In a randomised trial, the drugs reduced pain in 80% of patients who had suffered for more than six months and had signs of damaged vertebra under MRI scans.

Too Busy to Read

May 20th, 2013

Adam Elkus pities the fool who paraphrases General Mattis, so here’s the general’s full response to a colleague who asked him, back in 2003, about professional reading for officers who are generally too busy to read:

The problem with being too busy to read is that you learn by experience (or by your men’s experience), i.e. the hard way. By reading, you learn through others’ experiences, generally a better way to do business, especially in our line of work where the consequences of incompetence are so final for young men. Thanks to my reading, I have never been caught flat-footed by any situation, never at a loss for how any problem has been addressed (successfully or unsuccessfully) before. It doesn’t give me all the answers, but it lights what is often a dark path ahead.

With TF 58, I had w/ me Slim’s book, books about the Russian and British experiences in AFG, and a couple others. Going into Iraq, “The Siege” (about the Brits’ defeat at Al Kut in WW I) was req’d reading for field grade officers. I also had Slim’s book; reviewed T.E. Lawrence’s “Seven Pillars of Wisdom”; a good book about the life of Gertrude Bell (the Brit archaeologist who virtually founded the modern Iraq state in the aftermath of WW I and the fall of the Ottoman empire); and “From Beirut to Jerusalem”. I also went deeply into Liddell Hart’s book on Sherman, and Fuller’s book on Alexander the Great got a lot of my attention (although I never imagined that my HQ would end up only 500 meters from where he lay in state in Babylon).

Ultimately, a real understanding of history means that we face NOTHING new under the sun. For all the “4th Generation of War” intellectuals running around today saying that the nature of war has fundamentally changed, the tactics are wholly new, etc, I must respectfully say… “Not really”: Alex the Great would not be in the least bit perplexed by the enemy that we face right now in Iraq, and our leaders going into this fight do their troops a disservice by not studying (studying, vice just reading) the men who have gone before us. We have been fighting on this planet for 5000 years and we should take advantage of their experience. “Winging it” and filling body bags as we sort out what works reminds us of the moral dictates and the cost of incompetence in our profession. As commanders and staff officers, we are coaches and sentries for our units: how can we coach anything if we don’t know a hell of a lot more than just the TTPs? What happens when you’re on a dynamic battlefield and things are changing faster than higher HQ can stay abreast? Do you not adapt because you cannot conceptualize faster than the enemy’s adaptation? (Darwin has a pretty good theory about the outcome for those who cannot adapt to changing circumstance — in the information age things can change rather abruptly and at warp speed, especially the moral high ground which our regimented thinkers cede far too quickly in our recent fights.) And how can you be a sentinel and not have your unit caught flat-footed if you don’t know what the warning signs are — that your unit’s preps are not sufficient for the specifics of a tasking that you have not anticipated?

Perhaps if you are in support functions waiting on the warfighters to spell out the specifics of what you are to do, you can avoid the consequences of not reading. Those who must adapt to overcoming an independent enemy’s will are not allowed that luxury.

This is not new to the USMC approach to warfighting — Going into Kuwait 12 years ago, I read (and reread) Rommel’s Papers (remember “Kampstaffel”?), Montgomery’s book (“Eyes Officers”…), “Grant Takes Command” (need for commanders to get along, “commanders’ relationships” being more important than “command relationships”), and some others. As a
result, the enemy has paid when I had the opportunity to go against them, and I believe that many of my young guys lived because I didn’t waste their lives because I didn’t have the vision in my mind of how to destroy the enemy at least cost to our guys and to the innocents on the battlefields.

Hope this answers your question…. I will cc my ADC in the event he can add to this. He is the only officer I know who has read more than I.

Semper Fi, Mattis

The Mexican Mormon War

May 19th, 2013

This Vice piece on the “war” between Mormons and drug cartels dwells a bit much on the Romney connection, but it is fascinating for any number of reasons:

Wild Game

May 19th, 2013

In 1903, the King of Chefs, Chef of Kings, Auguste Escoffier, wrote his 646-page cookbook, Le Guide Culinaire. When hunter Steven Rinella got a copy, he decided to plan a feast:

I scoured the pages of Le Guide, setting my sights on 13 dishes: smoked breast of goose, mincemeat pie, duckling à la presse (basically a roasted and flattened duck), abattis à la bourguignonne (bird giblets in wine), pigeon pie, rabbit à la flamande (rabbit thighs in a sweet, spicy stew), turtle à la Baltimore (a thick turtle soup with lots of liquor), freshwater matelote (a brothy fish soup with a crayfish garnish), truite au bleu (stunned and blanched trout), bird’s-nest soup, a sampler of roast birds, fried smelt, and milt (fish semen) butter sauce.

Luckily, I already had a good start from the past hunting season. I had elk, deer, black bear, and antelope meat. I had ducks, doves, pheasant, Canada geese, and a big tub of hearts and gizzards from grouse, pheasant, and waterfowl. The giant mule-deer neck on the bottom shelf of my freezer would make a large pot of game stock, which Escoffier used as freely as water. But even so, my “to get” list quickly grew to an intimidating length. I need perch, pike, crayfish, smelt, carp semen, and a live trout. I’ll have to find a way to breed pigeons and collect their eggs, and I need to get my hands on a bunch of rabbits and a couple of swallow nests. Time to get rolling.

In Escoffier’s day, wild-game eating was so commonplace that the term “wild-game chef” would have been redundant. Before his death in 1935, Escoffier made four journeys to the New World, where he surely dined on a wide array of American game. In 1903, at the time of Le Guide’s publication, you could walk into Delmonico’s Restaurant, in New York City, and order such favorites as diamondback terrapin (a small eastern turtle), whitetail deer, and canvasback duck.

Delmonico’s opened its doors in 1830 and enjoyed 93 years of business. But the same factors that finally brought the restaurant to its knees were to blame for the demise of wild-game eating in general. Prohibition, enacted in 1919, was a deadly blow: Without legal access to alcohol for cooking, many popular wild-game dishes were deleted from the Delmonico’s menu. The other problem was the wholesale wildlife slaughter of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. One of the most popular Delmonico’s dishes was the passenger pigeon, which went extinct in 1914. By the time the restaurant closed its doors, on May 1, 1923, a proliferation of state and federal laws had banned the sale of wild game in the United States. These days, the game served in the “wild game” restaurants popping up in major cities has been farm-raised.

It’s surprising to me that faux wild game is gaining popularity in a society that is too squeamish and horrified to kill its own grub. We’ve become so removed from the reality of obtaining our food supply that almost no one knows how to wring — or would dare to wring — a chicken’s neck. If I’m going to eat something, I much prefer to kill it myself. I hunt elk and deer with a bow and arrow, I fish with hooks, and I take birds with a shotgun, then wring their necks if the shot didn’t finish them off. This may sound gruesome, but I can face the consequences of my need to eat. I limit my kills to what is sustainable and sound for animal populations, and I participate in efforts to protect wilderness and open lands. It may seem like my lifestyle is a holdover from the past, but to me it is a good plan for the future.

Beasts of Burden

May 18th, 2013

Beasts of Burden doesn’t look at animals carrying packs but at animals fighting, in Afghanistan — where they bet on quail and partridge fights, in addition to rooster and dog fights:
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