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The way you get to be a colonel is by being a good soldier. The way you get to be a general is by being a good politician. Everybody in the officer corps of the United States soon learns this.

There remains a distinction, however, between generals who become even better soldiers (Douglas MacArthur, George Patton, Creighton Abrams, Norman Schwarzkopf, Tommy Franks, David Petraeus)  and those who phone-in the soldier part and concentrate on becoming better politicians (Dwight Eisenhower, William Westmoreland, Colin Powell, Wesley Clark, Alexander Haig). The latter are a serious danger to our Republic, but unfortunately their chosen career path gives them the inside track to success in an increasingly political world.

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If everyone else obeys such a ‘ban’, then that leaves more for the Japanese. Most nanny-staters would characterize this as a solid example of the ‘freeloader problem’.

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Historians have finally revealed what they reckon is the definitive site of the Battle of Bosworth – the 22 August 1485 scrap in which Henry Tudor’s army defeated Richard III’s forces.

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Hey, tenure doesn’t grow on trees, you know.

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Doesn’t that sound like a great name for a high-school football team? The Balch Springs Cane Toads!

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So how come I can’t wear jeans to work?

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It’s good to know that the Central Incompetence Agency isn’t the only thing standing between us and the Bad Guys.

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Grant Achatz is probably one of the best chefs now living; El Bulli was reputed to be the best restaurant in the world. This is an amazing story.

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There seem to be reports of sudden acceleration of spending, and of brakes failing. Toyota has shown us the way.

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Although analysis of the man’s mitochondrial DNA proves that he was of Asian origin, the archaeologists are unable to say whether he himself settled in Italy or whether he was the descendant of an Asian family which was already living there.

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Megan McArdle does what she does best.

The possibility that no one risks death by going without health insurance may be startling, but some research supports it. Richard Kronick of the University of California at San Diego’s Department of Family and Preventive Medicine, an adviser to the Clinton administration, recently published the results of what may be the largest and most comprehensive analysis yet done of the effect of insurance on mortality. He used a sample of more than 600,000, and controlled not only for the standard factors, but for how long the subjects went without insurance, whether their disease was particularly amenable to early intervention, and even whether they lived in a mobile home. In test after test, he found no significantly elevated risk of death among the uninsured.

If gaining insurance has a large effect on people’s health, we should see outcomes improve dramatically between one’s early and late 60s. Yet like the Kronick and Rand studies, analyses of the effect of Medicare, which becomes available to virtually everyone in America at the age of 65, show little benefit. In a recent review of the literature, Helen Levy of the University of Michigan and David Meltzer of the University of Chicago noted that the latest studies of this question “paint a surprisingly consistent picture: Medicare increases consumption of medical care and may modestly improve self-reported health but has no effect on mortality, at least in the short run.”

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Australia is witnessing the emergence of “Kangatarians” – people who limit their diet to vegetables and kangaroo meat only.

I love the use of the word ’emerge’ – as if this were some new species.

Gotta love Australians.

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“At the evening service tonight, the sermon topic will be ‘What Is Hell?’ Come early and listen to our choir practice.”

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Works for me.

The foundation admitted people would earn less, but said they would have more time to carry out worthy tasks.

And, as we all know, Worthy Tasks are our chief priority.

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Too many Americans live in two-story homes, and/or have basements, yet have no easy access to the upstairs bathroom and Halloween decorations in the attic, or to the aunt living up there. They are forced to rely on outdated “stairs” technology. (And stairs are dangerous! So this is far more urgent than broadband! Show your outrage! Etc.!) So I ever-so-slightly tweaked the letter; this bold new campaign is meant to rectify this injustice and I hope you’ll sign on and spread the word.

Joel on Software.

At one point I entertained the quixotic and, retrospectively, stupid idea of requiring every employee at Fog Creek to be a programmer… even the receptionist would have to have done some BASIC programming in high school to qualify. In the US Marines everyone, even the cooks, is a rifleman. Of course that’s because the cooks are in friggin Afghanistan getting shot at so they better be riflemen, whereas our receptionist almost never has to drop into the source code and bang out a class. Almost never.

The population of the planet is so large, and the effect of sales and marketing so hard to scale, that by the time your product is really great, the optimal ratio might be very heavily tilted in favor of sales and marketing. Large software companies might have 5 or 10 or 20 people in the sales organization for every developer.

This explains, among other things, why US software companies can’t expect to get sustainable advantage by offshoring software development to cheaper countries. If a developer in Russia, India, or China costs 50% as much as a developer in Seattle, San Francisco, or Boston, but software development is only 10% of your costs, you can only get a 5% advantage from offshoring development. The offshoring that does happen is strongly biased to custom software development which, by design, can only solve one person’s problem, so more developers than marketers are needed.

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Not necessarily a bad thing.

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Like the space race, the America’s Cup race brings out the rich-guy toys that advance tech for the rest of us.

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It’s all about motivation.

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In social psychology, the fundamental attribution error (also known as correspondence bias or attribution effect) describes the tendency to over-value dispositional  or personality-based explanations for the observed behaviors of others while under-valuing situational explanations for those behaviors. The fundamental attribution error is most visible when people explain the behavior of others. It does not explain interpretations of one’s own behavior – where situational factors are often taken into consideration. This discrepancy is called the actor-observer bias.

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The young men and women of America’s future elite work their laptops to the bone, rarely question authority, and happily accept their positions at the top of the heap as part of the natural order of life.

Training the Crustians of Tomorrow.

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Hey! I like Spam!

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Take a look at this amazing color film footage of London in the 1920s.

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These are astonishing.

Megan McArdle is as unimpressed with the iPad as I am.

I do not want to go to school today.I’d rather just relax at home and playComputer games, or maybe read a book;then, at the proper time, perhaps I’d cookA meal that takes some time and thought to do;Not like our lunches, spare and quickly madeBefore commuting to our daily trade,Where moments to relax are brief and few.

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This is what the monster movies don’t show you: The enormous commercial possibilities of, say, crabs the size of SUVs.

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Japanese horseradish, whose smell is more usually found in sushi restaurants, contains allyl isothiocyanate – the same chemical compound that gives mustard its bite – and tests at the Shiga University of Medical Science have shown that virtually all the hearing-impaired people exposed to the odour of wasabi woke up within two-and-a-half minutes.

That would certainly make me wonder what was going on.

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Was just noticing in the genre of scary ghost movies that also happen to be mysteries, when the time comes to sit down in front of Google or a microfiche reader at the library and figure out what’s going on, for some reason that’s the chick’s job.

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Hey, you didn’t have anything else to do today, right?

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And who could blame him?

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Yeah, Latin and Greek would raise the tone of the country beyond measure.

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One wishes to speak carefully here, but without letting pass a compound of willful ignorance, crude ethics, and cruder social doctrine: a compound, indeed, of the sorts of small, soft hearted errors that transform charity into social work, love of the Body of Christ into “altruism,” and a sense of personal obligation to a scheme of bureaucratic methods for getting others to pay for my sense of moral obligation.  Let us note a few things.

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Fortunately, Obama doesn’t speak Italian, otherwise the resemblance would be truly frightening.

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Recently, we pointed out that what’s often called “identity theft” involving someone falsifying bank account info to take your money is really nothing of the sort, but is instead a bank robbery where the victim gets blamed.

And watch the video, which is as funny as a ‘Get a Mac’ ad.

Tyler Cowen thinks he’s figured it out.

My theory is that Apple wants to capture a chunk of the revenue in this nation’s enormous textbook market — high school, college, whatever.  Why lug all those books around?  The superior Apple graphics, colors, and fonts will support all of the textbook features which Kindle botches and destroys.  Apple takes a chunk of the market revenue, of course, plus they sell the iPads and some AT&T contracts.  There are lots of schoolkids in the world.

In the longer run the iPad will compete with your university, or in some ways enhance your university.  It will offer homework services and instructional videos and courses, none of which can work well on the current iPhone or Kindle.

Can you imagine one attached to every hospital bed or in the hands of every doctor and nurse?

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“Progressive” is a buzz word for liberalism, and when liberalism is cloaked behind the P-word it is bait and switch. You act like you’re going to restore power, wealth or both to the “Middle Class” — middle class being an imprecise term that generally refers to the income and property bracket of the person who is listening to you.

As soon as you build up a self-delusional groundswell of populist support, you do this hairpin turn and start parceling out the power and wealth to your friends. Leaving the middle class to twist in the wind.

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A useful chart.

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Without getting crucified at the end, one hopes.

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Well, if they were blind drunk, how valid was the test?

Good to know that the Taiwanese can keep up with professionals.

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There we go: A shovel-ready project. Alert the White House.

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You want to see what meaningless, vague generalities look like — as a Palin hater why they have so much hate.

You want to see what compelling, well-thought-out specifics look like, ask an Obama voter why he’s sorry.

Read it.

Just in case you’ve forgotten.

House of Eratosthenes is always worth reading.

Reality teevee is starting to look like droopy butt-crack jeans to me: It appeals to morons, it looks (consequently) as stupid as all holy hell, but for reasons nobody can explain it’s just hanging around like a bad smell, year after year and decade after decade. Who thinks this looks cool? Who likes it? Someone somewhere must.

Slow news day.

Joel Spolsky always has interesting things to say.

Now, we all know that communication is very important, and that many organizational problems are caused by a failure to communicate. Most people try to solve this problem by increasing the amount of communication: cc’ing everybody on an e-mail, having long meetings and inviting the whole staff, and asking for everyone’s two cents before implementing a decision.

But communications costs add up faster than you think, especially on larger teams. What used to work with three people in a garage all talking to one another about everything just doesn’t work when your head count reaches 10 or 20 people. Everybody who doesn’t need to be in that meeting is killing productivity. Everybody who doesn’t need to read that e-mail is distracted by it. At some point, overcommunicating just isn’t efficient.