Dennis Cauchon of USA Today puts U.S. casualties in Iraq into historical and domestic perspective:
Even this year, being a U.S. soldier is about as risky as being a police officer. Criminals kill about 60 officers each year in a force of 750,000 nationwide. If the 1.5 million members of the armed forces had a similar rate of loss, 120 soldiers a year would die in combat.
The article, which analyzes the reasons for the low casualty rate, deserves a reading in full.
Chuck Watson's Near Real Time Satellite Images of Iraq detect big new fires in northern Iraq.
The New Scientist reports that baby teeth contain stem cells that can turn into fat cells, neural cells, or " tooth-forming cells called ondontoblasts."
Previous work by [NIH pediatric dentist Songtao] Shi in 2000 had already shown that extracted adult wisdom teeth contain stem cells in the pulp at the centre of the tooth (PNAS, vol 97, p 13625). So when his six-year old daughter and her friends started losing their baby teeth, he decided to see if they also contained stem cells.
Whenever a tooth fell out, instead of putting it under the pillow, the parents stored the tooth in a glass of milk in the refrigerator overnight.
To isolate the stem cells, Shi extracted the pulp and cultured the cells for several days, then tested the survivors for markers of stem cell activity. About 12 to 20 cells from a typical incisor tooth turn out to be stem cells.
By culturing the cells in various growth factors, Shi could differentiate the cells into tooth-forming cells, fat cells or neural cells. The differentiated cells survived when implanted under the skin and in the brain of immunocompromised mice.
Shi also found that the cells promote the growth of bone. He suspects the stem cells may play a role in preparing the way for adult teeth. "We don't have evidence at the moment, but we think these stem cells do have a reason to be there."
The discovery of stem cells in baby teeth could give a big boost to oral surgery, says oral biologist Bjorn Reino Olsen, at Harvard Medical School. The cells, once differentiated into odontoblasts, could secrete dentine. This bone-like material could then replace the less biocompatible metal posts that are currently used to anchor implants to the jaw.
Take it from someone with too many crowns, any serious attempt to extend healthy life will have to deal with decrepit teeth. This development is definitely good news.
In response to my note about the odd absence of Starbucks in Greenville, Aussie-blogger-in-London Michael Jennings writes:
That is quite interesting. I have actually been running a series of posts on my blog on the spread of Starbucks around the world. Starbucks' international strategy involves something called "clusterbombing" (their expression). Essentially, they enter individual cities one at a time, and go from no stores in the city to a substantial number in a very short time. Thus there is really no middle ground. Either you have cities with no Starbucks, or cities with Starbucks seemingly on every street corner, but nothing in between. When I commented on this on my blog, I qualified my discussion by saying that this model might not apply in North America, because I simply didn't know. However, from your comments on Greenville, it looks like it might. (When you say that there are no "free standing" Starbucks, I assume you mean that you found one or more outlets in bookstores or at the airport or something like that). My most recent comment is here.
I think there may be an element of this "all or nothing" aspect in why Starbucks are such a favourite object of hatred for anti-globalisation types. Visit a few of the most commonly visited international cities (Hong Kong, Tokyo, London, Bangkok) and from the evidence of these you will likely think there is a Starbucks on every street corner throughout the world, when in fact they only have outlets in maybe 20 countries, and only in the very biggest cities in most of those. In terms of global penetration, they are nowhere near being in the same ballpark as McDonald's, say.
(Another interesting situation is what may be called "preemptive Starbucks cloning", in which someone else will create a chain of coffee shops that look very like Starbucks in a city or country. The first reason is that there is a market for that kind of coffee shop that Starbucks haven't yet filled. The second is that Starbucks entered the UK market by acquiring such a chain and the people who owned that chain got rich as a consequence. Other people doing the same thing hope to have the same thing happen to them).
To clarify my "free-standing" remark, the Greenville Barnes & Noble store does have the usual Starbucks, and the Bi-Lo supermarkets also have them. But my Greenville relatives definitely feel Starbucks-deprived.
After my Berry College speeches, I took a detour to visit my family in South Carolina. That's why blogging is so light. Not only am I busy with family fun, but my Internet access is limited. I thought I might use some Starbucks Wi-Fi, but amazingly, I've found that Greenville, SC, which is not a tiny town, does not have a single free-standing Starbucks. Proof, I suppose, that the chain still has plenty of room to grow.
Just in time for April 15, I recount the history of the "marriage penalty" in an article for the Boston Globe's Sunday Ideas section. The marriage penalty is one of those subjects nobody in political life tells the blunt truth about. Contrary to popular belief, it's not a conscious policy, the 2001 tax bill didn't get rid of it, a lot of married couples get a bonus, and the public and politicians are deeply attached to the contradictions that give rise to it.
To calculate your own marriage penalty/bonus, use the marriage penalty calculator here.
Update: The link above has been fixed. Thanks to everyone who wrote in--and no thanks to Movable Type for getting it wrong in the first place!
Update II: A friend writes, "I got married last year. Just did my taxes. Wife and I were hit with a HUGE marriage penalty. Gov't promotes 'family values' my ass. It's outrageous." At our house, we know that all government tax policy is based on a single principle, "Tax the Postrels."
[This posting was written last week, but I accidentally left it on "draft" and it didn't appear on the site.--vp 4/14]
Phil Carter has some thoughtful comments on women warriors, and a link to a Slate discussion on the subject, between Debra Dickerson and Stephanie Gutmann.
I'm a pragmatist on this subject, which is why I like the tone and content of Phil's post. But it's important to remember that a truly pragmatic assessment includes remembering what women can do, which is a lot. The military needs their skills.
Pragmatism also means acknowledging, as Phil does, that women are not uniquely subject to brutalization and torture as POWs. Well-intended men may believe that women's suffering is worse than men's--evolution has probably programmed us to think that way--but it isn't. And those who worry about the fates of female POWs tend to forget that women have always been the victims and spoils of war (ever hear the phrase, "rape and pillage"?). Women warriors simply have a chance to fight back.
Rod Nordland of Newsweek reports on a tour of the Ba'ath party's prison and torture chambers in Basra:
Adnan Shaker has a tiny passport picture of himself that he's somehow managed to save during his three years in one of Saddam Hussein's prisons. It shows a handsome man in his 20s, lean and fit, with a luxurious mustache and thick black hair. Today his own three children would probably not recognize him as the same person.
His hair is cropped short. Half his teeth have been knocked out, his face is battered and the eyes sunken and haunted-looking. His chest is covered with 50 separate cuts from a knife, his back has even more marks, which he says are cigarette burns. Two of his fingers were broken and deliberately bent into a permanent, contorted position and there's a hole in the middle of his palm where his torturers stabbed him and twisted the blade.
Today, though, Adnan was a happy man, so happy that he could barely restrain his excitement. He was finally freed from a prison in downtown Basra, after British troops entered the city and drove the remaining defenders away. And as he took a small group of American journalists on a tour of the hospital, he enthusiastically led a crowd of fellow ex-prisoners, their families, friends and passersby in the first rendition of a pro-American chant that any of us have so far heard: "Nam nam Bush , Sad-Dam No" ("Yes, yes, Bush, Saddam No"). They chanted and danced, filling one of their former cells in a spontaneous celebration.
The prison was originally the School for Adult Reeducation, until the authorities converted it after the Shiite uprising against Saddam in 1991 and, perversely renaming it the Jail for Adult Reeducation, used it as a place to punish rebellious Shiites. The white walls outside are covered with blue-painted Baathist and pro-Saddam slogans, but nothing announces that it's a prison. In the central courtyard, there's a long-disused basketball hoop, under which are arrays of metal beds for prisoners who were lucky enough to sleep outside. Arrayed around that were groups of classrooms, now cells, which housed so many men that they had to lie down in shifts to sleep. Prisoners whose families had enough money to bribe the authorities at the prison went into Unit One, where they were only occasionally beaten; it cost at least three million Iraqi dinars for that privilege (about $1,000 at the current rate). Unit Two was worse, and so on. In Unit Four, where Adnan lived for his 10-year sentence, the prisoners say they were tortured daily, sometimes thrice daily. Only Unit Five was worse, in a sense. It was where they took them to die.
Read it all. There's also video.
The only good thing about tax time is Dave Barry's annual tax-time column. Here's the conclusion, which isn't the best part, just the most self-contained:
Here's my proposal, which is based on the TV show Survivor: We put the entire Congress on an island. All the food on this island is locked inside a vault, which can be opened only by an ordinary American taxpayer named Bob. Every day, the congresspersons are given a section of the Tax Code, which they must rewrite so that Bob can understand it. If he can, he lets them eat that day; if he can't, he doesn't.
Or, he can give them food either way. It doesn't matter. The main thing is, we never let them off the island.
Tomorrow morning, I'll be traveling to Berry College in Rome, Georgia, to give a lecture on The Future and Its Enemies tomorrow night and The Substance of Style on Thursday morning. I used to live in Rome, but I left when I was 3.