No More Waiting for the Slayer
Amazon has started shipping DVDs of the final season of Buffy. (You can buy all seven seasons here.) Thanks for all your orders via this site.
Dynamist Blog
Starbucks for Soldiers
The WaPost reports on efforts to give troops in Iraq better brew than the Maxwell House and Taster's Choice doled out by Halliburton contractors:
Some GIs in Iraq, distraught over the quality of military coffee, keep clamoring for stronger java than that served by Halliburton. Never one to miss a brand-development opportunity, Starbucks CEO Jim Donald came to Capitol Hill this week to announce that the Seattle-based coffee giant will donate 50,000 pounds of beans for overseas troops, with distribution handled by the Red Cross. Much smaller outfits -- including Just Plain Joe Coffee of Stevensville, Md., Santa Lucia Estate Coffee of Potomac and Dean's Beans in Massachusetts -- have been donating coffee to military personnel in Iraq for months.
In related news, Starbucks announced that its profit rose 46 percent from last year. Caffeine competitor Coca-Cola wasn't so lucky.
Head Banging Research
Professor Postrel called my attention to this interesting Sports Illustrated piece on efforts to measure football hits as they occur.
For years a football player taking an especially vicious hit to the head has been said to have gotten his bell rung. Like most euphemisms, that cute phrase masks a serious problem: the 300,000 sports-related concussions that take place in the U.S. every year. Medical experts still know surprisingly little about concussions, but thanks to a new device installed in football helmets at Virginia Tech, North Carolina and Oklahoma this season, researchers are beginning to amass data about these brain injuries. What they learn could force a rethinking of everything from helmet design to tackling technique and even the rules of the game.
The technology used to gather the data is called HITS, for Head Impact Telemetry System, and was developed by a team of engineers at Simbex, a Lebanon, N.H., company that specializes in biofeedback devices. HITS uses six accelerometers -- the devices that trigger auto air bags -- to measure the exact force, location and direction of each impact during a game. The accelerometers are mounted in a U-shaped pad that fits snugly into a helmet, along with a microprocessor and a radio transmitter. Each time the player's cranium accelerates due to a tackle or a collision, the acceleration is registered in g's, and that information is transmitted to a computer by the bench. There the data pops up in graphics that are easy to read even on a hectic sideline. A bar graph indicates the force of the blow, and an arrow points to the exact place of contact on a three-dimensional image of a head. If the impact exceeds a predetermined level -- it's 80 g's at Virginia Tech -- a pager instantly alerts the team doctor, who then knows to monitor the player closely.
The Hokies pioneered the use of HITS last season, rotating eight of the specially equipped helmets among 38 players. "Last year we recorded 3,312 impacts," says Stefan Duma, a mechanical engineering professor who directs Virginia Tech's Center for Injury Biomechanics. "This year, [using 20 helmets] we've recorded more than 10,000 already, with numerous concussions. This isn't the first attempt to put a monitor in a helmet. The revolutionary thing here is the magnitude of the sample and the instantaneous feedback to the team physician. What we're going to come up with is guidelines on when to look for injury."
No one knows how much force is required to produce a concussion. A five-year NFL study that used game film of concussed players to reproduce collisions using crash dummies identified 98 g's as the threshold. But this year the Oklahoma staff has recorded impacts in excess of 100 g's with no apparent consequences. In addition, the cumulative effect of subconcussive impacts, over a game and over a season, remains a mystery. Also unknown are how other factors -- such as physiology, past history, age and even altitude or air temperature -- might affect the threshold.
Alas, the link does not work for nonsubscribers. But you get the gist.
The Big Story
Arafat is dead. But then you knew that. He was a bad guy. But you knew that too. He had won the Nobel Peace Prize. If you didn't know that, you do by now. They led with that credential when CBS broke into CSI: New York with the big news.
I've finally gotten over my old reaction to the announcement of all such "Special Reports." I used to assume that the president had been shot. Now, even though the world is full of surprises and surprisingly bad news, I don't expect much when "We interrupt this program." It's just part of the war with 24/7 cable and as likely to be trivial, or in this case expected, as important or surprising. Arafat's death could have waited a few minutes until the end of the show. If I want news as it happens, I watch cable or surf the Web. In fact, I wasn't even watching CSI: NY live, but on Tivo with a 45-minute delay.
At any rate, I missed the end of CSI: New York. So why did the guy kill all those people? The CSI guy, I mean, not Arafat.
UPDATE: CBS is apologizing: "An overly aggressive CBS News producer jumped the gun with a report that should have been offered to local stations for their late news. We sincerely regret the error. The episode of CSI: NEW YORK will be rebroadcast Friday, Nov. 12." (Via Drudge.)
The Visual Display of Electoral Information
Lots of cool maps here. Thanks to Joel Sabin for the tip.
Northern Lights
A gorgeous slideshow of aurora borealis photos, from the WaPost site.
More Steves
Via Steve Portigal, here are the Top Ten Greatest Books of All Time About Guys Named Steve. (If you like Grant McCracken's site, check out Steve's as well. He and my own Steve P. are frequent commenters there.)
A Celebration of Steves
If you're lucky enough to have a Steve in your life, my friend Steve Kurtz has created the perfect gift, a picture book called Steve's America: A Celebration of Steves. You can order it here.
Flipping through the book, I noticed a disproportionate representation of photos from Upstate South Carolina (samples here and here. When I mentioned this geographical peculiarity, Steve replied:
As to Greenville-Spartanburg, that was just one of the fascinating things about doing the book--you never knew where you'd find cool stuff. Sure, the populous states had plenty of places, that was bound to happen. But the in-between states were always mysteries. One state might be a washout while the next was amazing. For example, Minnesota was a disappointment, but Wisconsin more than made up for it. And going down the Eastern seaboard, while the state of Virginia offered surprisingly little, South Carolina was a cornucopia. It's not that I stayed there long, it's just that there were a bunch of places, relatively close together, worth checking out. I might add that Steve's Pallets (listed in the phone book as "Steve's Bags Gaylord Box" for some reason I can't understand) was way out along a country road and, just as I was about to turn back, I found it. The guy let me walk all around the area after I first promised I wasn't with the IRS.
In fact, I left out a few places since I had so much. There's Steve's Car Wash of Inman, Steve's Muffler in Greer (just a mile up the same street as Steve's Fuel Oil), Homework By Steve in Greenville and Steve's Printing in Spartanburg, none of which made the final cut. I remember tracking down Steve's Printing and it turned out to be the guy's garage. I knocked at his front door and no one answered. Then I walked into his backyard, into his garage, and took some photos. I was quite worried I might get in trouble, but no one was around.
And that's the kind of stuff I did for several months. It was a strange time.
Buy the book here.
GOOD READING
Grant McCracken's always-interesting blog is full of good stuff: advice to Democrats from a disinterested Canadian anthropologist (that would be Grant) and a fascinating entry on the cultural significance of "Silent Saturdays," where parents stay quiet during their kids' soccer games.
Partisan Robots
Jesse Walker has a modest proposal for dealing with all the partisan robots who make intelligent political discussion so difficult:
The folks who spent the campaign saying Halliburton is a front for NAMBLA are now muttering that they're ashamed to be Americans and want to join Canada. The folks who spent the campaign fretting that John Kerry is a sleeper agent for the Viet Cong are now claiming that they're the only "real" Americans and, in general, confusing "51%" with "98%." In a classic illustration of the thesis that you eventually become the thing you most hate, the Kerrybots are now terrified, resentful, and convinced that the culture is poisoned; the Bushbots are smug, self-congratulatory, and as condescending when they discuss the coasts as a Hollywood producer deriding "flyover country."