I'm forever fascinated by examining the Time Zone Map of who's been reading here. Pretty darn cool.

Talking about the virtual world subculture, you might google for "Edward Castronova". He's an economist who's done field work on the economies of virtual reality worlds. Here's a news story about him.

Chester,

How do you account for the spike in the SE Asia time zone?

Speaking of subculture, there's this: www.cosplay.com.

I seem to recall that during the Berkeley Free Speech Movement in 1964 two professors wanted to determine how accurate the crowd estimates were. Accordingly, the obtained a photo of one of the largest rallies, one where the crowd size was estimated at more than 10,000, and actually hand-counted the crowd. Their count came in at about 3,500, if memory serves.

It strikes me that it would be very useful to actually count the crowd at a demonstration like Saturday's, where crowd size is a way of making a political statemment (or lack of one) so that the attendance figure could be fact based. I wonder if software for counting, say, bacterial colonies might not be adapted for this purpose, or if a neural net might not be trained to do the job. At the very least, it would be very valuable to hand-count the crowd at at least one major demonstration in Washington D.C. on the Mall or in the Eclipse so that it could serve as a standard against which future demos could be measured.

Paul,

Now that is an excellent idea. How many people can crowd into the Mall and its environs? Good way of looking at it.

Just a quick update on crowd counting. I just did a Google search of news stories on crowd-counting. After the organizers of a February 2003 anti-war demonstration in San Francisco claimed to have attracted a crowd of 200,000 to 250,000, the San Francisco Chronicle found that a series of aerial photos of the crowd had been taken from a light plane, and arranged for a "descrete count" to be conducted from the blow-ups. The result was a crowd count 65,000.

Great work, Paul. I wonder how much some commercial imagery of the weekend's festivities would cost? Probably a few hundred bucks. Maybe next time they schedule one of these, we could have a quickie fundraiser ahead of time. Of course that would mean we have to pay attention to the schedules of ANSWER etc. How depressing.

I suppose I'm accounting for bit of the UTC-0 traffic these days while traveling in West Africa and now Scotland.

I've been wondering for the past few days about the post-Katrina-pre-Rita hysteria and the amazing costs associated.

I haven’t seen any figures about what the mass evacuation is costing us the tax payer but I think it’s safe to assume that it was done in the usual expensive way of politicians who boast about how much was spent as if by spending more they somehow care more or know better. I am from Houston but I’ve been over in the UK for the past week so I don’t get all the news, however I did hear reports on the radios that the long traffic jams caused city officials to fly out those stranded by the traffic jams. I don’t see how this falls under government responsibility. We all know the media would cry it’s a dereliction of duty to do anything otherwise, but where is the line drawn that people are responsible for their own safety. Is this exaggerated need to support irresponsibility and protect those too foolish to protect themselves the lead weight around the Nation-State’s neck? Will we be able to afford the ever growing costs and assumed liabilities for future disasters no matter how large or small and regardless of predictability? I guess the nation-state will sink fully into a nanny-state before it must transform to market-state. How will the market-state respond differently, will it tolerate insurance company bankruptcies?

Many of you have probably seen the ‘Porkbusters’ logos and stories across the blogosphere. I’m hoping that these new calls for government efficiency, particularly in regards to relief spending, are a sign of things to come in the new market-state.



I know I’m a bit late to the discussion but hopefully someone else has thoughts on the subject. Nobody else I know has read ‘The Shield of Achilles’ (TSOA) or seems much interested to do so.

Sorry I'm commenting a little late on this post...

I've had a question on my mind for quite awhile now that maybe Chester or somebody in this crowd might be able to help me with.

My military knowledge comes primarily from readings on the American Civil War, and these are not military manuals, but personal memoirs.

It seems that the goal of war (in the classical sense) is to achieve the surrender of the opposing force. This is done through the application of pain and suffering. It seems that we each have a "breaking point" where the pain becomes so great that the impulse to cry "uncle" overwhelms the impulse to continue the conflict. And this seems to be true of people/armies/societies collectively as well.

If surrender is the Goal, and pain and suffering are the Means; I would think that the military would have studied this phenomenon to gain an understanding of how much pain and suffering is required to achieve surrender. Having an idea of the amount of pain and suffering that must be administered would be very useful to pre-war planning.

Also, from a moralistic viewpoint, I see from the Civil War that the application of too little pain and suffering doesn't bring surrender and just prolongs the war which inevitably leads to more casualties. If, say, 5 units of pain and suffering are required and only 3 units are applied, then surrender is not achieved. If some months later another 3 units are applied, still no surrender. If 3 units at a time are applied over and over and over again, then surrender is never achieved and the total casualties are much higher than if 5 units of pain and suffering had been applied the first time. (This is how, in a nutshell, I understand Lincoln's misgivings for his numerous Generals). This also strikes me as the situation with the Israeli/Palestinian conflict -- both sides strike with too little force (for, perhaps, different reasons) to achieve a permanent end to the conflict and so casualties continue to mount decade after decade.

But on the other hand, if only 5 units of pain and suffering are required and 10 are applied, then you also have more casualties than needed to achieve your goal. In this case, the mistake is being too heavy handed.

So it seems that there is some optimum level of pain and suffering that is needed to achieve surrender and a permanent end to further casualties. Applying either more or less than this level will result in more overall wartime casualties than applying just the amount needed.

Does anybody know if the military has studied this to form some kind of theory and/or guidelines for the application of pain and suffering to achieve surrender? (I would expect this to include what constitutes pain and suffering, how to achieve pain and suffering, as well as how much of the various types of pain and suffering are required under different circumstances). (I would also expect that it uses very different terminology).

It also seems that what we are experiencing, in our relatively recent efforts at the practice of war, is the problem that the application of pain and suffering to others is painful to ourselves. Perhaps this is what Mahatma Gandhi understood in his approach with the British. Their application of pain and suffering to the Indians was painful to themselves, so they surrendered. This also happened for the USA in Vietnam and we are currently seeing (and are concerned with) its influence on the MNF in the war in Iraq. This perception might also, at least partially, underlie Osama Bin Laden's "we value death more than they value life".

Thoughts anyone?