The Olympics are always a festival of human biodiversity, with each sport having its ideal body-type.

The Chinese Olympic team flagbearer Yao Ming, the enormously tall Houston Rockets center who memorably led the Chinese in during the Opening Ceremonies next to the tiny hero boy who rescued two classmates buried in the recent earthquake, is the product of a more or less arranged marriage between the centers on the Chinese national men’s and women’s basketball teams. Colby Cosh points out the 2005 book Operation Yao Ming by Brook Larmer, which begins:

The faint whispers of a genetic conspiracy coursed through the corridors of Shanghai No. 6 Hospital on the evening of Sept. 12, 1980. It was shortly after 7 p.m., and a patient in the maternity ward had just endured an excruciating labor to give birth to a baby boy. An abnormally large baby boy. The doctors and nurses on duty should have anticipated something out of the ordinary. The boy’s parents, after all, were retired basketball stars whose marriage the year before had made them the tallest couple in China. The mother, Fang Fengdi, an austere beauty with a pinched smile, measured 1.88 m—more than half a foot taller than the average man in Shanghai. The father, Yao Zhiyuan, was a 2.08-m giant whose body pitched forward in the kind of deferential stoop that comes from a lifetime of ducking under door frames and leaning down to listen to people of more normal dimensions. So imposing was their size that ever since childhood, the two had been known simply as Da Yao and Da Fang—Big Yao and Big Fang.

(more…)

As I’ve often mentioned, the most remarkable streak in sports is in the Olympic men’s 100 meter dash. The 100m competition typically starts off with about 80 entrants from around the world. After the first round, the top 40 move on to the quarterfinals, then 16 to the semifinals, and ultimately 8 to the finals.

Over the last six Olympics, 1984 through 2004, all 48 finalists have been men of West African descent.

Of the 40 survivors of the 2008 first round, there appear to be 3 East Asians (two from Japan and one from China), six Europeans (Poland, Italy Britain, Slovenia, Spain, and Russia), one or two mulattoes (e.g., Brazil), and around 30 blacks of West African descent, including the representative of Norway.

The Japanese can be pretty fast, as baseball player Ichiro Suzuki shows. Japanese runners made up 3 of the 32 semifinalists in the 1996-2000 Olympics.

Judging by the first round times, I’m assuming this streak will continue for a seventh Olympiad.

If I had to guess the man to break this string, it would be 21-year-old Craig Pickering of Milton Keynes, England. The British beat the Americans to win the gold in the 4×100 meter sprint relay in Athens in 2004, showing that they are a legitimate sprinting power, so Pickering even making the British team for the Olympics is impressive. In the first heat, Pickering ran a solid 10.21 to finish third just behind two West Indian stars, former world record holder Asafa Powell and two-time Olympic finalist Kim Collins. That made him the fastest nonblack in the world on Friday. (To be precise about this, you should adjust for wind velocity, which I haven’t done.)

But Pickering’s year probably won’t be 2008. His goal now is to make the semifinals. He’ll likely be more of a threat when he’s at his 25-year-old peak at the 2012 Games in front of the hometown crowd in London.

Pickering told the Guardian:

“I only get bothered when I’m asked about the race issue. I don’t believe I can’t run 100m in 9.99 because I’m white.

Of the 364 times that human beings have run under 10.00 seconds, only once was by somebody not of largely or completely West African descent — Patrick Johnson of Australia, who is half Irish, half Australian Aborigine. (A Pole and a Japanese have run ten flat.)

“And I don’t believe black sprinters think that just because of their colour they’re automatically going to run under 10 seconds without working hard. But I don’t like these questions because I’m scared of saying something that might offend black people - or even white people.” …

The prospect of both Pickering and Aikines-Aryeetey improving markedly between now and the London Olympics needs to be considered in light of Colin Jackson’s recent assertion that it would take a miracle for a British athlete to win gold on the track in 2012. “I actually endorse that,” Pickering says, while acknowledging that Jackson’s formidable record as a world champion hurdler was also forged under Arnold’s coaching. “If you look at the current state of British athletics, it is going to need a small miracle. America can produce 10 great new athletes a year. Nine of them might go to American football but the 10th will probably still beat most European athletes. The Americans won’t be quaking that I’ve run 60m in 6.55. Next year in the indoor world championships they’ll probably have three athletes running under 6.50 - so in that sense we might need a miracle.”

And yet Pickering’s strong displays this year are striking especially because, as he points out, “60m is not my best distance. I’m much more suited to the 100m and I’ll be 25 in 2012 - which is the perfect age for a sprinter. So who knows?”

The AP reports:

WASHINGTON — Barack Obama and John McCain agree on Frank Sinatra.

The two presidential candidates offered widely different top 10 favorite songs to Blender magazine but shared the same appreciation for Ol’ Blue Eyes. Obama chose “You’d Be So Easy to Love,” while McCain liked “I’ve Got You Under My Skin.”
In the September issue, on sale nationwide Tuesday, the candidates delivered their list.

McCain prefers ABBA’s disco classic “Dancing Queen.” Obama favors the hip-hop jam “Ready or Not” by the Fugees.

(more…)

Scientific American has an article, “High Aptitude Minds,” by Christian Hoppe and Jelena Stojanovic on the relationship between brain size and IQ:

Most studies show that smarter brains are typically bigger—at least in certain locations. Part of Einstein’s parietal lobe (at the top of the head, behind the ears) was 15 percent wider than the same region was in 35 men of normal cognitive ability, according to a 1999 study by researchers at McMaster University in Ontario. This area is thought to be critical for visual and mathematical thinking. It is also within the constellation of brain regions fingered as important for superior cognition. These neural territories include parts of the parietal and frontal lobes as well as a structure called the anterior cingulate.

But the functional consequences of such enlargement are controversial. In 1883 English anthropologist and polymath Sir Francis Galton dubbed intelligence an inherited feature of an efficiently functioning central nervous system. Since then, neuroscientists have garnered support for this efficiency hypothesis using modern neuroimaging techniques. They found that the brains of brighter people use less energy to solve certain prob­lems than those of people with lower aptitudes do.

(more…)

A point that’s often overlooked in the anthrax case is that mad scientist Bruce Ivins had at least two counselors over the years who were disturbed enough by what he said during therapy sessions to alert the authorities that he was likely to murder somebody.

His 2008 counselor, who led a group therapy session for substance abusers, had to get a judge to issue a restraining order against Ivins after he threatened to murder her, along with his colleagues at work. This poor woman has had her dirty laundry aired all over the Internet by people trying to discredit her. Of course, Ivins made threats in front of his therapy group, so if you don’t believe the group leader, you could just ask the other members of the group. But, I guess, the theory then would be that they are all drunks and pill-poppers too, so you can’t believe them either … or something.

Tellingly, Ivins’ therapist in 2000 went to the cops, too, because Ivins had told her he intended to poison a young woman if she lost a soccer match. Fortunately, her team won.

That’s like Anton Chigur demanding the that gas station clerk in “No Country for Old Men” flip a coin to see if he lives or dies. It’s just not sane.

For me, that evidence that he was homicidally loony many years before the FBI had ever heard of him is, more than anything else, what caused me to change my evaluation of the case against Ivins from Plausible to Highly Probable. When a suspect kills himself, that’s usually a sign of guilt. Perhaps, though, the FBI badgered an innocent man into suicidal depression?

But, it now turns out that Ivins had boasted about much of the modus operandi of the 2001 attacks in 2000–poisoning people and taking long drives to anonymously mail things without anybody noticing.

Moreover, it appears that the FBI was not in contact with his 2000 counselor until this summer. Evidently, they had settled upon him as the main suspect before talking to his 2000 counselor.

Strangely enough, it was Ivins himself who set in motion the surfacing of his 2000 therapist. Why did he do it? The Washington Post reported on August 7 about his 2000 counselor, who has had the good sense to stay anonymous and not endure the kind of abuse to which his 2008 counselor has been subjected:

The counselor had not heard from Ivins for years until he called out of the blue about two months ago. Politely, “he asked whether I remembered him,” she said. And he asked whether she could give him his records for his attorney.

When FBI agents called her late last month [July] — near the day [July 29, 2008] Ivins swallowed a lethal dose of Tylenol — she replied, “In all my 25 years of counseling, there is only one client the FBI would call me about.”[Acquaintances and Counselor Recall the Scientist's Dark Side, August 7, 2008]

So, why did Ivins’ attorney want Ivins’ psychiatric records from 2000?

The only rational explanation that I can come up with is that his attorney was considering, with Ivins’ cooperation, a not-guilty-by-reason-of-insanity plea in the anthrax terrorism case.

Ivins would have been crazy not to plead insanity!

Judging from what we’ve seen of Ivins emails, you could make a decent argument that he was close to legally insane in 2000. My vague impression is that he wasn’t quite as crazy in 2001, perhaps due to the medication he’d been prescribed: I haven’t heard about as many deranged emails from 2001 as from 2000.

In summary, we should have a national commission to investigate the anthrax terrorism. Put on it non-politicians who could master the genetics and the criminal investigation — Henry Harpending, Vincent Bugliosi, Richard Posner, people of that caliber. My guess would be that Ivins will turn out to be the killer.

By the way, Science has a helpful article on the genetic side of the FBI’s case.

One of the endless problems of nationalism is finding low friction borders for nations. Oceans clearly work the best, but what else can be used?

At first glance, rivers look like they’d make good borders because they are line-shaped and they are moderately defensible in case of war. In reality, though, navigable rivers typically run through the heart of a nation (the Nile, the Mississippi, the Thames, the Volga, the Yellow, the Ganges, etc.). Indeed, nations are most likely to rise up along both banks of a mighty river.

Mountain ranges, such as the Pyrenees dividing France and Spain, seem more promising. They are military defensible and they reduce cultural and economic interchange, so the people living in the flat lands on either side of a big range tend to see themselves as different peoples.

The problem tends to be, however, that few mountain ranges are uninhabited. The mountaineers generally are often ornery folk who don’t like being shoved around by flatlanders, and they live on both sides of the border. The Pashtuns who live on both sides of the Khyber Pass are the classic example. What could be a more logical place to draw the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan than the rugged mountains pierced by the famously narrow Khyber Pass? Yet, that logical border seems nonsensical to the millions of Pashtuns who live in the region and pay no attention to that line.

Similarly, the ridgeline of the Greater Caucasus mountains makes a perfectly sensible border between Russia and Georgia, except to the Ossetian-speaking peoples who live in those mountains, both north and south of the border.

From New York magazine (via NRO):

In October, Obama’s former pastor, Wright, will publish a new book and hit the road to promote it, an occasion that might well place the topic of Obama’s blackness (along with his patriotism and his candor about what he heard in the pews in all those years at Trinity Church) squarely at the center of the national debate. How Obama handles that moment may determine whether he becomes the next occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

As I blogged here on April 2:

So, I don’t expect we’ve heard the last from Rev. Wright. All summer, he’s going to be sitting in his new mansion on the golf course in the gated community in 93% white suburban Tinley Park brooding on how Obama has betrayed him, and what he’s going to do about it.

He’ll think of something.

For example, last November 2, he invented the Jeremiah Wright Trumpeter Lifetime Achievement Award and gave it to Louis Farrakhan at a big bash at the Chicago Hyatt Regency, but it took the white media ten weeks to even notice what a black man had done. This year, there are all sorts of people he could give his award to on, say, Saturday night November 1st. And I bet this year it won’t take ten weeks before the white press talks about it!

Or maybe somebody else will think of something for Wright to do. If you were a literary agent, say, wouldn’t you want to sign Wright up for a quickie bestseller, with a release date targeted at, say, 10/1/08? Hustle your best ghostwriter out to Tinley Park and get Wright’s memoirs and views on current issues slapped together by the Fourth of July. Make that deadline and you could have it on the bookshelves five weeks before Election Day!

No, I don’t think we’ve heard the last from Rev. Wright.

Update: Now, Rev. Dr. Wright’s daughter says that isn’t true. She asserts her father is in an electronically inaccessible region of Ghana and will issue a statement when emerges from “email hell.”

I must say, the news Rev. Wright is currently hanging out with Dr. Livingstone and Mr. Kurtz makes Obama look much more Presidential than did the endless Obama-Wright psychodrama of last spring. As I blogged on April 29:

(more…)

Reading various commentaries on the Russia-Georgia war over South Ossetia, I’m struck by all the American pundits who have such strong opinions on whether this little dot of land should belong to one country or the other.

While it’s fun to argue over rights, in situations where a separatist province has long enjoyed de facto autonomy, such as South Ossetia or Taiwan, the best thing is usually to do nothing. The formula dreamed up by Nixon, Kissinger, and Chou for Taiwan in 1972 is logically absurd, but it has worked for 36 years, so why fix what isn’t broken?

On the other hand, if it’s assumed something has to be done about a disputed territory, the optimal way to settle it is often via a mutual auction. If both Russia and Georgia want South Ossetia, they should put their money where there mouths are. Auction off South Ossetia with the highest bidder paying that sum to the loser of the auction.

It’s a lot better than war.disputes.

Nine years ago, the U.S. and its NATO allies bombed heck out of Yugoslavia (i.e., Serbia) in order to liberate Kosovo, a province universally recognized as legitimately part of Yugoslavia-Serbia. After a couple of months, Milosevic gave up, and Kosovo recently declared its independence.

Russia has been squabbling for years with Georgia over a bit just over the Russian border within Georgia called South Ossetia, that, like Kosovo, is ethnically different on the whole from the rest of Georgia. Yesterday, Russia and Georgia went at it hammer and tongs.

How, exactly is this different from our Kosovo War, other than that Kosovo was thousands of miles away from America, while South Ossetia adjoins Russia?

Wikipedia writes:

“The Republic of South Ossetia consists of a checkerboard of Georgian-inhabited and Ossetian-inhabited towns and villages. The largely Ossetian capital city of Tskhinvali and most of the other Ossetian-inhabited communities are governed by the separatist government, while the Georgian-inhabited villages and towns are administered by the Georgian government. This close proximity and the intermixing of the two communities has made the conflict in South Ossetia particularly dangerous, since any attempt to create an ethnically pure territory would involve population transfers on a large scale.”

Back in 2000, on the first anniversary of the Kosovo war, I offered an explanation of a costly but peaceful way to resolve these kind of inevitable disputes.

As Testing99 has commented, the idea that a lone mad scientist could have pulled off the 2001 anthrax attacks is, in one way, much scarier than the idea that it was a conspiracy using special weaponized anthrax. If Ivins, whose anthrax specialty was defense, not offense, could have done it all by himself, then anthrax terrorism isn’t that hard to do. Not easy–Ivins had 20 years experience at the bioweapons lab–but not dauntingly hard, either.

That would be bad news.

We were frequently told in 2001 that the terrorist’s anthrax had been weaponized using sophisticated techniques to make it especially dangerous, but, did that turn out to be true?

Greg Cochran emails:

I’m pretty sure that the FBI doesn’t think there was any super-special ‘weaponization’ at all. From Wiki:

” The August 2006 issue of Applied and Environmental Microbiology contained an article written by Dr. Douglas Beecher of the FBI labs in Quantico, VA.[30] The article, titled “Forensic Application of Microbiological Culture Analysis to Identify Mail Intentionally Contaminated with Bacillus anthracis spores ,” states “Individuals familiar with the compositions of the powders in the letters have indicated that they were comprised simply of spores purified to different extents.” The article also specifically criticizes “a widely circulated misconception” “that the spores were produced using additives and sophisticated engineering supposedly akin to military weapon production.” The harm done by this misconception is described this way: “This idea is usually the basis for implying that the powders were inordinately dangerous compared to spores alone. The persistent credence given to this impression fosters erroneous preconceptions, which may misguide research and preparedness efforts and generally detract from the magnitude of hazards posed by simple spore preparations.” However, after this article had appeared the editor of Applied and Environmental Microbiology, L. Nicholas Ornston, stated that he was uncomfortable with Beecher’s statement in the article since it had no evidence to back it up and contained no citation. “

I’ve never seen any evidence of any coating, either, just a lot of people say that there must have been some. Finding silicon with a mass spectrometer doesn’t mean a there was any coating. This discussion is complicated by a natural reluctance to talk about the exact methods of preparing weapons-grade anthrax. I suspect that one point they’d really like to skip over would be that its fairly easy.

More on this from the Washington Post, 2006:

” The FBI would not allow Beecher to be interviewed about his article. But other scientists familiar with the forensic investigation echoed his description. Whoever made the powder produced a deadly project of exceptional purity and quality — up to a trillion spores per gram — but used none of the tricks known to military bioweapons scientists to increase the lethality of the product. Officials stressed that the terrorist would have had to have considerable skills in microbiology and access to equipment.

“It wasn’t weaponized. It was just nicely cleaned up,” said one knowledgeable scientist who spoke on the condition he not be identified by name because the investigation is continuing. “Whoever did it was proud of their biology. They grew the spores, spun them down, cleaned up the debris. But there were no additives.”

Like I said. This simplifies the situation considerably.