Reason Magazine - Staff > Katherine Mangu-Ward > Hit & Run Posts

Angels and UFOs: I Believe I Can Fly

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 14:32:00 EDT

68 percent of Americans believe in angels and 38 percent believe in UFOs. So what's not to like about a panel featuring early stage investors known as angel investors talking about strange new spacecraft?

Remember the NewSpace nerds* from Las Vegas? This weekend, these scrappy commercial space entrepreneurs, investors, and engineers have gathered in Virginia's slightly-less-sparkly Crystal City and I stopped by to see if they're still up to their old tricks.

Having a conference in a down-at-the-heels commercial district just outside D.C. offers up a pleasing metaphor for an industry that has mixed feelings about its runt position at the government teat.

Asked about the impact of government money on a small space company, one panelist raised his crossed fingers in front of him, as if to ward off evil. Another panelist, former venture capitalist Marco Rubin, said "Government money is the cheapest form of money. But I’ve seen it become crack cocaine for some serial entrepreneurs.” Certain kinds of government contracts can be a "culture killer" for companies that value being "light, nimble, and entrepreneurial," says Andrew Nelson, COO of the space firm XCOR Aerospace. Nelson also suggested that government cash-dependent companies grow more slowly than their fully-private counterparts.

But then all the panelists acknowledged that most large, successful space companies eventually depend on government revenue to survive, at least in part. So public/private it is, at least in the long run. NASA doesn't seem to be selling tickets yet, but there's plenty of action if you have some spare cash and want to reserve your seat on a quickie space flight now.

More info on real Space Angels and NewSpace 2008 panelist Guillermo Söhnlein here.

Awesome retro cartoon Space Angel here.

*I use the term nerd with the greatest affection and approbation.

It's Funny Because It's True

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 11:33:00 EDT

Maryland, like most states, would like businesses to open up shop within its borders. So the state put up a nice little website with all the great things about doing business in Maryland.

An educated workforce! Low taxes! Rolling hills! And very low union membership. Err, whoops? Did we say that last part out loud?

The “Choose Maryland” site said Maryland has a “quality workforce … key to achieving corporate goals” and pointed out that private-sector union membership in Maryland is below the national average and that between 1990 and 2001, unions won representation rights for only 1 percent of the total new firms.

Naturally, hilarity ensues and everyone has to apologize for stating the obvious.

Of course, touting low union membership is unacceptable. But a little South-bashing never hurt anyone:

“Outraged e-mails are flying across the state’s entire labor movement,” Maryland Politics Watch’s Adam Pagnucco wrote. “We cannot believe that rhetoric typical of Georgia and Oklahoma would be sanctioned at any level inside the [Gov. Martin] O’Malley administration.”

More reason on unions here.

Happy Cost of Government Day!

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 12:40:00 EDT

As the good people at Americans for Tax Reform are quick to remind me, today is "the date of the calendar year on which the average American worker has earned enough gross income to pay off his or her share of spending and regulatory burdens imposed by government on the federal, state and local levels."

So treat yourself to a beer—or your drug of choice—tonight (perhaps at the reason happy hour). You deserve it. And when you think about all the terrible days you have had at work already this year laboring in the service of Uncle Sam, you might need to have another.

What Politicians Are Actually Saying, In Case You Care

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 12:40:00 EDT

So much of political coverage is hearsay and paraphrase. But actually sitting and listening to politicians talk in order to find out what they think is a fate worse than death. What's a mildly interested political observer to do?

Now, thanks to a super-cool new Google gadget, you can cut to the chase. The Elections Video Search Google Gadget lets you search for keywords in transcribed YouTube videos from the Politicians channel. The gentlemen from Mountain View admit that accuracy is far from 100 percent at the moment—many of the transcriptions are terrible and the videos aren't well-sorted—but it's a start. You can even search just McCain or just Obama clips. And it sits right on your iGoogle homepage, so even the truly lazy can satisfy the smallest tremors of curiosity about what those guys are blathering about.

Via the Official Google Blog

Schwarzenegger for Cabinet (and President?)

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 14:47:00 EDT

Amid murmurs that he might consider a position as energy czar—from McCain or Obama—Schwarzenegger puts in a good word for the virtues of the flip flop:

"Flip-flopping is getting a bad rap, because I think it is great," Schwarzenegger told ABC's "This Week" in an interview broadcast Sunday.
"Someone has made a mistake. I mean, someone has, for 20 or 30 years, been in the wrong place with his idea and with his ideology and says, 'You know something? I changed my mind. I am now for this.' As long as he's honest or she's honest, I think that is a wonderful thing. You can change your mind," he said. "I have changed my mind on things and there is nothing wrong with it."

This is why I love Arnold. This is why America loves Arnold. This is why Arnold is a mere constitutional amendment away from the presidency.

Take a peek back at my coverage of the Arnold-dominated 2008 Governors' Declaration on Climate Change, where everyone agreed that no matter who won the election, he'd be "better on global warming" than Bush. Maybe that's because no matter who wins we're going to wind up with Schwarzenegger in the cabinet.

Query for constitutional scholars: What happens if Arnold is the only cabinet member to survive some kind of horrible attack. Does he finally get to be president, lack of native-born status notwithstanding?

CEO Capitalism Caveats Competition Continues

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 12:06:00 EDT

Remember Bill Gates' "creative capitalism" brainstorm? It's going to be the new system "where governments, businesses, and non-profits work together to stretch the reach of market forces so that more people can make a profit or gain recognition doing work that eases the world’s inequities."

At the time, I fretted that creative capitalism would be subject to the same problem as compassionate conservatism—we could wind up with a collage of the worst bits of the state and the market, rather than the best. For much more discussion on this topic from smart people, go here.

Not to be outdone in the alliteration wars, Whole Foods CEO John Mackey, a self-identified libertarian and a supporter of the nonprofit that publishes this website, offered his response yesterday at FreedomFest, an annual conference in Vegas "where free minds meet": Conscious capitalism.

Conscious capitalism doesn't include much of what Gates called "a direct role for governments." Mackey views himself as something of a libertarian—he candidly admits that "I'm not a big fan of government"—and says that "economic freedom is what results in poverty reduction," and "big government aid projects" don't.

For the beginnings of this line of thinking, check out Mackey's contribution to the Greatest reason Feature Ever, a debate between Mackey, Milton Friedman, and Cypress Semiconductors founder T.J. Rodgers on corporate social responsibility. (Question: Is corporate social responsibility now an outdated term, what with all these newfangled competitors?)

Do Cylons Like Organic Farming?

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 15:13:00 EDT

In today's New York Times, the story of Erehwon Farm, just outside Chicago. People pay a flat rate for a share of the produce, access to the land, and the chance to work the farm from time to time. Most of the subscribers, the Times reports, are locavores, in it for the environmental benefits as well as a desire to "get back to the land." One of the farms' business partners boasts, "We do everything by hand for more than 100 different crops.”

Erehwon is nowhere spelled backward. This same orthographic trick is played, albeit sloppily, by Samuel Butler in his 1872 novel, Erewhon.

In the book, a young man goes through the looking glass and emerges into a gentle inversion satire on Victorian society. The sick are treated like criminals, for instance, while criminals are offered nothing but solicitude and wishes for a speedy recovery.

But perhaps our charming communitarian farmers were more inspired by this element of Butler's fictional world--the citizens of Erewhon are aggressively technophobic. All manner of machinery is banned, and our hero's watch nearly gets him killed. This aspect of the book was drawn from Butler's essay "Darwin Among the Machines," which speculates on the possibility of machines evolving and eventually achieving some form of intelligence.

Could these Chicagoans laboring in the field be staving off The Rise of the Machines? Do the cylons of Battlestar Galactica, machines evolved to look like us, justify Erewhonian Ludditism?

Starving Indians Not Impressed by Global Warming Plan

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 18:55:00 EDT

How do you say "screw you" in Hindi?

The plan's authors, the Prime Minister's Council on Climate Change, said India would rather save its people from poverty than global warming, and would not cut growth to cut gases.
"It is obvious that India needs to substantially increase its per capita energy consumption to provide a minimally acceptable level of wellbeing to its people."
The plan's only real promise was in fact a threat: "India is determined that its per capita greenhouse gas emissions will at no point exceed that of developed countries."

More global warming fun here.

EU Agriculture Commissioner Is a Peach

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 15:01:00 EDT

European Commission agriculture commissioner, Mariann Fischer Boel of Denmark, wants to scrap most of the regulations governing the marketing of vegetables and fruits. The current regime is needlessly finicky, she says, causing grocers to discard slightly bent carrots and lumpy peaches in a time of rising food prices in Europe and famine abroad.

Consider the Class I cucumber, which must be "practically straight (maximum height of the arc: 10 mm per 10 cm of the length of cucumber)." Translation: A six-inch cucumber cannot bend more than six-tenths of an inch. Following 16 pages of regulations on apples (Class I must be at least 60mm, or 2 1/3 inches, in diameter) come 19 pages of amendments outlining the approved colors for more than 250 kinds.
As for peaches, "to reach a satisfactory degree of ripeness . . . the refractometrix index of the flesh, measured at the middle point of the fruit pulp at the equatorial section must be greater than or equal to 8° Brix."

And if that doesn't convince that things have gotten out of hand in Europe's fruit stands, this will:

In January 2007, the Dutch Ministry of Agriculture issued a report in which it took 29 pages to explain "quality standards for onions," complete with 43 photographs.

Brings a tear to your eye, doesn't it?

America's own war for ugly tomatoes here.

"If We Could Just Get Our Arms Around the Internet"

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 14:41:00 EDT

With gloomy economic news all around, people are fretting a little more than usual about cash flow these days. So thank god Oregon has already taken steps to keep people from safely, legally getting their hands on a little extra cash in an emergency.

Neon signs like the one at right are going out all over the state as three out of every four payday lenders close their doors after the state imposed a cap on the amount of interest they can charge. The storefronts that remain open to wrap up pending business are having to turn away prospective customers:

"The sad part is we have 25 people a day coming into our stores begging to borrow from us," said [Ken Wayco, president of small, high-interest lender], "but we can't lend to them."

So where are those people going? Online, of course:

In Oregon, officials now worry most about residents going into debt with payday lenders on the Internet, Tatman said.
Internet lenders selling to Oregonians are required by law to register with the state and abide by its regulations, but many do not.
It is difficult for the state to control Internet payday lenders who charge triple-digit interest rates, Tatman said. "If we could just get our arms around the Internet better to make sure people don't jump out of the fire and into the frying pan."

We'll give the final word about this state of affairs to the upbeat Angela Martin, director of economic fairness for Our Oregon, a nonprofit "consumer advocacy group" in Portland.

"It is fantastic for Oregon."

"It Is Unclear Why He Did That"

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 13:38:00 EDT

A tidy example of how government can corrupt business, rather than the far more frequently chronicled reverse case:

In my idyllic suburban hometown of Wellesley, Massachusetts, the police shut down a brothel a few days ago. According to the Wellesley Townsman, one of those arrested for running the business was a man named William Eastwick.

The paper also notes that six months ago the Wellesley police shut down a similar operation nearby. That police action was based on a tip from the same William Eastwick. Oddly, when referring to the Eastwick tip, the town paper says "it is unclear why he did that."

The temptation to shut down your competitors using the heavy hand of the state is ever-present. This little example of dueling rats is basically the same thing as, say, protective tariffs on steel or corn subsidies. Because the businesses in question happen to be illegal, the instruments are even blunter than usual.

Via Greg Mankiw

Taxation Without Transportation

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 16:13:00 EDT

Ever tried to cancel an airline ticket, only to discover that all the taxes, fees, and other annoying tacked on charges aren't refundable? Turns out it's just the U.S. government that keeps taxes for services not rendered.

European airlines refund taxes and fees, even when the ticket itself is nonrefundable. "For airlines, refunding the taxes and fees actually showcases to consumers what a large percentage of tickets those expenses are -- an issue that airlines have been harping on for many years."

And we're not talking chicken feed here. From The Wall Street Journal:

Last year, taxes and fees on U.S. domestic flights averaged $50 per ticket, with an effective tax rate of nearly 16%, according to a study by the aviation division of Daniel Webster College in Nashua, N.H. (The average domestic ticket cost $363 last year, including the $50 in taxes and fees, the study found.)

Set a Camera to Catch a Thief

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 12:11:00 EDT

A rematch in the citizens-with-YouTube versus law enforcement wars:

Dave Johnson's motorbike was stolen. He wasn't lucky enough to catch the thieves in the act, but he posted a note on Craigslist to keep his neighbors informed. Turns out that one of his neighbors caught the troublemakers on camera attempting another bike heist. They posted the video, which shows the car and faces of the culprits, on YouTube.

The Sacramento sherrif's office is ticked off at engaged citizens for stealing their thunder using basic online tools. A spokesman offers a strange hodgepodge of reasons why the video shouldn't have been posted:

Sgt. Tim Curran of the Sacramento Sheriff's Department said releasing possible evidence in any case can damage the chances of getting a conviction in court.

"It pollutes the jury pool, if you will," he said. "A lot of times, things can come out from that video that the suspect can use in their defense."

But Dave thinks using YouTube may help get his bike back. "Any place that shows their picture is a good idea to me," he said.

The Sheriff's Department says that victims should turn over video evidence to their local law enforcement agency and let them decide if it should be released.

To review: Potential jurors shouldn't see all the evidence, lest they be "polluted"; the accused shouldn't get to use exonerating evidence in their defense; and law enforcement arrogates all judgement calls about evidence to itself.

More on citizen law enforcement via YouTube here, and me on NPR talking about the upsides of living in a surveillance society here.

Via Fark

"Almost, Not Quite, Entirely Unlike Tea"

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 12:48:00 EDT

This month in retro-futurist news: The sad death of David Caminer, who "found the earliest ways to use a computer for business purposes, including standardizing flavorful, cost-effective cups of tea."

Caminer worked for a huge tea-cookies-meat pies-and-other-Britishy-things company called Lyons. The company needed faster clerical work to handle the math required to figure out efficiency stats and employee wages at its growing empire. In 1951, years before similarly useful* IBM computers were a twinkle in an American eye, they had a usable business computer up and running.

To help us laymen comprehend this development, New Scientist made this comparison: “In today’s terms it would be like hearing that Pizza Hut had developed a new generation of microprocessor, or McDonald’s had invented the Internet.”

All this brings to mind the greatest instance of automated tea in all of fiction: Arthur Dent's noble, computer-handicapping struggle to get a decent cuppa after the Earth is destroyed. The ship's computer eventually manages to produce a substance "almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea."

I've never tasted the fruits of Caminer's labors, but I believe he managed to do slightly better by not asking the computers to make the tea directly.

More delicious retro futurism here.

*Updated: IBM had, of course, been around forever, puttering around with big clunky mainframes.

60 Percent of Americans Won't Read This

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 15:01:00 EDT

A new study out from Pew finds that only 40 percent of Americans get news about the presidential campaign from the Internet. Useful for all of us pixel-stained wretches to keep in mind.

But the numbers are changing fast:

At this point in the 2004 election cycle, 31% of Americans had used the internet to get political news and information. The jump to 40% who say this now is even more striking because the population of online political users already exceeds the number of Americans who had used the internet for politics in the entire 2004 campaign. Moreover, the proportion of Americans getting political news and information on any given day in the spring of 2008 has more than doubled, compared with a similar period in 2004. In May and June of 2004, about 8% of adults were using the internet on a typical day to stay in touch with political developments. In April and May of this year, 17% of adults are getting political news online on a typical day.

And maybe, just maybe, Obama Girl actually is going to decide the election:

35% of Americans have watched online videos related to the campaign and 10% have used social networking sites to engage in political activity.

Via The Weekly Standard blog

Nashville to Lebanon Rail Line Fails. Lebanon War to Blame?

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 14:38:00 EDT

Mass transit continues to prove itself to be expensive, unpopular, and unprofitable--even when it "debuted as the least expensive commuter rail to be built in the United States" and when high gas prices are in the headlines every day.

Tenessee's Music City Star line is completely dysfunctional. Transiteers were shocked to discover that insurance, station security, and marketing cost money (who could have known!?). The inevitable $1.7 million shortfall resulted.

The Feds, who contributed some big bucks to the project, aren't pleased. When even the federal government wants its money back, you know things are bad:

The Federal Transit Administration, which invested more than $30 million in the 2006 start-up of the Lebanon-to-Nashville commuter line, would demand its money back from the Regional Transportation Authority and the return of all assets if the Music City Star were to stop running, it wrote in a letter to local authorities this week.

Note: That's Lebanon, Tennessee. Sadly, there is still no Orient Express originating in Nashville. The line was launched in 2006, however, about the same time as the Israel-Lebanon War. Coincidence?

How spectacular is the failure?:

In the first year, ridership fell considerably short of consultant projections of 1,479 daily trips. It's now averaging about half that number and recorded 938 trips on its best single day.

Via alert reader Jason Bates

Democratic Convention Update: Organic Fanny Packs and a Ban on Fried Food

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 11:49:00 EDT

In case you were worried about how Democratic convention planning is going in Denver: Don't worry. A "Director of Greening " has been hired, so everybody can relax.

The Wall Street Journal reports on the Democratic convention's "lean 'n' green" catering rules:

No fried food. And, on the theory that nutritious food is more vibrant, each meal should include "at least three of the following colors: red, green, yellow, blue/purple, and white." (Garnishes don't count.)

But everything isn't always sunshine and radicchio in Denver:

The host committee for the Democratic National Convention wanted 15,000 fanny packs for volunteers. But they had to be made of organic cotton. By unionized labor. In the USA.
Official merchandiser Bob DeMasse scoured the country. His weary conclusion: "That just doesn't exist."
Ditto for the baseball caps. "We have a union cap or an organic cap," Mr. DeMasse says. "But we don't have a union-organic offering."

I'm sure Ms. Robinson will be able to handle these challenges. After all, what better preparation could there be for running the Verdant Directorate than a degree in environmental studies from UC Santa Barbara, a guest role as "Barbara" on West Wing season 3, episode 4 ("Ways and Means"), and an appearance as Party Guest/Bridesmaid in Nutty Professor II: The Klumps?

Well, two out of three ain't bad.

Surfing, Orgy, Apple Pie, Boobs

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 16:31:00 EDT

Legal determinations in obscenity trials rely, in part, on "community standards," one of the parameters defined in Miller v. California. The question is whether "the average person, applying contemporary community standards' would find that the work, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest."

A lawyer in a current obscenity case in Florida has adopted an unusual approach to finding out what the community is really up to--checking out what they're googling. The findings:

Except for brief periods near Thanksgiving, searches for "orgy" consistently outrank attempts to find information about "apple pie" in Florida . The rest of the year, orgy searches are closer in frequency to what might be expected to be a common activity in Florida, "surfing."

We always suspected the much-ballyhooed "community" wasn't quite as wholesome as its reputation suggests. Looks like we were right--our neighbors have been googling orgies all along.

Via Ars Technica

"Ask Yourself Why Government Doesn't Start Helping to Fix This Mess"

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 16:02:00 EDT

In this weekend in The Washington Post, David Ignatius deplores the effects of airline deregulation. Among them:

In the years since deregulation, nearly 200 airlines have come and gone. These inadequately financed carriers — whose principal goal has often seemed to be merely to exist long enough to reap the rewards of an initial public offering — have consistently cut prices to attract passengers.

But this is exactly how we know that, as a general matter, airline deregulation has worked pretty well. Nowhere is Schumpeter's line about the perennial gale of creative destruction more relevant (or more metaphorically apt) than in the airline industry. Challengers arise, competition brings down prices and encourages innovation in services, and the losers have to sell their toys to the winners and go home.

The airline industry is far from a perfect market, of course. And even if it were, traveling would still be annoying, inconvenient, and subject to the vagaries of bad weather, mechanical malfunctions, and morons trying to jam an elephant into the overhead bin. Europe has been whupping us lately in the sustained deregulation stakes.

But Ignatius gives away the game in his own article:

The cost of domestic travel has gone up just 52 percent since 1978, compared with a 218 percent increase in the consumer price index. But otherwise, the U.S. industry has been a total loser.

Yep, other than the fact that prices for flights remain almost magically, absurdly low--low enough, in fact, for the number of American flying the friendly skies to have doubled in the 20 years after deregulation went into effect --no good has come of deregulation. Nope, none at all. After all, workers are "embittered." Air travel is "a staple of late night comedy." Dear god, no!

Ignatius instructs us to "ask yourself why government doesn't start helping to fix this mess." But that's the wrong question. There are problems with American air travel, but bipartisan action from Congress--the holiest of grails for the Washington Post opinion writer, doesn't exactly have a flawless record of efficient on point solutions, either.

Go buy a cheap ticket somewhere fun at expedia.com and then don't forget to enjoy a sample from the enormous archive of news articles from the airlines-are-going-to-hell-in-an-handbasket-because-of-evil-corporations genre. Like this one ("The numbers for 1986 suggest that the nation's airlines are flying closer than ever to disaster, but by some combination of wit and luck are emerging with an improving safety record") or this one from 2002 ("this is shaping up to be a year for passengers to write their travel plans down in pencil, not ink.")

China: An Island Nation?

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 14:52:00 EDT

China isn't embracing rum cocktails with little umbrellas in them (as far as I know). But given the realities of Chinese geography--shared land borders with 14 other countries, but most of the population clustered away from those borders in the Han "heartland"--they might at least consider adopting some of the better features of island nations (say, hammocks and tropical fruit) to balance out the troublesome isolation:

From Strange Maps:

Only in three places are the Chinese borders naturally permeable: at the Vietnamese frontier, via the Silk Road, and near Russian Far East. Hilly jungles separate China from Laos and Burma, the Himalayas shield it from the Indian subcontinent, almost impassable deserts divide it from Central Asia and the forbidding expanses of Siberia have never appealed to Chinese expansionism (until now, as the Russians fear).
With the exception of the Ming dynasty’s sponsorship of admiral Zheng He’s naval expeditions (as far away as Sri Lanka, Arabia and Africa) in the early 15th century, China has never attempted to be a naval-based power – so for most of its history, China’s ports on the Pacific were hardly windows on the world either.

Check out the original article on Investors Insight, with lots more maps clarifying and expanding on the one above.

Al Sharpton, Tax Protester?

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 16:51:00 EDT

Sharpton sticks it to the (tax) man:

Sharpton himself, his business entities and his nonprofit civil-advocacy group owe millions in back taxes, documents show....
As of 2006, the most recent year that financial documents for [Sharpton's National Action Newtwork] are publicly available, it owed $1.9 million in payroll taxes and penalties....
Personally, Sharpton owes $931,397 in federal taxes and $365,558 in New York City taxes, according to an IRS lien.

When you throw in Wesley Snipes, it's a trend of two tax-dodging celebs! It's sweeping the nation!

UPDATE: Read the proud history of the "trend of two" here.

Welcome to Little Idaho, DC. Care for Some Fries?

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 12:58:00 EDT

Washington is a strange city, with a New York-style grid undergirding what has since become known as a Parisian-style system of squares and parks with wide diagonal avenues in between--New York hustle buried under Parisian pomp and circumstance. As if unable to decide on a single organizational scheme, D.C. has numbered streets, lettered streets, state streets, quadrants, and twisty water-tracing parkways. The layers upon layers of competing rules for organization and traffic flow have also long served as a handy metaphor for out-of-towners attempting to navigate the federal bureaucracy.

A little-known fact is that the city's planner, Pierre L'Enfant, had a mad, brilliant plan for the little squares dotting the Capitol Hill landscape:

Each of these squares, he told Washington, was to be, in effect, the center of a little village. All these villages should be settled simultaneously to encourage the city to fill in between them. And one such “village” should be allotted to each state to help attract investors from those states. That way each state would have a presence, symbolic as well as financial, in the new federal city, and engage in prideful competition to settle and expand its stake. Such a visionary idea might have gone a long way toward selling the notion of federalism to those still wary of an imposing national capital.

But there's always a metaphor-ready twist:

But that aspect of the plan was apparently never seriously considered. (Instead, this strip became Pennsylvania Avenue, a power lane rather than an artery of urban life.)

Instead, the squares that remain today host bums, metro stops, the occasional office worker having lunch on a sunny day, and zero monuments to the glory of federalism and/or commerce. Oh well. C'est la vie.

For more on Our Nation's Capitol, read Matt Welch on the city of rats, and Radley Balko on the National Mall going kitsch.

Does Too Much Data=Bad Predictions?

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 17:55:00 EDT

There's no shortage of data available to police, meteorologists, and other soothsayers. But could there be a point where more data means worse predictions? Yes, sayeth camera skeptic and BoingBoing impresario Cory Doctorow:

Take London: cover every square inch of the city with CCTVs and you'll get so much information that you'll never make any sense of it. Scotland Yard says that CCTVs help solve fewer than 3% of all crimes, while a study in San Francisco found that at best, criminals simply move out of camera range, while at worst they assume no one is watching.
Similarly, if you take fingerprints from every person who applies for a visa – or worse still, from every person in Britain who has to carry one of the proposed new biometric cards – you will fill the databases with chaff that slows down searches, generates endless false matches, and threatens everyone in the database with the worst kind of identity theft.

Check out Doctorow's recommendations for political books for young adults. And check out his book, Little Brother.

No Taureau Rouge?

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 12:58:00 EDT

France says "eh" to Red Bull, allowed for now only in a neutered, taurineless form, on both nationalist and health grounds. And maybe not for long...

France is extremely wary of letting in big name, globally available products. Apparently they don't like Coca Cola, and now the Ministry of Health is giving Red Bull a hard time.

Read all about it here.

Eat, Drink, Krugman, Woman

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 16:00:00 EDT

Paul Krugman is freaking out again today about America's food supply. This time, of course, the problem is tainted tomatoes.

Opting for a Carrie Bradshaw-style lede question, he asks:

How did America find itself back in The Jungle?

Last time around, you'll recall, Krugman blamed Milton Friedman for our spinach woes.

Fortunately, Alex Tabarrok isn't afraid of raw CDC data (or raw spinach, for that matter). He crunches some numbers and comes up with this:

On an only slightly related topic, Krugman's headline "Bad Cow Disease" made me think, for one shining moment, that he might have written about the tempest-in-a-teapot scandal over Judge Kozinski's online pictures of "naked women on all fours painted to look like cows."