In America, when I think Michelin I think tires and that white mascot (the Michelin Man) who looks like a series of different-sized Menthos glued together like a multi-tiered wedding cake, or the corporate logo love child of the Stay-puff Marshmallow Man and the Pillsbury Doughboy.

In Europe, though, Michelin means restaurant ratings, but not the warm and fuzzy democratic ratings of America's Zagat Survey. Leave restaurant evaluations to the masses? Quelle horreur! No, we're talking elite French ratings, a la "you tink weeth a credit rating like zees you ken hav zee duck? You cannot hav zee duck." Hell, a top rating only gets you 3 stars. Bertolucci's The Dreamers alone receives 4 stars from Ebert, and it's merely filmed in France.

But what a 3 stars they are. In 2003, famed chef Bernard Loiseau committed suicide, presumably because his restaurant La Côte d'Or was to be downgraded from 3 stars to 2.

Now one-time Michelin employee Pascal Remy is writing a tell-all tale about the machinations behind the scenes at his former employer. Oh la la, the scandal.

The closest I came to dining at a Michelin 3-star restaurant was in Monaco in 1998. Derek and I walked up and peered into Alain Ducasse's Louis XV in the Hotel de Paris, but alas, a sportcoat was required of all diners, and we were but a pair of raggedy student backpackers.

It surprises me not that for the French, food is a life-and-death matter. It shows in their food and in their critics.
posted by Eugene Wei at 11:57 PM | link

Caught a new Nike commercial during the Chappelle Show tonight. It's linked off of the Niketown homepage. Good stuff (the commercial, and the Chappelle Show).

I was still chuckling to myself when I logged on and found an e-mail from Ken pointing to the same commercial. That puppy is going to spread quickly.

Ken also sent me this link to Ask the Whitehouse, "an online interactive forum where you can submit questions to Administration officials and friends of the White House." The host this time? Michael Waltrip, NASCAR driver. He fielded weighty questions such as:

Steve, from Dover writes:
Michael You guys are in your cars for a long time. What if you have to hit the bathroom?

posted by Eugene Wei at 7:55 PM | link

I link to Louis Menand reviewing a book that reviews the Boris Spassky-Bobby Fischer chess match of 1972, the "Match of the Century."

I'm not sure why I find chess so intriguing, but one of these days, I'd like to learn how to play well.
posted by Eugene Wei at 11:22 PM | link

NOTE: I found this post in my draft folder. I guess I never published it. I was searching my own site using Google to try and locate the name of the program that would help predict the optimal time to buy a plane ticket (turns out it's called Hamlet). I sure could use it right now as I have to purchase plane tickets to all sorts of weddings and events these next several months. Well, this post is about a year old, but it's only midly stale. I've found week-old pizza crusts in cardboard boxes and eaten them without a second thought, so I might as well dust this one off...

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One trend which has always intrigued me is the ever-growing world of computer-aided pattern recognition. It sits at the intersection of several vectors: the growth in computing power (driven in large part by Moore's Law), improvements in software algorithms (e.g. with neural networks), and breakthroughs in human understanding of how we perceive and process certain stimuli.

Let's take a real world example. Humans have long puzzled over why we find certain people physically attractive. Enough studies have been done to determine that certain visual cues play a huge part in what many have otherwise considered to be subjective evaluations. This recognition allows us to create robots which evaluate how good-looking people are.

Extrapolate to the future. Someday, we might evaluate a several dozen photos of members of the opposite sex for a computer which would then try and determine what physical features attracted us. Then that computer could be attached to video sensors to screen people on your behalf. Imagine if Match.com could pre-screen the looks of people on behalf of its users, or if you could just hold up your digital camera cellphone in a bar or at a concert and have the camera highlight people you'd be attracted to.

Now pair this with some poly-layer voice analysis software (i.e., lie detector), also loaded on your phone. You approach a prospective date and begin making small talk, flirting up a storm. "Oh you are so funny!" Are they being honest? You ask for a phone number and they read off some digits. Is that their real number? You glance down at your phone, which you've casually left on the table. You press a button, pretending to check for messages, and the phone says no, it's unlikely you'll ever hear from this person again, and that phone number likely comes from one of these services.

Sure, it's somewhat creepy to contemplate, and extremely shallow, but it's naive to think it doesn't emulate what people do today anyway, only a computer might be able to do it quicker, allowing us to then evaluate those things which are more difficult for computers to gauge, like personality, sense of humor, etc.

Here's another real-world example I'd love to test. Researchers at the University of Washington have created a program called Hamlet which can advise travelers whether to purchase a ticket now or wait for a while for a lower price [when I purchase plane tickets, I try to shoot for 7 cents or less per mile to evaluate whether or not I'm getting a good deal]. Airlines have heavily guarded pricing algorithms which move prices up and down. To a human, these price fluctuations are hard to comprehend and appear quite random. But it makes sense that a computer, looking at years and years of price fluctuations, could more easily reverse engineer those algorithms.

[One scary thought: these price fluctuations have helped airlines to maximize their profitability over the years. Only customer purchasing at a few times during the year will receive the lowest price on any flight. Yet almost all airlines are not profitable, and many have filed for bankruptcy. Can you imagine what would happen if programs like Hamlet increased airline price transparency? All fares would probably have to go up just to allow airlines to stay in business, just as the Internet and ease of price shopping really hurt airlines during the late 90's. They had grown accustomed to gouging business travelers and some percentage of their personal travelers, and both those groups became more price-savvy.]

A fun example of computer-aided pattern recognition is Shazam which I first heard about through work. Available in the UK and Germany, Shazam helps you identify songs you hear. When you hear a song that you can't identify, simply dial 2580 on your cellphone and hold it up to the music source. The software on the other end listens for 30 seconds, then ends the call. Then it compares the input against a massive database of songs, identifies the song, and sends you a text message with the title, artist, and other info.

There's nothing magical about this process, of course. It's like a fingerprinting system or any other database. But it does something which humans can't easily do, and one can easily imagine that this service will become available all over the world, a global auditory CDDB.

Pattern recognition can be serious business. I recall reading about software that successfully predicted the crime rates in various neighborhoods based on a variety of info on its inhabitants and surrounding neighborhoods. Crime analysis software has long been a holy grail for law enforcement agencies. Today, the FBI uses software to track down serial killers. By looking at the locations of a series of serial killings suspected to be related, software can narrow down the likely area in which the killer lives, taking advantage of historical analysis which indicates that serial killers like to work close to home.

The beauty of this computer-aided pattern recognition is that a human doesn't have to understand why certain patterns are generated, or how they're generated, in order for the programs to be effective. I may not understand why the price of a certain flight is supposed to go down next week, but if Hamlet is right and snags me a lower airfare, I probably won't care.

Computers don't even have to better humans in pattern recognition to be of value. In some cases, simply replacing humans might free us to do more valuable work, or might extend our bandwidth and reach. For example, computers which can monitor closed circuit cameras and detect car thieves could allow parking garages to blanket their premises with cameras while maintaining the same or fewer security guards. The computer would simply alert a guard when a suspected crime was taking place. Of course, the uproar over false identifications and privacy would be immediate and impassioned, but ethical and moral debates over technology are inevitable. Imagine installing a nanny-cam in your house that can page you via your cellphone or e-mail whenever your nanny was suspected of mistreating your child, or whenever your baby was crying. It would save parents a lot of time having to watch hours and hours of footage.

Computing power, paired with neural network algorithms, may even begin to detect patterns which we may not be prepared to deal with. A recent study found that a software program was 90% successful in predicting breast cancer survival chances. Would patients want to know, and would doctors consciously or unconsciously alter their treatment of patients if they knew that the chances for surviving were slim to none?

Of course, humans will still be best at other types of recognition. Despite all the advances in computing, humans are still stronger than computers in long-range planning in chess, and I suspect humans can still kill computers in games with an even larger set of possible moves, like Go. I've written before about FACS--I can't confirm it, but I suspect that human intuition about other people's emotional states is simply a name for a very sophisticated pattern recognition system which we've honed over years of interaction with other people. A friend might notice if something's bothering me based on the faintest of clues, whereas a robot might have to have have all sorts of electrodes and needles attached to me to make the same judgment.
posted by Eugene Wei at 11:03 PM | link

Early reviews of The Passion of the Christ are trickling in, and so far they're all over the map (what a surprise). American Sucker David Denby has been the harshest critic to date, while Roger Ebert gives it four stars and anoints it "the most violent film I have ever seen."

That 3-D, gold colored font used for the film title reminds me of the opening titling from The Lord of the Rings.
posted by Eugene Wei at 11:33 PM | link

The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King is now #2 all-time in worldwide box office behind the amazing anomaly that was Titanic which still nearly doubles it's closest competitor's worldwide gross. It appears that ROTK will be the second movie to crack the $1 billion mark. TTT is #5 all-time, and FOTR is #8. You can see how Peter Jackson can command a $20 million salary for King Kong.

The usual caveats apply: these figures don't adjust for inflated movie ticket prices, the increased number of screens around the world, etc., so the rankings are heavily weighted towards recent history.

UPDATE: Just saw in IMDb's studio briefing that ROTK broke the $1 billion mark this past weekend: "According to its distributor, New Line Cinema, the film's total stood at $1,005,380,412 through Sunday."
posted by Eugene Wei at 10:10 PM | link

The highest scoring men's basketball team in NCAA's Division III is a tiny, private, liberal arts college named after the town where it's located: Grinnell. The school enrolls 1,350, making up a huge part of the town's population of 9,100.

The team's scores this season resemble video game results: 135-128, 143-113, 155-138, 152-76. Remember, this is in only 40 minutes of play as compared to 60 minutes a game in the NBA. Through 22 games, Grinnell has launched 1,432 three-pointers as a team for an average of over 65 per game. Twenty-one different players have played for coach Dave Arseneault this season.

When Arseneault arrived at Grinnell in 1989, the Pioneers were coming off of their 25th straight losing season. Arseneault figured he had nothing to lose by trying something new, so he invented a new system and put it into place. How does it work?

• The Pioneers try to get off a shot, preferably a 3-pointer, within 12 seconds of gaining possession. The system fits their personnel which consists of a lot of short sharpshooters. If the shooter misses and one of the other 4 players gets an offensive board, they try to kick it back out to the original shooter for another 3-pointer. Any shot from inside the arc is a last resort. In 1998, Pioneer Jeff Clement scored 77 points in a game, including 19 3-pointers.


• Adopting a hockey tactic, Arseneault maintains different lineups of 5 players and substitutes entire groups in every 50 seconds. Each lineup goes all out during their time on court and then rotate out.


• Defensively, they run a full-court 1-2-2 press to try and create turnovers.


• Arseneault has the same five goals for his team each game, though they've grown more ambitious over the years: take 100 shots, shoot 30 times more than their opponents, make 50% of their 3 pointers, get 33% of their misses as offensive boards, and force 32 turnovers.


• To attain the number of shots they want to take, sometimes they let the other team score easy layups.


• Another indirect goal of the system is to tire the other team out. Most teams in college really only run 7 or 8 players deep. Using that type of rotation against Grinnell simply wears those 7 or 8 players down because of the pace. Arseneault rarely calls timeouts. In one game, a referee nearly collapsed.

This season, Grinnell is averaging 126.1 pts per game, well on their way to breaking the single season record for avg. pts. per game of 124.9, owned by, yes, Grinnell.

How offensive.
posted by Eugene Wei at 11:01 PM | link

I received my copy of The Grey Album today. I ordered it off of eBay. The Grey Album, for the remaining few who haven't heard, is a CD in which the vocals from Jay-Z's Black Album were laid over samples taken entirely from the Beatles' The White Album.

DJ Danger Mouse, the perpetrator, sent out 3000 CDs to friends. The album would likely have spread through word of mouth, but EMI (one of the labels with rights to the Beatles back catalog) had to come out and issue a ceast-and-desist. That was like tossing dry grass on fire.

eBay sellers hawking the CD were also slapped with the legal notices, so now eBay contains dozens of auctions for "cover art" from The Grey Album, all bundled with a free "mystery CD". Gee, I wonder what that mystery CD might be.

It's sounds like a strange idea, but after thirty seconds of listening, The Grey Album sounds completely natural and, in places, quite ingenious. The old and the new. A long time ago in a galaxy far far away.
posted by Eugene Wei at 1:28 AM | link

Ryan, how do you feel now that Greg Maddux is rejoining the Cubs?

Ryan favors Mongolian-style hats with many of his outfits. Secure in his masculinity, he's not afraid to sport bold red palettes.

posted by Eugene Wei at 12:30 AM | link

Oh hallelujah!

UPDATE: Here's a photo of Maddux, Wood, and Prior as pitchers and catchers reported in Mesa, AZ. What's even more beautiful is that all three (four if you toss in Zambrano) are products of the Cubs farm system.

posted by Eugene Wei at 11:46 PM | link

Finding a new TV show to love on DVD is a unique and joyous event. It means hours and hours of fun over many consecutive nights. For me, the current TV-DVD apple of my Trinitron eye is MI-5, formerly titled Spooks. It's one of those happy instances of the British sending over a superior TV series to the States via BBC (The Office being another sterling example).

Seasons one and two aired here on A&E as one combined season, but by the time I was hooked by the DVDs for the six episodes of season one, A&E had stopped broadcasting the show. My Tivo managed to snare just one measly episode. Waiting for the latest episodes to appear on DVD or TV is agonizing. If someone out there has season two (the original season two) on DVD, well please just send them over and let me know what my firstborn child's name will be.
posted by Eugene Wei at 12:55 AM | link

Getting around to piles of old Sunday NYTimes lying around my place. Caught an interesting article about how Bill Belichick took work on incremental analysis (PDF) by David Romer to heart. Some recommendations: most teams go for the 2-point conversion too often, and it's worth going for it on 4th and short from almost anywhere on the field.

Good to see innovative quantitative analysis making an impact in sports beyond baseball.
posted by Eugene Wei at 12:28 AM | link

Say it ain't so. The Onion article titled "Yankees Ensure 2003 Pennant By Signing Every Player in Baseball" is just one year off. Note this quote from the article:

Some 10 hours later, the final opposing player, Texas Rangers shortstop Alex Rodriguez, had been acquired by the Yankees, who bought out the remainder of his $252 million contract for $300 million.

I'm not sure what to call it when even the satire of the Onion fails to go far enough. The Yankees are that ridiculous.

Losing Maddux to the Yankees would be like a bad nightmare for Cubs fans still trying to forget about losing him the first time, to the Braves. He only went on to win the next 3 NL Cy Young Awards.

Maddux came out of the Cubs farm system. He deserves to win his 300th in Cubbies blue.
posted by Eugene Wei at 11:22 PM | link

I enjoyed this interview with Sofia Coppola, among others, about the making of Lost in Translation, now out on DVD.
posted by Eugene Wei at 11:12 PM | link

Malcolm Gladwell (forever to be known as Mr. Tipping Point) has posted his most recent New Yorker article online. It's a good read as I mentioned before. From Big and Bad: How the S.U.V. ran over automotive safety:

In the history of the automotive industry, few things have been quite as unexpected as the rise of the S.U.V. Detroit is a town of engineers, and engineers like to believe that there is some connection between the success of a vehicle and its technical merits. But the S.U.V. boom was like Apple's bringing back the Macintosh, dressing it up in colorful plastic, and suddenly creating a new market. It made no sense to them.

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Fred J. Schaafsma, a top engineer for General Motors, says, "Sport-utility owners tend to be more like 'I wonder how people view me,' and are more willing to trade off flexibility or functionality to get that." According to Bradsher, internal industry market research concluded that S.U.V.s tend to be bought by people who are insecure, vain, self-centered, and self-absorbed, who are frequently nervous about their marriages, and who lack confidence in their driving skills.

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The truth, underneath all the rationalizations, seemed to be that S.U.V. buyers thought of big, heavy vehicles as safe: they found comfort in being surrounded by so much rubber and steel. To the engineers, of course, that didn't make any sense, either: if consumers really wanted something that was big and heavy and comforting, they ought to buy minivans, since minivans, with their unit-body construction, do much better in accidents than S.U.V.s.

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Most of us think that S.U.V.s are much safer than sports cars. If you asked the young parents of America whether they would rather strap their infant child in the back seat of the TrailBlazer or the passenger seat of the Boxster, they would choose the TrailBlazer. We feel that way because in the TrailBlazer our chances of surviving a collision with a hypothetical tractor-trailer in the other lane are greater than they are in the Porsche. What we forget, though, is that in the TrailBlazer you're also much more likely to hit the tractor-trailer because you can't get out of the way in time. In the parlance of the automobile world, the TrailBlazer is better at "passive safety." The Boxster is better when it comes to "active safety," which is every bit as important.

Are the best performers the biggest and heaviest vehicles on the road? Not at all. Among the safest cars are the midsize imports, like the Toyota Camry and the Honda Accord. Or consider the extraordinary performance of some subcompacts, like the Volkswagen Jetta. Drivers of the tiny Jetta die at a rate of just forty-seven per million, which is in the same range as drivers of the five-thousand-pound Chevrolet Suburban and almost half that of popular S.U.V. models like the Ford Explorer or the GMC Jimmy. In a head-on crash, an Explorer or a Suburban would crush a Jetta or a Camry. But, clearly, the drivers of Camrys and Jettas are finding a way to avoid head-on crashes with Explorers and Suburbans. The benefits of being nimble--of being in an automobile that's capable of staying out of trouble--are in many cases greater than the benefits of being big.

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The S.U.V. boom represents, then, a shift in how we conceive of safety--from active to passive. It's what happens when a larger number of drivers conclude, consciously or otherwise, that the extra thirty feet that the TrailBlazer takes to come to a stop don't really matter, that the tractor-trailer will hit them anyway, and that they are better off treating accidents as inevitable rather than avoidable.

This is a new idea, and one largely confined to North America. In Europe and Japan, people think of a safe car as a nimble car. That's why they build cars like the Jetta and the Camry, which are designed to carry out the driver's wishes as directly and efficiently as possible. In the Jetta, the engine is clearly audible. The steering is light and precise. The brakes are crisp. The wheelbase is short enough that the car picks up the undulations of the road. The car is so small and close to the ground, and so dwarfed by other cars on the road, that an intelligent driver is constantly reminded of the necessity of driving safely and defensively. An S.U.V. embodies the opposite logic. The driver is seated as high and far from the road as possible. The vehicle is designed to overcome its environment, not to respond to it. Even four-wheel drive, seemingly the most beneficial feature of the S.U.V., serves to reinforce this isolation. Having the engine provide power to all four wheels, safety experts point out, does nothing to improve braking, although many S.U.V. owners erroneously believe this to be the case. Nor does the feature necessarily make it safer to turn across a slippery surface: that is largely a function of how much friction is generated by the vehicle's tires. All it really does is improve what engineers call tracking--that is, the ability to accelerate without slipping in perilous conditions or in deep snow or mud.

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So many of my friends have S.U.V.'s., and I can sure understand why all the extra space comes in handy. I often borrow their monsters to move heavy things, and I'm often dependent on them to get to the mountains for snowboarding.

I can also understand the practicality of size. I grew up in a family that always owned some sort of Volkswagen van. Our first was a baby blue, flat-faced toaster of a bus that some hippie ended up buying from us for $2000. It had a suroof you had to open with a hand-operated crank, like a giant car window. It didn't have air conditioning, and the heater barely worked. We carried several thick blankets in it at all times during the winter months. Our next was a dark brown Westfalia camper in which we kids used to have sleepovers in the driveway. I saw most of the fifty states through that camper's windows, and both I and many of my friends learned to drive stick in that refined gentle giant (its engine had just a tad more power than our lawnmower). Whenever we sat in the back, eating a meal our mother cooked on the camper stove, I felt we were living the American dream.

But whenever I'm behind the wheel of an modern S.U.V., with its mushy power steering and unresponsive handling, I'm nervous. For myself, and for whomever I might run into. I guess I'm not the target market.

UPDATE: Some government data on car safety is available online.
posted by Eugene Wei at 10:13 PM | link

The centerpiece of the Feb 2004 issue of Harper's Magazine is a fascinating article titled "The Oil We Eat". Written by Richard Manning and derived from the thesis of his upcoming book Against the Grain: How Agriculture Has Hijacked Civilization, the article blames mankind's move towards agriculture as its primary source of food for a whole host of environmental and social ills.
Who would have thought we'd ever be seeing mug shots of innocuous crops such as wheat, corn, and rice?

Some revealing excerpts:

Agriculture is a recent human experiment. For most of human history, we lived by gathering or killing a broad variety of nature's offerings. Why humans might have traded this approach for the complexities of agriculture is an interesting and long-debated question, especially because the skeletal evidence clearly indicates that early farmers were more poorly nourished, more disease-ridden and deformed, than their hunter-gatherer contemporaries. Farming did not improve most lives. The evidence that best points to the answer, I think, lies in the difference between early agricultural villages and their pre-agricultural counterparts--the presence not just of grain but of granaries and, more tellingly, of just a few houses significantly larger and more ornate than all the others attached to those granaries. Agriculture was not so much about food as it was about the accumulation of wealth. It benefited some humans, and those people have been in charge ever since.

Plato's lament is rooted in wheat agriculture, which depleted his country's soil and subsequently caused the series of declines that pushed centers of civilization to Rome, Turkey, and western Europe. By the fifth century, though, wheat's strategy of depleting and moving on ran up against the Atlantic Ocean. Fenced-in wheat agriculture is like rice agriculture. It balances its equations with famine. In the millennium between 500 and 1500, Britain suffered a major "corrective" famine about every ten years; there were seventy-five in France during the same period. The incidence, however, dropped sharply when colonization brought an influx of new food to Europe.

The new lands had an even greater effect on the colonists themselves. Thomas Jefferson, after enduring a lecture on the rustic nature by his hosts at a dinner party in Paris, pointed out that all of the Americans present were a good head taller than all of the French. Indeed, colonists in all of the neo-Europes enjoyed greater stature and longevity, as well as a lower infant-mortality rate--all indicators of the better nutrition afforded by the onetime spend down of the accumulated capital of virgin soil.

The precolonial famines of Europe raised the question: What would happen when the planet's supply of arable land ran out? We have a clear answer. In about 1960 expansion hit its limits and the supply of unfarmed, arable lands came to an end. There was nothing left to plow. What happened was grain yields tripled.

The accepted term for this strange turn of events is the green revolution, though it would be more properly labeled the amber revolution, because it applied exclusively to grain--wheat, rice, and corn. Plant breeders tinkered with the architecture of these three grains so that they could be hypercharged with irrigation water and chemical fertilizers, especially nitrogen. This innovation meshed nicely with the increased "efficiency" of the industrialized factory-farm system. With the possible exception of the domestication of wheat, the green revolution is the worst thing that has ever happened to the planet.

For openers, it disrupted long-standing patterns of rural life worldwide, moving a lot of no-longer-needed people off the land and into the world's most severe poverty. The experience in population control in the developing world is by now clear: It is not that people make more people so much as it is that they make more poor people. In the forty-year period beginning about 1960, the world's population doubled, adding virtually the entire increase of 3 billion to the world's poorest classes, the most fecund classes. The way in which the green revolution raised that grain contributed hugely to the population boom, and it is the weight of the population that leaves humanity in its present untenable position.

More relevant here are the methods of the green revolution, which added orders of magnitude to the devastation. By mining the iron for tractors, drilling the new oil to fuel them and to make nitrogen fertilizers, and by taking the water that rain and rivers had meant for other lands, farming had extended its boundaries, its dominion, to lands that were not farmable. At the same time, it extended its boundaries across time, tapping fossil energy, stripping past assets.

The common assumption these days is that we muster our weapons to secure oil, not food. There's a little joke in this. Ever since we ran out of arable land, food is oil. Every single calorie we eat is backed by at least a calorie of oil, more like ten. In 1940 the average farm in the United States produced 2.3 calories of food energy for every calorie of fossil energy it used. By 1974 (the last year in which anyone looked closely at this issue), that ratio was 1:1. And this understates the problem, because at the same time that there is more oil in our food there is less oil in our oil. A couple of generations ago we spent a lot less energy drilling, pumping, and distributing than we do now. In the 1940s we got about 100 barrels of oil back for every barrel of oil we spent getting it. Today each barrel invested in the process returns only ten, a calculation that no doubt fails to include the fuel burned by the Hummers and Blackhawks we use to maintain access to the oil in Iraq.

David Pimentel, an expert on food and energy at Cornell University, has estimated that if all of the world ate the way the United States eats, humanity would exhaust all known global fossil-fuel reserves in just over seven years. Pimentel has his detractors. Some have accused him of being off on other calculations by as much as 30 percent. Fine. Make it ten years.

America's biggest crop, grain corn, is completely unpalatable. It is raw material for an industry that manufactures food substitutes. Likewise, you can't eat unprocessed wheat. You certainly can't eat hay. You can eat unprocessed soybeans, but mostly we don't. These four crops cover 82 percent of American cropland. Agriculture in this country is not about food; it's about commodities that require the outlay of still more energy to become food.

About two thirds of U.S. grain corn is labeled "processed," meaning it is milled and otherwise refined for food or industrial uses. More than 45 percent of that becomes sugar, especially high-fructose corn sweeteners, the keystone ingredient in three quarters of all processed foods, especially soft drinks, the food of America's poor and working classes. It is not a coincidence that the American pandemic of obesity tracks rather nicely with the fivefold increase in corn-syrup production since Archer Daniels Midland developed a high-fructose version of the stuff in the early seventies. Nor is it a coincidence that the plague selects the poor, who eat the most processed food.

There is another energy matter to consider here, though. The grinding, milling, wetting, drying, and baking of a breakfast cereal requires about four calories of energy for every calorie of food energy it produces. A two-pound bag of breakfast cereal burns the energy of a half-gallon of gasoline in its making. All together the food-processing industry in the United States uses about ten calories of fossil-fuel energy for every calorie of food energy it produces.

You think being a vegetarian gets you out of jail? Think again.

Green eaters, especially vegetarians, advocate eating low on the food chain, a simple matter of energy flow. Eating a carrot gives the diner all that carrot's energy, but feeding carrots to a chicken, then eating the chicken, reduces the energy by a factor of ten. The chicken wastes some energy, stores some as feathers, bones, and other inedibles, and uses most of it just to live long enough to be eaten. As a rough rule of thumb, that factor of ten applies to each level up the food chain, which is why some fish, such as tuna, can be a horror in all of this. Tuna is a secondary predator, meaning it not only doesn't eat plants but eats other fish that themselves eat other fish, adding a zero to the multiplier each notch up, easily a hundred times, more like a thousand times less efficient than eating a plant.

This is fine as far as it goes, but the vegetarian's case can break down on some details. On the moral issues, vegetarians claim their habits are kinder to animals, though it is difficult to see how wiping out 99 percent of wildlife's habitat, as farming has done in Iowa, is a kindness. In rural Michigan, for example, the potato farmers have a peculiar tactic for dealing with the predations of whitetail deer. They gut-shoot them with small-bore rifles, in hopes the deer will limp off to the woods and die where they won't stink up the potato fields.

Animal rights aside, vegetarians can lose the edge in the energy argument by eating processed food, with its ten calories of fossil energy for every calorie of food energy produced. The question, then, is: Does eating processed food such as soy burger or soy milk cancel the energy benefits of vegetarianism, which is to say, can I eat my lamb chops in peace? Maybe. If I've done my due diligence, I will have found out that the particular lamb I am eating was both local and grass-fed, two factors that of course greatly reduce the embedded energy in a meal. I know of ranches here in Montana, for instance, where sheep eat native grass under closely controlled circumstances--no farming, no plows, no corn, no nitrogen. Assets have not been stripped. I can't eat the grass directly. This can go on. There are little niches like this in the system. Each person's individual charge is to find such niches.

Chances are, though, any meat eater will come out on the short end of this argument, especially in the United States. Take the case of beef. Cattle are grazers, so in theory could live like the grass-fed lamb. Some cattle cultures--those of South America and Mexico, for example--have perfected wonderful cuisines based on grass-fed beef. This is not our habit in the United States, and it is simply a matter of habit. Eighty percent of the grain the United States produces goes to livestock. Seventy-eight percent of all of our beef comes from feed lots, where the cattle eat grain, mostly corn and wheat. So do most of our hogs and chickens. The cattle spend their adult lives packed shoulder to shoulder in a space not much bigger than their bodies, up to their knees in shit, being stuffed with grain and a constant stream of antibiotics to prevent the disease this sort of confinement invariably engenders. The manure is rich in nitrogen and once provided a farm's fertilizer. The feedlots, however, are now far removed from farm fields, so it is simply not "efficient" to haul it to cornfields. It is waste. It exhales methane, a global-warming gas. It pollutes streams. It takes thirty-five calories of fossil fuel to make a calorie of beef this way; sixty-eight to make one calorie of pork.

Still, these livestock do something we can't. They convert grain's carbohydrates to high-quality protein. All well and good, except that per capita protein production in the United States is about double what an average adult needs per day. Excess cannot be stored as protein in the human body but is simply converted to fat. This is the end result of a factory-farm system that appears as a living, continental-scale monument to Rube Goldberg, a black-mass remake of the loaves-and-fishes miracle. Prairie's productivity is lost for grain, grain's productivity is lost in livestock, livestock's protein is lost to human fat--all federally subsidized for about $15 billion a year, two thirds of which goes directly to only two crops, corn and wheat.

You'll have to buy the issue to read the entire article, or, for the time being, you can find a transcript online at the blog How to Save the World.
posted by Eugene Wei at 10:03 PM | link

Seinfeld does this riff in his standup routines on the fine line between "great" and "sucks". He contends there's not much difference. You go see a movie someone claims was great. It ends up sucking. He ends his routine thus: "Great. Sucks. They're the same thing. You buy an ice cream cone, and just as you go to take your first bite, the ice cream falls off the cone onto the sidewalk. What do you say? 'Great.'" Q.E.D.

For me, this weekend was an exploration of "great" and "sucks". I went out for my first ride of the season Saturday morning. It took nearly an hour just to find all the necessary gear: waterproof warm-weather clothing, bike pump, helmet and gloves, shoes, bike tool...ever since moving, there's always one thing each week I just can't find, no matter how hard I look.

My next obstacle was my cycling fitness level, or total lack thereof. It is damn hilly near my place. Just a short 20 mile ride nearly killed me, and the rest of the evening I could barely walk. The old 65th street hill, a good bellwether for my cycling strength, climbs up quick and steep from the Burke Gilman trail. It nearly killed me. My eyes were crossed and legs quivering as I passed over the summit.

Moral of this story? Gravity sucks. Literally and figuratively.

On a related note, the weather in Seattle from November to June? It sucks, especially from a cycling perspective. I don't mind riding in the cold, but rain kills. It chills your skin, decreases braking power, leaves your drivetrain covered in goop, and leaves the roads slippery. The weather from July through some of October? Great.

The Yankees got A-Rod. Without a doubt, that sucks. I hate the Yankees, but I can't blame them. They operate within the confines of the rules established by MLB, and they do it ruthlessly well. Hicks may have overpaid for A-Rod, but it was how he spent the rest of his payroll that caused the Rangers problems. A-Rod was playing unbelievably for them, but no single player can carry a major league team. That's the nature of a sport where nine players are on the field, starting pitchers can only pitch every fifth day, and batters can only bat once every nine at-bats. Tom Hicks is a wealthy baseball fool. Of very minor consolation is the fact that the Yankees are tarnishing A-Rod's legacy by putting him at shortstop, despite the fact he's a great shortstop while Jeter's defense sucks.

Baseball Prospectus did an analysis that indicated that if you took the best players from the Red Sox and Yankees and fielded an All-Star team from just those two teams, it would be nearly comparable to an All-Star team made up of the best players from all the remaining teams. And that was before the Yankees obtained A-Rod.

I love baseball, it's a great game, but that sucks.

Also, this weekend, the great Italian cyclist Marco Pantani was found dead in a hotel room at the age of 34. Pantani's duels with Lance Armstrong in the 2000 Tour de France were awesome, and if Lance never wins a stage at Mont Ventoux he'll look back with regret at giving Pantani that victory at the top of the bald mountain in 2000.

Jason Richardson's dunk in the NBA All-Star game, where he threw the ball off the backboard, caught it in mid-air, put it between his legs, and jammed it? Great.

Stanford men's hoops held off Cal (great), and Duke lost to N.C. State (great), so for the first time I can remember, Stanford may be a legitimate #1 in the AP Poll (really great). I'm looking forward to seeing them at Key Arena as the top seed in the West Regionals.

I watched the Korean movie Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance this weekend. Some of director Chan-Wook Park's other movies have shown a spark, a hint that he might become an accomplished stylist. The lives of the characters in this movie suck. It's not much of a plot synposis, but believe me when I say it's true. Suicides, electrocutions, stolen kidneys, accidental drownings...those are some of the happier moments. It's a flawed movie (it would be much tougher punch to the gut with a more coherent social critique), but Park has the chance to become one of Korea's great directors down the road. Hearsay has it he may have already attained that greatness with Oldboy, a movie I'm dying to see.

Finally, in keeping with the Korean theme, after a day of snowboarding at Crystal today, two carfuls of hungry skiers hit the Korean BBQ restaurant Mi Rak in Federal Way on South Aurora. It's a long way to go for Korean BBQ, but from time to time I get a craving for good Korean BBQ that just can't be satiated any other way. And unfortunately, the Korean food within Seattle city limits sucks, while the Korean restaurants on both far North (Lynnwood) and far South Aurora Ave. (Federal Way) is great. Those areas are known affectionately as North and South Korea. Mi Rak was awesome; we ordered, the food arrived literally two minutes later, we were done eating inside of twenty-five minutes, and I started breathing again about two minutes after that.

Sometimes there's a fine line between great and sucks, and other times it's a forty minute drive.
posted by Eugene Wei at 10:03 PM | link

I only seem to have the attention span for watching a reality TV show in its first season, when the contestants have no history to work off of and the rules of the game are still fuzzy. The first season is when the show is still fresh and pure, when the contestants aren't sure how to game everything. This TV season, that show for me is The Apprentice.

The show has the essential quality of the best reality television, and that is that the characters truly believe they're amazing even though many of them are actually ridiculous. You'd think that would describe Trump as well, but he comes off quite well in the show. I quite enjoy his boardroom firings, especially his explanations for why he's picking each week's victim. Chalk up another self-promotion coup for Trump, who manages, with just a few minutes on-screen each week, to be the star of a show ostensibly focused on the contestant vying to prostrate themselves before the Donald.

Isn't applying for one of these shows a post-modern rite of passage? Maybe I will apply for Season 2.
posted by Eugene Wei at 10:17 AM | link

Amazon now carries my favorite dental floss.
posted by Eugene Wei at 11:05 PM | link

Last week, I wondered how wind chill was measured, so I Googled the term and discovered after some research that there is no agreed-upon method to measure wind chill. In fact, scientists aren't really sure how to measure how cold it is. A few years ago, the validity of the widely used wind chill chart was called into question, and shortly thereafter the National Weather Service published a revised chart which purported to eliminate the exaggerations of its predecessor.

It just goes to show that it doesn't matter what the thermometer reads. When you're cold, you're cold, and it doesn't matter what anyone else says.
posted by Eugene Wei at 9:11 PM | link

A man who didn't want to pay airfare to fly from New York to his parents' house in Dallas shipped himself in a crate. His plan was foiled when, just a few minutes from freedom, on his parents doorstep, he stirred to life too soon and attracted the attention of the deliveryman.
posted by Eugene Wei at 7:49 AM | link

I'm about halfway through the hard-to-put-down Down and Dirty Pictures: Miramax, Sundance, and the Rise of Independent Film. Writer Peter Biskind paints an unflattering portrait of Harvey Weinstein, to be sure.

I have mixed feelings about Weinstein and Miramax. On the one hand, they've raised the profile of plenty of films that might otherwise have never gotten widespread theatrical distribution. In the process, Harvey and his brother Bob have created one of three movie studios whose brand means something to moviegoers (all of them were under one roof at one point, Disney and Pixar being the other two, though Disney's brand has muddied over the past decade). The other studio logos are like postmarks; they don't provide any clue as to the nature of the content inside the envelope.

On the other hand, Miramax routinely butcher movies they purchase from overseas markets (voice dubs of Miyazaki animated films being one example that always leaps to mind), and they also delay the U.S. release of foreign films for such a long time that eager cinephiles are left to seek out DVDs from other countries or to languish in thirst. For example, in this interview at Salon.com, Harvey expresses pride at having delayed the video release of City of God for so long, claiming it helped the movie to retain its buzz and perhaps led to its 4 Oscar nominations. I saw this fabulous movie over a year and a half ago, and it still hasn't come out on DVD (its street date has been pushed back more times than I can count), and now it's finally getting a limited release in theaters. Why does Miramax deserve credit for keeping this movie tucked away in its back pocket all this time? Ridiculous.

If you haven't seen this movie and it comes out in your area the next few weeks, do go see it, though.
posted by Eugene Wei at 11:43 PM | link

A thought-provoking analysis of Charles Schultz's Peanuts comic strip as existentialist.

Ultimately, we exist in an abandoned and free state. We are responsible for our actions, and since Sartre argues that there is no God to conceive of a human nature, we are responsible for our own creation.

How does this apply to Peanuts? Like the existential human in a world of silent or absent deities, Schulz’s characters exist in a world of silent or absent adult authority. In fact, the way the strip is drawn (with the child characters taking up most of each frame) actually prevents the presence of any adults. Schulz argued that, were adults added to the strip, the narratives would become untenable. While references are sometimes made to full-grown humans (normally school teachers) these characters are always out of frame, and silent. The children of Peanuts are left to their own devices, to try and understand the world they have found themselves thrust into. They have to turn to each other for support – hence, Lucy’s blossoming psychiatric booth (at five cents a session, a very good deal).

An ideal example of abandonment is the relationship between Linus and The Great Pumpkin. Every Halloween, Linus faithfully waits by a pumpkin patch, in the hopes that he will be blessed with the holy experience of a visitation by The Great Pumpkin. Of course, The Great Pumpkin never shows up, and He never answers Linus’ letters. Despite this, Linus remains steadfast, even going door to door to spread the word of his absent deity. Does The Great Pumpkin exist? We can never know. But from an existential point of view, it doesn’t matter if he exists or not. The important thing is that Linus is abandoned and alone in his pumpkin patch.

Of course, Charlie Brown does have a deity, and that deity is Charles Schultz, the cartoonist who gives Charlie Brown purpose and action, but Charlie Brown does not know of Schultz and therefore the existence of Schultz means nothing.
posted by Eugene Wei at 11:07 PM | link

Stephen Wolfram's back-busting 1,192-page opus A New Kind of Science is now available online, and it's searchable. It's like Amazon's Look Inside the Book, but for the entire book. Very cool.

I've barely made a dent in the book, but I've gained some definition in my biceps just picking it up to read.
posted by Eugene Wei at 9:19 PM | link

First come predictions. If someone challenges a prediction and the challenge is accepted, it becomes a bet. It may seem like you have to be some bigwig to take part in a bet, though the rules don't mention anything about it. This is Long Bets, and some of the predictions and bets are fascinating and thought-provoking. And then you have Ted Danson betting that the Red Sox will win the World Series before the US men's soccer team wins the World Cup (I think he's right).

I'm thinking of challenging this one: "Brooke Shields will be be a recipeint of the Kennedy Center Honors for her lifetime contributions to American culture through the performing arts, within the next fifteen years."
posted by Eugene Wei at 11:54 PM | link

How sad is it that some of our greatest pop cultural artifacts are relegated to finding a home on DVD in Region 2, in PAL of all formats? Yes, I'm talking about Airwolf and Knight Rider. It isn't enough that David Hasselhoff had to flee into the arms of Germany to find the public's embrace? Now we're showing Edward Mulhare, Ernest Borgnine, and Jan-Michael Vincent the door, too?

What's next, Michael Keaton doing commentaries in French? Oh, the horror.
posted by Eugene Wei at 11:25 PM | link

A Rocky Balboa statue is currently going for $3,000,000 on eBay. But don't worry, the seller is offering free shipping, so it's quite a bargain. But do note, "To place a bid of US $15,000.00 or more, you'll need to provide a valid credit card..."

For that price, these days you could get Sylvester Stallone himself to come perform at your kid's birthday party for the next ten years.
posted by Eugene Wei at 11:08 PM | link

If you have Windows Media Player, you can preview Norah's new album (currently the #1 seller at Amazon.com) at here at VH1. I've only listened to a few of the tunes, but it looks to go down like warm butterscotch, just like her first album.
posted by Eugene Wei at 11:14 PM | link

Lottery applications for the 2004 NYC Marathon are available starting tomorrow, Monday, February 2.
posted by Eugene Wei at 11:45 PM | link

In the pregame show, CBS pointed out that all-star grounds crew members from across the NFL had flown into Houston to tend to the turf. Well, the All-Stars didn't do all that impressive a job as players in the secondary were slipping and sliding everytime they tried to cut. Fortunately, the poor traction didn't overshadow an exciting game.

The Super Bowl was my first extended exposure to CBS HighDef, rumored to offer the best production values of any of the major networks in the HD game. Even projected onto a massive screen, the CBS footage confirmed everything I'd heard. The shot of Reliant Stadium from across the parking lot was so sharp and vivid I could spy loose change on the sidewalk. Awesome.

The sharp picture came in handy during the halftime show that ended with Justin Timberlake revealing Janet Jackson's right breast. When it happened, a few of us screamed with both horror and pleasure.

"Omigod! What was that? Was that a breast?!"

"Holy ----! Is this on Tivo? Rewind it!"

I have a hard time believing it was truly unrehearsed, but if it was, it will go down as one of the funniest and most bizarre Super Bowl halftime bloopers ever, and if it wasn't, well then thank you Justin and Janet. I look forward to seeing the footage on the Internet shortly. This begs for one of those shorthand movie scenes in which some detective or agent stands over the shoulder of a video computer analyst, analyzing some grainy video footage.

Detective: "Zoom in here. Okay, now clean up the picture a bit. Wait, rewind a bit. There, freeze it! Now zoom in again, right there."

Video analyst: "Dear God! Is that Janet Jackson's breast? Then the murderer is..."

Detective has already sprinted out of the room.
posted by Eugene Wei at 7:35 PM | link