The Creation of Yao Ming

I've heard that Yao Ming's parents were forced to marry by the communist leaders of China in hopes of producing a basketball prodigy. I found an article (which is actually a book excerpt) from TimeAsia magazine that gives the whole story on that, as well as Yao's story starting with his mother's youth and going through to his playing days with the NBA's Houston Rockets--all in 8 interesting pages.

As to the forced marriage? According to the article, it was an "arranged" marriage that they were "encouraged" to enter. Perhaps "forced" is too strong, but maybe not...

The Metric Revolution

It seems that on this day in 1790, the French proletariat which had just taken over the country in the ongoing French Revolution decided to create what became the metric system. One thing I didn't know but that my nerdly mind finds very cool:

The system was elegant. All conversions were based on 10, with Greek prefixes (deka-, hecto-, kilo-) for multiples and Latin (deci-, centi-, milli-) for fractions.

I never realized that the multiple and fractional prefixes were from different languages. I guess kilo is Greek for 1000 and milli is the Latin word for the same number, and thus the etymology of the words explains the difference between kilometer and millimeter.

Among the changes that were made that didn't catch on: the 10-day week and the 10-hour day.

Be sure to check out the (short but great) article.

Obama vs. Wright on Race

Thomas Sowell has an interesting take on the differences between Barack Obama and his former pastor Jeremiah Wright. Sowell believes that Wright whips up resentment while Obama sells a sense of entitlement, but both are telling basically the same story:

The difference between Barack Obama and Jeremiah Wright is that they are addressing different audiences, using different styles adapted to those audiences.

It is a difference between upscale demagoguery and ghetto demagoguery, playing the audience for suckers in both cases.

Sowell, who is a black man from Harlem, tells three random stories:

• South Korean schoolgirls studying 15 hours a day to get into top colleges;
  
• a Harvard classmate who refused to ask his parents for new shoes he needed but that they couldn't afford;
  
• a childhood friend who literally spit food out of his mouth when he realized it was given to him out of charity.

He ties them together thusly:

People on the far left like to flatter themselves that they are for the poor and the downtrodden. But what is most likely to lift people out of poverty-- telling them that the world has done them wrong or promoting the work ethic of the Korean girls, the dogged determination of my Harvard classmate with the newspaper in his shoe, or the self-reliance of my fellow junior high school student in Harlem who had too much pride to take charity?

Be sure to check out the article.

Taxing the Rich

It's election season, so the various candidates pull out their go-to rhetoric and we hear vague truisms about very complex issues like taxations shouted at us a lot. I found a very interesting breakdown for 2005, the most recent year for which breakdowns are available.

Before you check it out, ask yourself if you can answer some basic questions about the current tax structure in the US:

1. What percentage does the average American pay in federal income tax?
2. What percentage of Americans filing income tax returns didn't end up paying any?
3. Are you rich?

This article hits those points, and plenty of others, and it's interesting stuff. The 2005 answers to the above questions are 13.6%, 32.6%, and you're rich if you made 61,055 or more (if you define rich as the top 25% of Americans).

I don't know about you but my target income is above 61K, so remember next time you vote to soak the rich that it could be you and me.

Medical Arrogance and Butterfly Collecting

Wired is a technology magazine, and this essay takes an interesting perspective on the need for the medical profession to use technology to enhance our knowledge of human wellness as opposed to human illness.

If you had died 50 years ago, your body would have stood a pretty good chance of serving science. In the 1960s, autopsy rates at US hospitals exceeded 50 percent. Pathologists weren't necessarily looking for what killed people — they were taking advantage of the fact that a body was available and ready for inspection. There was still much to learn about normal human biology, the thinking went, so every corpse was an educational opportunity.

It turns out that autopsies are now comparatively rare now as modern medicine is much more confident about its current body of knowledge. However, it seems that in medicine (as other fields such as in spying) our capacity to gather information has exceeded our capacity to understand it.

In heart disease, for example, CT screening tests can spot abnormalities in arterial plaque — but no research exists on whether that information is actually predictive of heart disease or stroke. "We need to know normal variation," says Pat Brown, a professor of biochemistry at Stanford University School of Medicine. "It's really underappreciated as a part of science." In too many areas, Brown argues, we're too quick to jump at any blip without understanding whether it's a true red alert or just normal background noise.

I believe that alternative medicine has something to offer in instances where conventional medicine doesn't have answers because conventional medicine tends to discount things in areas that are considered well-understood. Instead of ignoring apparent red herrings, the medical community should focus more on better understanding of normalcy (and thus a better understanding of abnormalcy).

It seems like it would be easy just to step back and survey the broad picture. But research costs money, and studying what's normal is generally considered trivial, dismissed as mere butterfly collecting. At the National Institutes for Health, for instance, all grants are given a "priority score," an indication of a project's novelty, originality, and "scientific merit." Normal need not apply.

Very interesting stuff.

OK, OK, More Posts!

Carlos, an Official Brother-In-Law of The Brink, took some of his valuable time to harangue me this morning about the age of the posts here at the Brink of Normal. He's right, new entries have been few and far between here. Unbeknownst to him, I have been considering channeling some of the results of my regular net-surfing into this space to ensure that we have at least five new posts per week. So, with his goading, we'll try that this week.
I'll try to make them short and sweet for ease of writing and ease of reading. Leave some comments when you visit to let me know what you think.