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"Lighter vehicles have higher occupant death rates in two-vehicle crashes" is a misleading sentence. It's true, but it overlooks the bigger factor: lighter vehicles are much less likely to get into a two-vehicle crash in the first place.

If you look at death rates per passenger-mile, instead of per-crash, you'll find smaller, lighter cars are at least as safe as bigger, heavier vehicles.

Not according to this study that someone posted in the earlier SUV story. http://www.gladwell.com/2004/2004_01_12_a_suv.html

I don't know how reliable are their numbers, but the article mentioned in previous article, http://www.gladwell.com/2004/2004_01_12_a_suv.html says that if you measure deaths per million of cars, small cars are less dangerous.

This means that if you end up in a crash driving a small car, especially if you crash into a big vehicle, you are more likely to get killed. But with a small car, you won't crash as much as in a SUV, because of better braking and handling (active safety).

Besides, when it comes to crashes, you don't always crash into another vehicle. You can run off the road, crash into a pole or a tree, etc. And there I doubt driving a SUV will help you all that much. The study you linked doesn't take this into account.

When it comes to me, I'd rather drive a medium sized car with good safety rating & proper handling & good tires. But I'm from Europe.

--Coder

I urge anyone who owns an SUV and/or considers buying one to read "Big And Bad" by Malcolm Gladwel.

Since I can't mod this up any more that it already is, I'll have to comment - jawtheshark: that was one of the best explanations I've ever seen of how SUVs aren't as safe.

I have a big red F150. It sits in my driveway unless I need it. I instead drive a hammered old Porsche 944, worth all of $3000, and have a much better time, KNOW for sure I'm safer because I can actively protect myself, and get 30MPG instead of the 14 that my pickup gets. People don't understand/dont think about this concept of active vs. passive safety, and the linked article in your post is a really good explanation.

Actually, SUVs aren't the safest. For the occupants, a Ford Explorer is twice as dangerous as the little Volkswagen Jetta.

http://www.gladwell.com/2004/2004_01_12_a_suv.html

Still, I have to see it to believe it. The current generation of SUVs will inevitable end up in the hands of young drivers. Those will be even less aware of the extra dangers a SUV presents while being in traffic. The SUV craze will have a significant impact for the years to come.

I urge anyone who owns an SUV and/or considers buying one to read "Big And Bad" by Malcolm Gladwel.

In case anyone is interested, the original research that created the idea of 'six degrees of separation' is summarized and analyzed by Malcolm Gladwell in his essay Six Degrees Of Lois Weisberg. The original research was done by Stanley Milgram (of greater fame for the (in)famous Milgram Experiment in which people were led to believe that they were shocking other people to death, but continued to do so anyway because they were Just Following Orders.) Milgram's six-degrees research, to sum up, involved handing out a large number of letters to random people, and asking them to give the letters to other people they knew who they thought would be most likely to know a (given, random, unknown-to-everyone-involved) person, and then tracking how those letters actually moved through society to their intended recipients.
The result was a map that showed large groups of closely-connected people, linked by small numbers of people who were linked into many, disparate, closely-linked groups. These people are unusual and their behavior is unusually influential on others, precisely because they serve to transfer information from homogenous groups to other homogenous groups.
It's not that people, or wikipedia articles, are all evenly linked by an average of six links that's important. The idea of 'six degrees of separation' is precisely about the nodes which interlink groups of nodes to each other.

It is thought that punishment of petty crimes deters the more violent and dangerous crimes. The reason is that if people see that they can get away with small stuff, they will push the boundaries and see all what else they can get away with. If small crimes are prosecuted, they won't dare try to commit a serious crime. This has been studied with strict treatment of graffiti artists in NY during the 1980s and 1990s. See this book for more information: http://www.gladwell.com/tippingpoint/index.html

Funny you use heinz ketchup as your example.

-Ted

Birds are the primary predator for most insects (and fish feed on mosquito larvae), and insect populations recover from DDT sprayings much more quickly than birds or fish. And since they can now breed with impunity, as they don't have to worry about predators anymore, those insects will be a much bigger threat to the human population than they were before, and just spraying more DDT doesn't work, since at that point it starts to affect other wildlife (including humans), and the insects build up resistance quickly.

Nice story. If you can back it up with facts (solid references), it'll even be interesting.

Also, banning DDT didn't cause "millions of people" to die, no matter how popular that meme is with the anti-environmentalist crowd. Just repeating something over and over again doesn't make it true.

More than a million people die every year from Malaria.

DDT was a key component in eliminating Malaria in the United States, according to This New Yorker Article.

With poverty that could potentially have prevented some countries from buying DDT and the existence of DDT resistant mosquitoes it's impossible to say how many lives could have been saved by heavier DDT usage for malaria prevention over the past 30 years - but given the two basic facts I stated above it seems likely that the number is, literally, millions.

You don't have to be an "anti-environmentalist" to agree with me, but you probably can't be part of the "ban dihydrogen-monoxide because chemicals are evil"/"cellphones cause cancer because they emit electromagnetic radiation" crowd.

Ooops... I meant to be a smart alec, but also to be informative... then I hit "submit" instead of "preview" before I was finished. Here's are two interesting articles, submitted for serious consideration on the (off topic) question that you raised.

Paul Krugman: Death by Insurance
Million-Dollar Murray

Mr. Krugman is an economist and writes regularly and eloquently about health care issues. You may or may not agree with his policy recommendations, but his analysis of the issues with our current system is always interesting. Health care is more expensive than it probably should be for a few reasons. One is that our system in the United States is based on the concept of health insurance. This drives up costs in several ways, some of which are explored by the two articles above.

True, big vehicles are dangerous to *others*, but we're talking your own safety.

Look at How the S.U.V. ran over automotive safety. About halfway the page there is a table with fatal-accident statistics for various car models, specified for both driver deaths and other deaths. SUVs and pick-ups score pretty bad on both counts, by about a factor two compared to smaller cars. The cause is in how bad they perform in emergency manoeuvers that sometimes are necessary to avoid a crash.

Can you back up the statement that size does not correllate with safety?

There's this article about how unsafe SUVs are for their occupants and there was a whole thing about how much better it is to be in an accident in a (tiny, by American standards) BMW Mini vs a huge Ford F-150.

Pure size does not equal safety the same way that raw megahertz don't equal performance.

You're correct about diversity. Malcolm Gladwell wrote a New Yorker article about racial diversity, or more specifically, about why so many athletes in some sports are of African descent. A geneticist studying this is quoted: "I would say, without a doubt, that in almost any single African population-a tribe or however you want to define it-there is more genetic variation than in all the rest of the world put together..." The conclusion is that since there's more diversity, there are more people at the high -- and low -- extremes of fitness in African-derived populations.
It's an interesting article. In some other stuff I've read, that I can't find, they talk about how expectations form success (he talks a little about this) and give an example of how in the early 1900's the majority of basketball players were small Jews, because at the time it was believed that they had faster reflexes so could outmaneuver larger/slower players. The more racism changes, the more it stays the same...

You're correct about diversity. Malcolm Gladwell wrote a New Yorker article about racial diversity, or more specifically, about why so many athletes in some sports are of African descent. A geneticist studying this is quoted: "I would say, without a doubt, that in almost any single African population-a tribe or however you want to define it-there is more genetic variation than in all the rest of the world put together..." The conclusion is that since there's more diversity, there are more people at the high -- and low -- extremes of fitness in African-derived populations.
It's an interesting article. In some other stuff I've read, that I can't find, they talk about how expectations form success (he talks a little about this) and give an example of how in the early 1900's the majority of basketball players were small Jews, because at the time it was believed that they had faster reflexes so could outmaneuver larger/slower players. The more racism changes, the more it stays the same...

I have to ditch a bunch of moderations to post this, but I can't not.
If you're thinking about SUV's and safety, read Malcolm Gladwell's New Yorker article about perception vs. performance.
I quote a particularly choice section:
"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."

That's why most people drive SUV's -- because they want to be the biggest, which makes them think they're the safest.
As Gladwell has written elsewhere, as have many many other people paying attention to this, small cars are *vastly* safer in single-car accidents, which account for a large percentage of all accidents, and small-car-vs-small-car accidents result in much less harm to the passengers than small-vs-large *or* large-vs-large. SUV's make everyone, including the drivers of the SUV's, less safe.

As has been pointed out, this essay isn't particularly unique. It's just stating the rather obvious point that lots of people are inspired by other people, and that when we make things, we often reshuffle bits of stuff we like. This practice is so common that it's not too interesting to point out. The article is clever, interesting, perhaps, but I wouldn't mod it insightful. The idea of creative reuse is the very basis of formal study of literature, music, and art-- why else spend hours, weeks, months reading, viewing, sampling, and arguing about the greats if not to enjoy them and learn how they work?

The Harper's article really isn't that much about plagiarism, and it also doesn't really address the questions of copyright very thoroughly-- he dismisses it as "rapacious" and makes some aside references to Jefferson.

A few years ago, in "Something Borrowed", Malcolm Gladwell looks at the personal story of a psychiatrist whose personal memoir is "plagiarized" by a playwright who writes a semi-successful play about the psychiatrist and her clients-- without consulting the psychiatrist or clients. Gladwell looks into issues about copyright, intellectual property, and the creative commons, but he also looks at the public and emotional effects in the lives of the psychiatrist (who feels "violated" by this appropriation of her life), and the playwright (who feels heartbroken, confused--devastated by the stigma and bad press). It's an awesome article.

Comfortably, sure... (But my car is comfortable too!) Safely... Let's say, that I'm safer in my roadster than you are in your SUV. Educate yourself

At over 4€/gallon, you'd be talking differently.... that's what I pay and I live in one of the "cheaper" countries of the EU. You are wasting resources, just like I am. We both use much more gas that we need to. You're just a worse offender than I am. My wifes Mini is both comfortable, safe and does 50mpg. Apart from that your SUV took much more energy to produce than my mine....

The only reason that I didn't sell my car and bought a more energy efficient one is simple: it's paid off, and the only thing I need to pay now is insurance, tax, gas and maintenance. I would have to pay all those on a brand-new energy-efficient car too and add in money to get a new one. You may have the same reasons, and I will not be criticising you for it. I just wanted to point out that 19mpg most certainly is a bad mileage. Just as my 25mpg is a very bad mileage. Especially for new cars. Heck, I used to have a 14 year old Audi 80, that did 33.5mpg (gasoline, not diesel in case you wonder) and that was 7 years ago! These days a new car should at least do 35mpg: anything lower is unacceptable.

"The Bakeoff"

http://www.gladwell.com/2005/2005_09_05_a_bakeoff. html

The article is a discussion about the use of programming methodologies (traditional, open source, "extreme") to create something that isn't software -- in this case, a cookie.

It's n=1 but the conclusion is that there are some good reasons why an expertly run traditional team is better at producing goods, even if some of the alternate programming methodologies are sometimes better at producing code.

Already happened ...

Yukon vs Accord head-on
Mustang side swipes an Explorer

And from the archives, the Gladwell article about SUVs: the psychology, history, and numbers:
http://www.gladwell.com/2004/2004_01_12_a_suv.html

Personally, I'm glad people drive SUVs. It's like the stupid-tax they call the lottery, but here it's like watching Darwinism in high-chairs action.

They don't buy SUV's just for the sake of vanity.
"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."
They also buy them because they think a high-clearance vehicle makes it easier to spot someone who is hiding on the other side of the car. I'm serious. Read the linked article. It's one of the most brilliant essays written in the last ten years.

Any "profile" you setup can be defeated.

That's true -- assuming you choose such bad criteria for your profile. Race, religion, etc., as you point out, are easily skirted. Why? Because they have fundamentally got nothing to do with terrorism. Blond, white Irish Catholics would have been a reasonable choice. Now it's dark haired, tan Muslims. In ten years, maybe it'll be Mexican Catholics upset about immigration laws. Maybe Eskimos who want their seals back.

But profiling does work. Here's my profile: Nervous facial cues or body language. Suspicious baggage. Suspicious behavior. Probably there are more criteria that would be effective.

The point is that terrorists are very likely to be nervous, and are by definition up to something suspicious. Yes, it's possible to hide these traits as well. But now a terrorist recruiter needs to find someone who is willing to die for a cause, willing to buy into that particular cause, willing to kill lots of civilians, and is in addition a very convincing actor, with the discipline to not stop acting for one second in the airport. The category of potential undetected terrorists is now relatively miniscule.

These magical, invisible terrorists also have to be in the right (wrong) place at the right time and get recruited. I feel pretty good about my odds of getting blown up under a scheme like that.

Malcolm Gladwell has a good article about this stuff.

The other week I was pointed to a fascinating article about nonverbal communication,
written for the New Yorker by Malcolm Gladwell:

    http://www.gladwell.com/2002/2002_08_05_a_face.htm

It is about "face reading": reading a person's emotional state by looking at their face.
It turns out that researchers have found over 40 specific, culture independent signs
people make with their face to convey an emotional state. The signs are involuntary:
people are trained at suppressing them, but the suppression only kicks in after
fractions of a second.

So face movements form a universal "language" that everybody writes,
and the researchers can give you a crash course if you need one.

Clearly a universal and well-established form of human communication.
Many of our tiny little muscles in the face appear to have no other use than
for this communication.

I don't doubt that the same could be done, or has been done, for the rest of the body.

In e-mail, all that remains of out facial movement language is the smiley!
But conveying emotions is extremely important in communication: intentions
depend on emotions, and communication is often about getting each other to
act in a specific way. Words exist to describe emotions, of course, and situations
that bring about certain emotions in the writer can be described in the hope
that they will bring about the same emotions in the reader. But this takes a great
deal of slowly acquired skill with words, and it will always be much slower and
more indirect than use of the facial movement language we are born with.

No, I haven't seen research to prove this, but it seems obvious enough to me.

Yes, it does.
'"When you feel safe, you can be passive," Rapaille says of the fundamental appeal of the S.U.V.'

Not to turn the snark abruptly off, but Malcolm Gladwell wrote a hella good article about facial cues a few years ago: http://www.gladwell.com/2002/2002_08_05_a_face.htm

I don't find any of this hard to believe. If we didn't subconsciously give away cues to our personalities, how would animation work? Or for that matter, acting? I think it's easy to be scared at just how much we do give away.

Here's a brilliant article by the equally brilliant Malcolm Gladwell, discussing the original six degrees research, the social connector aspects of it, and how they apply to social interaction in general. I don't know that he introduced the idea but he sure did do a good intro and summary.

Malcolm Gladwell has covered this - long but interesting:

http://www.gladwell.com/2001/2001_06_11_a_crash.ht m

Wow, that's a great link! 20 comments later and by an AC... not much chance for an upmod, but here's hoping.

(Can you believe how many of those 20 comments were from people who thought I had *plans* to step out in front of the next Jaguar I see? Guess I should have used the [sarcasm] tag after all.)

Malcolm Gladwell has covered this - long but interesting:

http://www.gladwell.com/2001/2001_06_11_a_crash.ht m

His brilliant article about SUV's and minivans comparing their safety. It's not just that the SUV passenger has many times higher risk of getting injured once a crash has happened, it's that the SUV has a higher chance of getting in a crash. And it's not just that the SUV's crash more often, it's that, if you factor out the handling differences, people who choose to buy SUV's drive in a manner more likely to lead to a crash than people who choose to drive minivans.

One plus of ABS is that, in the hands of an unskilled driver, it allows significant evasion capability that a standard car might/would not allow because side-loading combined with heavy braking would exceed the tire's roadholding. As such it becomes a significant safety aid for the vast majority of drivers.

When A.D.H.D. kids are actually tested on activities like video games, however, this alleged "good fit" disappears. Rosemary Tannock, a behavioral scientist at the Hospital for Sick Children, in Toronto, recently looked at how well a group of boys between the ages of eight and twelve actually did at Pac Man and Super Mario World, and she found that the ones with A.D.H.D. completed fewer levels and had to restart more games than their unaffected peers. "They often failed to inhibit their forward trajectory and crashed headlong into obstacles," she explained. A.D.H.D. kids may like the stimulation of a video game, but that doesn't mean they can handle it.

There's a great book about trusting intuition called Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking. In a nutshell, it goes over reasons why your first impression is often the most honest one, no matter how we later try to justify it with rational thought later. Some fun topics are covered.

Pedantic summary of the book: We're taught from an early age to "look before we leap," to think about things before making a decision, to carefully weight all options based on logic and reasoning. But it seems that the opposite is true: our unconcious, gut reaction is often right, and our concious minds are correct less frequently.

AND I found another article he wrote about trading off safety and convenience, which is an even better illustration of what you're talking about.
"The orthodoxy of that time held that safety was about reducing accidents--educating drivers, training them, making them slow down. To Haddon, this approach made no sense. His goal was to reduce the injuries that accidents caused. In particular, he did not believe in safety measures that depended on changing the behavior of the driver, since he considered the driver unreliable, hard to educate, and prone to error. Haddon believed the best safety measures were passive." (By passive, they mean technologic fixes rather than educational ones: ABS and traction control are not considered 'passive' safety measures in the context of car design.) (This article includes the single most amazing bit of Gladwell's writing I've ever read, the part about the basketball game and the gorilla.)

From another article of his: this gem: "The reason we don't like drunk drivers is that by making the decision to drink and drive an individual deliberately increases his or her chance of killing someone else with a vehicle. But how is the moral culpability of the countless Americans who have walked into a dealership and made a decision to buy a fifty-six- hundred-pound sport utility any different?"

I've read an essay, and I thought it was his, specifically about the tradeoff we've made between safety and convenience, discussing how we introduced seat belt legislation and airbags, saw the death rate drop, and then chose to raise the speed limit, knowing full well that it would raise the death rate. In other words: we, as a culture, have decided that the convenience of rapid transport is worth a certain, specific number of deaths each year, and we'd rather keep the death rate constant to support and increase our sense of convenience, than reduce the death rate and keep our sense of convenience the same. Brutal analysis, and I'll keep looking to see if I can find that article somewhere else.

AND I found another article he wrote about trading off safety and convenience, which is an even better illustration of what you're talking about.
"The orthodoxy of that time held that safety was about reducing accidents--educating drivers, training them, making them slow down. To Haddon, this approach made no sense. His goal was to reduce the injuries that accidents caused. In particular, he did not believe in safety measures that depended on changing the behavior of the driver, since he considered the driver unreliable, hard to educate, and prone to error. Haddon believed the best safety measures were passive." (By passive, they mean technologic fixes rather than educational ones: ABS and traction control are not considered 'passive' safety measures in the context of car design.) (This article includes the single most amazing bit of Gladwell's writing I've ever read, the part about the basketball game and the gorilla.)

From another article of his: this gem: "The reason we don't like drunk drivers is that by making the decision to drink and drive an individual deliberately increases his or her chance of killing someone else with a vehicle. But how is the moral culpability of the countless Americans who have walked into a dealership and made a decision to buy a fifty-six- hundred-pound sport utility any different?"

I've read an essay, and I thought it was his, specifically about the tradeoff we've made between safety and convenience, discussing how we introduced seat belt legislation and airbags, saw the death rate drop, and then chose to raise the speed limit, knowing full well that it would raise the death rate. In other words: we, as a culture, have decided that the convenience of rapid transport is worth a certain, specific number of deaths each year, and we'd rather keep the death rate constant to support and increase our sense of convenience, than reduce the death rate and keep our sense of convenience the same. Brutal analysis, and I'll keep looking to see if I can find that article somewhere else.

Malcolm Gladwell has written about this in this article. Among the choice quotes: "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."

One of the things he talks about is why minivans, which are roughly the same size and weight as SUV's, have nearly twice as good a safety record -- a little because of the design, but primarily because the people who choose to drive a minivan are likely to drive carefully, while the people who choose an SUV tend to drive like idiots, and buy the SUV in an attempt to ameliorate their stupid driving: "But that's the puzzle of what has happened to the automobile world: feeling safe has become more important than actually being safe" and "Jettas are safe because they make their drivers feel unsafe. S.U.V.s are unsafe because they make their drivers feel safe. That feeling of safety isn't the solution; it's the problem."

It's a brilliant article, like everything else he's ever written.

A study by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory found that several compact and mid-size models, such as the Volkswagen Jetta or the Toyota Camry, have significantly lower rates of driver death than almost any SUV. For several SUVs, such as the Jeep Grand Cherokee, the Ford Expedition, the GMC Jimmy, and the Toyota 4-Runner, the driver risk is more than 50% greater than for the Camry.

In a separate study, Tom Wenzel at LBL found that there was very poor correlation between vehicle weight and driver safety.

Actually, according to an article by Malcolm Gladwell, SUV's are actually far from the safest vehicles overall when measured in deaths per million vehicles.

Your best choices include the Toyota Camry, Honda Accord and VW Jetta. The Honda Civic and Toyota Corolla have better survivability numbers than all but two sport-utes.

Read the article, it's engrossing (Gladwell is a great writer) and a great companion to TFA.

Newspapers take advertising to support themselves. There is a clear editorial wall between Journalists and AdvertisingSales in a newspaper. Why would it have to be any different at Wikipedia?

For a really solid read on how journalists take their bias and potential conflicts seriously please read this: Malcom Gladwell's Disclosure Statement.

-david

Malcolm Gladwell ("The Tipping Point") wrote an excellent article about this: http://www.gladwell.com/2001/2001_07_02_a_ddt.htm

Yeah, you're a selfish to drive something that protects your kids? I wonder which is more expensive, the 6 mpg you loose by driving a civic, or the 10 years of productive life you loose to back problems when you get hit in a micro-car.

Maybe not selfish, but certainly "vain, self-centered, and self-absorbed, [...] frequently nervous about their marriages, and [...] [lacking] confidence in [your] driving skills." That last part is the kicker. If you had confidence in your driving skills, you wouldn't need a tank to "protect your kids". Active protection (driving skills, braking and maneuverability, handling) is much better than passive protection (large chunks of metal), but if you must go for passive protection I'd much rather have the crumple zones of a unibody car or crossover SUV than the unyielding chassis of a frame-on-body light truck or SUV. Oh, yeah, and it's "losing", not "loosing". But then, what would you expect from an SUV driver?

Indeed, when patents expire competition drives the cost of generic drugs down so they're much cheaper in the US than in Canada or Europe. Most people don't need super-expensive brand-name drugs. There are lots of effective, safe generics out there.

Big pharma is not always involved anyway. Where the new technology is clinical tests rather than drugs, a small startup can usually market the invention itself. Some of these startups are criticised in the Fortune piece. It's a small startup company, not a big pharma, that's getting more than $2000 in royalties for each patient tested for BRCA-1 and -2 mutations; Another small company, Chiron pretty much owns the Hepatitis C genome, so it has a lock on tests for Hep-C infections, which is why they're so expensive.

The main restriction to new players entering the drug market (as opposed to the clinical test market) to compete with big pharma is the cost of doing clinical trials to determine safety and efficacy. The best way to open the market up would be to remove government (FDA) regulation of drugs.

We tried it back before the FDA existed and too many people were dying from taking unproven drugs.

In any event, the main beneficiaries of Bayh-Dole are not big pharma but little pharma---small startups who take the ideas from the university lab and develop them into potentially useful drugs. There is a very active venture-capital market to invest in these small startups (Techno-Venture Management, etc.)

If the initial tests are promising, then even with a healthy dose of VC, the small players are not set up to do massive phase-III clinical trials, large-scale manufacturing, and marketing, so at this point, they usually sell out to a big pharma house and collect a large paycheck for the VC investors.

How would this change if Congress, rather than the private market, supplied the capital to the startups?

I was given this article by a collegue just a couple days. It dates back to 2002, but is still incredibly relevant. Read it and enjoy. It talks quite a bit about how IQ and success have not been shown to be correlated. http://www.gladwell.com/2002/2002_07_22_a_talent.h tm

Ok, waaay off the original topic here, but related to ketchup. There's a good reason why, when you say ketchup, the vast majority of people think 'heinz.' It's called "amplitude". Actually, to bring it back to the main topic, i suppose you can apply that concept to mp3 players as well.

From the ketchup article, amplitude is:

After breaking the ketchup down into its component parts, the testers assessed the critical dimension of "amplitude," the word sensory experts use to describe flavors that are well blended and balanced, that "bloom" in the mouth. "The difference between high and low amplitude is the difference between my son and a great pianist playing 'Ode to Joy' on the piano," Chambers says. "They are playing the same notes, but they blend better with the great pianist." Pepperidge Farm shortbread cookies are considered to have high amplitude. So are Hellman's mayonnaise and Sara Lee poundcake. When something is high in amplitude, all its constituent elements converge into a single gestalt. You can't isolate the elements of an iconic, high-amplitude flavor like Coca-Cola or Pepsi.

So perhaps the ipod just has really good amplitude.

-Ted

Yes, I mean the EFI box, too.

Ralph Nader meant to make things safer with the airbag: he didn't. He took away the owner's (owner's!) ability to get himself out of a jamb. The addiction to battle-carrier sized cars was the natural extension of his philosophy: don't let the stupid human be responsible for himself.

http://www.gladwell.com/2004/2004_01_12_a_suv.html

Gladwell does an exceptional job of showing how Nader and the airbag made us FEEL safer. And people with SUVs and airbags FEEL safer. But it doesn't have anything to do with the statistics.

There is plenty of tech that is purely mechanical and would do well with fuel metering, emissions, etc. But since we put a computer in every other damn thing, why not a ton and a half of plastic and steel going fast.

Don't flame if you haven't read the gladwell article. Then if you disagree, chew me out. But LOOK at it.

I can't wait until MSFT is controlling the 'fly by wire' car. That's when I'm dropping out to go raise goats.

RMW

For more on this, read Malcolm Gladwell's new book, Blink . It mentions the same kind of subconscious (he calls it unconscious) mental processing which surreptitiously informs your conscious mind, but from a social point-of-view.

Now, it would be tremendously useful if Gladwell had figured out some general rules of thumb for when to rely on your instantaneous hunches and when not to.

But as far as I can tell, his book reduces to two messages:

1. Go with your gut reactions, but only when they are right
2. And even when your gut reactions are factually correct, ignore them when they are politically incorrect.

Gladwell does make a genuinely useful point about how when people try to put their ideas into words, they often distort them into meaninglessness or falsehood.

Ironically, this happens to Gladwell every time he writes about race.

Because there were already plenty of books on the market advising corporate workers in tiresome detail how to look before they leap, the sales potential of a book telling them, "Wotthehell, just go ahead and leap," was clear.

Unfortunately for Gladwell, the best-known examples of thinking without thinking are racial and gender prejudices. But, then, you've forgotten Rule #2--Readers despise logic and consistency. So Gladwell just assumes that his otherwise beloved "rapid cognition" is 100% wrong whenever it's based on race or gender stereotypes.

(And that's why he makes a $1 million annually and I don't.)

The most intriguing aspect of Gladwell's book is that its hopeless confusion and mind-melting political correctness stem from the author's own racial background. Although mostly white, Gladwell is partly of African descent (his mother was black, Scottish, and Jewish). But he doesn't look noticeably black in most of his pictures.

The origin of Blink, he writes on his website, came when, "on a whim," he let his hair grow long into a loose but large Afro.

As you can see in this picture of Gladwell with his Afro, he wound up with more of a Napoleon Dynamite Mormon 'fro than the genuine kinky kind that ABA basketball players espoused back in the 1970s. Still, it does finally make him look marginally black.

As soon as Gladwell grew his Afro, he claims, he started getting hassled by The Man: highway patrolmen wrote him speeding tickets, airport security gave him the evil eye, and the NYPD questioned him for 20 minutes because they were looking for a rapist with an Afro.

"That episode on the street got me th

Americans live in a country that voted in the government that created DMCA, Patriot Act, Dubya and his 2nd Term.

Looking at how people have willingly giving up their Bill of Rights rights for extra "comfort", purchasing a SUV for that extra comfort, etc. A country of fat, spoiled, ignorant fools.

It's really not surprising how it's translating to rights on the computer and web.

The fact is, HIV [sic] is the most daunting disease we have ever faced.

Which, of course, is not to deny that AIDS is daunting.

If it had hit even 50 years earlier we may very well have faced an epidemic on the order of the Black Death.

While you'd be more protected in a crash in an SUV than in a compact, SUVs are far more likely to get into an accident in the first place due to reduced maneuverability and larger size. Also, some SUVs are classified as trucks, which means they don't have to meet the auto body safety standards of passenger vehicles. "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." --Malcolm Gladwell, http://gladwell.com/2004/2004_01_12_a_suv.html, which also includes a full chart of fatalities-per-million drivers of the most popular cars in the US.