Death Wait on Hospira

The headline (on a January 21 AP story carried by Yahoo! Finance) read "US drug maker discontinues key death penalty drug". The story in brief was that Hospira Inc. decided to switch manufacture of sodium thiopental from North Carolina to Liscate, Italy, near Milan. Because Hospira could not guarantee Italian authorities that the anesthetic wouldn't be used in executions, the company halted production rather than risk being liable to Italian law.

Already in short supply and with batches of sodium thiopental set to expire in March, 2011 executions across the U.S. now have an additional problem besides pesky picketers.

Imagine executions being halted not by the will of the people, moral or legal qualms but a logistical problem.

I've wondered why people aren't executed by firing squad. Is it that today's criminals do not rise to the level of Joe Hill and Gary Gilmore? I would expect that some law and order/NRA/über-patriot types would be willing to organize flying execution squads, able, willing, and ready to be there to get the job done.

(A brief web check found that Utah, which executed Gilmore by firing squad, has gone the lethal injection route. And with one thing leading to another I learned that the gun Gilmore used to kill a shop clerk was for sale.  That in itself was interesting because the gun, which was evidence, had been stolen from a gun store and later returned to the owner.  The current owner turned down a $500,000 bid for the gun and had it up for auction at $1,000,000.

It brings to mind a story I saw (can't now remember if it was on TV or a film) where a fugitive in a story about the Old West raised money by turning himself in to collect the reward money.  Will Son of Sam laws prohibiting individuals from benefiting from their crimes now prohibit this?  What about people letting their relations turn them in to pay medical bills?  Commit an outrageous crime, call your main squeeze to reveal where you're hanging out, and indicate that it would be OK to reveal your location to the police, and wait patiently for the law to show up.)

Saturday Morning Flotsam

Listening to Car Talk on NPR this morning I picked up these:

Q: What is the difference between an airplane pilot and a pizza?
A: A pizza can feed a family of 4.

Syncro de Mayo - a coven for fans of Volkswagon vanagon.  They've got a site (http://www.syncro.org/SdM_2011.html) Yahoo group (http://autos.groups.yahoo.com/group/syncro-de-mayo/) and, of course, Facebook page (http://www.facebook.com/pages/Syncro-de-Mayo/60934111908).

And while I'm at it, I was appalled and reassured to recognize that they repeated the Car Talk quiz about ancient Roman roads.  When I checked the website for "Today's Puzzler" all I found was a discussion of the previous puzzle, finding the quarter fill mark on a cylindrical gas tank without calculus.

The Apple Experience or You're Screwed

The big buzz in Apple Technologyland is the new pentalobe screw.  Apple has patented the screw which means that it should be illegal to import a screw driver which can turn the screw.  Hackers should be up to the challenge and I'm curious as to whether a classic jail house trick would be able to turn the screw.

The part of the story which may generate a law suit is statemetn that the original screws will be replaced with pentalobe screws if an Apple device is brought in for repair at an Apple store.

I found the story on The Consumerist and Computerworld.

McDonald's Texas Burger

I first saw this in the January 12, 2011 Marketplace section of the "Daily Diary of the American Dream" (Wall Street Journal) and again on WSJ's Japan Realtime. ("Japan Real Time is a newsy, concise guide to what works, what doesn’t and why in the one-time poster child for Asian development, as it struggles to keep pace with faster-growing neighbors while competing with Europe for Michelin-rated restaurants.")

McDonald's will be introducing limited time burgers in Japan where, according to the article, the Japanese line up for anything with limited availability.  (Could I go to the land of the rising sun and say, "Hey girls, come and get it - I'm here for only a limited time."?  Sure I could, but it wouldn't get the desired results.)

Carnage and Culture, Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power

Some years ago a coworkers described a TV show which tried to unravel a mystery of how Zulu warriors overwhelmed a British garrison.  All that stuck with me from his account was that there were sealed boxes of ammunition still left.

This came to mind as I read “Carnage and Culture, Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power”, a family-friendly compendium of carnage by Victor Davis Hanson.  Among the battles he discusses is Isandhlwana where 250 horsemen and 300 native foot soldiers were annihilated by the Zulu’s.  This was probably the same battle.

Hanson’s analysis is that the officer in charge underestimated the opposition to the extent that he violated standard military practice.  In short, the British forces were spread to far apart which, when they ran out of ammunition allowed them to be swarmed over by the Zulu. The British ran out of ammunition for several reasons:

1)   Bureaucratic stupidity – a quartermaster refused to dispense ammunition to one set of troops because the ammunition belonged to another troop.

2)   By not following standard practice, the troops were spread out - too far away from ammunition stores and separated enough to be enveloped by the Zulu.

To quote: “ It was as if their officers—like the Roman generals at Cannae – had done everything to ignore their intrinsic advantage of Western discipline and superior offensive power. “  There’s more of course, but Hanson points out that the next day, the same Zulu warriors were unable to best a hundred British soldiers at Rorke’s Drift where the troops followed standard military procedure.

What make’s it so striking (besides the blood and gore) is that the Boer’s had long before worked out the gold standard protocol for defense against Zulu attack:  a tightly defended area (encircled wagons, walls, stockades), readily available ammunition, and steady disciplined rifle fire.

The author maintains that the Zulu never developed anything other than their single envelopment strategy despite horrific losses against Europeans.  There was also the cultural difference, the author’s main thesis.  The Zulu’s fasted before battle, did not carry supplies, and did not seem to have much in the way of strategy other than to get as close as possible to their enemy by stealth and then swarm over and envelope them.  By the time the Zulu army got to Rorke’s Drift they had not eaten for 2 days.  They had never developed the idea of a siege.

I’ll spare you a book review, (see below) but to say that in the section on Cortes and the Aztecs, repeated the theme: the Aztec’s idea of war seems to have been to capture sacrificial victims.  If they managed to knock down a Spaniard or one of the native forces allied against them, the captive was bound and dragged to the rear for later sacrifice rather than dispatched on the spot.  The idea of killing your enemy on the battlefield was quite literally a foreign notion.  The Aztec's horrific losses didn't seem to change their strategies.  It didn't hurt the Spanish conquest that their weaponry was centuries ahead of that of the Aztecs.

There are plenty of reviews of the book including one by Newt Gingrich, he of the "Contract On America" fame, on Amazon.

It only struck me later that the book is about battles, not wars and it is a history.  I have yet to read the section about the Tet Offensive in Vietnam.  While the Viet Cong may have been defeated as a strategic move the Tet Offensive accomplished two things: it shocked the American public ("I thought we were winning") and it removed the Viet Cong as a potential home-grown adversary to the inevitable victory.  This last is reminiscent of the Soviet Army halting their advance through Poland in July of 1945 to give the German army time to decimate the Polish partisans, effectively removing a source of opposition to their seizure of post-war power.

Battles are not wars.  Guerrilla warfare is a different situation.  I noted that there was no mention of Napoleon's Iberian campaign, arguably the first modern example of guerrilla warfare. Mathematical models in the 1960's predicted that guerrillas were more likely to lose because even though the probability of success in each engagement was large, the large number of actions reduced the probability of overall success was low.  I've always been cautious about accepting mathematical models as predictors of human behavior.  We're just too squirrelly. 

Current events (Afghanistan, Somalia, your suggestion here) with an opposition where death/martyrdom is interpreted as success suggest that if nation states have progressed beyond confrontation warfare (Hello, Iran?) in favor of letting proxies do their fighting (Hezbollah for Iran and Syria), battles will be few and far between.  What armies will be facing a continuing series of attacks.  With more advanced technology (remote controlled bombs) I would expect the balance of a war of attrition to shift in the favor of insurgents. 

An Interesting Watch

For reasons known only to those beaming thoughts into my brain I've been interested in watches.  (Note to self: double the thickness of my aluminum foil cap.)

This hasn't transformed into a watch collection.  (Full disclosure: a number of years ago I was about to bid on a vintage Breitling on eBay, but I couldn't find anyone who might wear it.  My father was happy with his Armitron.   Clients have given my brother expensive watches, but he doesn't usually wear, fearing that he'd lose them.  "The Rolex is nice," he said, "but it's too heavy."  He usually wears a plastic watch because he finds it's less trouble than checking his cell phone.)

Nevertheless, when I see an interesting watch I take note.  And here it is, a watch from Ziiiro. The leading edge of the outer ring indicates the minutes. The inner ring shows the hours.

They're girls!

Just recently I got an old 27" Sony TV for free on Craig's List to replace the much smaller TV fried by our local power company. I hoped that having the TV might interest my mother, giving her something to do other than nodding off over the papers.

I didn't realize how big and heavy it was, but with help from my brother we got it into the house. Getting the TV hooked up to cable required getting a new cable box because that too was fried in the power surges.

With the TV finally connected to cable a friend turned it on to see if something would interest my 92-year old mother. Flipping through the channels they found a broadcast of a local high school basketball game. My mother's eyesight has been getting worse, but after a short while she exclaimed, "They're girls!" Title IX made manifest.

My friend reported that my mother watched the whole rest of the game, switching away only during half-time and occasional breaks.

Counting Problems in the Pool

Yesterday was my first day back in the school's pool after the Holiday break. I usually swim a pair of laps in one style, then a pair of laps in another, etc. About half way through my usual routine I realized that I had not completed a pair of laps, but - brain cramp - started on the next style.

It reminded me of a joke from either Mad magazine or the National Lampoon which attributed the longevity of certain isolated villagers to their inability to count correctly.

Search around for a graphic for counting on my fingers I came across this: