British industrial designers are tackling a grim subset of alcohol-related violence: so-called glassing injuries, caused when a pint glass is smashed against someone's head or body. One hundred such injuries are reported to police each weekend, and, judging from hospital admissions, seven times that number may go unreported.

As part of a government-and-industry project called Design Out Crime, the firm Design Bridge has developed two prototype pint glasses intended to make pub violence less lethal. (Plastic pint glasses are an obvious option, but drinkers find them gauche.) In the first, a thin film of resin would be affixed to the inside of every glass. In the second, resin would be used to bind two thin layers of glass to each another. In both cases, the glasses become much more sturdy and, when they do break, they break like windshields, with the glass remaining bound together in small bits--no dangerous shards.

As a bonus, the resin would provide new "branding opportunities": logos and slogans printed on it would be shielded from wear and tear.

In the American Conservative, William S. Lind argues that there's an opening for Pope Benedict to re-unite Christianity. The Pope's invitation to conservative Anglicans last fall to rejoin the Catholic church while retaining their own bishops and even many rites could be the first move, Lind thinks, in the realignment of the faith that would, at long last, sort out true Christians from "the politically correct" and "the cultural Marxism of the Frankfurt School." (The present division, Lind writes, is not denominational but "between those who believe the Christian faith was revealed and is to be received and those who think you just make it up to accord with the temper of the times.") If members of other denominations are granted some degree of strategic autonomy, all true Christians would once again be in full communion with Rome.

A stuck accelerator is a terrifying prospect, but an article in Car and Driver provides some counterintuitive solace: Modern brakes will stop a vehicle in that situation. In fact, somewhat amazingly, the magazine's editors say that unless you're driving an outlandishly powerful sports car, brakes will stop your vehicle nearly as quickly as if the gas pedal were not stuck.

To test their faith in brakepower, the editors rounded up a V-6 Toyota Camry (one of the vehicles Toyota has recalled), a sportier Infiniti G37, and, for an extreme example, a V-8 Ford Mustang modified to produce 540 horsepower.

With the Camry's accelerator pinned to the floor at 70 m.p.h., the driver of the Camry was still able to stop it in 190 feet. "That's a foot shorter than the performance of a Ford Taurus without any gas pedal problems," writes Dave Vanderwerp, "and just 16 feet longer than with the Camry's throttle closed." The results for the Infiniti were similar: That car took 170 feet to go from 70 to 0 m.p.h. under the out-of-control accelerator condition, compared to 161 feet with the accelerator unpressed--a mere 6 percent difference.

Brakes will stop a vehicle with a stuck gas pedal even at 100 m.p.h., Car and Driver found. The magazine's driver stopped the Camry going that speed, with the gas pedal floored, in 435 feet. Without a depressed gas pedal, the figure was 347 feet. (The numbers for the Infinity were an even-more-impressive 326 feet versus 320 feet.)

Only at the outer limits of engine power can modern cars come close to overpowering their brakes, it seems. The 540-horsepower Mustang took a full 903 feet to stop from 100 m.p.h.  with the throttle open, compared to 324 feet with the throttle closed.

Car and Driver does not excuse Toyota: It says that the manufacturer has been slow to adopt industry-standard technology that cuts off the gas when brakes are applied. That is one of the reforms the car company has pledged to make.

Should you find yourself in a runaway car, incidentally, the best strategy is to shift to neutral while braking.

Christopher Caldwell's book "Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam, and the West" has been reviewed with a level of respect not accorded other doom-and-gloom books about the supposed rising Muslim tide. In a sense, writes David Rieff in the journal World Affairs, that respect is justified, as Caldwell has an able mind and pen. But the book, Rieff concludes, is a different story: It is "intellectually and morally beneath him."

Consider his treatment of crime committed by Muslims:

Caldwell never pauses in his breathless account of the decline of the West to ask himself whether things would really be so bad if youth unemployment rates in places like the Paris suburbs didn't hover around 40 percent. .... The problem is that, where immigrants in Europe are concerned (as opposed to soccer hooligans in the United Kingdom, Latino street thugs in the States, or gangs in Rio), Caldwell simply will not accept that the criminal and the political are not inseparable. In this, his argument is oddly reminiscent of the one made by radical leftists like the writer Mike Davis about the Crips and Bloods street gangs in Los Angeles being proto-revolutionary formations.

Rieff includes some thoughts about the temptations facing intellectuals who want to reach an audience beyond their small circle of peers. Of the corner-cutting he identifies in Caldwell's book, he writes: "Such simplifications make for provocative Op-Ed pieces, fat book contracts, and wide media attention for the writers who trade in them. ... But given the seriousness with which writers like Caldwell take themselves, and what to be taken, it simply won't do."

Matthew Yglesias argues, in a post that has inspired a lot of discussion, that "under conditions of perfect competition, the price of a song ought to be equal to the marginal cost of distributing a new copy of a song. Which is to say that the marginal cost ought to be $0. That's not a question of habit, you can look it up in all the leading textbooks."

I think he has just rediscovered the reason for copyright law, not, as he thinks, undermined the premise of copyright law. It is even easier to replicate a "pure" idea, like a scientific or industrial innovation, than it is to copy (or cover) a song. The marginal cost of copying an innovation is zero. It doesn't follow that the people who come up with such ideas deserve no reward. That, of course, is a separate question from whether existing copyright regimes are maximally efficient and just.

Richard J. Evans, the great historian of the Third Reich, has written what sounds like a fairly self-congratulatory book about Britain's success at producing fine historians of continental Europe. In contrast, Evans argues, continental universities produce scholars who tend to be interested in their home country's narrative.

There is some truth to that thesis, argues Mark Mazower, a British transplant who now teaches at Columbia. But Evans' focus on Europe prevents him from discussing a distinct weakness of British history departments, Mazower says: their coverage of what the Brits still call "the Rest of the World." Mazower asks, in the New Republic:

The implicit contrast seems to be with the United States. Indeed, Mazower concludes by ruing that "many British historians find their warmest reception abroad, not least in the United States, where history still seems to matter."

But where did he get the strange idea that history matters here? No doubt he got a large bump in salary when he crossed the Atlantic. But that metric may not be a sound gauge of public, or even elite, sentiment in the United States regarding the importance of the study of history.

"Heavy multitaskers are often extremely confident in their abilities," says Clifford I. Nass, a professor of psychology at Stanford University. "But there's evidence that those people are actually worse at multitasking than most people."

Architectural Record has named the renovated Jeremiah E. Burke High School one of its "Schools of the 21st Century," singling out the artful way the architects--Boston-based Schwartz/Silver--combined the original Art Deco building with an addition that includes a gym lit by expanses of glass, a public library, and community center.

In the addition, a basketball court sits on the top floor, isolated from the lower levels by two concrete floor slabs, one of them on sound-deadening springs. The public-library branch and a community "living room" occupy the first floor, and sandwiched in between is the school library. When the school day ends, that library opens to the community as well, and the two levels are linked by a long run of open stairs, accented with red laminated glass affixed to the railings.



Photos: Alan Karchmer

If you were one of Margaret Thatcher's relatives, you might hope that a social-science finding known as the "Thatcher effect" would refer to, oh, something like the galvanizing influence of a charismatic leader on a political movement.

In psychology, however, it refers to the ghastly impression that can be caused by inverting the eyes and mouth in a photographic portrait. It was first discussed in a very brief article published in Perception, in 1980, by Peter Thompson, a psychologist at the University of York.

Thompson was exploring the related questions of 1) why it is so hard to recognize an inverted face and 2) how much information is conveyed by the eyes and mouth alone. Given the importance of eyes and mouths as signifiers of identity, one hypothesis was that if you inverted a face but kept the eyes and mouth right-side-up, the face would be easier to identify.


In truth, the two faces do not look all that different--until you rotate the page 180 degrees and look at the manipulated face from the new angle. Then it comes across as semi-monstrous.

In his original paper, titled "Margaret Thatcher: A New Illusion," Thompson did little more than throw that odd tidbit out there. (His final line was, "It might even tell us something about Margaret Thatcher.") But in the latest issue of Psychological Science, three researchers from the University of Western Australia conclude that the "grotesque effect" has largely to do with "inconsistent lighting cues." It is not the inverted eyes and mouths per se that cause the illusion but the fact that while most of the face is lit from one direction, the eyes and mouth are lit from another.

Once that lighting anomaly is eliminated (through simple photo-editing), the "mean bizarreness rating" of the Thatcherized faces drops down into the normal range. Yes, they asked research subjects to use such a scale.

Since it's hard to invert a computer monitor, and I don't want you to strain your neck, I've flipped the Thatcherized Thatcher for you. (You're welcome.)


FULL ENTRY

Talk about an author with a wide range--at least at first glance. Bill Martin, Jr., the author of the children's board-book classic "Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?" and many other books for kids, was up for consideration as someone whom Texas third-graders might learn about, in a part of the curriculum that focused on artists' biographies and their cultural contributions.

Then a member of the Texas State Board of Education did some web-searching and found, attributed to one Bill Martin, Jr., alongside "Brown Bear" and "Chicka Chicka Boom Boom," books with somewhat more daunting titles: "Ethical Marxism: The Categorical Imperative of Liberation," for example, and "Politics in the Impasse: Explorations in Postsecular Social Theory." (These did not sell quite as well.)

The board member, Terri Leo, alerted a fellow member, Pat Hardy, to the news, and Hardy  moved that Martin be struck from the list, citing his "very strong critiques of capitalism and the American system." That was it for Martin.

The board members, however, had failed to notice that there were (at least) two Bill Martins, the second of whom is a philosophy professor at DePaul University. The children's book author died in 2004, in Commerce, Texas, at 88.

Michael Sampson, who co-wrote numerous books with Bill "Brown Bear" Martin, called the move "a new low" for the Texas board, known for its politicized fights about course content.

Writing in The American Conservative, Susan McWilliams, who teaches politics at Pomona College, asks whether contemporary conservatism has room for a thinker like Robert Nisbet. A sociologist, Nisbet taught at Berkeley, Riverside, and Columbia before taking a post at the American Enterprise Institute, and his name used to be as well-known in conservative circles as that of Russell Kirk.

In the '80s, Nisbet wrote that he found it "most amusing" that "commerce-threatening, budget-expanding enthusiasts for great increases in military expenditures" were calling themselves conservatives.

And he read the Constitution as a warning against all attempts to regulate behavior from on high, even in the name of "conservative" morality. (The truer conservative impulse, he thought, was to suspect that one's crusading impulses might be wrong.) He wrote:

From the traditional conservative's point of view it is fatuous to use the family--as the evangelical crusaders regularly do--as the justification for their tireless crusades to ban abortion categorically, to bring the Department of Justice in on every Baby Doe, to mandate by constitution the imposition of 'voluntary' prayers in the public schools, and so on.

But don't cheer yet, liberals. Nisbet, the author of "History of the Idea of Progress" and "The Degradation of the American Dogma," reserved his deepest suspicion for advocates of the "liberal-provider state," fearing that it would sweep away community and familial bonds as citizens poured more and more resources into the national bureaucracy. "Current efforts to reduce this state," he wrote, "are like nothing so much as chipmunks trying to bring down a giant Redwood."

If all this sounds fatalistic, it was, McWilliams writes. Nisbet saw two main projects for conservatives: tempering, if only at the margins, the "totalizing" impulses of modernity and "nurturing where necessary the varied groups and associations which form the true building blocks of the social order."

The Yale Alumni Magazine profiles two student entrepreneurs--one from Boston College, one from Yale--who think that a smarter alarm clock could make all the difference in your day. It's well-known that waking from the R.E.M. stage of sleep is less jarring than waking from deeper sleep stages. With the Harvard Medical School sleep expert Robert Stickgold serving as a consultant, the duo envisions an alarm clock that will monitor sleep patterns--perhaps by identifying when the sleeper tosses and turns--and, within a pre-programmed time window, wake you at the ideal moment.

The two, Arun Gupta and Greg Nemeth, got the idea during high school, when they noticed that the quality of their morning tennis games were directly correlated with how good they felt when they rolled out of bed.

Heather Gerken, of Yale Law School, argues that critics of the Supreme Court's recent campaign-finance decision may be exaggerating its practical effects. The truth, she says, is that the court had already largely stripped away the restrictions that reformers had championed.



She's talking with Mark Schmitt, editor of The American Prospect.

Magazines like Dwell can be beautiful and aesthetically inspiring, but is there something missing, a sense of joy, perhaps?

That's the premise behind Unhappy Hipsters, a blog that reprints images from design magazines--okay, so far just Dwell--featuring people relaxing or working in high-taste, high-modern surroundings. And looking pretty miserable while doing so. The blog's tagline is "It's Lonely in the Modern World."

(The images are from the Nov. 2006 and Nov. 2009 issues of Dwell; captions courtesy of the Unhappy Hipster.)

To mark the reclusive writer's passing, The New Yorker has opened up its digital archives, making available the thirteen pieces of fiction he wrote for the magazine, his longtime professional home. It appears to be a temporary move, so read them while you can.

And The Awl reminds its readers of a piece that ex-Ideas editor Jennifer Schuessler wrote last summer exploring why students don't relate to Holden Caulfield in the way they used to. A teacher at the well-regarded New Trier High School, in Winnetka, Ill., told Jennifer:

In general, they do not have much sympathy for alienated antiheroes; they are more focused on distinguishing themselves in society as it is presently constituted than in trying to change it.

I wasn't feeling very alienated today, till I read that quote.

Obviously, the iPad, like the iPhone and the iTouch before it, is a cool device. Given a windfall, I'd love to have one to play with--to read newspapers with on the bus, dig up old You Tube clips of Brian Eno in his glam days, peruse Sports Illustrated during brunch, etc.

But it is remarkable how little attention has been paid, in the coverage of Apple's new baby, to the distinction between traditional computer displays (which the iPad relies on) and the technology used in the Kindle and other devices that Apple wants to supplant. (The company that created that technology, E-Ink, happens to be based in Cambridge, so this may come across as a Boston-boosting post, but that's not the point.) E-Ink technology was devised precisely because reading for long periods on computer screens is uncomfortable. Even Bill Gates has said that the first thing he does when someone emails him a long document is to print it out.

E-readers are still far from perfect--there are delays in turning pages, moving from one part of a book to another quickly is ungainly, and annotation is a work in progress. But their makers have engaged the central problem facing electronic devices for reading: a screen that makes Star Trek "pop" turns "Wolf Hall" into an eyestrain-inducing ordeal. Apple simply ignored that issue, and many technology writers are giving them a pass.

For example, Slate's Farhad Manjoo, a writer whom I quote often because I like his stuff even when I disagree with him, writes: "[T]he iPad is going to be the perfect way to read books." Granted, he adds, "LCD isn't as easy on the eyes [as E-Ink], but it's got a few upsides--it can display colors, it can do animation, and you can use it in the dark. Pages turn instantly in iBooks, unlike the half-second it takes on the Kindle. You can also see full-color photos--you can get iPad travel books, photo books, cookbooks, and textbooks, all of which look crummy on the Kindle--and authors can even include video."

Query: if you were devising, from scratch, "the perfect way to read books," would you rate "easy on the eyes" or embedded video as the more important feature? I agree the iPad would be great for cookbooks, given a reliable splashguard.

Similarly, the folks at CNET, in their discussion of the iPad and books, gloss over the issue of reading in favor of such questions as how exciting it is to browse and purchase the word-oriented deliverable:

The iPad doesn't offer the paper-like e-ink technology of its competitors, but it does include an attractive, iTunes-style storefront of e-books and an intuitive touch-screen interface for manipulating virtual pages.

I'm not one who thinks that our increasingly video-driven cultural landscape necessarily detracts from literacy (although Caleb Crain has offered data suggesting that, practically speaking, this has been the case). I'm not immune to gadget lust, either, and display an inordinate interest in my new Android phone. But given the coverage of the iPad, I find myself wondering, no doubt uncharitably, whether technology writers ever put in a solid two, three, even four hours of book-reading at one stretch.

If you can do that on the iPad, or your laptop, after all, why all that fuss about E-Ink? My hunch is that the fuss existed for a reason.  

After the financial meltdown, even as conservative a figure as the federal judge Richard Posner conceded that the economic theories of John Maynard Keynes deserved a closer look. Citing Keynes, Posner, like the majority of professional economists, supported the idea of a stimulus package. Meanwhile, a few Chicago-school economists, as revealed in a recent New Yorker piece and elsewhere, continue to argue that Keynesianism should be dumped into history's dustbin.

Laypeople may not feel equipped to adjudicate the disagreements between the two camps. With these eager-to-learn but confused citizens in mind, Russ Roberts, an economist at George Mason University--who tilts against Keynes--and John Papola, a video producer for ostentatiously macho Spike TV who thought the media was doing a bad job of explaining economic theory during the recession, came together to create a video that would offer just such a primer. (Papola, a fan of Roberts's podcast, EconTalk, made the initial approach.) The result is a knock-off rap video that pits Keynes against his theoretical arch-enemy, F.A. Hayek. ("Prepared to get schooled in my Austrian perspective!") Hip-hop parody-homages are getting tired, but these songwriters and the actors in the video put some life back in the genre. Sample lyrics:

We've been going back and forth for a century
[Keynes] I want to steer markets,
[Hayek] I want them set free
There's a boom and bust cycle and good reason to fear it
[Hayek] Blame low interest rates
[Keynes] No! it's the animal spirits
 

An intrepid assistant professor of the performing arts at Georgetown University is attempting a challenging project (to put it mildly): adapting the French philosopher Michel Foucault's "Madness and Civilization" for the stage.

Translating such a book into a work of theater might seem--well, to say unhinged would be to walk right into a trap, no? The project has its roots in thoughts and experiences the professor, Natsu Onoda Power, had while her brother-in-law spent time in a mental institution. Yet this is no grim, didactic "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest." According to a press release, "60s-mod-clad nurses sing and dance to French techno-pop; performers reenact 17th-century treatments for insanity involving tubs of water, leeches, enemas, and a branding iron; and audience members play mad libs with the cast and enjoy 'antipsychotic cocktails' served in the style of a cooking show."

The play will be run at the Georgetown's performing-arts center February 11-20.

You may be familiar with "Word a Day" email lists and smartphone apps. Susan Perkins, an associate curator at the American Museum of Natural History, is doing "Parasite of the Day."

That's the name of her new blog, inspired by the UN's pronouncement that 2010 is the International Year of Biodiversity. At the site, you'll see some familiar faces, such as Pediculus humanis capitis, better known as head lice, but also some truly bizarre creatures, like Enteroxenos oestergreni, "a species of parasitic gastropod"--it's technically a snail--"that lives inside the body cavity of sea cucumbers."

"Evolution has done away with all its apparently superfluous organs like its digestive system, gills, heart, nervous system, and reducing it down to just the bare essentials of a parasite--reproductive organs."

Or ponder the plant Rafflesia arnoldii, which lacks stems, leaves, and roots, the latter having been replaced by structures that penetrate the cells of the rainforest vines it uses as hosts. Meanwhile, its flowers, which can be a meter across, smell like rotting flesh, the better to attract  the insects that pollinate it.

For the project, Perkins has borrowed an epigram from Jonathan Swift: "So, naturalists observe, a flea has smaller fleas that on him prey; and these have smaller still to bite 'em; and so proceed ad infinitum."

The site is a useful reminder that biodiversity isn't all about charismatic megafauna.