Brendan I. Koerner's Blog, page 84
February 24, 2010
Shell Game
The Wired cover story this month is not our Ug99 opus, but rather a brilliant meditation on the future of money. A couple of years hence, you can forget about the ATM—just think "pay this man," and neural implants will automatically wire dough from your bank account to your creditor. Or something like that.
In the Solomon Islands, however, the future of money is looking very much like the past, at least when it comes to settling local debts:
Mother of Shell Money Hilda Gelulu from Surabotaá in...
February 23, 2010
The Red Menace
It took over half-a-year, but the Wired piece that brought us out to Kenya last fall is finally live. It's the tale of a wheat-killing fungus called Ug99, which is currently sweeping across Central Asia. The pathogen is remarkable because it can easily overcomes the genetic defenses created by the Green Revolution. As a result, the vast majority of the world's wheat is susceptible to Ug99, and a major catastrophe could ensue if nothing is done to halt the epidemic's spread.
We'll be posting b...
The Appeal of Uniformity
An Applebee's recently opened up here in Atlah, and it's doing pretty decent business on a strip of 125th Street that attracts scant foot traffic at night. Perhaps we shouldn't be surprised at the restaurant's success, seeing as how we praised the chain's business acumen in a 2005 Slate column. But we do find it a bit disconcerting that so many diners opt for the familiar, despite the abundance of higher-quality local joints within a half-mile radius. (Every single item on the menu at
Ending the Cycle of Blood
In reading about the persistence of clan feuding on Mindinao, we got to thinking about how governments can best end such cycles of revenge. Our natural assumption is that these feuds exist where organized justice is in short supply, and so familial units take over the role of punishing offenders. But a University of Maryland offers a different take here:
Extracting revenge by killing people and engaging in a blood feud is not, as one might be tempted to think, just a way to extract justice...
February 22, 2010
Days Like This
At some point in the not-too-distant future, we hope that the considerable time we spend on Microkhan will lead to some sort of remuneration (apart from the obvious psychic rewards). But until we figure out a way to turn y'all's interest in Hmong beauty pageants, Medieval drinking habits, and boxing kangaroos into some sort of hard currency that'll keep Microkhan Jr. awash in his beloved strawberries, there are gonna be days like this—days in which we must forgo tending to this blog in the...
February 19, 2010
The Ride Og Wishes He Had
We realize we should stop being surprised by the scientific illiteracy of our countrymen, but we just couldn't let this loopy tidbit pass without notice:
Did humans live at the same time as the dinosaurs? Three in ten Texas voters agree with that statement; 41 percent disagree, and 30 percent don't know.
We have a deeply personal reason for recoiling at such dunderheadedness. About a decade ago, during our cub-reporter days, we were assigned to participate in a "creation safari". This was a...
February 18, 2010
Carving Out a New World
If you haven't caught it already, The Independent's latest dispatch from the jungles of Laos is well worth a read. It's an eye-opening look at life for the Hmong tribespeople who decided to remain in Southeast Asia after the end of the Vietnam War, rather than take the CIA up on its offer to resettle them in America. (The full background on that drama here.) These Hmong continue to be hunted by their former Communist foes, and thus live in abject circumstances while on the run. It is a...
The Questionable Power of Horse
In keeping with our recent paying-gig focus on addiction science, we'd like to turn your attention toward the remarkable work of Lee N. Robins, who recently passed away. In the early 1970s, after hearing rumors that tens of thousands of Vietnam War veterans had come stumbling home as hopeless heroin addicts, Robins vowed to determine whether that was really the case. She found that although drug abuse had been alarmingly common on the battlefield, with a third of Army enlistees trying heroin ...
February 17, 2010
A Master's Secret
Contrary to what you might conclude by checking out our "music" tag, we don't only permit hip-hop, soul, and vintage ZZ Top to enter our eardrums. We've also taken quite a shine to ukulele music in recent weeks, a jag that has brought us in touch with the work of the late, great John King. True, you might quibble with the fact that King lived in Florida rather than Hawaii, the supposed motherland for ukulele music (though Portugal has a better claim to that title). But no one can dispute...
If Vulcan Rears His Head
Because so few potential clients are directly threatened by volcanoes, the insurance industry hasn't developed sophisticated models to estimate damage due to cataclysmic eruptions. But sooner or later, a volcano located near a major population center is going to blow, and government cash alone may not be enough to heal the economic wounds. Could the insurance industry fill the void while making a tidy little profit to boot? A pair of British researchers make the case, asserting that it's...
