You've heard of those alarm clocks that roll off your side table, forcing you to chase them down? An alarm described (and videotaped) by reader "Kevin" at TechEBlog takes a more direct approach to solving the ever-vexing problem of the snooze button.

Kevin installed a "large air cylinder" and some sort of valve at the head of his bed. There's lots of visible tubing and wiring, and the whole thing is controlled via a computer. (He's a little stinting with the technical details.) But the result is unambiguous: at the appointed hour, the head of the bed begins pounding like a jackhammer. After a few jolts, the snoozer's mind surely shifts from sleep to survival. (The video is a must-see.)

The device's creator claims he's been waking up this way for years. Take that with a grain of salt. But if you're not like Teach for America founder Wendy Kopp, who claimed in a recent interview that she pops out of bed at 3 a.m. or so daily, then here's one option.

I could use one.

(Via Boing Boing)

Affirmative action, specifically the Supreme Court's backing of a bias complaint by white firefighters in New Haven, has dominated recent discussion of judicial issues. But several legal bloggers have noticed fresh contentiousness related to obscenity law brewing at the circuit-court level.

In 2006, Dwight Whorley, a deeply unsympathetic figure with a long history of convictions for possession of child pornography, was sentenced in Virginia to 20 years in prison. Authorities had found "lascivious" pictures of children on a computer he'd used at a state-managed center for job-seekers. They also found -- and here's where things get more contentious -- Japanese anime cartoons depicting sex between adults and children, and emails in which Whorley discussed his sexual fantasies (involving children) with friends. The various infractions added up to an unusually long sentence.

Whorley's bid to get his sentence reduced hit an apparent dead end last month, when 10 of 11 members of the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals voted against having the full court rehear his case. But Whorley found a champion -- or, to be more precise, current obscenity law found an enemy -- in Judge Roger Gregory. Gregory found it ominous that his colleagues came close to equating anime with actual child porn, and, worse, that they would imprison a man for writing down his (admittedly depraved) fantasies. Of the charges that stemmed from the emails, Gregory wrote: "I am hard-pressed to think of a better modern day example of government regulation of private thoughts than what we have before us in this case: convicting a man for the victimless 'crime' of privately communicating his personal fantasies to other consenting adults."

Do you recognize this jovial mug? It is best known, writes the novelist and New Yorker staffer Ben Greenman, from its appearance in a second-rate 1939 Hollywood comedy entitled "No News from the Navy." The picture centers on an inveterate seaman forced by circumstance to remain on land. In its one memorable scene, a bit of Chaplinesque farce, the man tries to shave, using the cartoonish vessel as a shaving mug, but, unused to doing so on land, he can't keep his balance and lurches about amusingly. The mug, one critic has suggested, is "an oddly compelling focus of the film so long as it is onscreen, enormous in its diminutive size, menacing in its cheer." What's more, it was fashioned by a Belgian surrealist of some note. It appeared in that one film alone.

With that kind of back story, are you now tempted to buy what seemed, at first glance, like a mere tchotchke? Well, you can, via eBay! (Last I checked, it was going for $10:51.)

As it happens, however, the story is pure fiction. And that's the whole point of an arty exercise, The Significant Objects project, conceived by Joshua Glenn (former author of Brainiac), and Rob Walker, the "Consumed" columnist for the New York Times magazine. Intrigued by the question of how consumer goods -- things -- become the objects of intense, even libidinal, human desire, they picked up sundry seemingly trivial objets at yard sales and the like. Then they recruited noted writers, including Greenman, Kurt Andersen, Luc Sante, and Stewart O'Nan, to devise fanciful, evocative stories about what they'd collected.

"Invested with new significance by this fiction, the object should -- according to our hypothesis -- acquire not merely subjective but objective value," Glenn and Walker write.

So is it the intrinsic utility and beauty of a commodity that creates its value, or the stories we tell ourselves about them? We'll know shortly, at least in the case of one goofy, leering mug (and a "Sanka ashtray," cow creamer, and toy hot dog …).

There's no attempt to hoax eBay shoppers: the descriptions are clearly labeled as fiction. High bidders will receive the objects as well as printouts of the stories.

Hmm. That mug's menacing cheer is growing on me!

Here's how the math looked when Infinite Summer, an online effort to get as many people as possible to read David Foster Wallace's magnum opus, "Infinite Jest," from June 21 to August 21, got started: 1000 pages divided by 92 days = 75 pages a week. "No sweat," the organizers concluded, optimistically.

Well, June 21 has come and gone and the math is working against you. The sweat quotient has increased markedly. But it's not too late, and, what's more, if you still want to tackle Wallace's daunting text (the very opposite of the stereotypical beach read), you can draw on a surprisingly rich ecosystem that has sprung up around Infinite Summer: bloggers (including non-literary policy types like Matthew Yglesias and Ezra Klein), Twitterers, Facebook addicts, and Tumblrs alike are all urging one another on through DFW's doorstop of a book, trading thoughts as they go about its characters, structure, and those (in)famous proliferating and involuted footnotes.

Infinite Summer is the brainchild of Matthew Baldwin, a contributing writer to The Morning News and founder of the National Novel Reading Month. For that effort, Baldwin recruited friends (virtual and otherwise) to conquer a masterpiece each November -- "Catch-22" and "Lolita," for example. "Infinite Jest," he concluded, needed not a month but a full season.

Infinitesummer.org serves as home base for the techno-literary experiment, where Baldwin and three co-conspirators have been posting their own theories about the novel plus handy character i.d.'s and chapter summaries.

There are a few dissenters: Scott Eric Kaufman, at The Valve, said the project was "a little morbid," given DFW's suicide. And signal-to-noise is an issue for anyone sifting through all the commentary it has inspired. (Ezra Klein: "I'm a blogger. I like to get to the point. Wallace doesn't." Noted!)

Still, in an interview with the L.A. Times blog Jacket Copy, Baldwin offered a penetrating explanation of how reading the book communally might help him, and others too:

One thing I am already noticing about "Infinite Jest," even 60 pages in, is that it is an intensely claustrophobic novel. Much of the action takes place in small apartments, hospital wards and in the minds of the various protagonists. It's so overwhelming that it would be easy to close the novel with a shudder and never return. I think the knowledge that there are thousands of folks out there reading concurrently goes a long way toward leavening those feelings.

As journalists and cultural commentators debate whether, or how, in-depth, expensive reportage can be saved from the tsunami of blog culture, along comes Judge Richard Posner with a novel idea.

His proposal, however, which he floated recently on The Becker-Posner Blog, has received early reviews that make those for "Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen" sound enthusiastic.

After sketching the familiar present scene (newspaper revenue falling, media start-ups building online publications on the backs of links to print publication), Posner proposed a substantial expansion of copyright law:

Expanding copyright law to bar online access to copyrighted materials without the copyright holder's consent, or to bar linking to or paraphrasing copyrighted materials without the copyright holder's consent, might be necessary to keep free riding on content financed by online newspapers from … impairing the incentive to create costly news-gathering operations … [emphasis added]

The predominant reaction to the first part of the proposal was: if newspapers don't want people linking to them, then they shouldn't put their stuff on the Web (or they should demand payment to view it). Some newspapers do this, of course, at least for some content.

But the idea that a law could be written, in compliance with the First Amendment, forbidding even paraphrase of published material? That struck many readers as even more far-fetched.

The reaction of journalist Tom Scocca, at the Web site The Awl, was typical: "The idea of outlawing paraphrase is unbelievable. I mean, I actually cannot believe it. And I say this as someone who thinks HuffPo [a site with many links to newspapers] is a nest of thieves."

I only got around to reading Atul Gawande's remarkable New Yorker piece on disparities in health-care costs within the United States -- and even between different parts of Texas -- last week. I deserves all the buzz it's received.

I've heard the health-care expert Uwe Reinhardt, of Princeton, say that the phenomenon Gawande explores is the single most important fact to get one's head around in the health-care debate. What is Rochester, Minnesota doing right and towns like McAllen, Texas, where Gawande sets part of his story, doing wrong? (At the time, I jotted down the phrase "story idea" next to my notation of Reinhardt's observation. I guess I can cross that one off the "possibles" list, given that Gawande has produced a National Magazine Award contender.)

Gawande floats some speculative but persuasive theories about why some cities have particularly "expensive" cultures when it comes to health care, and how to change those cultures: he thinks doctors should work in problem-solving teams, for example, possibly under set salaries, and not as independent entrepreneurs.

When John Sperling, the founder of the for-profit University of Phoenix, was a child, his father used to beat him. The beatings stopped when Sperling was 10, after the boy threatened to kill his father in his sleep if the abuse continued.

When Sperling was 15, his father died of natural causes. "I raced outside, rolled in the grass squealing with delight …" Sperling has written. "I realized this was the happiest day of my life. It still is."

Sperling is now 88 and among the richest people in the world, having built the University of Phoenix, which is looked down upon by traditional academics, into a financial behemoth. Unsurprisingly, observes Thomas Bartlett in a thorough profile of the entrepreneur in the Chronicle of Higher Education [subscribers only], he is a fan of Dickens.

(One recent setback: Christopher Heward, a biologist whom Sperling hired to run the Kronos Longevity Research Institute, "whose original purpose was to treat well-to-do patients interested in not dying" but whose "only real patient" turned out to be Sperling himself, died this year.)

(Photo credit: Inc. magazine)

The New Republic film critic Stanley Kauffmann has been a welcome, consistent presence at the magazine in the 20-odd years that I've been a reader -- one of the few steady presences, as pundits have come and gone. Somewhat unbelievably, I could make this claim even if I were a subscriber since the late 1950s. To celebrate Kauffmann's half-century at the magazine, TNR has posted a series of video clips in which he discusses film, and his own writing -- and the brief interregnum in which Pauline Kael filled his place -- with the senior editor Ruth Franklin. Here he explains why he never gets bored with his job.

We tend to think of plastic as semi-permanent: Once in landfills, it can take eons to disintegrate. But modern artworks made of plastic, and seminal examples of design fashioned from the stuff, are falling apart at an alarming rate, reports Slate:

The casualty list is appalling: Antique plastic dolls at the National Museum of Denmark have begun to peel and flake; classic furniture at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London might as well have been left out in the sun for years; the first-ever plastic toothbrush, at the Smithsonian, is collapsing into a pile of crumbs; etc. A whole generation of irreplaceable items that are as representative of our culture as pottery or flintheads were of ancient ones are dying -- and many people charged with their care have no idea how to stop further damage.

We're losing the first-ever plastic toothbrush! (In fact, the issue is quite serious.)

(Image via Slate)

The Baffler, the magazine that punctured business cant and confronted the morally dubious aspects of the New Economy at a time when many publications and pundits were turning a blind eye (or were complicit in the bubble-inflation), is returning -- perhaps to say, "We told you so."

Thomas Frank, who started the magazine-cum-journal in 1988, last put out an issue in 2007. Before that, there had been a four-year hiatus. Frank's work for the Baffler led to the acclaimed, much-debated book "What's the Matter with Kansas?" and he's currently a columnist for the Wall Street Journal.

Frank recently told The New York Observer that he suspected there might be a fresh receptivity to the Baffler's take on things: "We developed this critique of consumer culture and business culture, and lo and behold, a lot of the things that we were saying, instead of being this out-there stuff from the fringes of self-publishing land -- it's stuff that I think will make sense to everybody nowadays," he said. "The world has come a lot closer to our way of seeing things. It's funny how obvious it is now!"

According to the Observer, writers whom Mr. Frank has recruited include the Hermenaut founder (and former Brainiac author) Joshua Glenn, the n+1 editor Mark Greif, the BookForum editor Chris Lehmann, and the University of Illinois at Chicago literature professor Walter Benn Michaels, author of "The Trouble with Diversity: How We Learned to Love Identity and Forget Inequality."

The Baffler used to have a notoriously loose publication calendar, with publication deadlines serving as rough targets. Frank says the editorial team has committed to a regular, twice-a-year schedule.

(Image via The New York Observer)

In Dissent, Michael Walzer writes that it is citizens who should be expressing resolute solidarity with the Iranian protesters: union members, human-rights activists, professors, students. But President Obama? He is doubtful:

Right now, the most important task of the U.S. government with regard to Iran is not regime change. The most important task is to persuade or coerce the Iranian government to give up the effort to produce nuclear weapons. Doing that will require some mix of toughness and conciliation -- and that necessary mix will still be necessary whoever actually won and whoever finally wins the Iranian election. What Obama says must be guided by what he has to do.

The rest of us are much freer.

Leon Wieseltier, however, in the New Republic, laments Walzer's "exemption of the president from moral leadership in the midst of one of the greatest explosions of democratic energy in our time." And he dismisses in a parenthetical the argument that for an American president to ally himself with the protesters might, in fact, be to do them a disfavor:

(I am not an Iran expert, unlike almost everyone I meet, but I find it hard to imagine that the young men and women suffering the blows of the Basij would not welcome our support, that they are in the streets with angry thoughts of Mossadegh. If these events have shown anything, it is that their enemy and our enemy are the same.)

But, of course, Walzer wishes to give them "our" support. And history did not stop with the toppling of Mossadegh. It continued on, as it tends to do, through the 1979 revolution, America's backing of Iraq against Iran in the 1980s, and that notorious John McCain ditty "Bomb, bomb, bomb / bomb, bomb Iran."

Is it really self-evident within Iran that the interests of Iranian dissidents and those of official Washington are aligned? I wonder.

UPDATE: Would the dissidents applaud this Op-ed piece, for example, written by someone who declares himself to be an ally of theirs? (It asks, or declares, "Time for an Israeli Strike?")

In a recent column at National Review Online, the economist Thomas Sowell argues that President Obama has done nothing to stop Iran from developing atomic weaponry. That's not a unique argument, but Sowell goes further. Granted, he says, Iran may only acquire a handful of nukes. But that may be all it needs:

Just two nuclear bombs were enough to get Japan to surrender in World War II. It is hard to believe that it would take much more than that for the United States of America to surrender -- especially with people in control of both the White House and the Congress who were for turning tail and running in Iraq just a couple of years ago.

Perhaps people who are busy gushing over the Obama cult today might do well to stop and think about what it would mean for their granddaughters to live under sharia law.

I don't cherish the idea of my (hypothetical) granddaughters living under sharia, but, that said, I didn't gain much by pausing to ponder that scenario. But Sowell's column did make me think of a few questions that might inspire a lively discussion in, say, an eighth-grade history class:

Militarily speaking, what resources does the United States have, in 2009, that Japan did not have in 1945?

How might those options affect 1) Iran's decision to strike the U.S. with atomic weapons? Or 2) possible American responses to such an attack?

If Japan had possessed several thousand nuclear-tipped ICBMs in 1945, might that have affected the course of World War II? How?

Not long ago, Dinesh D'Souza, author of "The Enemy At Home: The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for 9/11," was nudged out of the Hoover Institution for making arguments that were long on Democrat-bashing and short on scholarship. It was decided that he was an embarrassment to Stanford University, where the think tank is based. Sowell is a far more credible figure, but this column, anyway, is D'Souza-level stuff.

Last year in Ideas, Joanna Weiss wrote that the George Mason economist Peter T. Leeson was at work on a book that would demonstrate that "the democratic tenets we hold so dear were used to great effect on pirate ships. Checks and balances. Social insurance. Freedom of expression."

Leeson's book is finally here, "The Invisible Hook: The Hidden Economics of Pirates." And, true enough, the economist gives democratic aspects of pirate life their due. (Pirates elected their captains, for example, and could depose them by a vote.) But what most stands out is just how eager Leeson is to rescue pirates from the clutches of left-wing historians and social theorists, and to claim them as avatars of right-wing economic theory. Pirates, Leeson suggests, were avid Hayekians a full two centuries before the Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek was born.

From the 19th-century Christian socialist Charles Kingsley, who wrote a romanticizing poem about pirates, to the University of Pittsburgh historian Marcus Rediker, leftists have hailed pirate ships as spaces of social experimentation in which race and class hierarchies were softened or upended. Leeson, however, argues that democracy and racial tolerance grew out of piratical self-interest, and had zero to do with utopian sentiment.

Take the election of captains. For Leeson, this is an opportunity to explain a dilemma familiar to economists: the "principalple-agent problem." Merchant ships, he explains, were owned by absentee capitalists. ("They were landlubbers.") As a result, the interests of the agents, or doers (the sailors) did not align with those of the principalsples, or owners. In order to keep sailors working, and to prevent them from siphoning off goods and profits, an autocratic captain was required.

In contrast, pirates stole their ships and afterwards shared ownership. They divided up any booty. There was no problem of misalignment: the principalsples were the agents, (To be sure, the pirates elected a captain in part to make sure that no one slacked off, but the incentive to shirk was lower on a pirate ship, as you'd partly be cheating yourself.)

The lesson, for Leeson, is not that workers' democracy is a good thing, per se, but merely that it can make sense in a highly specific and rare economic situation, one with a distinctive set of incentives. Today, for example, some variant of democratic decisionmaking might make sense in a small start-up in which everyone has money at risk. It would not make sense, he says, in a company that makes use of outside capital.

For further reading that will clarify why he's right about pirate democracy and Rediker is wrong, Leeson recommends Hayek's essay "The Use of Knowledge in Society," as well as "Socialism," by Ludwig von Mises.

PS Obligatory pirate-talk joke: one chapter is titled "An-ARRGH-chy: The economics of the pirate code."

PPS Most inadvertently funny sentence: "There is evidence, on the other hand, that at least some pirates were not gay."

Yesterday, just below and to the right of a serious discussion of Robert Wright's new book, "The Evolution of God," on Bloggingheads.tv, there appeared a striking ad for an online role-playing game called Evony. The central image was of a radiant, amply endowed (serious décolletage), quasi-medieval-looking maiden, her head tipped back in an attitude suggestive of incipient ecstasy, and the tag line was, "Play now, My Lord." Come again?

Yes, there's that God-Lord link. But what demographic niche could Evony's makers possibly be shooting for? Is there data to show that consumers of theological debate also like Harlequin-flavored gaming? Interesting, if true!

Several lit-bloggers have flagged this typically allusive passage by James Joyce ("Finnegans Wake"), for its deployment of the word "blog." Consensus seems to be that it's a play on "bog," not any kind of techno-prescience.

Also, everyone seems to agree that the phrase "thomistically drunk" is particularly fine, even if it is hard to parse.

Now from Gunner Shotland to Guinness Scenography. Come to the ballay at the Tailors' Hall. We mean to be mellay on the Mailers' Mall. And leap, rink and make follay till the Gaelers' Gall. Awake! Come, a wake! Every old skin in the leather world, infect the whole stock company of the old house of the Leaking Barrel, was thomistically drunk, two by two, lairking o' tootlers with tombours a'beggars, the blog and turfs and the brandywine bankrompers, trou Normend fashion, I have been told down to the bank lean clorks? Some nasty blunt clubs were being operated after the tradition of a wellesleyan bottle riot act and a few plates were being shied about and tumblers bearing traces of fresh porter rolling around, independent of that, for the ehren of Fyn's Insul, and then followed that wapping breakfast at the Heaven and Covenant, with Rodey O'echolowing how his breadcost on the voters would be a comeback for e'er a one, like the depredations of Scandalknivery, in and on usedtowobble sloops off cloasts, eh? Would that be a talltale too? This was the grandsire Orther. This was his innwhite horse. Sip?

The war of words escalates between (the liberal Princeton economist) Paul Krugman and (the Harvard conservative economist) Greg Mankiw.

Berkeley's Brad DeLong enters the lists on the side of his fellow liberal.

In early June, Charles Guan was part of an M.I.T. team that won first prize, and $100,000, in the Buckminster Fuller Challenge, which recognizes projects that have "significant potential to solve humanity's most pressing problems." The team's "Sustainable Personal Mobility and Mobility-on-Demand" proposal involved a citywide network of foldable electric scooters and partly collapsible minicars that could serve as alternatives to gas-powered vehicles.

All very high-minded, of course, making it considerably different from Guan's other, simultaneous project (which, you will be amazed to hear, got more attention in the tech blogosphere): At MITERS, the engineering school's "build-anything-you-want" workspace, Guan has been busy fashioning a shopping cart capable of reaching 45 miles per hour. His "LOLriocart" is powered by nickel-cadmium aircraft batteries and a 15 horsepower engine. It boasts grippy aftermarket wheels, a steering apparatus, and brakes that admittedly need a bit more work. On a recent rainy day, the aspiring engineer took his supercart for a spin on the MIT campus (including on public roads) and then posted a video of his adventure on the MITERS Web site.

"Awesome?" he asked. "Or evidence?"

He was helmetless.

Via Gizmodo

Mickey Kaus's often-exasperating, usually highly readable blog celebrates its 10th anniversary.

Kaus looks back on some of his greatest hits (and misses), and nominates a satirical memoir about his supposed friendship with JFK, Jr. as " the best-written piece I've published."

One of the leading proponents of Holocaust denial in the United States lived with a Jewish woman for eight years, in the 1970s. Another has a sister who converted to Orthodox Judaism, and he's terrified that his "peers" in the anti-Semitic underground will find out about her.

Car and Driver recently conducted a real-world test to determine just how dangerous driving-while-texting can be. The editors rented an airport runway, far from any traffic (car or plane), and brought along a Honda Pilot, two willing test subjects, cell phones, and plentiful vodka and orange juice.

The Pilot was fitted with small lights in the windscreen that could be flipped on and off, and the subjects were told to react to them as if they were brake lights suddenly flashing ahead of them. As the lights came on, an observer monitored how long it took the driver to hit the brake pedal, both at 35 and 70 miles per hour. The drivers -- Jordan Brown, 22, and Eddie Alterman, 37 -- went through the test in four conditions: sober and attentive; reading a text while glancing at the road; writing a text; and loaded (BAC of .08 and probably climbing).

The results: DWT was actually worse than DWI. The following chart documents the average delay in reaction time (and, crucially, extra distance traveled) for the two drivers under each condition:

The drunken-driving performances were sufficiently non-scary that the editors felt moved to add the following caveat:

[D]on't take the intoxicated results to be acceptable just because they're an improvement over the texting numbers. They only look better because the texting results are so horrendously bad. The buzzed Jordan had to be told twice which lane to drive in, and in the real world, that mistake could mean a head-on crash. And we remind again that we only measured response to a light--the reduction in motor skills and cognitive power associated with impaired driving weren't really exposed here.

Of course, the main difference is that drunken driving is taboo in most circles while warnings about DWT have, for a large swath of the population, not yet sunk in.

(Scientists have studied the texting phenomenon in the lab, Car and Driver noted, but the editors laid claim to the first real-world test.)