I’ll be offline mostly until Wednes­day to spend Christ­mas by my folks.  Have a Merry Christ­mas everyone.

Guess what folks?  Mar­ried men will spend more than their wives on Christ­mas gifts this year.  (No really!)

The Clarus Research Group poll found the aver­age mar­ried man will spend $493 on gifts for his wife this year, while wives will spend less than half of that on their hus­bands. The aver­age mar­ried woman said she would spend $210.

Nation­wide, the aver­age gift for a spouse this year will be $345, the sur­vey found.

Gifts vary among income level, the poll showed.

Those with income above $100,000 said on aver­age they would spend $461 on gifts for their spouse. Those earn­ing less than $50,000 will spend about $198.

One thing I’d like to know is did they just go with what peo­ple spent or by how much an aver­age gift costs?  Let’s face it, based on tra­di­tional gifts a gold and dia­mond neck­lace costs much more than a new power tool or new piece of elec­tron­ics.  There seems to be very lit­tle in this story which seems to give you any idea what peo­ple are buy­ing each other.

That being said, do men go over-board at Christ­mas time?  Yes, I’ve seen my own father do it with my mother mul­ti­ple times.  How the heck women don’t know this given the easy access for cou­ples to view credit card state­ments and bank accounts (shared or oth­er­wise) prob­a­bly tells you how much peo­ple are pay­ing atten­tion to their hol­i­day spend­ing in the first place.

And is it any won­der why we’re $16 Tril­lion in the red as a nation?

We are a vio­lent, vio­lent species folks.

Don’t ever let civ­i­liza­tion fool you oth­er­wise.  Only thing we’ve done is find more effec­tive ways to kill each other.

But a study just pub­lished in the Jour­nal of Exper­i­men­tal Biol­ogy by Michael Mor­gan and David Car­rier of the Uni­ver­sity of Utah has shown that the exact geom­e­try of the hand is prob­a­bly the result of its destruc­tive rather than its con­struc­tive power.

Most nat­ural weapons are obvi­ous: teeth, claws, antlers, horns. But the hand becomes a weapon only when it turns into a fist. Dr Mor­gan and Dr Car­rier there­fore stud­ied its anatomy to try to find out what makes the fist such an effec­tive weapon—one which, like the pre­ci­sion and power grips, the hand of even a chim­panzee is inca­pable of form­ing properly.

Part of the rea­son is obvi­ous. A fist presents the knuck­les first. That means the force of a blow is trans­mit­ted through a much smaller area than would be the case for its alter­na­tive, an open-handed slap. But the two researchers sus­pected that there might be more to it than that, so they dug a lit­tle deeper.

First, they gath­ered some basic mea­sure­ments. They asked ten athletes—a mix­ture of box­ers and mar­tial artists—to strike a punch bag as hard as they could using either a nor­mal fist or an open palm. The ath­letes did so in many ways, includ­ing for­ward strikes, side strikes and over­head attacks, and Dr Mor­gan and Dr Car­rier mon­i­tored how much force was deliv­ered in each case using an accelerom­e­ter attached to the bag.

They also used a series of pis­tons to mea­sure the stiff­ness of dif­fer­ent hand shapes. These included a fully clenched fist, a semi-fist with the fin­gers curled up but the thumb pointed out­wards, and a poorly formed fist in which the fin­gers were folded over the palm (but not fully curled) and the thumb pointed out­wards. (This lat­ter is rem­i­nis­cent of the clos­est that a chim­panzee can come to mak­ing a fist.) As the ath­letes formed these var­i­ous fists and fist-like shapes, the pis­tons mea­sured the rigid­ity of their hands along the knuckle bones.

Though the accelerom­e­ter in the punch bag sug­gested that a side­swipe made with a closed fist deliv­ers 15% more force than an open-handed strike, a frontal attack with either pro­duces about the same force. The fist’s advan­tage thus seems to be mainly in its geom­e­try rather than it mode of deliv­ery. Part of that advan­tage does, indeed, come from the small sur­face area of the knuck­les (which is about a quar­ter that of an open-handed strike). But the killer app, almost lit­er­ally, is the stiff­ness imparted by the way the bones are arranged in a prop­erly formed fist. This allows the force of a punch to be deliv­ered with an effect that can, for the receiver, be bone breaking.

Two things are cru­cial. One is the way the fin­gers curl back on them­selves, which leaves no empty space inside the fist. That is a prod­uct of the pre­cise lengths of the com­po­nent bones of each fin­ger, which is one rea­son a chim­panzee can­not form a proper fist. The other is the but­tress­ing role of the thumb, which adds yet fur­ther stiff­ness. Again, this requires the thumb to be of pre­cisely the right length, and to orig­i­nate in pre­cisely the right place at the side of the palm. In com­bi­na­tion, Dr Mor­gan and Dr Carrier’s machine indicted, these fea­tures make a prop­erly formed fist almost four times as rigid as a chimpanzee-style fist—for when a chimp curls its fin­gers up it leaves a gap through the mid­dle of the fist, fatally weak­en­ing the struc­ture; and the thumb plays no but­tress­ing role.

All this sug­gests that fists are indeed proper evo­lu­tion­ary adap­ta­tions, with their own his­tory of nat­ural selec­tion, rather than being just the coin­ci­den­tal by-products of humanity’s hand­i­ness with a tool. In fact, it is prob­a­bly eas­ier for the grip­ping role of the hand to adjust to the geo­met­ri­cal require­ments of the punch­ing role of the fist than the other way round. Which makes per­fect sense, for it has long been the case that the species is divided between those who pros­per by mak­ing things with their hands, and those who rely on their fists, or the threat of them, to take what the mak­ers have made.

Empha­sis added.

Via Mash­able.

The last cover, ever of Newsweek just became avail­able online.

Wel­come to the dig­i­tal age.

Who­ever dreamed this up either wasn’t a med­ical offi­cer, or is quite pos­si­bly has no idea how alco­hol is burned off by the body.

The Marine Corps‘ new on-duty stan­dard for drink­ing alco­hol is so strict that less than one drink at lunch would trig­ger a “pos­i­tive” and get a war­rior in hot water.

The Wash­ing­ton Times reported ear­lier this week that the Corps sent a Dec. 12 mes­sage to com­man­ders offi­cially begin­ning manda­tory breath tests for all 197,000 Marines twice each year.

A read­ing of just .01 per­cent sub­jects a Marine to coun­sel­ing. A Marine who reg­is­ters a .04 must be exam­ined by med­ical staff for fit­ness for duty.

The Corps is the first among the Army, Air Force and Navy to begin ran­dom manda­tory test­ing of all personnel.

The Army leaves test deci­sions up to a com­man­der and pro­hibits a blood alco­hol con­tent (BAC) at .05 per­cent or higher. The Air Force also instructs com­man­ders to order alco­hol tests when appro­pri­ate but has no com­pul­sory program.

The Navy said last March it plans to con­duct manda­tory breath tests. A spokes­woman says the pro­gram will not start until next year.

Let start with the basics.  The legal limit for being drunk while dri­ving is a BAC of .08.  On aver­age, the a 200 lbs. adult male burns roughly between .02 and .03 of BAC off an hour.  An aver­age 12 oz. can of beer, a shot of hard liquor, and a glass of wine will put you at about .02 or .03 depend­ing on how fast you drink it and one’s indi­vid­ual size.

A BAC of .01 is amaz­ingly small.  So small, that depend­ing on the brand of mouth­wash they might use in the morn­ing, they could poten­tially trig­ger a pos­i­tive test result.  In fact, the arti­cle quotes a doc­tor say­ing any Marine who just used mouth­wash that morn­ing be given a 20 minute grace period so it not effect the results.

Mr. Gold­berger, who is direc­tor of tox­i­col­ogy at the [Uni­ver­sity of Florida’s] Depart­ment of Pathol­ogy, said var­i­ous breath testers, often referred to as “Breath­a­lyz­ers,” are reli­able and accurate.

He said any Marine picked for a ran­dom test who has recently gar­gled with mouth­wash should be given 20 min­utes or so to let the alco­hol dis­ap­pear before blow­ing into the machine.

A read­ing of .01 “is very low,” he said, mean­ing the Marine Corps must ensure that the breath testers it uses can dis­cern a “neg­a­tive” score from a min­i­mal reading.

No one wants drunken Marines, or even buzzed Marines — on base or in the field — but a BAC of .01 is even smaller than the indus­try stan­dard of .02 given to most ran­dom screen­ings given in a cor­po­rate envi­ron­ment.  The Corps would be wise to imple­ment a sys­tem sim­i­lar to that.

Comics fund­ing terrorism?

Well, that’s the claim from an office inside the Trea­sury Depart­ment which clearly has no idea what its doing and has lit­tle con­cept of how much an aver­age comic book cre­ator makes these days.  (Hint: It’s not much and hasn’t been since the mid-90s.)

The U.S. gov­ern­ment report­edly has seized an advance pay­ment to artist Tim Hamil­ton for his work on non­fic­tion graphic novel detail­ing the activ­i­ties of noto­ri­ous Lord’s Resis­tance Army leader Joseph Kony in the Congo, claim­ing the money was being laun­dered for a ter­ror­ist organization.

The news comes from jour­nal­ist David Axe, who col­lab­o­rated with Hamil­ton on Army of God: Joseph Kony’s War in Cen­tral Africa, which was seri­al­ized online by the Dutch web­site Car­toon Move­ment. It will be pub­lished next year by Pub­lic Affairs.

Accord­ing to a press release, the title Army of God, which is also the name of a ter­ror­ist orga­ni­za­tion, “threw up a red flag” with the Office of For­eign Assets Con­trol, the divi­sion of the Depart­ment of the Trea­sury that admin­is­ters and enforces eco­nomic and trade sanc­tions. The money was seized early this month, and nei­ther Hamil­ton nor his agent have been able to secure its release; the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund has been contacted.

Tim Hamil­ton is an Amer­i­can cit­i­zen, born in Brook­lyn.  He’s been a comic book artists for years and done plenty of books for the big two for a while.

Sadly, this sort of mis­taken iden­tity hap­pens more often than you’d like in a post 9–11 world.  Sim­ple things and names get flagged which causes things which aren’t even remotely close or con­nected to ter­ror­ism to be said that they are.

This clearly is a graphic novel in the clas­sic sense of pieces like Pulitzer Prize win­ner “Maus,” which focus on events in the past to get greater aware­ness of them in the present via a dif­fer­ent medium.

Given the human rights record of Kony — think tons of child sol­diers, mas­sive rape squads and Lord knows what else — and the pol­i­tics of most comic book artists, these guys would rather be caught dead first before they’d fund a mur­derer like Joseph Kony.

That reminds me, I really need to catch an Admi­rals game some­time this season.

At least the NHL and NHLPA haven’t shut them down.  (Yet.)