Month: October 2011

Notes from a Dragon Mom

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A heartbreaking piece from a mother whose son, Ronan, is diagnosed with Tay-Sachs disease; unfortunately, the child isn’t expected to live much past his third birthday…

Ronan won’t prosper or succeed in the way we have come to understand this term in our culture; he will never walk or say “Mama,” and I will never be a tiger mom. The mothers and fathers of terminally ill children are something else entirely. Our goals are simple and terrible: to help our children live with minimal discomfort and maximum dignity. We will not launch our children into a bright and promising future, but see them into early graves. We will prepare to lose them and then, impossibly, to live on after that gutting loss. This requires a new ferocity, a new way of thinking, a new animal. We are dragon parents: fierce and loyal and loving as hell. Our experiences have taught us how to parent for the here and now, for the sake of parenting, for the humanity implicit in the act itself, though this runs counter to traditional wisdom and advice.

This just tugs at you… It’s about living in the present:

But today Ronan is alive and his breath smells like sweet rice. I can see my reflection in his greenish-gold eyes. I am a reflection of him and not the other way around, and this is, I believe, as it should be. This is a love story, and like all great love stories, it is a story of loss. Parenting, I’ve come to understand, is about loving my child today. Now. In fact, for any parent, anywhere, that’s all there is.

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The Casting Director for Police Lineups

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Ever wondered where they find the people to fill in police lineups with the guys who didn’t commit the crime? Apparently, in New York, they hire this casting director:

For some 15 years, Mr. Weston has been providing the New York Police Department with “fillers” — the five decoys who accompany the suspect in police lineups.

Detectives often find fillers on their own, combing homeless shelters and street corners for willing participants. In a pinch, police officers can shed their uniforms and fill in. But in the Bronx, detectives often pay Mr. Weston $10 to find fillers for them.

A short man with a pencil-thin beard, Mr. Weston seems a rather unlikely candidate for having a working relationship with the Police Department, even an informal one. He is frequently profane, talks of beating up anyone who crosses him, and spends quite a bit of his money on coconut-flavored liquor.

Sounds like something from the movies, right? It sounds like a hectic life:

Mr. Weston says he is always on call; his Bluetooth earpiece comes off in public only when he goes to the barber for his weekly $16 trim. His cellphone, he says, holds the numbers of some 100 potential lineup fillers, mostly friends and acquaintances from the Mill Brook Houses, the public housing project in the South Bronx where he has lived most of his life.

He often complains about how people hound him for the chance to make a few dollars through lineup work.

“I can’t even play basketball on the courts or sit here and drink a beer,” Mr. Weston said on a recent afternoon. “People are always asking me if there is a lineup.”

Hey, someone’s gotta do it, right?

The Original Name of Amazon

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From a good piece on Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon.com, in this weekend’s Wall Street Journal:  Amazon’s original name was Cadabra, which was nixed after someone misheard it as “cadaver.” Interesting fact of the day, to be sure.

The other highlights from the piece. Ding!

At first, there were a half-dozen orders per day. One of the programmers set up the computers so that a bell would ring every time an order came in. A great novelty at first, it quickly got annoying and had to be turned off.

I share this philosophy about launching. Put it out there, and then constantly improve what you build (rather than aiming for perfection at the beginning):

At launch, the site wasn’t even truly finished. Mr. Bezos’s philosophy was to get to market quickly, in order to get a jump on the competition, and to fix problems and improve the site as people started using it.

Fascinating tidbit about a glitch of an early version of Amazon’s site:

Among the early mistakes, according to Mr. Bezos: “We found that customers could order a negative quantity of books! And we would credit their credit card with the price and, I assume, wait around for them to ship the books.”

Sounds like I would have been a candidate for the third book mentioned here:

In the very early days, Mr. Bezos had employees pick out the 20 strangest titles sold every week and awarded a prize for the strangest. Some of the winners: “Training Goldfish Using Dolphin Training Techniques,” “How to Start Your Own Country” and “Life Without Friends.”

Finally, I had no idea Amazon had a patent on the one-click purchase option:

From the beginning, Mr. Bezos was fanatical about squeezing from Amazon.com every incremental degree of usefulness. New features were often simple things, like 1-Click ordering—whose notorious patent was called by one law journal “probably the most memorable example of an unoriginal software patent.” It forbids any other online retailer from using a one-click purchasing option without paying a royalty to Amazon.

Way to go, Mr. Bezos.

The Limit of Human Population Growth

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A good post at The New Yorker, summarizing the growth of human population. Earth should hit the 7,000,000,000 population mark sometime in the next two to three weeks:

Sometime on October 31st, the world’s population will hit seven billion. The baby who does the trick will most likely appear in India, where the number of births per minute—fifty-one—is higher than in any other nation. But he or she could also be born in China—the world’s most populous country—or in a fast-growing nation like Nigeria or Guatemala or, really, anywhere. The idea that a particular child will on a particular day bring the global population to a particular number is, of course, a fiction; nobody can say, within tens of millions, how many people there are on earth at any given time. The United Nations Population Fund has picked October 31st as its best estimate. That this date is Halloween is presumably just a coincidence…

If you aren’t already familiar with Thomas Malthus’s famous treatise, An Essay on the Principle of Population, in which he espouses that the rate of human growth will outstrip the food supply (which he argued, grows linearly), you should take a look at this Wikipedia page. Malthus’s essay is mentioned prominently in The New Yorker piece.

Furthermore, making predictions is hard. Hence, the frequent revisions:

The further ahead you look, the trickier things become. This is partly a matter of birth rates; because the base is now so large, even relatively trivial changes produce enormous effects. In most European nations, and also in countries like Japan and China, birth rates have already fallen below replacement levels. Until quite recently, the U.N. was projecting that rates in other parts of the globe would follow a similar downward slope, so that sometime toward 2050 global population would level out at around nine billion. A few months ago, though, the U.N. announced that it was revising its long-term forecast. The agency now estimates that the number of people on earth in 2100 will be ten billion and still climbing. One reason for the upward revision is that birth rates in many developing countries, particularly in Africa, have remained unexpectedly high.

The big question: is there a theoretical asymptote for the number of humans that Earth can sustain? If so, what is that number, to a first-degree approximation?

On Aggregation Versus Plagiarism

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Jack Shafer at Reuters has some thoughts on how plagiarism hurts the reader:

The plagiarist defrauds readers by leading them to believe that he has come by the facts of his story first-hand–that he vouches for the accuracy of the facts and interpretations under his byline. But this is not the case. Generally, the plagiarist doesn’t know whether the copy he’s lifted has gotten the story right because he hasn’t really investigated the topic. (If he had, he could write the story himself.) In such cases he must attribute the material he borrows so that at the very least the reader can hold somebody accountable for the facts in a story.

Or to put it another way, a journalist who does original work essentially claims, this is true, according to me. The conscientious journalist who cites the work of others essentially makes the claim that this is true, according to somebody else. The plagiarist makes no such claims in his work. By having no sources of his own and failing to point to the source he stole from, he breaks the “chain of evidence” that allows readers to contest or verify facts. By doing so, he produces worthless copy that wastes the time of his readers. And that’s the crime.

I guess the underlying assumption here is that if the reader wants to contest the facts of the article, he/she would be inclined to act upon his beliefs: contacting the author, the editor of the publication, etc. It’s certainly something to think about.

And what of aggregators, like the Huffington Post? Jack Shafer, again:

Instead, I would remind the established media that the Huffington Post is trying to teach it a lesson: That a huge, previously ignored readership out there wants its news hot, quick, and tight. At any point in HuffPo’s astonishing rise, the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, or any dozen other media companies could have strangled it in its crib by producing an equally entertaining and edifying pop-news Web site that drew on the Associated Press wire, licensed photo banks, its own stories, and, yes, rewrites of other sites’ content.

So, if aggregators stick to fair use and cite their sources, it’s a fair game.

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(hat tip: Felix Salmon)

The Man Who Sailed His House

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In this month’s GQ, Michael Paterniti writes a remarkable story of a Japanese man named Hiromitsu who survived the March 11 earthquake and subsequent tsunami. Not only is the story incredible, but so is the narration (you here are this man, experiencing the catastrophe in the present):

At two forty-six, something rumbles from deep in the earth, a sickening sort of grinding, and then everything lurches wildly, whips back, lurches more wildly still. The cut boards stacked along the wall clatter down, and your first move is to flee the shed, to dive twenty feet free onto open ground and clutch it, as if riding the back of a whale. Time elongates. Three minutes becomes a lifetime.

When the jolting ends, stupefaction is followed by dismay—and then a bleary accounting. Already phones are useless. The boss, Mr. Mori, urges you to rush home to check on your wife and parents, but fearing a tsunami, fearing a drive down into the lowlands by the sea, and trusting the strength of your concrete house to protect your wife and parents, you at first refuse. There are ancient stone markers on this coast, etched warnings from the ancestors, aggrieved survivors of past tsunamis—1896, 1933—beseeching those who live by the water to build on the inland side of their hubris or suffer the consequences.

A description of the approaching tsunami:

You don’t look out to sea, not once; you stand staring at the mountain, Kunimi, in the distance. And now you can hear her downstairs, inside again, and now comes the creak of the bathroom door. Comes the sound of running water. Comes this vision of the mountain, placid, immovable—and then, to your right, to the north, within twenty feet, drifts the whole house of your neighbor. The house is moving past as if borne by ghosts. When you turn left, to the south and the garden, everything is as it’s always been, dry and in place. When you turn back the other way, you can see only this coursing field of ocean.

Just an incredible descriptive paragraph here:

This force is greater than the force of memory, or regret, or fear. It’s the force of an impersonal death, delivered by thousands of pounds of freezing water that slam you into a dark underworld, the one in which you now find yourself hooded, beaten, pinned deeper. The sensation is one of having been lowered into a spinning, womblike grave. If you could see anything in the grip of this monster, fifteen feet down, you’d see your neighbors tumbling by, as if part of the same circus. You’d see huge pieces of house—chimneys and doors, stairs and walls—crashing into each other, fusing, becoming part of one solid, deadly wave. You’d see shards of glass and splintered swords of wood. Or a car moving like a submarine. You’d see your thirty pigeons revolving in their cage. Or your wife within an arm’s reach, then vacuumed away like a small fish. You frantically flail. Is this up or down?

The experience of being out at sea, and deciding: should I drink? Should I eat? Can I?

At sunset, sky in scratches of purple light, a gnawing in your gut tells you it’s dinner, so you crack open the first can, drink, then, head tilted back, try to lick out the last drop. The roof is perhaps twelve feet by six, of corrugated metal nailed to wood beams, your raft at sea. Last night, you and Yuko slept beneath it, and now you perch atop it on the sea, above the goblin sharks and whatever else lurks below. 

Hiromitsu forces himself from going to sleep, and soon experiences hallucinations. Frightening:

You’re convinced you see a body coming near, and start screaming—Help me! But then it’s a tree trunk. In another you see a huge wave hurtling toward the roof and imagine turning into a tree to save yourself. But just as you think to stand and hang your arms like branches, you stop yourself for fear the roof will tip.

And what of the rescue?

Out of the oblivion, a clear voice responds, “We’re here,” and the boat drifts alongside your roof-home, and the voice asks, “Which side is safest?” And you say, “The side toward land, please,” as you strip the plastic container full of notes from your body and place it on the altar of your futon. Then one of the bundled figures steps out of the lifeboat onto the tippy roof and comes toward you with arms outstretched. The figure leads you across, five paces, and only when you lean forward into their boat and splay your body over its hard gunwale, like a glorious falling tree, do you know it’s real…

This is a story of survival, love, and loss. Hiromitsu lost his wife to the tsunami, but he carries her memory:

This is how you speak to her, through the scraps in the bag, but also aloud sometimes. Before eating, you might murmur, “Thank you,” as if she’s prepared the food on your plate. You might do the same on a beautiful day, as if she’s created it. And before bed each night, you tell her you love her. You say this to her presence or spirit, but you forgo mementos, little altars, or pictures on the wall. You can’t bear the idea of seeing her again, as you knew her in all those endless days before the wave.

The Mystery of the Faster than Light Neutrinos

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I’ve been following this story of “faster than light neutrinos” since the news first came out in late September:

CERN says a neutrino beam fired from a particle accelerator near Geneva to a lab 454 miles (730 kilometers) away in Italy traveled 60 nanoseconds faster than the speed of light. Scientists calculated the margin of error at just 10 nanoseconds, making the difference statistically significant. 

To date, there have been more than 80 papers published trying to explain the 60-nanosecond discrepancy. But according to one physicist, Ronald van Elburg at the University of Groningen, the scientists at CERN neglected to consider nuances of the time mechanism. In particular, in order to synchronize the two locations (they are more than 700km apart, after all), the team used GPS satellites, which each broadcast an accurate time signal from orbit some 20,000km overhead. But herein lies the problem, according to van Elburg:

So what is the satellites’ motion with respect to the OPERA experiment? These probes orbit from West to East in a plane inclined at 55 degrees to the equator. Significantly, that’s roughly in line with the neutrino flight path. Their relative motion is then easy to calculate.

So from the point of view of a clock on board a GPS satellite, the positions of the neutrino source and detector are changing. “From the perspective of the clock, the detector is moving towards the source and consequently the distance travelled by the particles as observed from the clock is shorter,” says van Elburg.

By this he means shorter than the distance measured in the reference frame on the ground.

The OPERA team overlooks this because it thinks of the clocks as on the ground not in orbit.

How big is this effect? Van Elburg calculates that it should cause the neutrinos to arrive 32 nanoseconds early. But this must be doubled because the same error occurs at each end of the experiment. So the total correction is 64 nanoseconds, almost exactly what the OPERA team observes.

Here is the full paper (PDF). And the conclusion:

We showed that in the OPERA experiment the baseline time-of-flight is incorrectly identified with the Lorentz transformation corrected time-of-flight as measured from a clock in a nonstationary orbit and in fact exceeds it by at maximum 64 ns. The calculation presented contain some simplifying assumptions, a full treatment should take into account the varying angle between the GPS satellite’s velocity vector and the CERN-Gran Sasso baseline. We expect that such a full treatment will find somewhat lower value for the average correction. This is because the velocity of the GPS satellite is most of the time not fully aligned with the CERN-Gran Sasso baseline. In addition full analysis should be able to predict the correlation between the GPS satellite position(s) and the observed time-of-flight.

We know from special relativity that time is reference frame specific. This paper shows that Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) happens to be less universal than the name suggests, and that we have to take in to account where our clocks are located. Finally, making all calculations from the correct reference frame might also lead to further improvement of the accuracy of GPS systems as the errors reported here for the time-of-flight amount to a ±18 m difference in location.

I am skeptical. This is rudimentary physics, and I can’t believe that the OPERA scientists would have neglected to consider such a triviality. I’ll be paying attention to how this story unfolds…

Ernest Hemingway: The Finest Life

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Ernest Hemingway is one of my favourite novelists. I’ve read all his major works, though I have yet to read Green Hills of Africa and Death in the Afternoon. And so it was with great pleasure that I’ve read this James Salter review of Paul Hendrickson’s Hemingway’s Boat: Everything He Loved in Life, and Lost, 1934-1961.

A brief glimpse into Hemingway’s personality. If you got along with him, great. But if you didn’t, he said some mean things (that bit about F. Scott Fitzgerald is especially caustic):

Hemingway was generous with affection and money, but he had a mean streak. “I’m tearing those bastards apart,” he told Kitty Cannell. He was fine if he liked you but murder if he didn’t. Michael Arlen was “some little Armenian sucker after London names”; Archibald MacLeish, once his close friend and champion, was a nose-picking poet and a coward. As for Scott Fitzgerald, who was a couple of years older, successful before Hemingway, and had recommended him to Scribner’s, Hemingway said he wrote “Christmas tree novels,” was “a rummy and a liar and dishonest about money.”

I’ve never encountered this criticism of Hemingway, provided in the column by the critic Edmund Wilson:

For reasons which I cannot attempt to explain, something frightful seems to happen to Hemingway as soon as he begins to write in the first person. In his fiction, the conflicting elements of his personality, the emotional situations which obsess him, are externalized and objectified; and the result is an art which is severe, intense and deeply serious. But as soon as he talks in his own person, he seems to lose all his capacity for self-criticism and is likely to become fatuous or maudlin…. In his own character of Ernest Hemingway, the Old Master of Key West, he has a way of sounding silly. Perhaps he is beginning to be imposed on by the American publicity legend which has been created about him.

Ernest Hemingway loved fishing and his boat. A great description of him going after the marlin:

The deep, primal fears, the great fish fighting ferociously against the steel hook in its mouth, hour after hour, sounding, bursting from the water, struggling to be free and being slowly exhausted, the fisherman pumping and reeling in until the fish is gaffed alongside or even in the boat. In his first two years Hemingway caught ninety-one of them. One had jumped three times toward the boat and then thirty-three times against the current. That fish or another, gotten on board alive, had jumped twenty times or more in the cockpit.

On Hemingway’s diligence:

He had worked hard all his life. He had been to three wars, he had always showed up. “When you have loved three things all your life,” he wrote, “from the earliest you can remember; to fish, to shoot and, later, to read; and when all your life the necessity to write has been your master, you learn to remember.” 

If you remember my earlier post this year, Hemingway thought he was being followed by the FBI. There is a mention of that in this profile as well.

But what of this conclusion? I guess I need to read Hendrickson’s book to have a stronger opinion about Hemingway’s suicide:

The suicide could be seen as an act of weakness, even moral weakness, a sudden revelation of it in a man whose image was of boldness and courage, but Hendrickson’s book is testimony that it was not a failure of courage but a last display of it.

On More Servants

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Megan McCardle, over at The Atlantic, answers the question “With so many unemployed, and income increasing faster among the affluent, why aren’t people hiring more servants?” It’s an interesting thought experiment. The answers:

1.  Various forms of public assistance, and wealthier families, have increased the reservation wage.  A servant in 1900 worked at least 10 hours a day, at least 5.5 days a week, and according to our archives, cost at least $25 a month for a “passable” one.  Many middle class people could probably afford to pay about $500 a month, plus a room and some food, for someone who would take care of all the housework, all the time.  But how many Americans would work for such a sum?  Our house was built in that era, and either they didn’t have live-in servants, or the help was sleeping in a pretty gnarly unfinished basement.  You’d have to be fairly desperate to take the equivalent job today, and almost no one is that desperate.
2.  There’s a tax wedge.  If servants were more common, the IRS would be more assiduous about auditing for payroll taxes, etc.  (Already a problem for working women with nannies who end up in public service). My mother actually paid taxes for her cleaning lady, and it was not only expensive, but an administrative nightmare–somehow, the numbers never added up right, the paperwork got lost, etc. Taxes reduce the differential between the value of your labor and someone else’s, because you don’t have to tax you.
3.  Regulatory overhead  See above.  The modern labor regulatory system is set up to deal with corporations, not individuals contracting for informal labor.  Either the work ends up in the gray economy (illegals), or it’s contracted out to companies that can amortize the regulatory overhead over a lot of workers (Merry Maids)
4.  Management. Workers have to be managed.  They leave.  (Hance Saki’s memorable epigram: “She was a good cook, as cooks go.  And as cooks go, she went.”)  They need to be replaced.  Sometimes the replacement doesn’t work out.  All of this takes time.  For the mistress of a house in the era before labor-saving appliances, managing servants was undoubtedly more pleasant than scrubbing the coal scuttles. But it was a job.  And many high-paid women in the sub-Gates class have full-time jobs; they don’t have the time to take on full time employees.  A large servant class may have presupposed the existence of a large class of women at home.
More here.

R.I.P. Steve Jobs

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Today, Steve Jobs has passed away at the age of 56. I am so sad.

Tonight, I watch, again, Steve Jobs’s commencement speech from Stanford.

This is some of the best advice you’ll ever hear:

Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith. I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

R.I.P. Steve Jobs. You were a visionary. The world is a better place for everything you have done. Thank you.