Month: January 2012

On Stolen Bikes

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When thieves stole his ­commuter bike on a busy street in broad daylight, Patrick Symmes decided to do something about it: he wrote this outstanding piece for Outside Magazine.

With the rise of the bicycle age has come a rise in bicycle robbery: FBI statistics claim that 204,000 bicycles were stolen nationwide in 2010, but those are only the documented thefts. Transportation Alternatives, a bicycle advocacy group in New York City, estimates the unreported thefts at four or five times that—more than a million bikes a year. New York alone probably sees more than 100,000 bikes stolen annually. Whether in big biking cities like San Francisco and Portland, Oregon, or in sport-loving suburbs and small towns, theft is “one of the biggest reasons people don’t ride bikes,” Noah Budnick, deputy director of Transportation Alternatives, told me. Although bike commuting has increased by 100 percent in New York City during the past seven years, the lack of secure bike parking was ranked alongside bad drivers and traffic as a primary deterrent to riding more. It’s all about the (stolen) bike; even Lance Armstrong had his custom time-trial Trek nicked from the team van in 2009 after a race in California. Not every bike is that precious, but according to figures from the FBI and the National Bike Registry, the value of stolen bikes is as much as $350 million a year. 

I suppose the “business” of bike theft has its merits because:

Bikes are portable and easily converted to cash, and they usually vanish without a trace—in some places, only 5 percent are even reported stolen. Stealing one is routinely treated as a misdemeanor, even though, in the age of electronic derailleurs and $5,000 coffee-shop rides, many bike thefts easily surpass the fiscal definition of felony, which varies by state but is typically under the thousand-dollar mark. Yet police departments are reluctant to pull officers from robberies or murder investigations to hunt bike thieves. Even when they do, DAs rarely prosecute the thieves the police bring in.

Symmes also mentions that bikes may be sold far from where they were stolen:

In Miami in the 1980s, police found six freighters in the harbor holding hundreds of stolen bicycles, possibly headed for Haiti. Many bicycles stolen in Oregon crop up in San Francisco, evidence of an export network. In California, the Border Patrol has repeatedly caught pickup trucks entering Mexico that had been stuffed with high-end bikes stolen in Santa Cruz; drug dealers there take payment in valuable bikes, which they resell to the Mexican elite. 

A very interesting read in which we come to understand that on America’s rough streets, bicycles are a form of currency as liquid as cash and drugs.

Internet Speeds Around the World

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The numbers guy at the WSJ has a great post profiling how internet speeds around the world vary. More importantly, many consumers aren’t aware of what they’re actually getting from their internet service provider.

Government regulators in several countries are on speed patrol, though, and they have discovered that providers’ performance often fails to match their ads. For consumers, that could mean more time spent waiting for video to buffer, for photos to load, and for online games to continue.

This graphic is very informative. The gist:

1) Lithuania has the fastest internet in the world, clocking in at an average of 31.89 mbps. Also, the actual speed is very close to the promised speed (99.6% reliability).

2) The tiny nation of Iceland has the 10th fastest internet speed in the world, with an average of 21.9 mbps. However, the reliability of the advertised rate to the actual rate is much lower than that of Lithuania at 70.9%.

3) The United States has the 33rd fastest internet speed in the world, with an average speed of 12.29 mbps. The reliability rate is 93.6%.

4) Israel has a very high (99.6%) rate of advertised vs. actual speed, but it’s ranked at number 56 in the world with an average speed of 7.15 mbps.

5) Finally, Greece’s woes aren’t just tied to their economy. They have an abysmal 44.4% rate for promised vs. delivered internet speed, which clocks in at 6.05 mbps, or number 66 in the world.

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What’s your internet speed where you live? And who’s your internet service provider?

Comparing French and Germany Identity

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Francis Fukuyama writes how French and German identities differ:

French national identity is very much built around French language. I always found very impressive that Léopold Senghor, the Senegalese poet, was admitted to the Académie française back in the 1940’s, something that is indicative of the way French see their identity. If you spoke French and if you could write beautiful poetry in French that qualified you for the Académie française. Therefore, that republican sense of identity has underlined French citizenship.

The German case is very different. German national identity evolved very differently from France. Partly due to the fact that the Germans were scattered all over Central and Eastern Europe, the process of German unification required definition of Germanness in ethnic terms. So legally their citizenship law was based on the legal principle of jus sanguinis. You become a citizen not if you are born on German territory, but rather depending on whether you have a German mother. Up until the year 2000, if you were an ethnic German coming from Russia, you could get citizenship far more easily than if you were a 2nd or 3rd generation Turk that had grown up in Germany, spoke perfect German and did not speak Turkish at all. Germans have changed their practice but the cultural meaning of saying I am German is still very different from the cultural meaning of saying I am French. It has a connotation that is more deeply rooted in blood. This means that when Angela Merkel says that multiculturalism has failed in Germany, I think she is only half right. She would be quite wrong to describe that failure one-sidedly as an unwillingness of Muslim immigrants and their children to want to integrate into German society. Part of the failure of integration comes from the side of the German society as well.

I want to say that the majority of the world culture are similar to that of Germany, but I’m just speculating. I’m not certain if there is hard evidence for this question of defining identity.

Becker’s Bridal: A Magic Store Uniting Brides

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Before “bridezilla” became part of the English lexicon, there existed Becker’s Bridal — a magic store that united a generation of brides. Jeffrey Zaslow writes in The Wall Street Journal:

Since 1934, more than 100,000 girlies and sweethearts have come to Becker’s to find their wedding gowns, and in their journeys there, they formed a kind of sisterhood. All of them are linked not just to the eras in which they got married, but also to each other and to the wedding culture today.

Brides and bridal gowns have always offered a measure of our longings and aspirations. Just 51% of American adults are now married—a record low—according to a report issued last month by the Pew Research Center. Pew also reports that 39% of Americans believe marriage is “becoming obsolete.” And yet, in the story of this old bridal shop in a rural, one-stoplight town, it’s easy to see why, despite everything, wedding gowns remain a symbol of hope.

For 78 years, Becker’s Bridal on Fowler’s tired Main Street has been run by an unbroken family chain—a great-grandmother, grandmother, mother and daughter. Thanks to the Beckers, Fowler claims to have more wedding dresses per capita than any U.S. municipality; there are 1,100 residents and 2,500 bridal gowns stocked at the store.

And some fascinating statistics about the bridal dress business:

Department stores had 85% of the wedding-gown business nationwide in the 1950s, but Becker’s stayed afloat through word-of-mouth in small Michigan towns. In the 1960s, thousands of mom-and-pop bridal shops opened up in suburban strip malls. Because Becker’s had established itself so long ago, its customers remained loyal. The next big challenge came in the 1990s, when the David’s Bridal chain began growing, selling gowns starting at $99. As a result of this and other pressures, the number of U.S. bridal shops fell from a peak of about 8,000 in 1990 to less than 5,000, according to the Bridal Association of America. Becker’s held on. Last year, Becker’s sold 1,650 dresses. The store has $1.8 million in annual sales, with 85% of that revenue needed to cover merchandise and salaries.

The saddest part in the piece was the part about the “Dress Cemetery.”

Predictions of the Year 2000 by John Watkins in 1900

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In 1900, an American civil engineer called John Elfreth Watkins made a number of predictions about what the world would be like in 2000. He was surprisingly prescient, but also made a few wacky predictions…

In December of that year, at the start of the 20th Century, John Elfreth Watkins wrote a piece published on page eight of an American women’s magazine, Ladies’ Home Journal, entitled “What May Happen in the Next Hundred Years.” Below are his predictions:

1) Digital Photography. He wrote:

“Photographs will be telegraphed from any distance. If there be a battle in China a hundred years hence, snapshots of its most striking events will be published in the newspapers an hour later…. photographs will reproduce all of nature’s colours.”

2) The rising height of Americans. He wrote: “Americans will be taller by from one to two inches.” The average American man in 1900 was about 66-67 inches (1.68-1.70m) tall and by 2000, the average American was 69 inches  (1.75m).

3) Mobile phones. He wrote: “Wireless telephone and telegraph circuits will span the world. A husband in the middle of the Atlantic will be able to converse with his wife sitting in her boudoir in Chicago. We will be able to telephone to China quite as readily as we now talk from New York to Brooklyn.”

4) Pre-prepared meals. “Ready-cooked meals will be bought from establishment similar to our bakeries of today.”

5) High Speed Trains. Watkins wrote: “Trains will run two miles a minute normally. Express trains one hundred and fifty miles per hour.” Exactly 100 years after writing those words, Amtrak’s flagship high-speed rail line, the Acela Express, opened between Boston and Washington, DC. It reaches top speeds of 150mph.

6)  Television. “Man will see around the world. Persons and things of all kinds will be brought within focus of cameras connected electrically with screens at opposite ends of circuits, thousands of miles at a span.”

But Watkins also made some puzzling predictions that proved to be wrong:

1) No more C, X or Q. Watkins wrote: “There will be no C, X or Q in our everyday alphabet. They will be abandoned because unnecessary.” Obviously way off.

2) No cars in large cities. “All hurry traffic will be below or above ground when brought within city limits.”

3) No mosquitoes or flies. “Mosquitoes, house-flies and roaches will have been exterminated.” We’re not even close in eradicating these pests.

For a full list of Watkins’s predictions, see here.

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(via BBC)

Plato’s Allegory of the Cave and Addiction

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I first learned about Plato’s Allegory of the Cave (if you’ve never read it, pause and read the full text here) in a Georgia Tech humanities course (full list of courses here).

In the allegory, Plato allows Socrates to describe a group of people who have lived chained to the wall of a cave all of their lives, facing a blank wall. The people watch shadows projected on the wall by things passing in front of a fire behind them, and begin to ascribe forms to these shadows. According to Plato’s Socrates, the shadows are as close as the prisoners get to viewing reality. To them, shadows are reality. He then explains how the philosopher is like a prisoner who is freed from the cave and comes to understand that the shadows on the wall do not make up reality at all, as he can perceive the true form of reality rather than the mere shadows seen by the prisoners.

Outside of the philosophical comparison, I hadn’t seen many other writers invoke the allegory to describe an experience. But Peg O’Connor does this brilliantly in her reflective essay “In the Cave: Philosophy and Addiction.” She writes:

This allegory is richly wonderful for understanding addiction, relapse and recovery. Most people who become addicted become enchained to their drug of choice. The word “addiction” comes from the Latin verb “addicere,” which means to give over, dedicate or surrender. In the case of many alcoholics, for instance, including my own, this is just what happens. What had perhaps started as fun and harmless use begins to grow troubling, painful and difficult to stop. The alcoholic becomes chained to alcohol in a way different from others who “drink normally.”

In various scenarios of addiction, the addicted person’s fixation on a shadow reality — one that does not conform to the world outside his or her use — is apparent to others. When the personal cost of drinking or drug use becomes noticeable, it can still be written off or excused as merely atypical. Addicts tend to orient their activities around their addictive behavior; they may forego friends and activities where drinking or drug use is not featured. Some may isolate themselves; others may change their circle of friends in order to be with people who drink or use in the same way they do. They engage in faulty yet persuasive alcoholic reasoning, willing to take anything as evidence that they do not have a problem; no amount of reasoning will persuade them otherwise. Each time the addict makes a promise to cut down or stop but does not, the chains get more constricting.

Yet for many reasons, some people begin to wriggle against the chains of addiction. Whether it is because they have experiences that scare them to death (not uncommon) or lose something that really matters (also not uncommon), some people begin to work themselves out of the chains. People whose descent into addiction came later in life have more memories of what life can be like sober. Some will be able to turn and see the fire and the half wall and recognize the puppets causing the shadows. Those whose use started so young that it is all they really know will often experience the fear and confusion that Plato described. But as sometimes happens in recovery, they can start to come out of the cave, too.

The brightness of the light can be painful, as many alcoholic or drug dependent people realize once their use stops. Those who drank or used drugs to numb feelings or avoid painful memories may feel defenseless. This is why they will retreat back to the familiar darkness of the cave. Back with their drinking friends, they will find comfort. This is one way to understand relapse.

Others will make it farther out of the cave and have their eyes adjust. They will struggle to stay sober and balanced. So many of their old coping behaviors will not work, and they are faced with a seemingly endless task of learning how to rebuild their emotional lives. Some will stay clean and sober for a good while and later relapse. People relapse for all sorts of reasons, and often these have to do with old patterned ways of thinking and behaving that make a roaring comeback. When people who have had some sobriety relapse and go back to the darkness of the cave, they may be met with derision ― an “I told you so” attitude.

Those who do make it out of the cave and manage never to relapse again are few and far between…

Peg O’Connor also mentions other allegories in her post: Montaigne’s cat, Kierkegaard’s leap of faith, Nietzsche’s myth of eternal recurrence, and Wittgenstein’s fly in the fly bottle. You can imagine what kind of rabbit hole those references opened up…

The Making and Design of Google Maps

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Willem van Lencker is a user experience and visual designer at Google Maps. In this post, he shares a brief history of the design/creation process of Google Maps, a product that so many of us use daily.

Synthesizing all of this information in an approachable and aesthetically pleasing way carried obvious challenges. As the product grew and evolved, the map varied widely from one country to another, and the universal familiarity and usability that made Google Maps a success was being undermined by complexity and “feature creep.” To better understand which of these variances were useful, we audited the map styles, colors, and iconography of maps all over the world with the help of local users. We examined the leading online and offline mapping providers in each country, in addition to researching local physical signage and wayfinding. This undertaking provided us with a look at mapping as a local exercise—with cultural, ethnic, and region-specific quirks and nuances.

This is a good reminder of how people orient themselves in the West vs. East:

As Google Maps has broadened in scope, we have also had to address fundamental differences in tasks as basic as navigation and driving directions. We have found that, generally speaking, people navigate primarily by street names in Western countries and by landmarks and points of interest in the East. This is due to a combination of factors including a lack of road names (e.g. in India where locals rely on landmarks) or just a more complex street addressing system (e.g. in Japan where street numbers are assigned by date of construction, not sequentially)

Finally, it is smart of Google to use the local design elements in its maps. For example, see this image and what Google did about labeling the subway systems in different parts of the world:

As subways are often used by both tourists and locals, the local branding systems for subway stations worked best—helping guide users both on maps and as they navigate outside in the real world. Additionally, a custom body of regional road shields has been maintained, ensuring consistency and familiarity with real-world roadside markers.

The Lottery in Babylon by Jorge Luis Borges

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“The Lottery in Babylon” is a fantastic short story written by Jorge Luis Borges. In the story, an unnamed narrator recounts how a so-called lottery (run by “The Company”) influenced the society in which he lived. He begins his tale:

My father would tell how once, long ago–centuries? years?–the lottery in Babylon was a game played by commoners. He would tell (though whether this is true or not, I cannot say) how barbers would take a man’s copper coins and give back rectangles made of bone or parchment and adorned with symbols. Then, in broad daylight, a drawing would be held; those smiled upon by fate would, with no further corroboration by chance, win coins minted of silver. The procedure, as you can see, was rudimentary.

But there was no excitement in this kind of lottery. Some would win for the cost of coin. But they were ultimately unsuccessful. So what happened next? Someone suggested the introduction of unlucky draws. At first, the penalty was a fine. But as you read the story, you’ll understand that those who didn’t or couldn’t pay up for being unlucky were sent to jail. And then:

Some time after this, the announcements of the numbers drawn began to leave out the lists of fines and simply print the days of prison assigned to each losing number. 

And the depravity of the Lottery escalates further. If people can be made to pay fines, why can’t they be sentenced to death? But the narrator provides the following introspective:

If the Lottery is an intensification of chance, a periodic infusion of chaos into the cosmos, then is it not appropriate that chance intervene inevery aspect of the drawing, not just one? Is it not ludicrous that chance should dictate a person’s death while the circumstances of that death–whether private or public, whether drawn out for an hour or a century–shouldnot be subject to chance? Those perfectly reasonable objections finally prompted sweeping reform…

You should read the story to find out what happens at the end. The narrator’s admission leaves you deep in thought…

This short story by Jorge Luis Borges is one of the best I’ve read in a long time. 

Pico Iyer: In Praise of the Long Sentence

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Pico Iyer has a beautiful, poignant essay in The Los Angeles Times, praising the long and winding sentence. He argues that writing longer phrases is a way to protest the speed of information bites people are subjected to daily:

Yet nowadays the planet is moving too fast for even a Rushdie or DeLillo to keep up, and many of us in the privileged world have access to more information than we know what to do with. What we crave is something that will free us from the overcrowded moment and allow us to see it in a larger light. No writer can compete, for speed and urgency, with texts or CNN news flashes or RSS feeds, but any writer can try to give us the depth, the nuances — the “gaps,” as Annie Dillard calls them — that don’t show up on many screens. Not everyone wants to be reduced to a sound bite or a bumper sticker.

Enter (I hope) the long sentence: the collection of clauses that is so many-chambered and lavish and abundant in tones and suggestions, that has so much room for near-contradiction and ambiguity and those places in memory or imagination that can’t be simplified, or put into easy words, that it allows the reader to keep many things in her head and heart at the same time, and to descend, as by a spiral staircase, deeper into herself and those things that won’t be squeezed into an either/or. With each clause, we’re taken further and further from trite conclusions — or that at least is the hope — and away from reductionism, as if the writer were a dentist, saying “Open wider” so that he can probe the tender, neglected spaces in the reader (though in this case it’s not the mouth that he’s attending to but the mind).

Pico carefully lambasts the short sentence and then mentions authors who thrive on the long sentence:

The short sentence is the domain of uninflected talk-radio rants and shouting heads on TV who feel that qualification or subtlety is an assault on their integrity (and not, as it truly is, integrity’s greatest adornment).

If we continue along this road, whole areas of feeling and cognition and experience will be lost to us. We will not be able to read one another very well if we can’t read Proust’s labyrinthine sentences, admitting us to those half-lighted realms where memory blurs into imagination, and we hide from the person we care for or punish the thing that we love. And how can we feel the layers, the sprawl, the many-sidedness of Istanbul in all its crowding amplitude without the 700-word sentence, transcribing its features, that Orhan Pamuk offered in tribute to his lifelong love?

Interestingly, Iyer finds Henry James unreadable (I think The Turn of the Screw is an easy read, while The Portrait of a Lady was a challenge for me):

Not every fashioner of many-comma’d sentences works for every one of us — I happen to find Henry James unreadable, his fussily unfolding clauses less a reflection of his noticing everything than of his inability to make up his mind or bring anything to closure: a kind of mental stutter. But the promise of the long sentence is that it will take you beyond the known, far from shore, into depths and mysteries you can’t get your mind, or most of your words, around.

Perhaps my favorite part of Iyer’s essay:

But we’ve got shortness and speed up the wazoo these days; what I long for is something that will sustain me and stretch me till something snaps, take me so far beyond a simple clause or a single formulation that suddenly, unexpectedly, I find myself in a place that feels as spacious and strange as life itself.

The long sentence opens the very doors that a short sentence simply slams shut.

A beautiful, must-read. Writers: are you paying attention?

What Is It Like Being a Conductor?

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What does a conductor do? And what does conducting feel like? David Anderson sought to find out. In this piece in New York Magazine, he describes how he led a rehearsal of Mozart’s six-minute overture to Don Giovanni. His guides in the process: Alan Gilbert, the music director of the New York Philharmonic, and James Ross, who with Gilbert runs the Juilliard School’s conducting program. What Davidson discovers is that conducting is therapeutic, beautiful, and addictive.

A harsh perspective on the conductor (perhaps deserving no credit for his work; maybe you feel the same way?):

Audiences wonder whether he (or, increasingly, she) has any effect; players are sure they could do better; and even conductors occasionally feel superfluous. “I’m in a bastard profession, a dishonest profession,” agonized Dimitri Mitropoulos, who led the New York Philharmonic in the fifties. “The others make all the music, and I get the salary and the credit.” Call it the Maestro Paradox: The person responsible for the totality of sound produces none.

This is a wonderfully descriptive paragraph:

Not only am I letting the musicians in on my own inner life, I’m also asking them to express it for me. The idea of conducting as a kind of emotional ventriloquism helps deal with one especially thorny bit of the Maestro Paradox: Leadership requires confidence that is difficult to acquire and impossible to fake. Orchestras are psychic X-ray machines. They judge a new chief within minutes, and once scorn sets in, forget it. I’m going to have to project the sense that I am entitled to be there, and first, I must convince myself.

On the addictive power of lifting and moving the baton:

Lifting the baton feels a little like getting ready to push off from the top of a ski slope, in that I’ll move in the right direction whatever I do, and also because fear will cause disaster. Neither fact is comforting. My downbeat is stiff, and the great D-minor wobbles accordingly…Okay, now it’s hanging together. I try a third time, and I focus on the sound. I turn my left palm upward as if to hold an imaginary grapefruit and try to feel the baton cutting through some viscous medium, meeting resistance. Suddenly, the big chords acquire a rounded glow. Cellos and basses toll like a great bell, and the violins echo their answer on the offbeats. I have seen conductors shape music with their hands like clay, and now I’m doing it. It is a powerfully addictive feeling.

On interacting with the musicians as Davidson is conducting:

As we power toward the final cadence and I exchange glance after glance with the young musicians, it occurs to me that they are bombarding me with unspoken questions and it’s my job to convey answers. That’s what a conductor does: mold an interpretation by filtering the thousands of decisions packed into every minute of symphonic music. The clarinetist inclined to add a little gleam to a brief solo by slowing down slightly, the tuba player preparing for a fortissimo blast after twenty minutes of nothing—each will look to the podium for a split-second shot of guidance, and the conductor who meets those fleeting inquiries with clarity and assurance will get a more nuanced performance. My efforts haven’t made me a good conductor, or even a mediocre one, but they have given me the glimmerings of competence—an intoxicating taste of what it might feel like to realize the fantasy of my boom-box days.

While the piece leaves something to be desired (namely, the technical details of conducting), it is gorgeously written. I quite enjoyed it.