Year: 2012

The London Cab-otel

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Here’s a fun way to tap into the booming tourism market that comes with the Olympic Games. David Weekes, a full-time cab driver in London, has transformed his iconic black cab into a hotel for one, available to rent for £50 (US$78.50) a night. CNNGo explains:

The taxi comes with a “memory foam” mattress, pillow, duvet, a bedside lamp and a Paddington Bear teddy. 

It also offers a solar-powered fridge, a radio, an iPad and camping chairs and a portable table on request. 

But Weekes does have two rules: no smoking and no pets. 

The listing to book the cab-otel is here.

The History of the @-Reply on Twitter

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Garrett Murray didn’t invent the Twitter @-reply, but he provides some good background on its history:

I have always half-jokingly taken credit for inventing the @reply on Twitter. Or at least for starting its wide-spread use on Twitter—I got the idea from seeing people do it over at Flickr, where it had been happening for more than a year. But until today I continued to claim I was the first person to do it on Twitter. Recently, user @rabble put together a blog post titled Origin of the @reply – Digging Through Twitter’s History, in which he did some research to show when it was first used. Only his research isn’t entirely correct and it doesn’t give fair credit to everyone involved.

It turns out that I’m not the inventor of the @reply, though I’m definitely one of the pioneers. Robert Andersen seems to be the father of the @reply on Twitter. He sent this message on November 2, 2006 at 8:58PM (all times in this post are Pacific—if you’re reading this from the Tumblr Dashboard, all the dates will look funky):

@ buzz – you broke your thumb and youre still twittering? that’s some serious devotion

I like his thought about collective consciousness when he and a bunch of other people started using the (now indispensable) @-reply on the same day in November 2006.

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Related: the Twitter hashtag (#) was invented by Chris Messina in 2007. 

Exploring New York Through Pickup Basketball

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Isaac Eger moved to New York City on a whim: no job, no girlfriend, no aspirations. But he had one curiosity: the city’s mythical ownership of pickup basketball. Were its legendary courts just New York hype? He set out exploring the pick-up courts in what he describes as a “a little stream of consciousness, a little underreported, full of a bunch of first names and first impressions”:

If New York is the city that never sleeps, it is probably because the city never shuts up.

Drowning the shriek of sneakers and the clangs of missed shots is the constant trash talk from the players on and off the court.

“Shoot it! I dare you!”

“You ain’t got nothing.”

“I’m gonna score from the block next time. Wait and see.”

Players on the city’s courts comment on what you wear, how you look, how you smell, what you do, how you blink and breathe. Cries and hoots from the sidelines fill the park when someone gets crossed, blocked or dunked on.

On being close:

Though everything seems to be less than an hour away, people do not appear too inclined to venture far beyond their neighborhood. Perhaps there is a level of comfort that comes with picking a court and sticking with it — like picking your favorite bar or cigarette brand. All of the players seem to know one another’s nicknames, tricks and extended families.

The city’s busy, congested courts have influenced the style of play that takes place on them. For instance, I haven’t run across many pure shooters, but I have encountered a lot of athletes with wicked ball-handling skills. My theory is that because the courts here are so packed with players, there is not enough time or space to practice jump shots.

That is why so many shooters, I suspect, are cornfed boys from the Midwest and prep schoolers from the suburbs: the country and sprawl quarantine them, and they have nothing to do but practice fundamentals by their lonesome.

His conclusion on the guys he played with on the courts:

We weren’t going to be friends. Ever.

But teammates? Perhaps.

Relativistic Baseball

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One of my favorite comics, XKCD, is now up to something new: answering interesting questions with physics!

The first question: What would happen if you tried to hit a baseball pitched at 90% the speed of light? The answer…

The constant fusion at the front of the ball pushes back on it, slowing it down, as if the ball were a rocket flying tail-first while firing its engines. Unfortunately, the ball is going so fast that even the tremendous force from this ongoing thermonuclear explosion barely slows it down at all. It does, however, start to eat away at the surface, blasting tiny particulate fragments of the ball in all directions. These fragments are going so fast that when they hit air molecules, they trigger two or three more rounds of fusion.

After about 70 nanoseconds the ball arrives at home plate. The batter hasn’t even seen the pitcher let go of the ball, since the light carrying that information arrives at about the same time the ball does. Collisions with the air have eaten the ball away almost completely, and it is now a bullet-shaped cloud of expanding plasma (mainly carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, and nitrogen) ramming into the air and triggering more fusion as it goes. The shell of x-rays hits the batter first, and a handful of nanoseconds later the debris cloud hits.

When it reaches the batter, the center of the cloud is still moving at an appreciable fraction of the speed of light. It hits the bat first, but then the batter, plate, and catcher are all scooped up and carried backward through the backstop as they disintegrate. The shell of x-rays and superheated plasma expands outward and upward, swallowing the backstop, both teams, the stands, and the surrounding neighborhood—all in the first microsecond.

Suppose you’re watching from a hilltop outside the city. The first thing you see is a blinding light, far outshining the sun. This gradually fades over the course of a few seconds, and a growing fireball rises into a mushroom cloud. Then, with a great roar, the blast wave arrives, tearing up trees and shredding houses.

Everything within roughly a mile of the park is leveled, and a firestorm engulfs the surrounding city. The baseball diamond is now a sizable crater, centered a few hundred feet behind the former location of the backstop.

This is going to be awesome.

Zuckerberg’s Freshman Roommate: An Olympian

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Bloomberg has a good story on Samyr Laine, a roommate of Mark Zuckerberg at Harvard (in the now famous room D11). Laine will compete in the triple jump at the London Olympics for Haiti, the country of his parents’ birth.

Remembers Laine:

We had a good time our freshman year in Straus, we played a ton of PlayStation. We probably didn’t sleep nearly as much as we should have. None of us slept as little as Mark did, and now you can see why.

Laine, 27, holds Harvard records for the triple jump, both indoors at 51 feet, 11 1/4 inches (15.83 meters) and outdoors at 53 feet, 7 1/2 inches, which compare with the world outdoor record of 60 feet, 1/4 inch by Britain’s Jonathan Edwards in 1995.

This was my favorite tidbit from the story:

Laine still laughs at an incident from freshman year. He remembers Zuckerberg running out of their dorm room after oversleeping and missing the first hour of a computer science final exam, only to get the highest mark in the class.

“The mastery he had of computer science, even as a freshman, it was almost comical,” Laine said. “We would often try to see how fast he could hack into our computers.”

Full story here.

World Domination Summit 2012: Readings

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This past weekend, I attended the World Domination Summit. This was my second #WDS (I blogged about last year’s experience here, here, and here). I will post thoughts of my own about this year’s event a little bit later, but I wanted to highlight these five posts by other attendees that have resonated with me so far:

1) “10 Things I Learned at the World Domination Summit” by Elana Miller:

There is no great time to create, so you learn to keep creating, even if you don’t feel like it. If you wait around for the creative well to flow before you start doing anything, you might be waiting for a long time. People who learn to put in the work even when they don’t feel like it are able to chip away at their goals, one small step at a time.

2) “The $100 Bet” by Rami the Gutsy Geek. Everyone in attendance at #WDS this year received a $100 gift (investment) as the event concluded on Sunday afternoon. Chris Guillebeau, the founder of World Domination Summit, encouraged us to do something unique and inspiring with the gift, with the underlying themes of community, adventure, and service. What kind of story will you tell? So I liked the bet that Rami proposed:

More importantly, when you trusted me with $100 in cash to kickstart a goal, well, I couldn’t let you down. But I’m a competitive guy, and “here’s $100, go live a dream” doesn’t work for me as well as putting my pride on the line.

Instead, I’ve opted to turn the money into a bet, with 10-to-1 odds in your favor.

Here’s the deal: I bet you $100 that by July 5th 2013 [editor’s note: July 5th 2013 will be the opening night of WDS next year], my book will be ready for publishing.

I may not have an agent or a publishing deal, but I will have a fully finished manuscript.

3) “Don’t Stop Believing” by Brandon Sutton. Brandon provides some detail on how he was chosen to go on stage and sing Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believing” to a crowd of 1,000 attendees:

As surely as I write this, the music started, and Journey’s massive hit song, Don’t Stop Believing began to play. Chris got the crowd started as the rest of us provided backup. A few lines into the song, Michelle nudged me forward and Chris turned around and handed me the microphone.

This is probably a good time to mention that I’m not a fan of karaoke, have never sung karaoke, and haven’t sung in front of people since I was a little kid in church.

But there I was, on stage with a live microphone and 1,000 people singing along to one of the songs that defined an entire generation. After the initial shock wore off, I embraced it and really got into the groove. The music carried me away to a place I never knew existed, and the inner performer in me assumed the role.

Lunging forward to reach out to the crowd, the words and emotions poured out of me like a raging river. It was something I never in a million years expected, but wow did it kick off the weekend with a bang. Talk about vulnerability!

Brandon also gave a heartfelt presentation about Kids of the Gulf, a documentary film featuring two kids that are determined to have a positive impact in the Gulf coast region in the aftermath of the BP oil spill in 2010. I encourage you to check it out.

4) “World Domination Summit 2.0 and 8 Ways to Take Action on the Inspiration” by Farnoosh. I wanted to highlight this passage, which rang true for me last year and might happen again this year (and I have the feeling for others as well):

Oh yes, the stories. Inspiration was at the heart of every story. Stories like overcoming breast cancer and living to play it in a humorous song on the guitar, or building a water charity that helps deliver clean water to the poorest villages of Africa after wasting away the first part of life as a night-club promoter. Stories of waking up to a miserable career after 20 years of service to a company and turning things around because it’s never too late. Stories of starting businesses and making sacrifices and building something that makes a difference in this world.

Stories of not taking no for an answer and not playing by the conventional rules and systems, stories of finding solutions rather than playing a victim all your life.

Stories of believing in the infinite power of your dreams, and the true potential within your reach.

Inspiration is the easy part. You just have to be open to receiving, to hearing stories, to watching and observing and listening, and you will be filled to the brim with inspiration.

What comes after inspiration, now that’s not so easy. That’s the part where things stop looking sexy and shiny and sweet. That’s the day after the conference. That’s the long afternoon when you are home alone staring at your monitor and trying to re-capture the moments.

5) “What 1,000 Boomer’s Kids Did This Past Weekend” by Ken Solin at the Huffington Post. I really enjoyed Ken’s perspective on the event:

I don’t recall any speakers talking about making money beyond following your dreams and hopefully making a few bucks. The speakers preached being doers, not talkers. These young men and women already know something I only discovered in my sixties: Life isn’t just about stuff. They could teach their parents something about that.

For the first time in a very long while, I felt hopeful about America’s future. With men and women like those attending the WDS Conference, perhaps there’s hope after all. Their global approach to problems on a very personal level feels like a huge shift from the apathy that abounds in America regarding Third World people.

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If you’ve found any other inspring/interesting posts recapping the event, please leave a comment below. Thanks!

How to Deliver a Perfect Compliment

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Finding the perfect compliment isn’t a riddle at all. It’s not as though there’s one for every person at every time. It’s a matter of finding the right moment rather than insisting on one.

The quote above is from a really, really great piece by Tom Chiarella titled “The Perfect Compliment.” Tom goes on assignment trying to come up with the perfect compliment (if it exists). In the beginning, it’s all a numbers game to him: he encounters strangers and dishes out one liners: “Nice Shoes. Great tie.” One day, he delivers more than 1,000 compliments…

But then, as his observation of compliments grows, he re-engineers his technique. As he writes:

If a worthwhile compliment needs anything, it is the weight of realization behind it. So I fell back, watched people go about their jobs, the quality of their interactions, the way they looked at their reflection as they walked the street. I registered. And I learned, or started to learn, that a compliment is a partnership, because the pleasure of giving it lies in its effect upon the person receiving it. What I’d been doing was little more than a salesman’s trick, poorly played. I’d succeeded only in making myself bold enough to broadcast my judgments — dry little seeds spun out on the lawn of humanity — on the fly. I had to risk a little connection.

His compliments become more interesting and from the heart:

All I can say is, that is a classy umbrella. It looks old-timey and right for you.

My mother always wanted me to wear a corduroy coat like that. Now I see why.

Near the end of his adventure, Tom’s decision was to deliver one genuine compliment, one that would be heartfelt but also move the recipient:

In the end, the compliments I came up with were tailored and quirky in the best way. Most of all, they were thorough. I liked delivering them. I enjoyed plumbing the reactions. I sometimes considered for days what I would say before delivering one. Or I’d run after someone for my one chance to say what needed to be said. I’d sit in the broad doorway of the coffee shop for an entire day, feet in the sunshine, shoulders in the cool. I did not go on the hunt anymore. I scanned for a single, worthy compliment in the craw of each day.

Tom Chiarella, you have written a wonderful piece. I hope others can learn from you.

The Psychology of Discounting

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This is a good reminder in The Economist of how marketers take advantage of consumers’ innumeracy:

Consumers often struggle to realise, for example, that a 50% increase in quantity is the same as a 33% discount in price. They overwhelmingly assume the former is better value. In an experiment, the researchers sold 73% more hand lotion when it was offered in a bonus pack than when it carried an equivalent discount (even after all other effects, such as a desire to stockpile, were controlled for).

This numerical blind spot remains even when the deal clearly favours the discounted product. In another experiment, this time on his undergraduates, Mr Rao offered two deals on loose coffee beans: 33% extra free or 33% off the price. The discount is by far the better proposition, but the supposedly clever students viewed them as equivalent.

Studies have shown other ways in which retailers can exploit consumers’ innumeracy. One is to befuddle them with double discounting. People are more likely to see a bargain in a product that has been reduced by 20%, and then by an additional 25%, than one which has been subject to an equivalent, one-off, 40% reduction.

Consider a $100 product that’s been discounted 20%, then 20%, then 20% once again. If someone asked you whether you’d take that deal versus a one-time discount of 60%, choose the latter. The difference is paying $51.2 with the initial (three-time) discounting versus $40 via the one-time 60% discount.

Why Supermarket Tomatoes Taste Like Cardboard

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It’s no secret that the mass-produced tomatoes we buy at a typical grocery store tend to taste like cardboard. Now researchers have discovered one reason why: a genetic mutation, common in store-bought tomatoes, that reduces the amount of sugar and other tasty compounds in the fruit.

Mass-produced tomato varieties carrying this genetic change are light green all over before they ripen. Tomatoes without the mutation — including heirloom and most small-farm tomatoes — have dark-green tops before they ripen. There is also a significant difference in flavor between the two types of tomatoes, but researchers had not previously known the two traits had the same root cause.

The study authors set out to pin down the genetic change that makes tomatoes lose their dark-green top. They focused their attention on two genes — GLK1 and GLK2 — both known to be crucial for harvesting energy from sunlight in plant leaves.

They found that GLK2 is active in fruit as well as leaves — but that in uniformly colored tomatoes, it is inactivated.

Adding back an active GLK2 gene to bland, commercial-style tomatoes through genetic engineering created tomatoes that had the heirloom-style dark-green hue. The darker green comes from greater numbers of structures called chloroplasts that harvest energy from sunlight.

The harvested energy is stored as starches, which are converted to sugars when the tomatoes ripen.

The vast majority — 70% to 80% — of the sugar in tomatoes travels to the fruit from the leaves of the plant. But the remaining amount of sugar is produced in the fruit. This contribution is largely wiped out in uniform, commercial-style tomatoes — and thus they won’t be as sweet.

For the science nerds, here is the paper’s abstract:

Modern tomato (Solanum lycopersicum) varieties are bred for uniform ripening (u) light green fruit phenotypes to facilitate harvests of evenly ripened fruit. U encodes a Golden 2-like (GLK) transcription factor,SlGLK2, which determines chlorophyll accumulation and distribution in developing fruit. In tomato, two GLKs—SlGLK1 and SlGLK2—are expressed in leaves, but only SlGLK2 is expressed in fruit. Expressing GLKsincreased the chlorophyll content of fruit, whereas SlGLK2 suppression recapitulated the u mutant phenotype. GLK overexpression enhanced fruit photosynthesis gene expression and chloroplast development, leading to elevated carbohydrates and carotenoids in ripe fruit. SlGLK2 influences photosynthesis in developing fruit, contributing to mature fruit characteristics and suggesting that selection of u inadvertently compromised ripe fruit quality in exchange for desirable production traits.

It’s no wonder that tomatoes you can grow in your backyard taste that much better.

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(via Los Angeles Times)

The Best Moments of Euro 2012

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Roger Bennett distills the UEFA Euro 2012 tournament to the top 11 moments in his post for ESPN:

1. Shevchenko’s golden goals

In a tournament blighted by the occasional inability to fill stadia, the noise that greeted the brace of goals headed home in the opening group game by veteran Ukrainian icon Andriy Shevchenko still resounds. The 35-year-old striker’s body may be creaking, but muscle memory kicked in to provide his team with a fleeting moment of glory against Sweden. This was Kiev’s version of a Hollywood ending.

2. Danny Welbeck’s flick against Sweden

Had this late game-winning goal – an improvisational 360-degree flick between his own legs – been scored by a player wearing a Brazilian jersey, it would have instantly been hailed as a masterpiece. Because Welbeck was wearing an England shirt, the world media’s first instinct was to wonder whether he had really intended it. England would soon flounder. But the goal’s lasting significance may lie in the glimmer of false hope it offers long-suffering England fans that a youth revolution is poised to transform their team before the 2014 World Cup.

3. “This is Russia”

After rioting in the streets of Warsaw saw 184 people arrested and at least 24 injured, Russian fans completed their celebration of Russia Day by unfurling a colossal banner taunting their Polish opponents by proclaiming “This is Russia.” This show of power outstripped that of their team, which wilted oddly in the group stage. But the violent scenes do not augur well for the World Cup in Russia in 2018.

6. The flood

Donbass Arena in Donetsk, Ukraine, is a spectacular football stadium, but five minutes into Ukraine’s opening-round game with France, its man-made splendor was trumped by the force of nature. A downpour of biblical proportions forced the referee to suspend the action as players and match officials scurried to the locker room to seek refuge from the lightning storm. Unyielding Ukrainian coach Oleg Blokhin stood in the tunnel, monitoring matters with a towel wrapped around his shoulders.

7. Pirlo’s Panenka

With his throwback layered haircut granting his deft performances a timeless quality, the creativity of Andrea Pirlo’s play did not just lift Italy, it elevated the entire tournament. Pirlo’s confidence and experience were best captured by the “Panenka” kick he unveiled to embarrass England’s Joe Hart in the quarterfinal shootout. “I don’t practice it, it just comes to you in the moment,” Pirlo would later say about his poetic kick. “I saw that Hart was very sure of himself; I thought that he had to come down off his high horse.”

9. Mario Balotelli reveals his true self

His second thunderous semifinal strike that threatened to decapitate German goalkeeper Manuel Neuer was astonishing, as was his shirtless, stone-faced celebration that followed it. But the controversial Italian striker’s desire to run to the terraces and hug his tearful mother, Silvia, in the stands after Italy beat Germany showed a side of him we rarely get to see. Beneath the swirling tournament storylines of racism and Italian multiculturalism, Super Mario proved that at heart, he is just a mother’s boy.

10. Jordi Alba’s goal

Spain’s tactical flexibility and footballing intelligence allowed it to write history, triggering instant debate as to whether it is the greatest team of all time. La Roja played without a recognized striker, but who needs one when you have a left back who can run at the speed of light to latch onto Xavi’s clairvoyant pass?

11. Gigi Buffon’s singing of the national anthem

Few sights at Euro 2012 were more memorable than the Italian captain Buffon bellowing the national anthem before matches with eyes closed, chest puffed out, enunciating every syllable with pride. The goalkeeper revealed that the two grandparents he lost in World War II fill his mind before the game, but his musical rendition served as a reminder of what the tournament is all about beneath the hype – 23 men proud to represent the best of their nation.

Certainly #11, in my mind, is near the top of my list. I am really glad Spain was able to win the 2012 tournament, their third major tournament in four years.

Four years ago, I was in Spain and witnessed Spain claim the Euro 2008 title. How quickly time flies. You can browse through my adventures in Spain via this gallery.