Month: January 2013

To Build a Death Star? The White House Responds.

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In November 2012, someone proposed on the White House petition site to start building a Death Star by 2016.

Today, the White House responded. And it is spectacular:

The Administration shares your desire for job creation and a strong national defense, but a Death Star isn’t on the horizon. Here are a few reasons:

  • The construction of the Death Star has been estimated to cost more than $850,000,000,000,000,000. We’re working hard to reduce the deficit, not expand it.
  • The Administration does not support blowing up planets.
  • Why would we spend countless taxpayer dollars on a Death Star with a fundamental flaw that can be exploited by a one-man starship?

However, look carefully (here’s how) and you’ll notice something already floating in the sky — that’s no Moon, it’s a Space Station! Yes, we already have a giant, football field-sized International Space Station in orbit around the Earth that’s helping us learn how humans can live and thrive in space for long durations. The Space Station has six astronauts — American, Russian, and Canadian — living in it right now, conducting research, learning how to live and work in space over long periods of time, routinely welcoming visiting spacecraft and repairing onboard garbage mashers, etc. We’ve also got two robot science labs — one wielding a laser — roving around Mars, looking at whether life ever existed on the Red Planet.

Just had to be clear about this point:

We are living in the future! Enjoy it. Or better yet, help build it by pursuing a career in a science, technology, engineering or math-related field. The President has held the first-ever White Housescience fairs and Astronomy Night on the South Lawn because he knows these domains are critical to our country’s future, and to ensuring the United States continues leading the world in doing big things.

If you do pursue a career in a science, technology, engineering or math-related field, the Force will be with us! Remember, the Death Star’s power to destroy a planet, or even a whole star system, is insignificant next to the power of the Force.

Worth reading in entirety here.

Kevin Kelly: The Impossible is the New Normal

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One of the best things I’ve read this week is Kevin Kelly’s take on “the impossible is the new normal”:

Every minute a new impossible thing is uploaded to the internet and that improbable event becomes just one of hundreds of extraordinary events that we’ll see or hear about today. The internet is like a lens which focuses the extraordinary into a beam, and that beam has become our illumination. It compresses the unlikely into a small viewable band of everyday-ness. As long as we are online – which is almost all day many days — we are illuminated by this compressed extraordinariness. It is the new normal.

That light of super-ness changes us. We no longer want mere presentations, we want the best, greatest, the most extraordinary presenters alive, as in TED. We don’t want to watch people playing games, we want to watch the highlights of the highlights, the most amazing moves, catches, runs, shots, and kicks, each one more remarkable and improbable than the other.

We are also exposed to the greatest range of human experience, the heaviest person, shortest midgets, longest mustache — the entire universe of superlatives! Superlatives were once rare — by definition — but now we see multiple videos of superlatives all day long, and they seem normal. Humans have always treasured drawings and photos of the weird extremes of humanity (early National Geographics), but there is an intimacy about watching these extremities on video on our phones while we wait at the dentist. They are now much realer, and they fill our heads.

My only lament is how Mr. Kelly chose to present the extraordinary with a poor statistical anecdote:

To the uninformed, the increased prevalence of improbable events will make it easier to believe in impossible things. A steady diet of coincidences makes it easy to believe they are more than just coincidences, right? But to the informed, a slew of improbably events make it clear that the unlikely sequence, the outlier, the black swan event, must be part of the story. After all, in 100 flips of the penny you are just as likely to get 100 heads in a row as any other sequence. But in both cases, when improbable events dominate our view — when we see an internet river streaming nothing but 100 heads in a row — it makes the improbable more intimate, nearer.

Sure. But it would have made more sense to discuss the probability of getting 100 heads in a row versus various other distributions (for example: probability of getting between 45 and 55 heads in 100 tosses of a fair coin).

KK is the author of What Technology Wants, which I recommend reading (I read it near the end of 2010).

Liu Qianping: Fashionable Chinese Grandpa

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The Wall Street Journal profiles Liu Qianping, a 72-year-old grandfather who has taken the Internet by storm by modeling clothes:

He owes his star turn to his granddaughter, Lu Ting, a clothier who struggled for months to find a model who could boost her online store without breaking the bank. “He’s just so slender,” Ms. Lu says of her 110-pound grandfather. She notes that he looks great in crimson dresses and credits him for more than quadrupling her sales in recent weeks.

Mr. Liu’s ascent in the modeling realm speaks volumes about shifting cultural mores in a fast-aging society. The waif of a man, who goes about in a three-piece suit and a bow-tie when he isn’t clad in pink satin, is among a cadre of Chinese seniors who are all too familiar with cultural upheaval. Their lives have been marked by unimaginable change—from surviving famine to the advent of fast food. Along the way, many have adopted a devil-may-care approach that flies in the face of stereotypes about conservative Asian elders.

model_1

model_2

Thank you, Internet, for helping breaking all kinds of stereotypes. Read the entire story here.

On Friends Without Benefits

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One of the most heartbreaking Modern Love stories I’ve ever read is in this week’s New York Times:

He wanted nothing, and I wanted the world. I lay in bed with my phone cradled to my ear, taking the news as one might receive a diagnosis of cancer. I stayed there all weekend, unable to move, paralyzed by the knowledge that now it was over. Even our friendship was too damaged to repair. This is what happens, I learned, when happily ever after does not happen.

I moved to New York City that spring. He met another girl he loved, one that probably knew him a little less well. They married two years ago, but I wasn’t invited. When I saw him after the fact, he told me not to take it personally, but we both knew that with another twist of fate, it could have been us up there at the altar.

I couldn’t help but take it personally; it’s always personal.

Sigh.

Some would find the ending a triumph; I found it devastating.

On Israel’s Flourishing Russian Culture

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Israel has the third-largest Russian-speaking population outside of Russia, after the United States and Germany. 

The New York Times Lens blog looks into how Russians have assimilated into Israel culture, via photographs by Oled Balilty:

Mr. Balilty’s journey started a year ago, at a large Russian New Year’s Eve celebration. In Israel, most people celebrate the Jewish lunar new year, Rosh Hashana. Mr. Balilty said that he can appreciate continuing one’s culture, as his parents had emigrated from Morocco to Israel.

“The Russians are totally Israeli. They work like everyone else, often in high-tech jobs, but at night they can live in a different world,” Mr. Balilty, 33, said. “They came here with a beautiful culture, but the culture didn’t open to the Israeli people. I hope someday that Israel will be able to fully experience it.”

See the photographs here.

State of the Blog: 2012 in Review

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The helpful people at WordPress.com prepared a 2012 annual report for Reading by Eugene, profiling the most popular posts and other fun statistics.

Here’s an excerpt:

19,000 people fit into the new Barclays Center to see Jay-Z perform. This blog was viewed about 69,000 times in 2012. If it were a concert at the Barclays Center, it would take about 4 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report.

W. Eugene Smith on Breaking the Rules in Photography

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The American Society of Media Photographers recently discovered the transcript of an interview of W. Eugene Smith (1918-1978), conducted by the portraitist Philippe Halsmann and the society’s first president. The interview took place in New York during an American Society of Media Photographers meeting in 1956, although the organization is unsure of the date. The New York Times provides a transcript.

Their conversation covered a variety of topics. In particular, however, Mr. Halsmann asked about staging photographs, a then-controversial practice that is now taboo in documentary and journalistic photography. Mr. Smith defended the practice in certain circumstances. The most revealing question is at the end.

Q. Where were you born?
A. Kansas.
Q. You know that Alfred Adler, the discoverer of the inferiority complex, believes the youngest child has a sense of inferiority which forces him to prove his own value. Do you feel this to be true with your own personality?
A. Definitely.
Q. Did you go to school in Kansas?
A. Frequently.

I had a photographic scholarship at Notre Dame — which they created for me. But after a while, I found I was asked to do only commercial, publicity photos, and so — I had to quit.

Q. Why are you a photographer?
A. I discovered that saturated hypo was good for my poison ivy. Now, Groucho.

I fell into photography through my desire to design aircraft. I met a fine news photographer, Frank Knowles, who encouraged me.

I don’t think I became a real photographer until I made a real acquaintanceship with music. That’s why I make my layouts the way I do. Photography happens to be my means of communication. But I do not feel I am a photographer singular. I feel that my art or my necessity is communication, and this could apply to many branches of the communicative art — whether it be writing or photography.

Since I am somewhat adequate as a photographer, I remain with it. I am probably more in command of it than any other medium. I respect it highly as a medium. It has its own very definite purpose.

Q. When do you feel that the photographer is justified in risking his life to take a picture?
A. I can’t answer that. It depends on the purpose. Reason, belief and purpose are the only determining factors. The subject is not a fair measure.

I think the photographer should have some reason or purpose. I would hate to risk my life to take another bloody picture for the Daily News, but if it might change man’s mind against war, then I feel that it would be worth my life. But I would never advise anybody else to make this decision. It would have to be their own decision. For example, when I was on the carrier, I didn’t want to fly on Christmas Day because I didn’t want to color all the other Chistmases for my children.

Q. Here were people in deep sorrow and you were putting flash bulbs in their eyes, disturbing their sorrow. What’s the justification of your intrusion?
A. I think I would not have been able to do this if I had not been ill the day before. I was ill with stomach cramps in a field and a man who was a stranger to me came up and offered me a drink of wine which I did not want, but which out of the courtesy of his kindness, I accepted. And the next day by coincidence, he came rushing to me and said, “Please, my father has just died, and we must bury him and will you take me to the place where they fill out the papers?” And I went with him to the home and I was terribly involved with the sad and compassionate beauty of the wake and when I saw him come close to the door, I stepped forward and said, “Please sir, I don’t want to dishonor this time but may I photograph?” and he said, “I would be honored.”

I don’t think a picture for the sake of a picture is justified — only when you consider the purpose. For example, I photographed a woman giving birth, for a story on a midwife. There are at least two gaps of great pictures in my pictures. One is D-Day in the Philippines, of a woman who is struggling giving birth in a village that has just been destroyed by our shelling, and this woman giving birth against this building — my only thought at that time was to help her. If there had been someone else at least as competent to help as I was then, I would have photographed. But as I stood as an altering circumstance — no damn picture is worth it!

Q. I remember your picture of a Spanish woman throwing water into the street. Was this staged?
A. I would not have hesitated to ask her to throw the water. (I don’t object to staging if and only if I feel that it is an intensification of something that is absolutely authentic to the place.)
And I think the most revealing Q and A exchange:
Q. Cartier-Bresson never asks for this…. Why do you break this basic rule of candid photography?
A. I didn’t write the rules — why should I follow them? Since I put a great deal of time and research to know what I am about? I ask and arrange if I feel it is legitimate. The honesty lies in my — the photographer’s — ability to understand.
Read the rest here.

On Predicting the Person You’ll Be

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John Tierney offers a summary from a recent study published in Science about our ability to predict our future tastes and personality changes:

[W]hen asked to predict what their personalities and tastes would be like in 10 years, people of all ages consistently played down the potential changes ahead.

Thus, the typical 20-year-old woman’s predictions for her next decade were not nearly as radical as the typical 30-year-old woman’s recollection of how much she had changed in her 20s. This sort of discrepancy persisted among respondents all the way into their 60s.

And the discrepancy did not seem to be because of faulty memories, because the personality changes recalled by people jibed quite well with independent research charting how personality traits shift with age. People seemed to be much better at recalling their former selves than at imagining how much they would change in the future.

And another interesting bit:

When asked about their favorite band from a decade ago, respondents were typically willing to shell out $80 to attend a concert of the band today. But when they were asked about their current favorite band and how much they would be willing to spend to see the band’s concert in 10 years, the price went up to $129. Even though they realized that favorites from a decade ago like Creed or the Dixie Chicks have lost some of their luster, they apparently expect Coldplay and Rihanna to blaze on forever.

An FAQ: The Trillion Dollar Coin

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A good FAQ explainer at The Atlantic on the trillion dollar coin idea that’s floating around Congress (and the blogosphere):

What’s this nonsense I’ve been hearing about a trillion-dollar coin? It’s got to be some kind of elaborate —
 
Stop. It’s no joke. At least no more than voluntarily defaulting on our obligations by refusing to lift the debt ceiling would be. It sounds like something out of the Simpsons, but thanks to a crazy technicality the Treasury really can create a trillion-dollar coin, which would let us keep paying our bills if the debt ceiling isn’t raised. It’s an absurd solution to an absurd problem, but a solution nonetheless. As they say, when in Washington….
 
No, I’m pretty sure this is from the Simpsons.
 
Almost. That was a $1 trillion bill, which Fidel Castro tricked out of Monty Burns, but this is real life, so it has to be a $1 trillion coin. A platinum coin, to be exact.
 
I’m almost afraid to ask, but why does it need to be a coin? And why platinum?
 
We don’t make the loopholes. We just find them. The Treasury can’t print money on its own, because the money supply is supposed to be the strict purview of the Federal Reserve … but that might not be quite so strict after all, thanks to a coin-sized exception. Congress passed a law in 1997, later amended in 2000, that gives the Secretary of the Treasury the authority to mint platinum coins, and only platinum coins, in whatever denomination and quantity he or she wants. That could be $100, or $1,000, or … $1 trillion.
 
Read on to find out: what happens if the coin is stolen?

Tide Detergent: For Stains and Crack

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This New York Magazine story profiles the popularity of Tide detergent. It’s such a hot product that it’s used by criminals in the drug trade. Since the bottles aren’t easily traceable, they aren’t a nuisance to steal and then resell in the black market. The money paragraphs:

The criminal cost-­benefit ­analysis of a bottle of Tide is more straightforward. Most of the people stealing the detergent, Sergeant Thompson points out, are the same criminals who used to break into houses or mug pedestrians—male addicts whose need to feed their habits can foster a kind of innovative streak. “They are smart. They are creative. They want high reward and low risk,” he says. Theft convictions can come with a maximum fifteen-year prison sentence, but the penalty for shoplifting is often just a small fine, with no jail time. For the most active thieves, says Thompson, stolen Tide has in some ways become more lucrative than the drugs it’s traded for. “It’s the new dope,” he says. “You can get richer and have less chance of doing jail time.”

For stores, stopping Tide shoplifting presents unique challenges. Most frequently stolen goods—GPS devices, smartphones, and other consumer electronics—are pricey, light, and easily concealed. They’re also not routine purchases, which means they can be locked up until buyers ask for them. Bulk goods like detergent are harder to run off with, but they’re also bought by dozens of customers daily—lock those products up, and a store manager adds more time to his customers’ errand runs, potentially sending them to shop elsewhere. “Any time you secure something, it impacts the sale of that item at some level,” says Jerry Biggs, the director of Walgreens’ Organized Retail Crime Division.

 Nor is relying on clerks to head off suspected thieves a realistic option. Cashiers and stockists, working for low pay, are often disinclined to confront a potential criminal. “People at the cash register don’t stop you,” says one of Thompson’s informants, an ex-con who shoplifted for years. “They just let you go past.” What’s more, stolen bottles of Tide aren’t easily traceable. Many merchants don’t record the lot and batch numbers for most grocery-store products, because that takes precious man hours. And Procter & Gamble has not made its own database of that information publicly available. Some stores have tried attaching tracking stickers to bottles to establish their provenance, only to find that thieves just wash them off.

Interesting throughout.

As an aside, I am loyal to the Tide brand (the NY Mag feature touches nicely on brand loyalty). The current version I use to do my laundry is the high efficiency Tide with Febreze.