Month: June 2013

Drew Magary on Being a Terrible, Loving Father

readingbyeugene Leave a comment

Ahead of Father’s Day, I enjoyed this story by Drew Magary on his thoughts of being a father. In the story, his daughter has a fit, and he responds trying to punish her. It doesn’t go well.

Then my daughter somehow managed to scream even louder, as if summoning a bullhorn from down inside her esophagus. I raced up the stairs two at a time and threw open the door. I’m not sure I cared if the swinging door would hit her or not. She slipped by me and ran down the stairs. When she saw the boy, she reared back and smacked his chest with her open hand. And the look he gave her after she did it made me want to cry forever. He looked so deeply hurt. A pure hurt, as if his whole world had been shattered. He couldn’t fathom why anyone would ever want to hurt him like that, let alone his own sister, whom he adored. I could see the sense of betrayal in his eyes, and there arose in me a kind of anger that everyone possesses but that no one should ever unleash. I grabbed my daughter again as my son opened wide and howled in pain.

“WHY DID YOU HIT HIM?!”

“I hate him!” she said. “He’s the worst brother in the whole world and I’m going to cut his head open!”

“You apologize to him right now.”

She walked up and wrapped her arms tightly around him. For half a second, it was a loving gesture. Then she laughed maniacally. When my daughter was born, I got a nice card from my uncle saying that my child’s laughter would be the sweetest sound I would ever hear. But that’s a lie. Children have two kinds of laughter. The first is the genuine kind, the kind my uncle was talking about. The other is the I’M-ABOUT-TO-DO-EVIL-SHIT laugh. The criminal mastermind laugh. Mwahahahahaha. I dread that laugh because it means someone is about to cry or something is about to fucking break. By the time a child is 4 or 5, this is pretty much the only kind of laugh you hear out of them. The girl began squeezing her brother tighter and tighter. My son was now even more upset than when she first hit him.

“Will you let him go?” I demanded.

But she didn’t. She picked him up off the floor, like a pro wrestler about to execute a belly-to-back suplex. I pried her little fingers apart and wrested her away from him, pushing her into the stairs. At this point, the boy was a sobbing mess.

I screamed at her, “What is wrong with you? Leave him alone, god dammit!”

She smiled and hugged me and said, “I love you.” She didn’t mean ANY of it, which only angered me further.

“Get off of me,” I told her. “You’re being insincere and I can’t stand it.”

But she wouldn’t stop hugging me. She grabbed on tight and let her entire body sag, nearly snapping my spine. Children do this all the time. They just HANG on you, like you’re a monkey bar. I shook her off and she began hitting me in the stomach. She was 5, so these were solid blows. She let out another horrible scream and filled the house with a thick, seemingly impenetrable kind of misery. I grabbed her and dragged her back up to her room and pinned her down on the carpet. She was laughing now. The angrier I got, the harder she laughed. I had to use every last ounce of willpower to restrain myself from kicking her ass because I very much wanted to. Inside me, there arose a voice—a voice so alien from my own that it seemed to belong to some other race of being. A terrifying, horrible voice. If my wife had heard that voice early in our relationship, she never would have married me. I grabbed the girl by the chin and blasted her with The Voice.

Some existential thoughts here:

The fact that I had resorted to grabbing and spanking and willfully inflicting harm on my own child made me feel like a criminal. I felt like, if someone had videotaped the whole episode, I would have been thrown in jail forever. Maybe I deserved to be there. Maybe everyone else was good at keeping their shit together and I wasn’t. I alone was the Worst Dad on Earth—the kind of dad that gets entire memoirs written about him by his kids, about living with him and his horrible demons. Maybe I was an abuser. Even telling you this story now, I feel like I’m edging off the details because I’m terrified of admitting how hard I grabbed my daughter’s arm. As a matter of fact, I smacked her once. I can’t tell you where or why because it makes me feel ugly and I don’t want you reading it and demanding that my kids be taken from me. I don’t remember my dad ever smacking me. He may have yelled a few times, but nothing that dramatic. Why was I so much worse of a parent? Why didn’t my kid respect and fear me the way I respected and feared my old man? Why did my children always require one more minute of patience than I had? And why was I losing my shit at a 5-year-old for acting like a 5-year-old?

So what does Drew decide to do next? Give his daughter a cold shower. Read on to see how it turned out.

Lastly, this analogy is apt:

When I was in middle school, they brought in a lady who had traveled to the South Pole to speak to us. She told us that, at one point during the trip, she became so cold and so desperate for food that she ate an entire stick of butter. We all were disgusted. But she was like, “Yeah, well, if you had been at the South Pole, you would have had butter for dinner too.” Parenting is similar in that you end up acting in ways that your younger self would have found repellent because the circumstances overwhelm you. What I’m basically saying is that having kids is like being stuck in Antarctica.What I’m basically saying is that having kids is like being stuck in Antarctica.

Except the example is mild compared to what I was expecting.

Should The Birthday Song Be in the Public Domain?

readingbyeugene 2 Comments

This is a bizarre story. According to The New York Times, the song “Happy Birthday to You” is not in the public domain:

The dispute stems from a lawsuit filed on Thursday by a filmmaker in New York who is seeking to have the court declare the popular ditty to be in the public domain, and to block a music company from claiming it owns the copyright to the song and charging licensing fees for its use.

The filmmaker, Jennifer Nelson, was producing a documentary movie, tentatively titled “Happy Birthday,” about the song, the lawsuit said. In one proposed scene, the song was to be performed.

But to use it in the film, she was told she would have to pay $1,500 and enter into a licensing agreement with Warner/Chappell, the publishing arm of the Warner Music Group. Ms. Nelson’s company, Good Morning to You Productions, paid the fee and entered into the agreement, the suit says.

This is an interesting piece of trivia:

The lawsuit notes that in the late 1800s, two sisters, Mildred J. Hill and Patty Smith Hill, wrote a song with the same melody called “Good Morning to All.” The suit tracks that song’s evolution into the familiar birthday song, and its ownership over more than a century.

Personally, I sure hope Jennifer Nelson wins this case.

Focus@Will: Music to Help You Concentrate

readingbyeugene Leave a comment

I’m testing out a music service called Focus@Will. It’s designed to stream music that gets you to concentrate (up to 100 minutes) without your mind wandering, thinking about music.  The founders of the start-up behind the service call it a “DJ in the sky” that always plays great productivity music to support whatever you are focusing on.

From their FAQs, here is how the music is designed to help you focus:

  • The focus@will music stream engages your non-focal (background) attention, but not so much that it interferes with your conscious focal attention on the task at hand. This is music you hear but should not be actively listening to.
  • If a track is too bland, your subconscious will start ignoring it, and if too interesting, novel, dynamic or exciting, you will start consciously noticing it, which will distract you. Every track in our exclusive library has been remixed/re-edited and remastered to deliver the precise set of required attributes to keep you in the focus zone.
  • The patented secret sauce is how the system subtly phase sequences the stream to trick your limbic system (the fight or flight survival mechanism in the brain) into not habituating (tuning out) this focusing/anti distracting effect over time.

Worth reading is their science primer that further explains the motivation and research behind the start-up. I’ll follow up, either as an update to this post or in a separate entry on whether I’ve noticed an increase in my productivity using Focus@Will.

 

Summer Break: A Reality TV Show without the Television

readingbyeugene Leave a comment

Reality TV has jumped the shark. The Wall Street Journal reports on a new reality TV show titled Summer Break that follows nine Los Angeles area teenagers in the final days before they head to college. But unlike traditional reality shows that complete shooting and are then edited into drama-fraught narratives, Summer Break will offer tweets, pictures, and videos within minutes after cast members create them:

The monitoring goes on 20 hours a day, courtesy of a 45-person production and social-media crew who work out of a small office in Culver City, Calif. The only time someone isn’t digitally chaperoning the teenage charges is between 3 a.m. and 7 a.m.

The Last 19th Century Man Dies

readingbyeugene Leave a comment

Jiroemon Kimura was the last man living who witnessed the 19th century (he lived to be 116 years, 54 days):

Born in 1897, the year of Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee, he was 6 years old when the Wright Brothers showed the world that man can fly, and 11 when Henry Ford introduced the Model T automobile. He lived through two world wars, the reigns of four emperors, the terms of 20 U.S. presidents, and 61 Japanese prime ministers.  He had five kids, 14 grandchildren, 25 great-grandchildren, and 13 great-great-grandchildren,

It’s incredible that he was helping his son with farming until Mr. Kimura was 90 years old. His secret to longevity?

In 2009, Mr. Kimura told camera crews that he exercises daily, reads newspapers at least two hours a day, and keeps up with parliamentary proceedings. “I’ve got to keep up with the times,” he said.

Also, smaller portions of food.

Japan has the world’s highest life expectancy, and it’s bound to go up. Per WSJ, The life expectacy is projected to exceed 90 for Japanese women by 2050.

Craigslist Missed Connections for Cicadas

readingbyeugene Leave a comment

Some humor this afternoon, courtesy of The New Yorker:

You put the “ten” in antennae—Central Park

Saw you yesterday by the Promenade, perched on a statue. Not sure which one because humans all look the same, LOL. We locked multi-lensed compound eyes for a minute through a roiling swarm of our brood-mates, and I couldn’t be sure, but I think you were smiling at me? Unless it was at one of the other millions of cicadas behind, above, below, and swarming around me.

I don’t mean to be shallow, but your dorsal thorax looks amazing. If you see this before our life cycle comes to its imminent end, want to meet up by the fountain and lap up some melted rocket-pop syrup from the sidewalk, then listen to my calling song followed by my courting song, head off to the nearest branch to fulfill our biological imperative to spawn hundreds of larvae in tree slits, and then get brunch?

I was the cicada with wings, noise-making tymbals, and a mischievous smile. To prove you’re who I’m posting about, tell me what you were molting.

Long shot, but you had a body that was cic—Tompkins Square Park

Saw you seventeen years ago on a stoplight at Fourteenth and Third Ave. You were buzzing at me, but I didn’t click back, because I was already involved in something (ended up only lasting a few weeks). I realize it’s kind of crazy that I’d be posting this after so long, especially since the average lifespan of a cicada is just over a month, but hey, YOMO. You only metamorphose once.

Haha, YOMO.

On Locomotion Dynamics in Cheetahs

readingbyeugene Leave a comment

Per a recently published paper in Nature, it turns out the long held assumption that it’s the cheetahs’ remarkable speed that helps them in hunting is not entirely correct. Cheetahs that chase prey in the wild shows that it is their agility — their skill at leaping sideways, changing directions suddenly, and slowing down quickly — that gives those antelope such bad odds. From The New York Times summary:

Until now researchers had been able to gather data on the hunting habits of cheetahs only by studying the animals in captivity, or from direct — though relatively imprecise — observations of their movements in the wild. But Dr. Wilson and his team spent nearly 10 years designing and building a battery-powered, solar-charged tracking collar, one that uses an accelerometer, a gyroscope and G.P.S. technology to monitor the animal’s movements.

They attached these collars to five cheetahs in the Okavango Delta region and observed 367 of their hunting runs over six to nine months. The cheetahs ran as fast as 58 miles an hour, and their average speed was 33 m.p.h.. High-speed runs accounted for only a small portion of the total distance covered by the cheetahs each day, the researchers found.

They also found that a cheetah can slow down by as much as 9 m.p.h. in a single stride — a feat that proves more helpful in hunting than the ability to break highway speed records. A cheetah often decelerates before turning, the data showed, and this enables it to make the tight turns that give it an advantage over its fast and nimble prey.

A fascinating study on the land’s fastest mammal.

Ed Park’s Short Story “Slide to Unlock”

readingbyeugene Leave a comment

Ed Park’s short story “Slide to Unlock” in the most recent edition of The New Yorker had an interesting (familiar) beginning:

You cycle through your passwords. They tell the secret story. What’s most important to you, the things you think can’t be deciphered. Words and numbers stored in the lining of your heart.

Your daughter’s name.

Your daughter’s name backward.

Your daughter’s name backward plus the year of her birth.

Your daughter’s name backward plus the last two digits of the year of her birth.

Your daughter’s name backward plus the current year.

They keep changing. They blur in the brain. Every day you punch in three or four of these memory strings to access the home laptop, the work laptop. The e-mail, the Facebook, the voice mail. Frequent-flyer account. Every week, you’re asked to change at least one, to increase the security. You feel virtuous when the security meter changes from red to green.

Your home town backward.

Your home town plus the year you were born.

Your home town backward plus the year you were born.

Olaf Fub 1970.

There are hints when you forget. Mother’s maiden name. First car, favorite color, elementary school.

First girl you kissed—that should be one.

First boy.

Can the hints just be the passwords?

Stop stalling.

First sex. You remember the day, month, year. The full year or just the last two digits?

First concert you attended.

Name of hospital where you were born.

You wonder who writes these prompts. Someone has to write them…

And an ending I wasn’t expecting.

Also, you should be using 1Password.

On Rent-to-Own Tire Shops

readingbyeugene Leave a comment

The Los Angeles Times reports on the gouging business of rent-to-own tire shops:

Rent-to-own tire shops are among the newest arrivals to a sprawling alternative financial sector focused on the nation’s economic underclass. Like payday lenders, pawn shops and Buy Here Pay Here used-car lots, tire rental businesses provide ready credit to consumers who can’t get a loan anywhere else. But that access doesn’t come cheap.

Customers pay huge premiums for their tires, sometimes four times above retail. Those who miss payments may find their car on cinder blocks, stripped of their tires by dealers who aggressively repossess. Tire rental contracts are so ironclad that even a bankruptcy filing can’t make them go away.

Still, with payments as low as $14 a week, rent-to-own — long the province of sofa sets and flat-screen TVs — is proving irresistible for consumers desperate for safe transportation.

The rent-to-own market is huge:

With more people shut out of traditional financing, the rent-to-own industry has flourished. Promising no credit checks, small down payments and the option to return merchandise at any time with no questions asked, chains such as Rent-a-Center are raking in huge profits from a customer base that’s swelled to 4.8 million people, up 67% since 2007, according to the Assn. of Progressive Rental Organizations.

Tires account for just a tiny slice of the $8.5-billion rent-to-own market. But they stand out from the industry’s traditional fare because — unlike with a dinette set — giving back tires means not being able to drive to work.

###

(via Tyler Cowen)

On the Difficulty of Writing and Working at Start-Ups

readingbyeugene Leave a comment

James Somers considers the worthiness of coders in Silicon Valley. But it was a section on writing that caught my attention from the start:

When, in 1958, Ernest Hemingway was asked: ‘What would you consider the best intellectual training for the would-be writer?’, he responded:

Let’s say that he should go out and hang himself because he finds that writing well is impossibly difficult. Then he should be cut down without mercy and forced by his own self to write as well as he can for the rest of his life. At least he will have the story of the hanging to commence with.

Writing is a mentally difficult thing — it’s hard to know when something’s worth saying; it’s hard to be clear; it’s hard to arrange things in a way that will hold a reader’s attention; it’s hard to sound good; it’s even hard to know whether, when you change something, you’re making it better. It’s all so hard that it’s actually painful, the way a long run is painful. It’s a pain you dread but somehow enjoy.

Some of this is existential angst that comes with working at a start-up:

When I go to the supermarket I sometimes think of how much infrastructure and ingenuity has gone into converting the problem of finding my own food in the wild to the problem of walking around a room with a basket. So much intelligence and sweat has gone into getting this stuff into my hands. It’s my sustenance: other people’s work literally sustains me. And what do I do in return?

We call ourselves web developers, software engineers, builders, entrepreneurs, innovators. We’re celebrated, we capture a lot of wealth and attention and talent. We’ve become a vortex on a par with Wall Street for precocious college grads. But we’re not making the self-driving car. We’re not making a smarter pill bottle. Most of what we’re doing, in fact, is putting boxes on a page. Users put words and pictures into one box; we store that stuff in a database; and then out it comes into another box.

He comes back to the difficulty of writing:

The price of a word is being bid to zero. That one magazine story I’ve been working on has been in production for a year and a half now, it’s been a huge part of my life, it’s soaked up so many after-hours, I’ve done complete rewrites for editors — I’ve done, and will continue to do, just about anything they say — and all for free. There’s no venture capital out there for this; there are no recruiters pursuing me; in writer-town I’m an absolute nothing, the average response time on the emails I send is, like, three and a half weeks. I could put the whole of my energy and talent into an article, everything I think and am, and still it could be worth zero dollars.

And so despite my esteem for the high challenge of writing, for the reach of the writerly life, it’s not something anyone actually wants me to do. The American mind has made that very clear, it has said: ‘Be a specialised something — fill your head with the zeitgeist, with the technical — and we’ll write your ticket.’

And so he will continue coding, coding, coding. Thoughtful piece.