Year: 2013

On The Joys of Becoming a Restaurant Regular

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This is a wonderful piece by Frank Bruni (former restaurant critic for The New York Times) on the joys and pleasures of becoming a regular at your local restaurant:

I’m no monogamist, that’s clear. More of a polygamist, but I dote on my sister wives. I’ve come to see that the broccolini isn’t always greener on the other side of Houston Street, and I’m here to sing what’s too seldom sung: the joys of familiarity. The pleasures of intimacy. The virtues of staying put.

What you have with a restaurant that you visit once or twice is a transaction. What you have with a restaurant that you visit over and over is a relationship.

Great point here about the smiles:

[T]he smiles you get from hosts, hostesses and bartenders who know you are entirely unlike the smiles from ones who are just meeting you. They’re less theatrical, less stilted, warmer by countless degrees.

I love this addendum from Jason Kottke:

This is a totally minor thing but I love it: more than once, I’ve come in early in the evening, had a drink, left without paying to go run an errand or meet someone somewhere else, and then come back later for another drink or dinner and then settle my bill. It’s like having a house account without the house account.

I haven’t yet made any nearby restaurants a regular for me, but now I am really tempted to pick one or two.

Is Vladimir Putin the Richest Man on Earth?

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An interesting report at Bloomberg on the wealth that Vladimir Putin has accumulated via his stakes in Russian companies like Gazprom and Surgutneftegaz:

The media reports, which often cite one another, ultimately tend to rely on one primary source: a November 2007 interview given by a prominent member of Moscow’s chattering classes, Stanislav Belkovsky, to the German daily Die Welt. In the interview, he claimed that Putin “controlled” 37 percent of the oil company Surgutneftegaz and 4.5 percent of natural gas monopoly Gazprom. The $40 billion estimate of Putin’s fortune was simply the 2007 market price of these stakes.

“And these numbers are substantiated?” Die Welt journalist Manfred Quiring asked. “These numbers are correct,” Belkovsky replied, and that was that.

Interviewers regularly ask Belkovsky about the $40 billion number. “That figure could now have changed, I believe at the level of $60-70 billion,” Belkovsky told Maeve McClenaghan of the Bureau of Investigative Journalism.

There has never been the slightest bit of evidence that Putin actually owns stakes in Surgutneftegaz or Gazprom. The Western journalists using Belkovsky as a source either do not know who he is or print his allegations simply because they are colorful. “What game Mr. Belkovsky is playing — and on whose behalf — is unclear,” the Telegraph of London warned in a story copiously citing Belkovsky’s allegations.

If the upper tier estimates are true, then Vladimir Putin may be as rich (or even richer) than Bill Gates, whose estimated worth is around $70 billion.

The CDC on Antibiotic-Resistant Infections in America

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A troubling new report from the CDC estimates that in the United States, more than two million people are sickened every year with antibiotic-resistant infections, with at least 23,000 dying as a result . The estimates are based on conservative assumptions and are likely minimum estimates. From the report:

Each year in the United States, at least 2 million people acquire serious infections with
bacteria that are resistant to one or more of the antibiotics designed to treat those
infections. At least 23,000 people die each year as a direct result of these antibiotic-resistant infections. Many more die from other conditions that were complicated by an antibioticresistant infection.

In addition, almost 250,000 people each year require hospital care for Clostridium difficile (C. difficile) infections. In most of these infections, the use of antibiotics was a major contributing factor leading to the illness. At least 14,000 people die each year in the United States from C. difficile infections. Many of these infections could have been prevented .

Antibiotic-resistant infections add considerable and avoidable costs to the already
overburdened U .S . healthcare system . In most cases, antibiotic-resistant infections require prolonged and/or costlier treatments, extend hospital stays, necessitate additional doctor visits and healthcare use, and result in greater disability and death compared with infections that are easily treatable with antibiotics . The total economic cost of antibiotic resistance to the U .S . economy has been difficult to calculate . Estimates vary but have ranged as high as $20 billion in excess direct healthcare costs, with additional costs to society for lost productivity as high as $35 billion a year (2008 dollars) .

Here is one important point: taking antibiotics when it they are not needed can lead to the development of antibiotic resistance. When resistance develops, antibiotics may not be able to stop future infections . Every time someone takes an antibiotic they don’t need, they increase their risk of developing a resistant infection in the future.

The New York Times raises this point:

One point of contention has been the extent to which industrial-scale animal farming contributes to the problem of antibiotic-resistant infections in humans. The government has estimated that more than 70 percent of antibiotics in the United States are given to animals. Companies use them to prevent sickness when animals are packed together in ways that breed infection. They also use them to make animals grow faster, though federal authorities are trying to stop that.

A note on MRSA (page 77 in the report):

Infections from one of the most pervasive types of drug-resistant bacteria tracked in the report, MRSA, have been declining. Invasive MRSA infections in hospitals went down by more than half from 2005 to 2011, according to a paper published Monday in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine. However, the number of invasive MRSA infections picked up outside health care settings has not changed much, and researchers pointed out that the number of those types of infections has for the first time outstripped the number acquired in hospitals.

Minecraft as an Education Tool

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I’ve observed my younger cousins playing the game of Minecraft, and this New York Times article espouses the benefits of this video game:

Earlier this year, for example, a school in Stockholm made Minecraft compulsory for 13-year-old students. “They learn about city planning, environmental issues, getting things done, and even how to plan for the future,” said Monica Ekman, a teacher at the Viktor Rydberg school.

Around the world, Minecraft is being used to educate children on everything from science to city planning to speaking a new language, said Joel Levin, co-founder and education director at the company TeacherGaming. TeacherGaming runs MinecraftEdu, which is intended to help teachers use the game with students.

A history teacher in Australia set up “quest missions” where students can wander through and explore ancient worlds. An English-language teacher in Denmark told children they could play Minecraft collectively in the classroom but with one caveat: they were allowed to communicate both orally and through text only in English. A science teacher in California has set up experiments in Minecraft to teach students about gravity.

Also, could Minecraft make better doctors? Apparently so:

A study by S.R.I. International, a Silicon Valley research group that specializes in technology, found that game-based play could raise cognitive learning for students by as much as 12 percent and improve hand-eye coordination, problem-solving ability and memory.

Games like Minecraft also encourage what researchers call “parallel play,” where children are engrossed in their game but are still connected through a server or are sharing the same screen. And children who play games could even become better doctors. No joke. Neuroscientists performed a study at Iowa State University that found that surgeons performed better, and were more accurate on the operating table, when they regularly played video games.

If you want a movie recommendation, I watched Indie Game: The Movie on Netflix the other day. It is a very interesting documentary that goes behind the scenes of Indie game developers and how their lives have been affected as they’ve spent (typically) years working on creating games like Braid, Minecraft, and Fez.

BiblioTech: The Country’s First Bookless Library Opens in Texas

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This week, an all-digital public library in Bexar County, Texas opened its doors. The facility offers 10,000 free e-books for the 1.7 million residents of the county (which includes San Antonio). NPR has more:

On its website, the Bexar County BiblioTech library explains how its patrons can access free eBooks and audio books. To read an eBook on their own device, users must have the 3M Cloud Library app, which they can link to their library card.

The app includes a countdown of days a reader has to finish a book — starting with 14 days, according to My San Antonio.

The library has a physical presence, as well, with 600 e-readers and 48 computer stations, in addition to laptops and tablets. People can also come for things like kids’ story time and computer classes, according to the library’s website.

Is this the future of the library? I sure hope that physical books will remain a core of the library for years to come.

Jeopardy! Is Now in Its 30th Season

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Jeopardy!‘s 30th season (the current incarnation of the syndicated show) will premiere tonight (September 16). To commemorate the occasion, The Daily Beast compiled videos of some of the “craziest answers, wackiest stories, and unforgettable people who helped make the iconic game show just that—iconic—for these past three decades.”:

This one might take the cake:

This is a case of an amazing answer being shot down on the technicality that it wasn’t on Trebek’s cue card. Ken Jennings, who won for 74 straight days, pulling in over $2 million dollars, threw out this little gem in response to a question about a term that can be both garden tool and immoral pleasure seeker. The best part of the video is the brief pause before everyone realizes what Jennings had just said. Even Trebek was caught off guard. 

More here.

The Rise and Toils of Hipsterification

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The hipster culture is growing. In this amusing piece, Steven Kurutz wonders if there’s ever been a subculture that’s been more broadly defined. Pretty much anything he chooses to wear can be classified as trying to be hipster. And picking up new hobbies (such as photography or bicycling) makes him hipster too.

Thirty years from now I’ll be able to un-self-consciously wear a cardigan and a tweed cap or fedora, because there is an age limit for being seen as a hipster, but, at the moment, hipsters have geezer style locked up.

Even the basic building blocks of a wardrobe have been hipsterfied. Jeans, especially slim-cut denim, are a hipster essential. So are white T-shirts, leather jackets and hooded sweatshirts. I could wear suits. But they would have to be boxy styles from Men’s Wearhouse, because anything slim or tailored is the province of high-fashion hipsters.

Hipsters have the market cornered on vintage and irony, so I can’t raid the back of my closet for the 20-year-old Smashing Pumpkins concert tee I bought at an actual concert, 20 years ago. Not content with irony, hipsters have also co-opted authentic heritage brands like Woolrich and Gant.

So what does the author think would classify as non-hipster?

The only way to safely avoid looking like a hipster, so far as I can tell, is to dress in oversize mesh jerseys bearing the logos of sports teams. Or to wear the blandest, baggiest, beige-est clothes possible, like a middle-aged tourist. Oh, wait. My girlfriend read a draft of this story and told me mesh jerseys “are kind of hipster now.” The Rick Steves look is next.

This line made me laugh:

Hipsters love their iPhones, yet swoon over antiquated technology like typewriters and record players, so Luddites can’t even stand apart.

Do you feel like you’re becoming hipster, unintentionally?

On The Hunt for Fancy Serial Numbers on Dollar Bills

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Boston Globe has an interesting piece on collectors of dollar bills that have “fancy” serial numbers. Think ordered sequences, palindromes, and serials that are the first few digits of pi:

The simplest fancy numbers are the early ones: The redesigned $100 note with serial number 00000001 is likely to fetch $10,000 to $15,000, according to Dustin Johnston, director of currency for Heritage Auctions in Dallas. A $20 bill that was first off the press in a 2009 run sold in April for $5,581. A $2 bill numbered 0000001 with a star—the star means it replaced a misprinted note with the same number—sold in May 2009 for $29,900.

The print runs don’t always start with 00000001—in the first six months of this year, only 11 “00000001” notes have been printed in any denomination, because the Bureau of Engraving and Printing has decided for technical reasons to start the print runs with a higher number. The low digits are therefore exceptionally rare this year. Notes numbering 00000002 and on up are worth less, but all the way through 00000100 they can sell for hundreds of dollars (with only a small premium for a $100 bill over a $20 note—since for collectors, the numbers that really count are the tiny ones).

What else qualifies a bill as “fancy” is an unpredictable set of qualities limited only by the imagination of digit-heads. One collector, a Nashville songwriter named Dave Undis, has cataloged fancy notes and presented a taxonomy on a website, coolserialnumbers.com.

In addition to the “low numbers,” which stop at 100, there are “ladders,” which have numbers in sequence, such as 12345678 or 54321098. These sell for as much as $1,300. A “radar” (selling for $20 to $40) is a palindrome, such as 35299253, and “repeaters” are notes with two blocks of the same four digits, like 41884188. Undis observes subcategories of each of these, such as “super radars” ($75 to $100) that have all internal digits the same, like 46666664.

Battushig Myanganbayar: From Mongolia to M.I.T.

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This is a very cool story of Battushig Myanganbayar, a 16-year-old teenager from Ulan Bator, Mongolia who caught the attention of M.IT. officials by participating and doing exceptionally well in an online course (a MOOC) in Circuits & Electronics. He has now enrolled in M.I.T. as a freshman as a result of his accomplishment.

Battushig has the round cheeks of a young boy, but he is not your typical teenager. He hasn’t read Harry Potter (“What will I learn from that?”) and doesn’t like listening to music (when a friend saw him wearing headphones, he couldn’t believe it; it turned out Battushig was preparing for the SAT). His projects are what make him happy. “In electrical engineering, there is no limit,” he said. “It is like playing with toys.” He unveiled Garage Siren in August 2012, posting instructions and a demonstration video on YouTube. The project impressed officials at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology — where Battushig planned to apply for college — but at that point they were already aware of his abilities. Two months earlier, Battushig, then 15, became one of 340 students out of 150,000 to earn a perfect score in Circuits and Electronics, a sophomore-level class at M.I.T. and the first Massive Open Online Course, or MOOC — a college course filmed and broadcast free or nearly free to anyone with an Internet connection — offered by the university.

How does a student from a country in which a third of the population is nomadic, living in round white felt tents called gers on the vast steppe, ace an M.I.T. course even though nothing like this is typically taught in Mongolian schools? The answer has to do with Battushig’s extraordinary abilities, of course, but also with the ambitions of his high-school principal. Enkhmunkh Zurgaanjin, the principal of the Sant School, was the first Mongolian to graduate from M.I.T., in 2009, and he has tried since then to bring science and technology labs to his students. “My vision,” he told me, “is to have more skilled engineers to develop Mongolia. To do that, everything has to start from the beginning.” In the past decade, Mongolia, which had limited landlines, invested heavily in its information technology infrastructure and now has an extensive 3G network. Most homes in Ulan Bator have Internet connections, and almost everyone, including nomads, has at least one cellphone. Even on the steppe, with only sheep in sight, you can get a signal.

On comparing these Mongolian students to the M.I.T. students taking this same course:

Battushig was one of 20 students, ranging in age from 13 to 17, to enroll in the class. About half dropped out. The course is difficult in any setting — M.I.T. sophomores often pull all-nighters — and the Mongolian students were taking it in a second language. Battushig, however, thrived. “I can’t compare it to a regular class,” he said. “I had never done that kind of thing before. It was really a watershed moment for me.” To help his classmates, he made videos in Mongolian that offered pointers and explanations of difficult concepts and posted them on YouTube. Kim, who had taught similar classes at M.I.T., told me, “If Battushig, at the age of 15, were a student at M.I.T., he would be one of the top students — if not the top.

I don’t think this kind of exposure for anyone would have been possible before the advent of the MOOCs. Or at the very least, incredibly difficult. Quite an impressive accomplishment for Battushig. The story highlights that the MOOCs democratize education, but they also can serve as a way for universities to attract top talent from all over the globe.

The Feynman Lectures on Physics: Free Online

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This is an incredibly generous endeavor by Caltech: they have published The Feynman Lectures on Physics in HTML format, available for free:

Caltech and The Feynman Lectures Website are pleased to present this online edition of The Feynman Lectures on Physics. Now, anyone with internet access and a web browser can enjoy reading a high-quality up-to-date copy of Feynman’s legendary lectures. This edition has been designed for ease of reading on devices of any size or shape; text, figures and equations can all be zoomed without degradation.

Amazing.

Get your fix of Volume I.

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Notes:

1) If you’re wondering, the hardcover set of the lectures goes for around $180 on Amazon.

2) Read why Richard Feynman is my favourite scientist.