Author: readingbyeugene

POCBS: Power Outages Caused by Squirrels

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Are squirrels causing an uprising? Will the world end in fire or ice? The author of this delightful op-ed piece, Jon Mooallem (the author of Wild Ones: A Sometimes Dismaying, Weirdly Reassuring Story About Looking at People Looking at Animals in America), thinks it could end with the lowly squirrel:

Power outages caused by squirrels are a new hobby of mine, a persnickety and constantly updating data set that hums along behind the rest of my life the way baseball statistics or celebrity-birthing news might for other people. It started in April, after I read about a squirrel that electrocuted itself on a power line in Tampa, Fla., cutting electricity to 700 customers and delaying statewide achievement tests at three nearby schools. I was curious, just enough to set up a Google news alert: squirrel power. But as the summer progressed, and the local news reports of power outages caused by squirrels piled up in my in-box, my interest in power outages caused by squirrels became more obsessive and profound.

I know: it’s hard to accept that a single squirrel can disrupt and frustrate thousands of people at a time, switching off our electrified lives for hours. But since Memorial Day, I’ve cataloged reports of 50 power outages caused by squirrels in 24 states. (And these, of course, are only those power outages severe enough to make the news.) Fifteen hundred customers lost power in Mason City, Iowa; 1,500 customers in Roanoke, Va.; 5,000 customers in Clackamas County, Ore.; and 10,000 customers in Wichita, Kan. — and that was just during two particularly busy days in June. A month later, there were two separate P.O.C.B.S., as I’ve come to call power outages caused by squirrels, around the small town of Evergreen, Mont., on a single day.

All this is quite fascinating! I had no idea that the NASDAQ was affected by squirrel:

Squirrels have been causing power outages since long before I started cataloging power outages caused by squirrels. (In 1987, a squirrel shut down the Nasdaq for 82 minutes and another squirrel shut down the Nasdaq again in 1994 — a seminal bit of P.O.C.B.S. history that was sometimes noted in coverage of the power outage at the Nasdaq in August, which was a power outage not caused by squirrels. “This is a terrible pain in the neck,” the president of one brokerage firm told The Wall Street Journal in 1994 — which, I’ve found, is still a typical reaction to power outages caused by squirrels.)

Here’s the juicy explanation on why squirrels are so dangerous for power lines:

Squirrels chew through electrical wiring because the animals are constantly teething. An adult squirrel’s incisors never stop growing — they can grow as much as 10 inches per year — and the animals must chew constantly to keep them worn down. Squirrels gnaw or burrow their way into transformers for the same reason they enter rotting cavities of aging trees: hollow spaces offer them den sites and safety from predators. Squirrels break into equipment at substations because the seeds and insects they eat get sucked into that machinery by cooling fans, or are pooled inside by the wind

A must-read in entirety here. What’s stopping us from building out infrastructure for underground wiring?

A History of Meh, from Leo Rosten to W.H. Auden to The Simpsons

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I’m loving the new Slate blog on words and vocabulary. It’s got a great name: Lexicon Valley. In their most recent post, they trace the development of the now-common “meh” to signify boredom or indifference:

First, a consideration from the early 1990s:

A variant of meh, namely mnyeh, famously appears in the works of the late academic and humorist Leo Rosten, with extended treatment in his Hooray for Yiddish. But Rosten’s work is often disparaged by experts in Yiddishology, and, in any case, there’s no evidence that mnyeh is even a Yiddish word.

The British poet W.H. Auden didn’t think much of the first lunar landing, and he wrote a poem about it (but used “Mneh”):

Worth going to see? I can well believe it.
Worth seeing? Mneh! I once rode through a desert
     and was not charmed: give me a watered
     lively garden, remote from blatherers

Finally, the tracing of “meh” to The Simpsons:

Though Swartzwelder is the most prolific of all Simpsons writers, he has led a reclusive lifewriting novels since leaving the show in 2004. After finding a way to send him a message, I was amazed to actually get a response from the man called “the J. D. Salinger of comedy writing.” He didn’t recall putting meh on the show before his “Hungry Hungry Homer” episode, which aired in 2001, some seven seasons after meh began to be used by Simpsons characters. Oakley, though, suspects meh might have appeared in an early Swartzwelder-penned scene that never made it to air. And Swartzwelder did have a memory of where he first came acrossmeh, though it wasn’t in Mad. “I had originally heard the word from an advertising writer named Howie Krakow back in 1970 or 1971 who insisted it was the funniest word in the world,” he told me. So let’s thank Mr. Krakow for his unwitting role in the spread of the meh meme.

 

Wikipedia has this to add about “Meh“: the word’s first mainstream print usage occurred in Canadian newspaper the Edmonton Sun in 2003: “Ryan Opray got voted off Survivor. Meh.”

Little Bastard: The Computer Poker Machine

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A fascinating piece in New York Times Magazine on the advancement of artificial intelligence in how machines play poker:

The machines, called Texas Hold ‘Em Heads Up Poker, play the limit version of the popular game so well that they can be counted on to beat poker-playing customers of most any skill level. Gamblers might win a given hand out of sheer luck, but over an extended period, as the impact of luck evens out, they must overcome carefully trained neural nets that self-learned to play aggressively and unpredictably with the expertise of a skilled professional. Later this month, a new souped-up version of the game, endorsed by Phil Hellmuth, who has won more World Series of Poker tournaments than anyone, will have its debut at the Global Gaming Expo in Las Vegas. The machines will then be rolled out into casinos around the world.

They will be placed alongside the pure numbers-crunchers, indifferent to the gambler. But poker is a game of skill and intuition, of bluffs and traps. The familiar adage is that in poker, you play the player, not the cards. This machine does that, responding to opponents’ moves and pursuing optimal strategies. But to compete at the highest levels and beat the best human players, the approach must be impeccable. Gregg Giuffria, whose company, G2 Game Design, developed Texas Hold ‘Em Heads Up Poker, was testing a prototype of the program in his Las Vegas office when he thought he detected a flaw. When he played passively until a hand’s very last card was dealt and then suddenly made a bet, the program folded rather than match his bet and risk losing more money. “I called in all my employees and told them that there’s a problem,” he says. The software seemed to play in an easily exploitable pattern. “Then I played 200 more hands, and he never did anything like that again. That was the point when we nicknamed him Little Bastard.”

Read the rest here.

Overhauling the Bar Mitzvahs and Bat Mitzvahs in America

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As Jews celebrate the new year tonight, leaders in the largest branch of Judaism, the Reform movement, are starting an initiative to stop the attrition by reinventing the entire bar and bat mitzvah process. Laurie Goodstein, writing for The New York Times:

The problem Jewish leaders are trying to tackle is deeper than the perennial lament about ostentatious bar mitzvah parties, revived last month with a YouTube video from Dallas of a bar mitzvah boy hoofing it with Vegas-style showgirls.

Their concern is that they have built up the bar mitzvah worship service as the pinnacle, putting children through a lot of time and effort geared to preparing them for a daylong event. Rabbis said in interviews that the event has become more a private service for the bar mitzvah family and friends than a communal event for the congregation.

Children and their families go through what some rabbis call an “assembly line” that produces Jews schooled in little more than “pediatric Judaism,” an immature understanding of the faith, its values and spirituality. Most students deliver a short speech about the meaning of the Torah passage they were assigned to read, but they never really learn to understand or speak Hebrew, only to decode the text.

The new initiative by the Reform movement, a liberal branch that claims 1.5 million of the nation’s estimated 6 million Jews, is called B’nai Mitzvah Revolution.

Interesting. I wonder how successful it will be. This comment at The Times is thought-provoking:

Laurie Goodstein’s article about reviving the bar/bat mitzvah is well written. Unfortunately, there is nothing new about the “new look” of the American bar/bat mitzvah. As a former Reform rabbi, I heard and read endless variations of responses to the dilemma of the bar mitzvah/religious school industrial complex for decades. Efforts to include good deeds and social action in the process of bnei mitzvah study have been underway for generations, as have efforts to rewrite the Sabbath morning service to make the bar/bat mitzvah more “meaningful”. Such efforts, however, ignore the basic truth that, for most Reform Jews (and Jews of the other reformed movements), Judaism is a matter of nostalgia, not belief. It is a cultural identity, to be taken out of the drawer during life cycle events and then put back again. There is no getting around the fact that Judaism is based upon a belief in a Jewish God who issued Jewish commandments, not just good or humane ideas. If a Jewish child grows up in a family that does not believe in or follow such a God or such commandments–however moral that family may be–that child will not feel he or she is entering a religious community in any real sense. Do I have the answer? The fact that today I am a Zen Buddhist will tell you. I wish these well-intentioned rabbis and congregants luck, but unless they look issues of belief–belief specific to Judaism–squarely in the face, their efforts will be frustrated.

 

The Role of Sleep in Brain Repair and Growth

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The purpose of sleep is not very well understood. I’ve been fascinated with the topic for a number of years, so I am pretty excited when there’s new developments in the field of sleep research.

A new study sheds light on the role sleep plays in the the ability of the brain’s cells to grow and repair themselves. Preliminary research suggests that sleep replenishes a type of brain cells that go on to make an insulating material known as myelin, which protects our brain’s circuitry.

The research, published in The Journal of Neuroscience, was conducted in mice that were either allowed to sleep, or forced to stay awake. Researchers looked particularly at how sleep affected gene activity of cells called oligodendrocytes, which play a role in the production of myelin. Myelin covers brain and spinal cord nerve cell projections as a sort of “insulation”; researchers explained that it is integral to the movement of electrical impulses from cell to cell.

The study shows that sleep seems to turn on genes known to play a part in the formation of myelin. Conversely, lack of sleep was linked with the activation of genes associated with cell stress and death.

Dr Chiara Cirelli and colleagues from the University of Wisconsin, where the study was conducted, explained:

For a long time, sleep researchers focused on how the activity of nerve cells differs when animals are awake versus when they are asleep.

Now it is clear that the way other supporting cells in the nervous system operate also changes significantly depending on whether the animal is asleep or awake.

 

Georgia Tech’s Starter: Crowdfunding for Science Research

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Starter is an independent crowdfunding site based out of Georgia Tech. think backing cool science projects à la Kickstarter or IndieGoGo. The projects that appear on Starter must be submitted by a faculty member. They’re also vetted by a department chair, who looks for conflicts of interest. Projects will be posted on the site for 60 days, and donors will only be charged if the funding goals are reached (similar to Kickstarter and IndieGoGo).

Here is a description of one project that caught my eye, The Georgia Tech Urban Honey Bee Project:

Wiring our beehives will not only allow students to collect large amounts of data about the impact of urban environments on bees, but will also allow us to share this information with the public and to easily participate in other ongoing research like NASA’s Honey Bee Net, which uses beehive data to track the effects of climate and land use change. We also plan to live-stream video from inside and outside the hive on our website, bees.gatech.edu.

We will use the RFID system to determine whether urban bees require longer foraging flights to find nectar and pollen than bees in suburban or rural settings. RFID detectors will be set at the entrances to the hives. Tiny RFID tags will be attached to bees and we will then be able to measure the foraging flight times of individual bees.

This concept isn’t unique to Georgia Tech. As Fast Company notes:

Automatic government spending cuts that went into effect this year have made grants harder to come by, and Georgia Tech isn’t the only research institution that has sought to fund its researchers through crowdfunding. Arizona State University and the University of Virginia have both partnered with a crowdfunding site called Useed. The University of Vermont has partnered with another called Launcht. And the University of Utah has partnered with still another called RocketHub.

One of my concerns is that the funded projects will take a large percentage (35%) as a fee for running the review process, site administration, and lab facility upkeep. But Starter appears to be promising and a great way for people to “invest” in science projects which they think are interesting.

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Read more:

1) Georgia Tech’s press release in May 2013, before the site went live.

2) Stephen Fleming’s blog post on Starter and crowdfunding.

Frank Bruni on the Cultural Echo Chamber

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Frank Bruni considers the cultural echo chamber afforded to us through the Internet when we travel. His op-ed, titled “Traveling Without Seeing,” has some very good paragraphs, including three of my favorites below:

I’m not talking about the chain hotels or chain restaurants that we’ve long had and that somehow manage to be identical from time zone to time zone, language to language: carbon-copy refuges for unadventurous souls and stomachs.

I’m talking about our hard drives, our wired ways, “the cloud” and all of that. I’m talking about our unprecedented ability to tote around and dwell in a snugly tailored reality of our own creation, a monochromatic gallery of our own curation.

This coddling involves more than earphones, touch pads, palm-sized screens and gigabytes of memory. It’s a function of how so many of us use this technology and how we let it use us. We tune out by tucking ourselves into virtual enclaves in which our ingrained tastes are mirrored and our established opinions reflected back at us.

Mr. Bruni: save those Wire episodes for when you get back home.

Who Will Prosper in the New World?

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Tyler Cowen, writing in The New York Times, hypothesizes on who will prosper in the next generation. This is a very good post in entirety, but my favorite three points below:

THE CONSCIENTIOUS Within five years we are likely to have the world’s best education, or close to it, online and free. But not everyone will sit down and go through the material without a professor pushing them to do the work.

Those who are motivated to use online resources will do much, much better in the generations to come. It’s already the case that the best students from India are at the top in many Coursera classes, putting America’s arguably less motivated bright young people to shame. “Free” doesn’t really help you if you don’t make an effort.


PEOPLE WHO LISTEN TO COMPUTERS Your smartphone will record data on your life and, when asked, will tell you what to do, drawing on data from your home or from your spouse and friends if need be. “You’ve thrown out that bread the last three times you’ve bought it, give it a pass” will be a text message of the future. How about “Now is not the time to start another argument with your wife”? The GPS is just the beginning of computer-guided instruction.

Take your smartphone on a date, and it might vibrate in your pocket to indicate “Kiss her now.” If you hesitate for fear of being seen as pushy, it may write: “Who cares if you look bad? You are sampling optimally in the quest for a lifetime companion.”Those who won’t listen, or who rebel out of spite, will be missing out on glittering prizes. Those of us who listen, while often envied, may feel more like puppets with deflated pride.


PEOPLE WHO DON’T NEED MONEY We are used to thinking in terms of rich, poor and middle class, but those categories will change. Berlin’s eastern neighborhoods and Williamsburg, Brooklyn, are a window onto our future. These urban areas are full of people who are bright, culturally literate, Internet-savvy and far from committed to the idea of hard work directed toward earning a good middle-class living. We’ll need a new name for the group of people who have the incomes of the lower middle class and the cultural habits of the wealthy or upper middle class. They will spread a libertarian worldview that working for other people full time is an abominable way to get by.

Read the rest here.

On the Optimal Time for Napping

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The Wall Street Journal summarizes the benefits of napping and enumerates the time you should nap for:

For a quick boost of alertness, experts say a 10-to-20-minute power nap is adequate for getting back to work in a pinch.

For cognitive memory processing, however, a 60-minute nap may do more good, Dr. Mednick said. Including slow-wave sleep helps with remembering facts, places and faces. The downside: some grogginess upon waking.

Finally, the 90-minute nap will likely involve a full cycle of sleep, which aids creativity and emotional and procedural memory, such as learning how to ride a bike. Waking up after REM sleep usually means a minimal amount of sleep inertia, Dr. Mednick said.

My favorite part of the article was this tip about taking a 10 to 15 minute nap by holding a pen/pencil in your hand:

Jonathan Brandl is a Newton, Mass.-based consultant who works from home. Up at 5 a.m. to hit the gym, he finds himself fading around 2 p.m. His solution is a fast snooze in a comfy chair in his den. His trick for waking up: He holds a pen or pencil in his hand, which usually falls about 10 to 15 minutes into his nap, waking him up.

Sign me up.

On Genetic Advantages, Doping, and Sports

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Malcolm Gladwell, in my opinion, has published the best piece he’s written this year in “Man and Superman.” The central question he posits: do genetic advantages make sports (in particular, cycling) unfair compared to those who choose to dope? Paraphrased: what qualifies as a sporting chance in athletic competitions? He goes through a brief comparison of elite athletes in skiing, long-distance running, but his primary focus is on cycling.

When Hamilton joined Armstrong on the U.S. Postal Service racing team, he was forced to relearn the sport, to leave behind, as he puts it, the romantic world “where I used to climb on my bike and simply hope I had a good day.” The makeover began with his weight. When Michele Ferrari, the key Postal Service adviser, first saw Hamilton, he told him he was too fat, and in cycling terms he was. Riding a bicycle quickly is a function of the power you apply to the pedals divided by the weight you are carrying, and it’s easier to reduce the weight than to increase the power. Hamilton says he would come home from a workout, after burning thousands of calories, drink a large bottle of seltzer water, take two or three sleeping pills—and hope to sleep through dinner and, ideally, breakfast the following morning. At dinner with friends, Hamilton would take a large bite, fake a sneeze, spit the food into a napkin, and then run off to the bathroom to dispose of it. He knew that he was getting into shape, he says, when his skin got thin and papery, when it hurt to sit down on a wooden chair because his buttocks had disappeared, and when his jersey sleeve was so loose around his biceps that it flapped in the wind. At the most basic level, cycling was about physical transformation: it was about taking the body that nature had given you and forcibly changing it.

“Lance and Ferrari showed me there were more variables than I’d ever imagined, and they all mattered: wattages, cadence, intervals, zones, joules, lactic acid, and, of course, hematocrit,” Hamilton writes. “Each ride was a math problem: a precisely mapped set of numbers for us to hit. . . . It’s one thing to go ride for six hours. It’s another to ride for six hours following a program of wattages and cadences, especially when those wattages and cadences are set to push you to the ragged edge of your abilities.”

Hematocrit, the last of those variables, was the number they cared about most. It refers to the percentage of the body’s blood that is made up of oxygen-carrying red blood cells. The higher the hematocrit, the more endurance you have. (Mäntyranta had a very high hematocrit.) The paradox of endurance sports is that an athlete can never work as hard as he wants, because if he pushes himself too far his hematocrit will fall. Hamilton had a natural hematocrit of forty-two per cent—which is on the low end of normal. By the third week of the Tour de France, he would be at thirty-six per cent, which meant a six-per-cent decrease in his power—in the force he could apply to his pedals. In a sport where power differentials of a tenth of a per cent can be decisive, this “qualifies as a deal breaker.”

A must-read if you’re at all interested in sports, genetics, and the doping as cheating debate.

This sentence in the concluding paragraph is telling:

It is a vision of sports in which the object of competition is to use science, intelligence, and sheer will to conquer natural difference.