Author: readingbyeugene

Carolyn Hopkins and Jack Fox: The Voices at 110 Airports and the NYC Subway

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Carolyn Hopkins and Jack Fox are two cheerful retirees who also happen to be longtime buddies and the (mildly authoritative) public announcement voices heard at 110 airports and the New York City subway. The Verge has a great article profiling the two friends:

Conspiracy theorists will probably be delighted to learn that a smallish, 100 person company out of Louisville controls the announcement systems in just about every important public space in the United States. They do it for 110 airports including JFK, LAX, and Chicago O’Hare, all 26 buildings at the Capitol, the Mayo Clinic, the Kennedy Space Center, and the New York City subway system, just to name a handful. (The NYC MTA has a host of other voices for specific platform announcements; for instance, Charlie Pellett says, “stand clear of the closing doors.”) They also work worldwide, from China to Iceland and everywhere in between.

The company responsible for the voices, IED, short for Innovative Electronic Designs, is the preeminent supplier of what’s known as an automated paging system: networked, computer-controlled equipment that controls audio notifications for big complexes. Though competitors exist — Biamp, and QSC, for instance — IED is the main US player in this specialized sector. The company was founded in 1978, but its genesis really occurred in tandem with the birth of rock ‘n’ roll.

Hopkins’ voice isn’t what you’d expect from a paging system. It’s neither robotic, nor elegant and actressy, but rather, mirthful and folksy.

“They said, ‘Can you do a certain voice?’” Hopkins, now 64, remembers. “They wanted a veryhappy smiling voice! And I tried it.” The gig continued, and Hopkins was called back every time they created a new system.

Definitely click through the article and hear the two interviews with Carolyn and Jack embedded in the article.

On Skinny Dipping in New York City

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A fun and interesting piece about what people have to do to go skinny-dipping in the New York City area:

But skinny-dipping is something different, its acolytes say. A term coined in the late 1940s, it connotes both quickness — a dip — and transgression, a departure from the old painted scenes of bathing in rivers. (The skinny part, linguists have argued, most likely refers to skin, not thinness.)

“It’s about spontaneity and freedom in the moment,” said Lauren Christianson, 23, who along with two partners is working on a guide to skinny-dipping around the city for their Web site, The Skinny Dipping Report. “You can’t go in the East River or the Gowanus Canal. You have to find these secret spots.”

One spot eyed for the list, a hot tub at the New York Loft Hostel in Bushwick, may need to be reconsidered. The hot tub was taken out last year, a receptionist there said, after becoming an occasional clothing-optional hangout. The removal was “very possibly for that reason,” she said.

A minor offense most often classified as either “exposure of a person” (a violation) or public lewdness (a misdemeanor), it is not the sort of crime that makes the blotter in New York, as it might elsewhere. Faced with a boisterous bunch of naked swimmers, many officers just shake their heads. “Move along” is more likely to be heard than “You’re under arrest.”

I guess you can consider the officers assigned to give out summons/tickets for this behavior as a sort of mild hazing?

“Usually a junior guy will get stuck with that assignment,” said Sgt. Grant Arthur of the United States Park Police, which patrols the area. “They’ll just come right up and start talking, get real close, telling the officer how good he looks in uniform. Nothing bad — it’s kind of funny. We put the new guys down there, and it’ll kind of catch them off guard.”

A Desert, a Smiling Dog, and a Revelation

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A hasty engagement and subsequent marriage turned into anguish for Liesl Schillinger, who realized she was incompatible with her husband. So she goes off to the desert in New Mexico and has a revelatory experience:

I continue amending my idea of fulfillment as I go. I have no regrets except for one: I am not allowed to own a dog in my apartment building. I travel too much to have a dog, anyway. Out of curiosity, though, I sent the photo of the big white dog to a breeder, who told me what kind it was: a Samoyed.

The breed, also known as “the smiling dog,” is famous for its friendly temperament. The dog I met in Taos would have shared its good mood with any creature it happened to encounter on its run. I’m so glad I was that creature.

I wish I still had the picture, but I will never lose the impression bestowed upon me by that generous, exultant animal on that long-ago day, when I most needed to be reminded that happiness is not an intellectual choice, it’s an instinct, and a good in itself.

A beautiful conclusion in this Modern Love story.

On Luck, J.K. Rowling, and the Chamber of Literary Fame

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I had a conversation today at lunch with a lady about the role of luck in her career. We both agreed that we shouldn’t underestimate chance encounters and how certain circumstances bring us opportunities. Too often we attribute success to diligence and/or hard work, while we (strongly) discount the role of luck that played in our successes.

In this spirit, I thought this was an excellent piece by Duncan J. Watts on the discovery of J.K. Rowling’s pseudonymously published novel, The Cuckoo’s Calling:

In the real world, of course, it’s impossible to travel back in time and start over, so it’s much harder to argue that someone who is incredibly successful may owe their success to a combination of luck and cumulative advantage rather than superior talent. But by writing under the pseudonym of Robert Galbraith, an otherwise anonymous name, Rowling came pretty close to recreating our experiment, starting over again as an unknown author and publishing a book that would have to succeed or fail on its own merits, just as Harry Potter had to 16 years ago — before anyone knew who Rowling was.

Rowling made a bold move and, no doubt, is feeling vindicated by the critical acclaim the book has received.

But there’s a catch: Until the news leaked about the author’s real identity, this critically acclaimed book had sold somewhere between 500 and 1,500 copies, depending on which report you read. As they say in the U.K., that’s rubbish! What’s more, had the author actually been Robert Galbraith, the book would almost certainly have continued to languish in obscurity, probably forever.

“The Cuckoo’s Calling” will now have a happy ending, and its success will only perpetuate the myth that talent is ultimately rewarded with success. What Rowling’s little experiment has actually demonstrated, however, is that quality and success are even more unrelated than we found in our experiment. It might be hard for a book to become a runaway bestseller if it’s unreadably bad (although one might argue that the Twilight series and “Fifty Shades of Grey” challenge this constraint), but it is also clear that being good, or even excellent, isn’t enough. As one of the hapless editors who turned down the Galbraith manuscript put it, “When the book came in, I thought it was perfectly good — it was certainly well-written — but it didn’t stand out.”

I highly recommend reading the entire thing where the author discusses a social experiment about the discovery of music by unknown artists.

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Recommended related reading: Nassim Taleb on the role of luck.

Pandoraviruses: Largest Viruses Ever Discovered

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Scientists have discovered the biggest virus ever, called a pandoravirus. National Geographic has the details on this “alien” virus:

Each about one micron—a thousandth of a millimeter—in length, the newfound genus Pandoravirus dwarfs other viruses, which range in size from about 50 nanometers up to 100 nanometers. A genus is a taxonomic ranking between species and family.

In addition to being huge, pandoraviruses have supersize DNA: 2,500 genes as compared with 10 genes in many viruses. 

The most interesting part, perhaps, was that a pandoravirus was possibly discovered as far back as 13 years ago. However, because anything on the 1 micron scale is of the bacterium size, scientists were dismissive.

Connecting with Mishka Shubaly on the Internet

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When Hanny (@beradadisini) wanted to read one of the Kindle Singles she found on Amazon, she realized she could not because of an Amazon restriction on her country of residence, Indonesia. So she reached out to the author, Mishka Shubaly, on Twitter. “My Saturday with Mishka” is a beautiful account of what happened next:

I judge people from the way they write (including the type of font they choose). I fall for their writing style, their choice of words, their inner voice, the way they place the right punctuation marks, as well as the wonderful feeling of reading those sentences out loud and thinking about how smart or funny or dark or interesting or intriguing the writer must be.

I also fall for Mishka Shubaly this way.

The Long Run is indeed a story about struggling with addiction–but it is more than that. Mishka’s addictions to drugs and alcohol is our addiction to a certain guy. To political power. To a branded bag. To be skinny. To a lighter skin-tone. To self-pity. To wealth. To the Internet. To an unresolved love affair. To a past.

We’re all dealing with our own addictions. We’re carrying these things inside, hiding it like a well-kept secret–so that no one will find out. Everyday, we’re all trying to run away from something that anchors us down, and run towards the freedom to be who we truly are.

I just love stories of connections like this. I haven’t read The Long Run, but I will now.

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(via Freshly Pressed)

The $17 Billion Dot Kosher Battle

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Bloomberg has details on the battle over the .kosher top level domain that’s been happening ever since for-profit business could apply to get a top-level domain of their own. Five organizations have banded together to oppose the sole applicant for dot-kosher, Kosher Marketing Assets:

Icann — the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers — began accepting applications for generic top-level domain names, or gTLDs, in January 2012. In November, Kosher Marketing Assets, the OK Kosher unit, filed an application for dot-kosher, with a mission to “promote kosher food certification in general, and OK Certification and its clients in particular.”

While only clients who pass “rigorous certification” tests would be allowed to use the gTLD, OK Kosher said in its application it expected to have more than 600 licensees by its third year of operation. OK Kosher supervises products including Fruity Pebbles cereal and Maxwell House coffee.

Applying for a gTLD doesn’t come cheap, at close to $200,000 including the evaluation fee and legal services, OK Kosher’s Levy said in a telephone interview.

More general details on the handling of these top level domains is further in the article:

Icann has begun to announce the awarding of some 1,930 proposed domain names this week, primarily non-English ones. Early gTLDs established include the word for network in Arabic, the words “web” and “online” in Cyrillic, and the Chinese characters for “game” or “games,” according to Cyrus Namazi, an Icann vice president.

Potentially key to the dot-kosher dispute is the fate of an application for the “dot-halal” domain name. Halal refers to the Muslim set of rules on food preparation and consumption.

The United Arab Emirates, India and Saudi Arabia have all registered their opposition to any one entity owning dot-halal though Icann’s Governmental Advisory Committee, which provides countries with a forum to protest domain names. The five Orthodox groups have asked Icann to use the same logic in the dot-kosher decision, while Kosher Marketing Assets argues that no country has complained about its bid.

 

Are TV Shows Better than the Movies?

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David Haglund argues that we should stop saying TV is better than the movies:

Who was the first person to say that TV is better than the movies? It’s probably impossible to say, but the argument in its contemporary form may date to October 1995, when Bruce Fretts—with “additional reporting” from 10 (!) of his colleagues atEntertainment Weekly—offered, over several pages, “10 simple reasons why the small screen is superior” to the big one. Even if you didn’t read it at the time, the piece will feel strikingly familiar: Replace NYPD Blue and The X-Files with Mad Men and Breaking Bad and the argument made by Fretts is more or less identical in its essentials to the one that over the last six or seven years has appeared in Time, Newsweek, the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Vulture, Vanity Fair, Entertainment Weekly (again!), and on blogs too numerous to count.

The TV-is-better argument is, above all, an attempt to narrow the range of what sophisticated viewers feel obligated to watch. Yes, such polemics sometimes serve other purposes. (Shaming Hollywood studios out of making another board-game-inspired blow-’em-up and turning to taut, Breaking Bad–style thrillers instead, for instance.) But generally the TV-is-better argument is a way of saying, “I don’t have to keep up with the movies anymore, and neither do you.”

I disagree!

But I do think Mr. Haglund has a point here:

For one thing, when we talk about television, we are almost always only talking about American television. Maybe we’ll include a few British shows, but rarely do we grapple with foreign-language efforts, the way serious moviegoers have been doing for decades. And while the source of most cinematic creativity in the United States has for the last few decades probably come from independent filmmakers, there is not really any such thing as independent television. (The medium, for the most part, just doesn’t work that way.) So while the best movies come from an intimidating diversity of sources, and present a similarly wide range of aesthetic approaches and aims, the best TV shows tend to come from three or four American cable networks and frequently follow a familiar model. (It’s like The Godfather, only in modern-day New Jersey—or in the advertising world, or the New Mexico meth market, or in Hollywood …)

Read the entire argument here.

Writing Tips from Joyce Carol Oates

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This afternoon, Joyce Carol Oates took to Twitter and dispensed ten bits of writing advice:

10) Write your heart out.

9) Read, observe, listen intensely!–as if your life depended upon it.

8) Don’t try to anticipate an ideal reader–or any reader. He/ she might exist–but is reading someone else.

7) Be your own editor/ critic. Sympathetic but merciless!

6) Unless you are experimenting with form–gnarled, snarled & obscure–be alert for possibilities of paragraphing.

5) When in doubt how to end a chapter, bring in a man with a gun. (This is Raymond Chandler’s advice, not mine. I would not try this.)

4) Keep in mind Oscar Wilde: “A little sincerity is a dangerous thing, and a great deal of it is absolutely fatal.”3

3) You are writing for your contemporaries–not for Posterity. If you are lucky, your contemporaries will become Posterity.

2) The first sentence can be written only after the last sentence has been written. FIRST DRAFTS ARE HELL. FINAL DRAFTS, PARADISE.

1) Write your heart out.

I also enjoyed her addendum about writing workshops: “Something magical can happen in a writing workshop. Don’t know why–but I have seen it countless times: writers are inspired by one another.” I think it’s not just inspiration, but accountability that matters. When you’re presenting your ideas to (with) others, you feel compelled to do a good job (rather than procrastinate or give up altogether).

The best writing book I’ve ever read is Stephen King’s On Writing. Much of the advice from Joyce Carol Oates’s is explained deeply in King’s book.

The Hikikomori around the World

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Two weeks ago, BBC published a piece about the hikikomori, those people in Japan who “refuse to leave their bedrooms.” There are as many as one million of them in Japan.

This week, BBC compiles a sampling of other hikikomori people around the world. A sample below:

I am a retired professor of astrophysics. I have only just avoided being a hikikomori myself. Since I was a child I felt awkward in society, and have tended to avoid human contact. I was fortunate to live in a rather short period of time when mathematical and scientific skills, which are easily acquired with minimal human interaction, were reasonably well rewarded. But I always felt that I was clinging to a cliff by my fingernails. Both my ex-wife and my wife have commented on the fact that I don’t seem to have any friends of my own. That’s not quite true, but not far wrong. I remain with the feeling that in the long term I am going to end up living, and dying, on the street. P, California, US

 

In sixth form I more or less stopped going to school. My grades were always good, but by the time I finished at 17, I had an attendance rate over the two years of less than 30%. I retreated to my room, became obsessive, paranoid. I wanted to go out and be social but felt that it was difficult. When I did go out, I tended to drink heavily, which made things worse. I went to uni immediately after finishing school. Those three years were a black hole of drink and isolation. About halfway through my second year I was diagnosed with “some sort of agoraphobia”, but no one could decide on treatment. I’m not sure how or why things changed. Some days I feel it start to take over me again, usually after a period of enforced confinement due to illness. I drag myself out for a walk. In a way this is confinement – I’ll often walk on my own, listening to music. I’ll arrange to do things with people, which helps. Eddie, Merseyside, UK

 

I loved withdrawing myself from the whole world, which includes my family and best friends. I found isolation a safe retreat. But it was eating me up, I lost 9kg (20lb) and knew that eventually it would kill me. I tried to fight back by reading books which made me laugh because essentially I was depressed. Facebook, games, slowly opening up to friends and telling them I was down. I sought help and said a lot of prayers. But the first step is to say I want to come out of this darkness. Watila, Tamil Nadu, India

 

I withdrew from society for at least five years, maybe longer. Honestly, that time is mostly a blur. For the most part, the farthest I’d travel was my mother’s backyard, and maybe to the store. I have social anxiety disorder, and it almost ruined my life. Crippling anxiety most of the time that is somewhat managed now by medication and therapy. I also go to group therapy sessions so I don’t isolate myself again. Maybe meeting Eric, now my fiance, on the internet brought me out of my shell. It gave me a reason to go out. I suppose I needed that push. Andrea, Wisconsin, US

Of course, the true hermits are selectively excluded from this compilation: they aren’t checking the Internet and could not have responded to BBC’s query.

In case you are wondering, hikikomori is in the Oxford English Dictionary as “In Japan: abnormal avoidance of social contact.”