links of the day

Why Wikipedia Is As Important as the Pyramids

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A rather interesting argument by Jonathon Keats, author of Virtual Words, in Wired:

But however much it may deserve designation, the truth is that Wikipedia doesn’t need the World Heritage List. The World Heritage List needs Wikipedia.

Unesco established the list in 1972 to help the UN foster “conditions for dialogue among civilizations, cultures and peoples, based upon respect for commonly shared values.” (Sound like a certain online encyclopedia?) But rampant politicking has nudged a rapidly expanding assortment of water management systems and silver mines into the league of universally significant landmarks like Persepolis and the Taj Mahal.

However, Unesco is plagued by an even deeper problem. Since the World Heritage Convention was written in 1972, the delegates haven’t known quite how to handle “intangible cultural heritage” — the traditions and wisdom that are as significant to civilizations as their monuments. After spending 31 years sorting out the intellectual property rights of ethnic groups, the delegates decided to create a whole separate convention for abstract landmarks, a second, independent roster. You’ll find the historic center of Bruges, Belgium, on the World Heritage List, and Bruges’ annual Procession of the Holy Blood ceremony on the List of Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.

That’s ludicrous. Intangible cultural context is the essence of heritage, making wood and stone worthy of our interest. To merit the name, World Heritage sites need to encompass the intangibles, to be virtual at least as much as they’re physical.

That’s why Wikipedia is an ideal candidate to set the World Heritage List right. The Wikipedia World Heritage site would be more than a plaque on a server farm in Tampa. It would be data. But not a particular data set, since the data is always changing, and that mutability is what makes it a wiki. As more of the world goes digital and grows more networked, world heritage will increasingly have this characteristic. The World Heritage Committee will have to adapt to it or become obsolete.

 

On the Origin of Spray Paint

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The editors of New York Times Magazine unveiled a new section this weekend titled Who Made That?. And starting off this weekend, they dove into the origin of spray paint. Have you ever wondered who created spray paint?

The spray-paint can, however, has eminently practical origins. Ed Seymour, the proprietor of a Sycamore, Ill., paint company, was in search of an easy way to demonstrate his aluminum coating for painting radiators. His wife suggested a makeshift spray gun, like those used for deodorizers. And so, in 1949, Seymour mixed paint and aerosol in a can with a spray head. As it turned out, compressing paint in a can made for a nice finish.

Seymour’s humble creation quickly proved so popular that Seymour of Sycamore began customizing its own manufacturing equipment and eventually expanded into new businesses, including the auto and industrial-machine markets. Soon afterward, home-furnishing heavyweights like Rust-Oleum and Krylon jumped in. And by 1973, Big Spray was producing 270 million cans annually in the U.S., according to the Consumer Specialty Products Association. Last year, U.S. spray-paint manufacturers produced 412 million cans.

This is an interesting bit about European companies catering to spray can artists:

Companies like Montana, based in Spain; Molotow, based in Germany; and Ironlak, based in Australia, were pleased to associate with street artists. They offered professional-grade enhancements too, like different kinds of valves that emit different types of mists. (Some artists now complain that American alternatives are like buying a tube of paint with only one brush.) “The control you can get with the can, from the pressure, is phenomenal,” Gastman said.

Such innovation is not without blowback. Some spray writers dismiss the European brands as “fancy paint,” and in pursuit of lost authenticity, stick to Krylon, which is based in Ohio, and Rust-Oleum, which is located outside Chicago. “American writers really want to be loyal to Rusto,” Neelon said. “Rust-Oleum is like the Ford F-150 of spray paint. It’s the workingman’s paint.”

Who Made That? is a series that I’m definitely going to be paying attention to.

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Some food for thought: is graffiti created with spray paint considered art or vandalism? Sound off in the comments.


How to Buy a Used or New Car: Confessions of a Car Salesman

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How did the car business get so screwed up? There’s nothing else in our society that is sold with the consumer so conspicuously unprepared.

And it’s true. Car buying is one of the most stressful consumer experiences. But it doesn’t have to be this way. After reading this extensive piece on Edmunds.com, I learned more about the business than I’ve ever had before. The author of the piece was a writer for Edmunds who went working undercover at two dealerships: a high-volume, high-pressure dealership and a no-haggle dealership:

The editor explained that they wanted me to write a series of articles describing the business from the inside. Of course I would learn the tricks of the trade, and that would better prepare me to write advice for Edmunds.com. But the benefits of the project would be greater than just information. I would live the life of a car salesman for three months. That would give me an insight and perspective that couldn’t be gained by reading books or articles or interviewing former car salesmen.

What he learned over those three months is incredible:

So, you think I’m romanticizing car salesmen? Trying to clean them up and excuse their evil ways? And, you might ask, if the salesmen aren’t the bad guys, who is?

Having been a salesman myself, I began to view the managers and dealership owners as the real culprits. While salesmen play people games with the customer, the guys in the tower work the numbers with computers, their eyes fixed on the bottom line. They can see at a glance what kind of profit they are taking from the customer and they do it any way. Furthermore, they bully the sales staff, encouraging them to manipulate, control and intimidate customers while they take the lion’s share of the profit.

Sometimes, the profit a salesman generates is not even pocketed by them. One salesman told me the F&I people can work their magic to rob a salesman of his commission. They move front-end profit to the back end where it evaporates from the salesman’s voucher and returns, over the years, to the dealer in the form of high interest and steady payouts.

There’s so much gold in the piece, but I picked out the highlights below. The piece is broken into nine parts: 1) Going Undercover, 2) Getting Hired, 3) Meeting, Greeting and Dealing, 4) Life on the Lot, 5) A Tale of Two Deals 6) Learning from the Pros, 7) No-Haggle Selling, 8) Parting Shots, and 9) Lessons from the Lot. The whole piece reads like a mini-novel, but if you’re in a hurry, at least check out the last section, in which the author provides specific recommendations on what you can do to get the best deal on a used or new car:

Concept 3: Profit Equals Commission

I never really thought of this until I sold cars but… Car salespeople earn their living by inflating the price of the car you are buying. The more they inflate the price, the bigger their commission. This might seem very obvious, but we tend to lose sight of it when the smiling salesperson greets us on the car lot. They make us think they have our best interests in mind. The good salespeople do have our interests in mind. The unscrupulous salespeople are thinking how your purchase increases their commission. One of the dealerships I worked at had a sliding scale for commissions. The higher the profit, the higher the commission. Naturally, the salespeople tried to hit that point where the commission was bumped to the higher percentage. That might mean moving you into a higher level vehicle. It might mean increasing the profit by financing sleight of hand. In both cases, this smiling salesperson, with the personable air, didn’t have your best interests in mind. I believe in paying a dealer a profit for his car. I also believe in rewarding the salesperson for their expert help. But I don’t think this justifies making an unfair profit at my expense.

On humor being an effective way to get closer to the customer:

Many salespeople find that humor is a good way to overcome objections. If a customer says they’re “only looking,” the salesperson might answer, “Last time I was only looking I wound up married.” If a customer objects to being hurried into buying the car, the salesperson might say, “The only pressure on this lot is in the tires.” These prepackaged lines were exchanged between car salesmen in the slow times with the feeling that the right joke at the right moment could be the ticket to a sale.

The most interesting parts of the piece, to me, were the psychological lessons that they were taught as salespeople. For example:

At one point, during a sales seminar, I was actually taught how to shake hands. The instructor, a veteran car salesman said: “Thumb to thumb. Pump one, two, three, and out.” Another vet told me to combine the handshake with a slight pulling motion. This is the beginning of your control over the customer. This would prepare the “up” to be moved into the dealership where the negotiation would begin. The car lot handshake is sometimes combined with the confident demand, “Follow me!” If you employ this method you turn and begin walking into the dealership. Do not look back to see if they are following you. Most people feel the obligation to do what they are told and they will follow you, if only to plead, “But I’m only looking!”

The author made a strong point that the salesman wasn’t the customer’s enemy; rather, the enemy was the person who the customer doesn’t see (the manager). This is a key takeaway, I think:

What the customer didn’t realize was that the poor car salesman or woman was not really the enemy. The real enemy was the manager sitting in the sales tower cracking the whip. Suppose for a moment a customer told us they were “only looking,” and we said, “fine, take your time,” and went back into the sales tower. Now we find ourselves looking up into the steely eyes of the sales manager.

“That’s your customer out there,” the manager would say.

“But they said they’re only looking,” I would answer.

“Only looking? You’re going to take that for an answer?” Foam was beginning to form at the corners of the sales manager’s mouth. “What the hell kind of salesman are you? Of course they’re looking! They’re all only looking until they buy. You want them to go across the street and buy a car over there? Because they havereal salesmen over there. Now go back out there and sell those people a car. And don’t let them leave until they buy or until you turn them over to your closer.”

Again, this is a fascinating piece and well worth the read in its entirety. And while the piece is dated (circa 2001, when there weren’t as many people who realized that “The Internet is your friend”), there’s also an update for 2009.

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For the hat tip, I thank longform.org.

Questions for the reader: What has been your best/worst experience shopping for a used or new car? Feel free to share in the comments. Did you find any of the advice in the piece at Edmunds.com useful/interesting?

Wedding Lawsuit of the Decade

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This one takes the cake, folks. Todd J. Remis of Manhattan married in 2003, but he didn’t like the services of his photography studio. He claimed that H & H Photographers, a 65-year-old studio “known fondly among thousands of former and current Bronx residents,” missed photographing the last dance and the bouquet toss.

Forget that the wedding took place more than seven years ago. And that Mr. Remis has demanded to be repaid the $4,100 cost of the photography and and additional $48,000 (!) to recreate the entire wedding and fly the principals to New York so the celebration can be re-shot by another photographer. So what’s the kicker? He is now divorced from his wife, and he doesn’t even know where she lives (supposedly she is back in her native Latvia).

What a totally wild story.

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And a personal call to action: if you hire me to shoot your wedding, I promise to be there from beginning to end. I don’t charge by the hour. 

The Cult of Jurassic Park

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From the middle 1990s to the mid 2000s, my favourite movie was Jurassic Park. I’m not kidding. I must have watched it at least two dozen times in my life, more than any other movie.

In celebration of the release of Jurassic Park (trilogy) on Blu-ray, Bryan Curtis wrote a good piece about the cult associated with this movie.

On the origin of Jurassic Park (I’ve read Michael Crichton’s novel, and was thoroughly mesmerized by it):

When was Jurassic Park hatched? We could start in 1924, when the American paleontologist Henry Fairfield Osborn wrote about an “alert, swift-moving carnivorous dinosaur” — Velociraptor mongoliensis. We could start in 1970, when Steven, a young movie director, and Michael, a young novelist, had a chance meeting on the lot at Universal Studios. But I’m thinking we should probably start in 1983.

Entomologist George O. Poinar and his wife, Roberta, had begun taking DNA from insects trapped in prehistoric amber. They’d published an article about it in Science. One afternoon, a stranger dropped by their office in Berkeley, Calif. “Tall, pleasant guy,” Poinar recalls now. “Really lanky.” The man quizzed the Poinars about their work. He asked about amber mines in the Dominican Republic. Then, with his notebook filled, the man left. He never mentioned anything about a dinosaur novel.

Michael Crichton, in fact, was already trying to bring dinosaurs back to life. But he’d gotten stuck. “It is always a problem for me to believe in the stories that I am writing,” Crichton later wrote to Poinar, “and a dinosaur story especially strains my own credence.” When Crichton discovered the Poinars and their bugs-in-amber, he stumbled onto the foundation of a billion-dollar enterprise. It was a beautiful premise for a thriller, in that it both contained cutting-edge science and was ridiculously easy to understand.

I agree with the below assessment entirely. I love the original film. I tolerate The Lost World. I’ve only seen Jurassic Park III in theaters, and I loathed it:

There’s some stuff you ought to know about serious Jurassic Park fans. On balance, they love the first movie; they’re OK with The Lost World; and they absolutely hate Jurassic Park III. (The proprietor of the Jurassic Cast podcast calls it “the abomination.”) Moreover, Jurassic fans have a moment that is their version of Greedo shooting first. “The big numero uno,” Terry says. It occurs in the third movie, when the Spinosaurus and the tyrannosaur get locked in a Hell in a Cell match.JPers hate this scene because it ends with the tyrannosaur getting killed.

I don’t really care for the feminist comparisons in the piece, but I did like the neat trivia. I loved this line: “As Alan Grant might say: I bet you’ll never look at blockbusters the same way again.”

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In other news: it’s my birthday tomorrow, and this would make an awesome gift. Hint hint.

The Perniciousness of “Buy Here, Pay Here” Car Dealerships

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I had no idea that there was a market for such things…

These dealerships focus on people who need cars to get to work, but can’t qualify for conventional loans. They sell aging, high-mileage vehicles at prices well above Kelley Blue Book value and provide their own financing. As lenders of last resort, they can charge interest at three times or more the going rate for regular used-car loans.

Many require customers to return to the lot to make their loan payments — that’s why they’re called Buy Here Pay Here dealerships.

If buyers default, as about 1 in 4 do, the dealer repossesses the cars and in many cases sells them again.

The dealerships make an average profit of 38% on each sale, according to the National Alliance of Buy Here Pay Here Dealers. That’s more than double the profit margin of conventional retail car chains like AutoNation Inc.

That 38% return is higher than anything you’ll see on Wall Street these days. And investors are paying attention. But here’s the rub:

Buy Here Pay Here is also being boosted by one of the sophisticated financial strategies that drove the nation’s recent housing boom and bust: securitization. Loans on decade-old clunkers are being bundled into securities, just as subprime mortgages were a few years ago. In the last two years, investors have bought more than $15 billion in subprime auto securities.

Although they’re backed mainly by installment contracts signed by people who can’t even qualify for a credit card, most of these bonds have been rated investment grade. Many have received the highest rating: AAA.

This is the same kind of thinking that led to AIG getting AAA rating and subsequently going bust. I can’t see this investment strategy working out in the long term. It will probably be another disaster.

Read the full story at The Los Angeles Times. This is predatory lending, but what can be done about it?

Why is the McRib So Popular?

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The McRib sandwich is back at McDonalds:

Most of the time, it’s up to local franchises to determine when and if they want to sell the McRib — except in Germany, the only place where it’s available perennially. But McDonald’s said the response was so great last November when it made the McRib available nationally for about three weeks that it decided to bring it back this year. The company, which previously hadn’t sold the McRib nationally since 1994, declined to give specific sales numbers.

The sandwich, which is dressed with onions, pickle slices and barbecue sauce, was introduced nationally in 1982. With 500 calories and 26 grams of fat, it’s slightly trimmer than the Big Mac, which has 540 calories and 29 grams of fat. And just like the Big Mac, the McRib has become a popular McDonald’s offering.

That’s fine and dandy until you find out what actually makes up the McRib. Following a link via Chicago Magazine, we learn about restructured meat products:

Restructured meat products are commonly manufactured by using lower-valued meat trimmings reduced in size by comminution (flaking, chunking, grinding, chopping or slicing). The comminuted meat mixture is mixed with salt and water to extract salt-soluble proteins. These extracted proteins are critical to produce a “glue” which binds muscle pieces together. These muscle pieces may then be reformed to produce a “meat log” of specific form or shape. The log is then cut into steaks or chops which, when cooked, are similar in appearance and texture to their intact muscle counterparts.

This bit about the origins of the McRib are very interesting:

The McRib itself was the brainchild of Rene Arend, a native of Luxembourg who first appeared in the Chicago area not as McDonald’s first executive chef, but as a 31-year-old night head second cook at the Drake and a protege of “great chefs in Strasbourg, France.” Arend won a 1959 gourmet contest at the Drake with his supreme de poularde Amphitryon—chicken in sweet butter with cognac Martell, Madere sauce, cream, and goose liver, accompanied by veal dumplings and hearts of palm covered in orange hollandaise sauce—”fixed up for tastes of American people,” Arend told the Tribune. Arend moved to the Whitehall Club before being lured away by the hours, benefits, and challenge of McDonald’s in the late 1970s by Ray Kroc, a Whitehall regular:

Given that Chef Rene is a native of Luxembourg, a graduate (first in his class) of the College Technique Hotelier de Strasbourg, and a man who has prepared dinners for such luminaries as Queen Elizabeth II of England, the king of Belgium, and Sophia Loren and Cary Grant, we asked him why the McFood at McYou-Know-Where’s doesn’t exactly taste like European gourmet cooking.

‘‘We have to cater to the American public,” he replied. ”I am 31 years here, nearly as long as McDonald’s. I have also become Americanized. McDonald’s is perfect American food, you see. But never are any restrictions put on me when I do a product.”

So there you go. The McRib came about as a way to Americanize food. I like its history, but I will pass on the sandwich, thank you very much.

To Be Young and Mormon in America

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An article in The New York Times explains the challenges of being Mormon and rebellious:

But the boundaries of Mormon style are expanding. The highly visible “I’m a Mormon” ad campaign (the subject of a major push on television, billboards, the subway and the Internet) seeks to quash strait-laced stereotypes by showing off a cool, diverse set of Mormons, including, besides Mr. Flowers, a leather-clad Harley aficionado, knit-cap-wearing professional skateboarder and an R & B singer with a shaved head.

It’s not just in ads sponsored by the church. On college campuses, city streets and countless style blogs, a young generation of Mormons has adopted a fashion-forward urban aesthetic (geek-chic glasses, designer labels and plenty of vintage) that wouldn’t look out of place at a Bushwick party.

You learn something new every day. This is the most unusual tidbit from the article:

But when it comes to dressing young and hip, some Mormons said they face unique challenges. Among other things, many adult Mormons wear a type of underwear known as the temple garment, meant as a symbolic reminder of an individual’s promises to God. Both men and women have their own style of garment, but each consists of two pieces, a chaste knee-length bottom reminiscent of a boxer-brief and a white undershirt.

No tattoos. No beards. Strict dress codes. It’s not easy being a Mormon.

How Many People Have Ever Lived on Earth?

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The BBC website has a neat interactive where you can plug in your date of birth, and it will output the numbern of where you fit “in the story of human life.”

But the more interesting part was the link to the Population Reference Bureau, where an article attempted to guess the total number of humans that have ever lived on Earth.

First, a caveat:

And semi-scientific it must be, because there are, of course, absolutely no demographic data available for 99 percent of the span of the human stay on Earth. Still, with some speculation concerning prehistoric populations, we can at least approach a guesstimate of this elusive number.

Continuing, the article explains a number of assumptions about early human life:

At the dawn of agriculture, about 8000 B.C., the population of the world was somewhere on the order of 5 million. (Very rough figures are given in the table; these are averages of an estimate of ranges given by the United Nations and other sources.) The slow growth of population over the 8,000-year period, from an estimated 5 million to 300 million in 1 A.D., results in a very low growth rate—only 0.0512 percent per year. It is difficult to come up with an average world population size over this period. In all likelihood, human populations in different regions grew or declined in response to famines, the vagaries of animal herds, hostilities, and changing weather and climatic conditions.

In any case, life was short. Life expectancy at birth probably averaged only about 10 years for most of human history. Estimates of average life expectancy in Iron Age France have been put at only 10 or 12 years. Under these conditions, the birth rate would have to be about 80 per 1,000 people just for the species to survive. Today, a high birth rate would be about 45 to 50 per 1,000 population, observed in only a few countries of Africa and in several Middle Eastern countries that have young populations.

Our birth rate assumption will greatly affect the estimate of the number of people ever born. Infant mortality in the human race’s earliest days is thought to have been very high—perhaps 500 infant deaths per 1,000 births, or even higher. Children were probably an economic liability among hunter-gatherer societies, a fact that is likely to have led to the practice of infanticide. Under these circumstances, a disproportionately large number of births would be required to maintain population growth, and that would raise our estimated number of the “ever born.”

The site starts tallying population growth from 50,000 B.C., and comes to the following conclusion:

This semi-scientific approach yields an estimate of about 108 billion births since the dawn of the human race. Clearly, the period 8000 B.C. to 1 A.D. is key to the magnitude of our number, but, unfortunately, little is known about that era. The assumption of constant population growth in the earlier period may underestimate the average population size at the time. And, of course, pushing the date of humanity’s arrival on the planet before 50,000 B.C. would also raise the number, although perhaps not by terribly much.

So with the current population approaching 7 billion, about 6.5% of humans living today have ever lived on Earth.

A Mission to Mars (on Earth)

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“Our main challenge right now is to avoid being bored. Every single day is very similar to the previous one.”

At the Institute for Biomedical Problems in Moscow, six men (three Russians, an Italian, a Frenchman, and a Chinese national) are finishing up a remarkable 520-day experiment in isolation. They are participants in a simulated mission to Mars about a “ship” dubbed Mars500.

Bill Donahue, the author of the Wired piece, had a chance to interact with the participants:

When I visited the institute last year…The voyagers were sealed off from terrestrial life, each one allotted a private bunk room just 32 feet square and access to a common living room, a small gym, a greenhouse, and two minuscule lavatories. The crew’s food storage room is almost as big as their living quarters, and when they entered isolation on June 3, 2010, it contained every single calorie they would consume as they soared through “space,” then spent nine days on “Mars” (in this case a small pit of red sand) before returning and exiting a year and a half later.

I did find the betting on who would quit the program a bit unsettling:

Isolation is hard; being deprived of fresh air and social variety makes you go batshit. That narrative is so ingrained in the collective psyche that when the Irish bookmaking chain Paddy Power set odds on Mars500, it all but anticipated failure. If a bettor wagered a dollar that the original six-member crew would not last the whole mission, he was, by Paddy’s lights, practically predicting the sun would rise tomorrow—he’d only get $1.20 back. Paddy, meanwhile, set 8-to-1 odds that at least one crew member would go “clinically insane” after leaving the Mars500 experiment. (Fairly long odds until you consider that most jobs don’t come with an 11 percent chance that you’ll go clinically insane in a year and a half.) The Irish bookie even set odds as to who’d be first to quit. It tapped the sole Chinese astronaut, Yue Wang, putting him at 2-1. (Yue was, after all, the most culturally isolated.)

And if you think everything is rosy aboard the Mars500, consider what has happened in a previous isolation experiment (in the year 2000):

The booze wasn’t the only contraband aboard that simulated space station run. The ship’s Russian cosmonauts regularly watched pornography, Kraft admitted, and one Japanese man, Masataka Umeda, left the mission two months early in protest. Meanwhile, there were cockroaches in the showers and mice crawling up through cracks in the floor.

The experiment sounds quite unpleasant, but these men are doing it for science!

Being aboard Mars500 is mostly menial and toilsome—the astronauts are glorified lab rats. Scientists are keeping close tabs on how the isolates’ hearts are coping with the stress of confinement. They are monitoring the microflora in the crew’s intestines, subjecting them to questionnaires on their interpersonal dramas, and hitting them with regular doses of blue light to gauge its effect on their psychological states. The regimen is at times exhausting. “The biggest challenge for me,” Charles wrote in one email, “is the width of my bed—60 centimeters. As soon as I have more than one device to wear during the night (for blood pressure tests, electrocardiograms, electroencephalograms, etc.), I can’t move.”