links of the day

Hyder, Alaska: The Only U.S. City That’s Secretly Canadian

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This is a bizarre story in Bloomberg on the small town of Hyder, Alaska which is, in secret, effectively Canadian. The town takes Canadian dollars in stores, gets electricity sourced from Canada, and even uses a Canadian area code:

• Hyder, population 87, is Alaska’s easternmost town, a tiny town surrounded by lofty, glacier-covered peaks at the corner of the Alaska Panhandle. The town boomed in the early 20th century when gold and silver were discovered nearby, but is now so small that residents bill it as “Alaska’s friendliest ghost town.” The ferry to Ketchikan, the nearest Alaskan city, stopped running more than a decade ago.

• What’s interesting about the residents of Hyder is that their only neighbors for miles and miles in any direction are the good people of Stewart, just ten minutes away—but across the border into British Columbia. Stewart, as if you didn’t know, is internationally famous as “Canada’s most northerly ice-free port!” (Remember, the vast majority of Canada is a frigid, uninhabitable wasteland of no interest to anyone, even Canadians.)

• As a result of its geographic isolation, Hyder functions as America’s only de facto outpost of Canada. All businesses (except the post office) price stuff in Canadian dollars, and take “Victoria Day” and “Boxing Day” off every year. Clocks are set to British Columbia time, the electricity comes from a B.C. utility, and the nearest police are Mounties. It’s the only place in Alaska not to use the state’s 907 area code—even Hyder’s phone numbers have joined in the open treason, and begin with a Canadian code, 250. Kids can be taught at home or bundled off to boarding school in Ketchikan, but many parents choose the dubious indoctrination of the Canadian public school system instead, especially up to the sixth grade.

There’s no way to prove that this is the only store in America that takes Canadian dollars, but is this the only city in America with a Canadian area code? If you know, sound off in the comments!

On Chopped Salad and Dating

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Silvia Killingsworth writes about her (chopped) salad days in The New Yorker:

Recently, I decided to see if I could sustain a week of virtuous lunches, inspired by a Timesarticle about the rise of the chopped salad as the latest lunch fad. Regional chains like Chop’t and Just Salad offer seemingly endless options for customization, and they inspire fierce loyalty on a par with the great Sheetz-Wawa debate. Hillary Reinsberg, an editor at BuzzFeed, prefers Just Salad to Chop’t. “I like the bread better. Their soundtrack is also wonderful, as is their Twitter,” she said. The chain just released a dating app, called SaladMatch, which aims to connect like-minded salad enthusiasts. Reinsberg’s coworker Jessica Misener is a diehard Chop’t fan. She faults Just Salad for insufficiently tangy dressings, and she finds their bread too chewy. Whereas Chop’t uses a new cutting board for each salad, Misener has seen Just Salad reuse them, “which means I’ve often found stray broccoli remnants from the previous person’s salad in my order.”

Sounds a bit preposterous, if you ask me:

Between noon and one on any given weekday afternoon, there is a line out the door of several midtown chopped-salad joints. Inside, the line snakes around and doubles back on itself, not unlike the security line in the international terminal at J.F.K. The interiors of both chains resembleIKEA-sourced cafeterias: poured-concrete floors, bright green walls, and fluorescent lighting. The effect is of an industrial salad factory, where bowls move along an assembly line; instead of whirring machines, one hears the pounding mezzalunas (Just Salad’s have three blades!). The wait is not insignificant, and there are three ways to pass the time: check your smartphone, peruse the extensive menu (Chop’t has twenty-eight kinds of dressing), or check your smartphone.

I checked the locations of Just Salad: limited to NYC and Hong Kong for now. I’ll stick to salads from Kroger and Publix for now.

Russian Transporter Planes and FedEx: How Apple Ships its iPhones

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Apple unveiled two new iPhones this week: iPhone 5C and the iPhone 5S. While the specs of the phones are somewhat interesting, I think this piece in Bloomberg on how Apple is set to deliver the devices on launch date is even more so:

The process starts in China, where pallets of iPhones are moved from factories in unmarked containers accompanied by a security detail. The containers are then loaded onto trucks and shipped via pre-bought airfreight space, including on old Russian military transports. The journey ends in stores where the world’s biggest technology company makes constant adjustments based on demand, said people who have worked on Apple’s logistics and asked not to be identified because the process is secret.

The multi-pronged operation has been built up under Cook, who oversaw Apple’s supply chain before being tapped as Steve Jobs’s successor in 2011. Getting iPhones seamlessly moved from factories to customers is critical for the Cupertino, California-based company, which derives more than half of its annual revenue from the flagship product. Apple also relies on a sales spike after a product’s release. It sold more than 5 million units in the debut weekend for the iPhone 5 last year.

There are seven countries that will launch the new iPhones on September 20:

Before Apple’s formal unveiling on stage, iPhones are shipped to distribution centers around the world, including Australia, China, the Czech Republic, Japan, Singapore, the U.K. and the U.S., said one of the people with knowledge of the matter. Security personnel are with the devices every step of the way, from truck depots, airports, customs and storage warehouses until the product is finally unveiled, two people said.

FedEx ships Apple handsets to the U.S. mainly using Boeing 777s, according to Satish Jindel, a logistics-industry consultant and president of SJ Consulting Group. Those planes can make the 15-hour flight from China to the main U.S. hub for freight shipments in Memphis, Tennessee, without refueling, Jindel said. The 777s can carry about 450,000 iPhones and cost about $242,000 to charter, with fuel accounting for more than half the expense.

Read the rest here.

David Schickler on How His Writing Career Began

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David Schickler, in reference to J.D. Salinger’s “For Esmé,” describes how his writing career launched in The New Yorker:

When I was in college, I read J. D. Salinger’s “For Esmé—with Love And Squalor” and adored it. I loved the relationship between the lovely, affecting young Esmé and the (eventually) jaded, shell-shocked male narrator. The story made me want to write short stories, but back then I also thought that I was going to become a Jesuit Catholic priest, and that took precedence. Priesthood was my goal in life.

My new memoir, “The Dark Path,” is about how hard I tried—and how hard I failed—to become a priest. Pursuing that path cost me a serious love affair and then, to a large extent, my sanity. I drank way too much and practiced karate until I permanently messed up my hip and leg. I ended up with my faith shot—living in a severe, depressive, insomniac daze, and teaching English at a Vermont boarding school.

One night while there I had a talk with a female student (she was nineteen, a few years younger than I was) that deeply moved me. I never saw it coming, but that girl was my Esmé, and years later, inspired by her and that night, I wrote my short story “The Smoker,” which (to my joy) came out in The New Yorker’s Summer Fiction Issue, in 2000, and launched my writing career. This is the story of that night…

Read the story of that night here.

 

How Gang Members Helped Create Grand Theft Auto V

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I’m not much of a gamer, but this news of real gang members being used in the upcoming (on what’s bound to be a hit) Rockstar Games’ Grand Theft Auto V is fascinating:

Contributing writer, talk show host, and in-game DJ “Lazlow” Jones revealed the information on Chicago’s WGN radio station, explaining: “We get these guys in to record the gang characters because we don’t want a goofy LA actor who went to a fancy school trying to be a hard gang member. There’s nothing worse than that, so just go find the real terrifying people and say ‘can you come in here please?'”

Rockstar recruited a person to find the criminals, including “El Salvadorian gang dudes with amazing tattoos, one of which literally had gotten out of prison the day before.” Jones says this lets the game get closer to reality than otherwise possible, with the actors often given free reign to improvise. “They look at the lines and say, ‘I wouldn’t say that,’ so we say, ‘OK, say what you would say.’ Authenticity, you know?”

Read more here.

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Disclosure: I’ve pre-ordered the game from Amazon for my PS3.

Ajit Pai’s Quest to Save AM Radio

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An interesting piece in The New York Times on the declining status of the AM radio station and one man named Ajit Pai (a Republican in the FCC) who’s fighting to keep it alive.

Although five of the top 10 radio stations in the country, as measured by advertising dollars, are AM — among them WCBS in New York and KFI in Los Angeles — the wealth drops rapidly after that. In 1970 AM accounted for 63 percent of broadcast radio stations, but now it accounts for 21 percent, or 4,900 outlets, according to Arbitron. FM accounts for 44 percent, or 10,200 stations. About 35 percent of stations stream content online.

“With the audience goes the advertising revenues,” said Milford Smith, vice president for radio engineering at Greater Media, which owns 21 stations, three of them AM. “That makes for a double whammy.”

Nearly all English-language AM stations have given up playing music, and even a third of the 30 Major League Baseball teams now broadcast on FM. AM, however, remains the realm of conservative talk radio, including roughly 80 percent of the 600 radio stations that carry Rush Limbaugh. Talk radio has helped keep AM alive.

I don’t have any skin in the game, but I side with natural selection:

But why try to salvage AM? Critics say its decline is simply natural selection at work, and many now support converting the frequency for use by other wireless technologies. A big sign of AM’s weakness is that one hope for many of its stations may be channeling their broadcasts onto FM.

Read the entire piece here.

On Compatibility Genes: Can You Smell the Perfect Partner?

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The Guardian on whether humans have the ability to smell out suitable partners/mates, based on an upcoming book by Daniel M. Davis, The Compatibility Gene: How Our Bodies Fight Disease, Attract Others, and Define Our Selves:

The basis for this notion is the so-called smelly T-shirt experiment, first performed by a Swiss zoologist called Claus Wedekind in 1994. He analysed a particular bit of the DNA of a group of students, looking specifically at the major histocompatibility genes (MHC). The students were then split into 49 females and 44 males. The men were asked to wear plain cotton T-shirts for two nights while avoiding anything – alcohol, cologne etc – that might alter their natural odour. After two days the shirts were placed in cardboard boxes with holes in them, and the women were asked to rank the boxes by smell using three criteria: intensity, pleasantness and sexiness.

Wedekind’s results appeared to show that the women preferred the T-shirts worn by men with different compatibility genes from themselves, raising the possibility that we unconsciously select mates who would put our offspring at some genetic advantage. The experiment was controversial, but it did alter scientific thinking about compatibility genes. And while the mechanism behind this phenomenon is poorly understood, that hasn’t stopped dating agencies from employing MHC typing as a matchmaking tool.

Of course, there are labs out there taking advantage of this science:

One lab offering such testing to online agencies (you can’t smell potential partners over the internet; not yet), a Swiss company called GenePartner, claims: “With genetically compatible people we feel that rare sensation of perfect chemistry.”

But take all this with a big grain of salt, as the research is still preliminary and no one really understands how all this works:

It is not completely understood how all this works at the molecular level, but it is at this forefront that Davis toils. “My research is in developing microscopes that look with better resolution at immune cells and how they interact with other cells,” he says. This interaction is “reminiscent of the way neurons communicate” in the brain, raising the possibility that your compatibility genes are responsible for more than just fighting infection, and could even influence how your brain functions. I confess to Davis that I don’t really understand this part. “None of us do,” he says. “I just happened to write a book about it.”

But how does the smelling thing work – if it works? It has been shown that mice can, and do, detect compatibility genes by smell, and that stickleback fish also choose mates by their odour, but in humans, Davis admits, the jury is out. “How it works on the olfactory level is basically not understood at all,” he says.

I think the more interesting point from Davis’s research is this: since each human responds slightly differently to any particular disease, in the not-too-distant future vaccines and other medications may be tailored to match our compatibility genes.

Is The Economist Left-Wing or Right-Wing? Neither.

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Last week, The Economist turned 170 years old. Readers have pondered whether the magazine leans left or right. So The Economist explains itself:

SOME readers, particularly those used to the left-right split in most democratic legislatures, are bamboozled by The Economist’s political stance. We like free enterprise and tend to favour deregulation and privatisation. But we also like gay marriage, want to legalise drugs and disapprove of monarchy. So is the newspaper right-wing or left-wing?

Neither, is the answer. The Economist was founded in 1843 by James Wilson, a British businessman who objected to heavy import duties on foreign corn. Mr Wilson and his friends in the Anti-Corn Law League were classical liberals in the tradition of Adam Smith and, later, the likes of John Stuart Mill and William Ewart Gladstone. This intellectual ancestry has guided the newspaper’s instincts ever since: it opposes all undue curtailment of an individual’s economic or personal freedom. But like its founders, it is not dogmatic. Where there is a liberal case for government to do something, The Economist will air it. Early in its life, its writers were keen supporters of the income tax, for example. Since then it has backed causes like universal health care and gun control. But its starting point is that government should only remove power and wealth from individuals when it has an excellent reason to do so.

Furthermore:

When The Economist opines on new ideas and policies, it does so on the basis of their merits, not of who supports or opposes them. Last October, for example, it outlined a programme of reforms to combat inequality. Some, like attacking monopolies and targeting public spending on the poor and the young, had a leftish hue. Others, like raising retirement ages and introducing more choice in education, were more rightish. The result, “True Progressivism”, was a blend of the two: neither right nor left, but all the better for it, and coming instead from what we like to call the radical centre. 

More explainers like this, media organizations around the world.

On Technology Advancements in the Grocery Store

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The Los Angeles Times reports how Ralphs, a grocery store chain, is using technology to speed up checkout times for customers:

Known as QueVision, the system uses hidden infrared cameras with body heat trackers to figure out how many customers are shopping at any given time. Managers use that information to redeploy workers to the cash registers when things get busy.

It’s already paying off. QueVision has trimmed the average time it takes to get to the front of the line to roughly 30 seconds from the national average of four minutes, a Ralphs spokeswoman said.

The checkout system is part of a long-overdue effort by traditional grocery chains to evolve and stay competitive through the use of technology.

I remember reading about this on Tesco’s virtual store:

In 2011, Tesco launched its futuristic Homeplus market at a Seoul subway stop. There’s no food in this virtual grocery store, only interactive walls around the station that display photos of fruit, vegetables, milk and other grocery staples. Using their smartphones, commuters can buy these products by photographing QR codes printed on the images and paying through their phones. Tesco delivers the purchases to customers’ homes the same day.

The article cites something else worth pondering: the grocery store industry is a $518 billion business in the United States.

 

Interview with Eric Kaplan: On The Science in The Big Bang Theory

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It’s no secret that The Big Bang Theory is one of my favorite shows. Not only did I go to graduate school at Caltech (the setting for the show), but as an introvert, I sympathize with the behaviors/personalities of the characters on the show (can you say Bazinga?)

So it was with great interest that I read this interview The New York Times conducted with Eric Kaplan, one of the executive producers and script writers for The Big Bang Theory. Below, selections of the interview.

On going to school at Harvard and how it was similar to Caltech:

Q. Was Harvard anything like your version of Caltech on “The Big Bang Theory”?

A: It was. Because you had people there who were sincerely and passionately interested in what they were doing. That world was about people so entrenched in whatever they were studying that they forget to put their pants on. Now, I don’t think I ever did that. But I’m sure I knew people who did.

The idea that you’re more interested in the amazing problems that life offers than in some kind of status game was genuine there, and that’s what we try to convey about the characters on the show.

On stereotypes of the show, especially that of Sheldon:

Q. Aren’t you stereotyping scientists by labeling them as misfits?

A. Listen, it’s a story, not a thesis about how everyone is. It’s a collection of specific characters. All scientists are not Sheldon Cooper, who finds it difficult to hug someone or go out to lunch and divide a check. But many people whose cognitive ability outstrips their emotional sense can see some aspect of Sheldon in themselves.

Steven Hawking is apparently a fan of the show too:

Q. Do you get fan mail from scientists?

A. We don’t just get mail. Scientists will come to the show and sit in the audience. We’ll often use them as extras in the background during cafeteria scenes.

Stephen Hawking came once. He was happy to portray a version of himself who was petty and childish and enjoyed humiliating Sheldon at a game of online Scrabble. He played himself as a big baby. He didn’t feel like he had to portray himself as a hero of science. That made me respect him even more, because he doesn’t feel the need to pretend to be anything.

I sure hope Eric Kaplan is right on this point:

Q. Do you sometimes hear from scientists who say, “Thank you for showing something about our lives”?

A. Oh, yeah. They’ll sometimes say that there will be a new generation of scientists 10 years from now: kids who watched the show and decided to become scientists because they liked the characters. That would be great. I think there should be more scientists and fewer lawyers. It’s better to invent a plastic airplane than to sue somebody.

If you enjoyed this interview, you might also like this interview with David Salzberg, a UCLA physics professor and advisor to the show.