links of the day

The History of the Escape Key

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The New York Times provides some fascinating history behind the “Escape” key, ubiquitous on computer keyboards:

The key was born in 1960, when an I.B.M. programmer named Bob Bemer was trying to solve a Tower of Babel problem: computers from different manufacturers communicated in a variety of codes. Bemer invented the ESC key as way for programmers to switch from one kind of code to another. Later on, when computer codes were standardized (an effort in which Bemer played a leading role), ESC became a kind of “interrupt” button on the PC — a way to poke the computer and say, “Cut it out.”

Why “escape”? Bemer could have used another word — say, “interrupt” — but he opted for “ESC,” a tiny monument to his own angst. Bemer was a worrier. In the 1970s, he began warning about the Y2K bug, explaining to Richard Nixon’s advisers the computer disaster that could occur in the year 2000. Today, with our relatively stable computers, few of us need the panic button. But Bob Frankston, a pioneering programmer, says he still uses the ESC key. “There’s something nice about having a get-me-the-hell-out-of-here key.”

Will the keyboard come with computers in ten to fifteen years?

A Doctor’s Experience With the Afterlife

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Newsweek has published a first person account from a neurosurgeon, Dr. Eben Alexander, who found himself in a coma and experienced a journey to the afterlife. Taking this with a grain of salt. I liked the vivid imagery, however:

A sound, huge and booming like a glorious chant, came down from above, and I wondered if the winged beings were producing it. Again, thinking about it later, it occurred to me that the joy of these creatures, as they soared along, was such that they had to make this noise—that if the joy didn’t come out of them this way then they would simply not otherwise be able to contain it. The sound was palpable and almost material, like a rain that you can feel on your skin but doesn’t get you wet.

Seeing and hearing were not separate in this place where I now was. I could hear the visual beauty of the silvery bodies of those scintillating beings above, and I could see the surging, joyful perfection of what they sang. It seemed that you could not look at or listen to anything in this world without becoming a part of it—without joining with it in some mysterious way. Again, from my present perspective, I would suggest that you couldn’t look at anything in that world at all, for the word “at” itself implies a separation that did not exist there. Everything was distinct, yet everything was also a part of everything else, like the rich and intermingled designs on a Persian carpet … or a butterfly’s wing.

It gets stranger still. For most of my journey, someone else was with me. A woman. She was young, and I remember what she looked like in complete detail. She had high cheekbones and deep-blue eyes. Golden brown tresses framed her lovely face. When first I saw her, we were riding along together on an intricately patterned surface, which after a moment I recognized as the wing of a butterfly. In fact, millions of butterflies were all around us—vast fluttering waves of them, dipping down into the woods and coming back up around us again. It was a river of life and color, moving through the air. The woman’s outfit was simple, like a peasant’s, but its colors—powder blue, indigo, and pastel orange-peach—had the same overwhelming, super-vivid aliveness that everything else had. She looked at me with a look that, if you saw it for five seconds, would make your whole life up to that point worth living, no matter what had happened in it so far. It was not a romantic look. It was not a look of friendship. It was a look that was somehow beyond all these, beyond all the different compartments of love we have down here on earth. It was something higher, holding all those other kinds of love within itself while at the same time being much bigger than all of them.

Without using any words, she spoke to me. The message went through me like a wind, and I instantly understood that it was true. I knew so in the same way that I knew that the world around us was real—was not some fantasy, passing and insubstantial.

The message had three parts, and if I had to translate them into earthly language, I’d say they ran something like this:

“You are loved and cherished, dearly, forever.”“You have nothing to fear.”

“There is nothing you can do wrong.”

Lots of dissenting opinions in the comments, obviously.

Apple’s Tribute to Steve Jobs, One Year Later

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Apple.com has a beautiful tribute to Steve Jobs, who died one year ago today. Click on the screenshot below to watch the video.

Remembering Steve Jobs, one year after his death.

Here is what I wrote one year ago today after I learned of Steve’s passing. Here are all the Steve Jobs posts on this blog. Here is the video on YouTube (unless it gets pulled).

Investing Gangnam Style

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This is a really interesting piece in The Economist that underscores investor confidence and stock mania:

A MID-SIZED sized Korean semiconductor firm named DI makes products with distinctly un-sexy names like “Monitoring Burn-in Tester” and “Wafer Test Board”. It has lost money in each of the past four quarters. And there have been no changes to its fundamentals that might explain why its share price should shoot up from 2,000 to 5,700 won (from $1.80 to $5.12) in the space of just three weeks—including another 15% gain today.

But DI’s chairman and main shareholder, Park Won-ho is no ordinary mortal. He is the father of Park Jae-sang, better known as PSY (as in “psycho”). “Gangnam Style”, if you haven’t heard, is now number one in Britain’s pop charts and number two in America. Local retail investors—referred with the derogatory gaemi-deul (“ants”) by professionals—are piling into DI shares because of it.

Quite how they expect the horse-dancing YouTube phenomenon of 2012 to help DI sell more of its Wafer Test Boards is a mystery. But convoluted investor logic is of course not a new thing. DI is merely the latest example of Korea’s “theme stock”—the local equivalent of the 17th-century Dutch tulip, Pets.com and the like going into 1999, or the Chinese walnut.

Wikipedia has almost 200 (!) references for the article on Gangnam Style. My favorite section is the song’s presence in academia:

According to a blog post published on the Harvard Business Review by Dae Ryun Chang, Professor of Marketing at Yonsei University, one primary factor that has contributed to “Gangnam Style”s international success is the song’s intentional lack of a copyright. This allows people to easily adopt, re-stylize and then spread the song.[6] Brian Gozun, Dean of the Ramon V. del Rosario College of Business at De La Salle University, writes that the absence of a copyright and the use of crowd-sourcing are just some of the more innovative ways that Psy has marketed his song.

Dan Freeman, Marketing professor at the University of Delaware, remarks that Psy’s achievement is an anomaly which counters the typical trend of successful international artists, because foreign music poses a difficult challenge due to language issues, making it unlikely for a song to catch on “when you don’t even understand the words”. Freeman asserts that Psy owes his success in the United States to YouTube, because of YouTube’s effectiveness in reaching a broad market.

David Bell, marketing professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, suggests that “Gangnam Style” lacks a certain aggressive attitude that many find offensive in the rap genre, and “Gangnam Style” is like a classic rap video from a few years ago with girls and cars—”not as offensive and in your face, but with a humorous edge”. Bell argues that it is Psy’s accessible image, not his message, that has made the song so popular.

As per The Economist piece, this entry would be incomplete without the video:

Really? Jerry Seinfeld Writes a Letter to New York Times

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Jerry Seinfeld was really upset about Neil Genzlinger’s recent piece about the “R” word. So Seinfeld penned an awesome letter to the editor, calling Neil’s piece “vacuous” and that Neil “crumbled a civilization”:

Really, Neil? Really? You’re upset about too many people saying, “Really?”? I mean, really.

O.K., fine, when it’s used in scripted media, it is a little lazy. But comedy writers are lazy. You’re not fixing that.

So, here’s the bottom line.

If you’re a writer, fine, don’t use it. But in conversation it is fun to say.

I did a “Saturday Night Live Weekend Update” segment titled “Really!?!” with Seth Meyers a few years ago. It was a blast and the audience loved it.

Your example with the girl in the office and the bad clothes? It is definitely much more fun to look at her and just say, “Really?” than to actually talk about the stupid outfit. Really, it is.

What I do not say or write, as you did in the part about responses to Einstein’s theories, is “wrap my head around it.”

Are you kidding? No, no, no, Neil. No sir.

Hilarious. And an instant classic.

A Rebellious Spring Break in Libya

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Last year, Chris Jeon, a 21-year-old UCLA math major, left his $9,000-a-month internship at BlackRock, a financial firm in San Francisco, in search of “real experience.”  He wound up fighting with the rebels in Libya. Men’s Journal describes Chris’s desperation and ultimate decision to leave his job (and school) to pursue a spontaneous idea.

On the nonchalant entry into Libya:

The rebels guarding the border were playing FIFA soccer on a PlayStation when he arrived. Jeon waved at them. They glanced at his passport and went back to their video game. “OK, cool,” Jeon said, and simply walked into Libya.

This comes across as careless:

Jeon didn’t speak Arabic and hadn’t done much research on the region, but he’d read the Wikipedia page on Libya and watched a bunch of YouTube videos documenting the war.

On bonding through music:

He [Jeon] was becoming part of the katiba, the Libyan word for brigade. He still didn’t speak much Arabic, but that didn’t seem to matter. There was a cheap Casio keyboard in the town house and when they weren’t on patrol, Jeon taught a skinny 17-year-old named Akram how to play Beethoven. In exchange, Akram showed him how to assemble and break down an AK-47. After two days, the Casio was covered in gun grease, but Akram could play “F ür Elise” and Jeon could field-strip the gun in less than 90 seconds.

And in the midst of rebel fighting, Jeon discovered true happiness:

A couple of days later, the katiba drove into the desert and fired cannons at loyalist positions. Jeon helped load the ammunition. “My lips were cracked and bleeding, I hadn’t brushed my teeth in days, and my face was peeling, but it didn’t matter,” Jeon says. “I was totally happy – happier than I’d ever been.”

Joshua Davis, the author of “Arab Spring Break,” joined Chris on his return trip to Libya. An interesting read overall, though the brazenness and recklessness of Jeon isn’t without criticism.

Mark Zuckerberg Visits Russia, Avoids Wearing Hoodie

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The New York Times details Mark Zuckerberg’s recent trip to Russia, where he met Prime Minister Dmitri Medvedev. The big story here is that Zuckerberg didn’t wear his hoodie and instead looked professional in a suit and tie…

But on a more interesting note, this paragraph intrigued me:

More Russians are online today than Germans, making Russia the largest Internet market in Europe. Russians also, strangely, have spent more freely relative to their income than Americans on virtual products, like special powers for online games, making their country a useful market for testing revenue streams other than advertising.

I don’t have a guess as to why virtual products are so popular in Russia.

On another note, check out the bottom of the article for a hilarious correction:

An earlier version of this article misstated the surname of Mark Zuckerberg as Zuckerman at one point.

The Winners of the 2012 MacArthur Genius Grant

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A solid list with which to get familiar: this year’s winners of the MacArthur genius grant. I must admit that I’ve heard of only two people on this year’s list: David Finkel (writer at The Washington Post) and Junot Díaz, whose poignant novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao I read earlier this year. On to the list:

— Natalia Almada, 37, Mexico City. Documentary filmmaker who captures complex and nuanced views of Mexican history, politics and culture.

— Uta Barth, 54, Los Angeles. Conceptual photographer who explores the nature of vision and the difference between seen reality and how a camera records it.

— Claire Chase, 34, Brooklyn, N.Y. Arts entrepreneur who engages audiences in the appreciation of contemporary classical music and opens new avenues of artistic expression through her International Contemporary Ensemble.

— Raj Chetty, 33, Cambridge, Mass. Economist at Harvard University who studies how policy decisions affect real-world behavior.

— Maria Chudnovsky, 35, New York. Mathematician at Columbia University whose work is deepening the connections between graph theory and other major branches of mathematics, such as linear programming and geometry.

— Eric Coleman, 47, Denver. Geriatrician at University of Colorado School of Medicine who is improving health care by focusing on patient transitions from hospitals to homes and care facilities.

— Junot Díaz, 43, Cambridge, Mass. Fiction writer at MIT who uses raw, vernacular dialogue and spare, unsentimental prose to draw readers into the various and distinct worlds that immigrants must straddle.

— David Finkel, 56, Washington, D.C. Washington Post journalist whose long-form newswriting has transformed readers’ understanding of military service and sacrifice.

— Olivier Guyon, 36, Tucson, Ariz. Optical physicist and astronomer at University of Arizona who designs telescopes and other astronomical instrumentation that play a critical role in the search for Earth-like planets outside this solar system.

— Elissa Hallem, 34, Los Angeles. Neurobiologist at University of California, Los Angeles, who explores the physiology and behavioral consequences of odor detection in invertebrates and identifies interventions that may eventually reduce the scourge of parasitic infections in humans.

— An-My Le, 52, Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y. Photographer at Bard College who approaches the subjects of war and landscape from new perspectives to create images rich with layers of meaning.

— Sarkis Mazmanian, 39, Pasadena. Medical microbiologist at the California Institute of Technology who studies the role intestinal bacteria may play in a broad range of human diseases.

— Dinaw Mengestu, 34, Washington, D.C. Writer whose novels and nonfiction pieces enrich understanding of the little-explored world of the African diaspora in America.

— Maurice Lim Miller, 66, Oakland. Social services innovator who designs projects that reward and track self-sufficiency among residents of low-income neighborhoods in Oakland, San Francisco and Boston.

— Dylan C. Penningroth, 41, Evanston, Ill. Historian at Northwestern University who is unearthing evidence from scattered archives to shed light on shifting concepts of property ownership and kinship among African American slaves and their descendants.

— Terry Plank, 48, New York. Geochemist at Columbia University who probes the usually invisible but remarkably powerful thermal and chemical forces deep below the Earth’s crust that drive the motion of tectonic plate collisions.

— Laura Poitras, 48, New York. Documentary filmmaker revealing the consequences of military conflict abroad in documentaries that portray the lives and intimate experiences of families and communities largely inaccessible to the American media.

— Nancy Rabalais, 62, Chauvin, La. Marine ecologist at the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium who documents the environmental and economic consequences of dead zones in the Gulf of Mexico.

— Benoit Rolland, 58, Boston. Stringed-instrument bow maker who experiments with new designs and materials to create violin, viola and cello bows that rival prized 19th century bows and meet the artistic demands of today’s musicians.

— Daniel Spielman, 42, New Haven, Conn. Computer scientist at Yale University who connects theoretical and applied computing to resolve issues in code optimization theory with real-world implications.

— Melody Swartz, 43, Lausanne, Switzerland. Bioengineer who enhances understanding of the dynamic processes of tissue vascularization and immune responses to tumor invasion using concepts and methods from biophysics, cell culture, molecular genetics, engineering and immunology.

— Chris Thile, 31, New York. Mandolinist and composer who is creating a new musical aesthetic and a distinctly American canon for the mandolin through a lyrical fusion of traditional bluegrass orchestrations with a range of styles and genres.

— Benjamin Warf, 54, Boston. Pediatric neurosurgeon at Children’s Hospital of Boston who is revolutionizing treatment of hydrocephalus and other intra-cranial diseases in young children and advancing standards of and access to health care in both the developed and poorest regions of the world.

“Be So Good They Can’t Ignore You”

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In a 2007 episode of the Charlie Rose show, Rose was interviewing the actor and comedian Steve Martin about his memoir Born Standing Up. They talked about the realities of Martin’s rise. In the last five minutes of the interview, Rose asks Martin his advice for aspiring performers. Steve Martin said:

Nobody ever takes note of [my advice], because it’s not the answer they wanted to hear. What they want to hear is ‘Here’s how you get an agent, here’s how you write a script,’ . . . but I always say, ‘Be so good they can’t ignore you.’ 

Cal Newport has a great piece in Lifehacker today in which we get a sample of his recently released book, So Good They Can’t Ignore You. When you’re done reading the excerpt, check out my post summarizing Cal Newport’s speech on career advice at this year’s World Domination Summit.

Is the PC Over?

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Jeff Atwood responds to MG Siegler’s post whose argument is that the PC is over:

I have an iPhone 5, and I can personally attest that it is crazy faster than the old iPhone 4 I upgraded from. Once you add in 4G, LTE, and 5 GHz WiFi support, it’s so fast that – except for the obvious size limitations of a smaller screen – I find myself not even caring that much if I get the “mobile” version of websites any more. Even before the speed, I noticed the dramatically improved display. AnandTech says that if the iPhone 5 display was a desktop monitor, it would be the best one they had ever tested. Our phones are now so damn fast and capable as personal computers that I’m starting to wonder why I don’t just use the thing I always have in my pocket as my “laptop”, plugging it into a keyboard and display as necessary.

So maybe MG Siegler is right. The PC is over … at least in the form that we knew it. We no longer need giant honking laptop and desktop form factors for computers any more than we need entire rooms and floors of a building to house mainframes and minicomputers.

They’re both right and wrong. Yes, we can do sophisticated tasks on our phones, and yes, my iPhone and iPad have become technologies which I use for browsing photos, sending email, checking out blogs. But the desktop remains the core for something that I can’t do on an iPad or iPhone: photo editing. Even as mobile versions of Photoshop and other photo software products exist, they pale in comparison to being able to edit images on the big screen (I have a 27 inch iMac). I am still waiting for the retina display iMac, one that will allow me to see the 5,616 × 3,744 resolution images coming from my Canon 5D Mark II without downsizing. I believe we’ll be there in one to two years.