links of the day

The Best Moments of Euro 2012

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Roger Bennett distills the UEFA Euro 2012 tournament to the top 11 moments in his post for ESPN:

1. Shevchenko’s golden goals

In a tournament blighted by the occasional inability to fill stadia, the noise that greeted the brace of goals headed home in the opening group game by veteran Ukrainian icon Andriy Shevchenko still resounds. The 35-year-old striker’s body may be creaking, but muscle memory kicked in to provide his team with a fleeting moment of glory against Sweden. This was Kiev’s version of a Hollywood ending.

2. Danny Welbeck’s flick against Sweden

Had this late game-winning goal – an improvisational 360-degree flick between his own legs – been scored by a player wearing a Brazilian jersey, it would have instantly been hailed as a masterpiece. Because Welbeck was wearing an England shirt, the world media’s first instinct was to wonder whether he had really intended it. England would soon flounder. But the goal’s lasting significance may lie in the glimmer of false hope it offers long-suffering England fans that a youth revolution is poised to transform their team before the 2014 World Cup.

3. “This is Russia”

After rioting in the streets of Warsaw saw 184 people arrested and at least 24 injured, Russian fans completed their celebration of Russia Day by unfurling a colossal banner taunting their Polish opponents by proclaiming “This is Russia.” This show of power outstripped that of their team, which wilted oddly in the group stage. But the violent scenes do not augur well for the World Cup in Russia in 2018.

6. The flood

Donbass Arena in Donetsk, Ukraine, is a spectacular football stadium, but five minutes into Ukraine’s opening-round game with France, its man-made splendor was trumped by the force of nature. A downpour of biblical proportions forced the referee to suspend the action as players and match officials scurried to the locker room to seek refuge from the lightning storm. Unyielding Ukrainian coach Oleg Blokhin stood in the tunnel, monitoring matters with a towel wrapped around his shoulders.

7. Pirlo’s Panenka

With his throwback layered haircut granting his deft performances a timeless quality, the creativity of Andrea Pirlo’s play did not just lift Italy, it elevated the entire tournament. Pirlo’s confidence and experience were best captured by the “Panenka” kick he unveiled to embarrass England’s Joe Hart in the quarterfinal shootout. “I don’t practice it, it just comes to you in the moment,” Pirlo would later say about his poetic kick. “I saw that Hart was very sure of himself; I thought that he had to come down off his high horse.”

9. Mario Balotelli reveals his true self

His second thunderous semifinal strike that threatened to decapitate German goalkeeper Manuel Neuer was astonishing, as was his shirtless, stone-faced celebration that followed it. But the controversial Italian striker’s desire to run to the terraces and hug his tearful mother, Silvia, in the stands after Italy beat Germany showed a side of him we rarely get to see. Beneath the swirling tournament storylines of racism and Italian multiculturalism, Super Mario proved that at heart, he is just a mother’s boy.

10. Jordi Alba’s goal

Spain’s tactical flexibility and footballing intelligence allowed it to write history, triggering instant debate as to whether it is the greatest team of all time. La Roja played without a recognized striker, but who needs one when you have a left back who can run at the speed of light to latch onto Xavi’s clairvoyant pass?

11. Gigi Buffon’s singing of the national anthem

Few sights at Euro 2012 were more memorable than the Italian captain Buffon bellowing the national anthem before matches with eyes closed, chest puffed out, enunciating every syllable with pride. The goalkeeper revealed that the two grandparents he lost in World War II fill his mind before the game, but his musical rendition served as a reminder of what the tournament is all about beneath the hype – 23 men proud to represent the best of their nation.

Certainly #11, in my mind, is near the top of my list. I am really glad Spain was able to win the 2012 tournament, their third major tournament in four years.

Four years ago, I was in Spain and witnessed Spain claim the Euro 2008 title. How quickly time flies. You can browse through my adventures in Spain via this gallery.

The Obituary of Count Robert de La Rochefoucauld

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The year 2012 is turning out to be a good one for excellent obituaries. This one of Count Robert de La Rochefoucauld certainly fits the bill. Here’s an excerpt:

En route to his execution in Auxerre, La Rochefoucauld made a break, leaping from the back of the truck carrying him to his doom, and dodging the bullets fired by his two guards. Sprinting through the empty streets, he found himself in front of the Gestapo’s headquarters, where a chauffeur was pacing near a limousine bearing the swastika flag. Spotting the key in the ignition, La Rochefoucauld jumped in and roared off, following the Route Nationale past the prison he had left an hour earlier.

He smashed through a roadblock before dumping the car and circling back towards Auxerre on foot under cover of night. He sheltered with an epicier. From Auxerre, friends in the Resistance helped him on to a train for Paris, where he evaded German soldiers hunting him by curling up underneath the sink in the lavatory. “When we arrived in Paris I felt drunk with freedom,” he recalled.

Still, this is only the second best obituary of the year. The best one? That of John Fairfax.

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(HT: @legalnomads)

On Busy-ness and Idleness

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Tim Kreider, in an op-ed piece in The New York Times, writes on the “Busy Trap.” I liked this paragraph in particular:

Idleness is not just a vacation, an indulgence or a vice; it is as indispensable to the brain as vitamin D is to the body, and deprived of it we suffer a mental affliction as disfiguring as rickets. The space and quiet that idleness provides is a necessary condition for standing back from life and seeing it whole, for making unexpected connections and waiting for the wild summer lightning strikes of inspiration — it is, paradoxically, necessary to getting any work done. “Idle dreaming is often of the essence of what we do,” wrote Thomas Pynchon in his essay on sloth. Archimedes’ “Eureka” in the bath, Newton’s apple, Jekyll & Hyde and the benzene ring: history is full of stories of inspirations that come in idle moments and dreams. It almost makes you wonder whether loafers, goldbricks and no-accounts aren’t responsible for more of the world’s great ideas, inventions and masterpieces than the hardworking.

How busy are you? Is it an excuse in your mind, or a welcome state?

Mark Cuban on High Frequency Trading

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The Wall Street Journal interviewed the brazen Mavericks owner Mark Cuban about his thoughts on high-frequency trading. His response is gritty:

WSJ: What do you say to the argument that high-speed traders provide liquidity to markets and narrow spreads? The argument is that those benefits outweigh the negative side effects that you’re talking about. If the HFTs are pushed out of the market, they say, regular investors will wind up paying more to buy and sell stocks.

Mark Cuban: That’s a bogus argument. By definition they can’t go into an equity unless there already is liquidity. To say they’re adding liquidity is like saying spitting in a thunderstorm is adding liquidity.

As far as narrowing spreads, that’s absolutely true, but in absolute terms what does it translate into? For the individual investor it might save them a quarter a month. So what? Relative to the risk that’s the worst tradeoff in the history of tradeoffs

And the argument is horrible for another reason. If you’re an investor you shouldn’t care if the spread widened by a penny, nickel dime or quarter. If you’re anything but a trader the change is of no impact to whether or not the company will be successful and create returns for investors. In fact, that anyone even considers this a valid argument is a red flag that the exchanges are more interested in traders than investors.

WSJ: What’s the solution? There have been some calls for a transaction tax recently for instance.

Mark Cuban: Public companies need to figure out what business the exchanges are in. Is the market supposed to be a platform for companies to raise money for growth and to create liquidity and opportunity for shareholders as it has been in the past? Or is the stock market a laissez-faire platform that evolves however it evolves? The missing link in all the discussions is: What is the purpose of the stock market?

Good stuff.

Your E-Book Is Reading You

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With the increased proliferation of e-books, publishers are using data analytics to determine what and how people are reading on their e-book devices. The Wall Street Journal provides some detail:

Barnes & Noble, which accounts for 25% to 30% of the e-book market through its Nook e-reader, has recently started studying customers’ digital reading behavior. Data collected from Nooks reveals, for example, how far readers get in particular books, how quickly they read and how readers of particular genres engage with books. Jim Hilt, the company’s vice president of e-books, says the company is starting to share their insights with publishers to help them create books that better hold people’s attention.

Some details on which books tend to get dropped by readers:

Barnes & Noble has determined, through analyzing Nook data, that nonfiction books tend to be read in fits and starts, while novels are generally read straight through, and that nonfiction books, particularly long ones, tend to get dropped earlier. Science-fiction, romance and crime-fiction fans often read more books more quickly than readers of literary fiction do, and finish most of the books they start. Readers of literary fiction quit books more often and tend skip around between books.

Those insights are already shaping the types of books that Barnes & Noble sells on its Nook. Mr. Hilt says that when the data showed that Nook readers routinely quit long works of nonfiction, the company began looking for ways to engage readers in nonfiction and long-form journalism. They decided to launch “Nook Snaps,” short works on topics ranging from weight loss and religion to the Occupy Wall Street movement.

Not very surprising, I suppose. I’d be interested in finding out what the criteria for a drop are: is it starting to read another book? No change in page numbers in a week? Longer?

Another thing to consider: giving readers what they want based on analytics can backfire. Imagine someone who’s read a longer book than they otherwise would have and their sense of accomplishment after finishing versus a publisher that tells authors to limit how and what they put on the page. As one astute publisher noted: “We’re not going to shorten War and Peace because someone didn’t finish it.”

Gorillas in Our Midst

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In a famous psychology experiment, participants watching a video of people passing a basketball around while moving missed a remarkable sight: Midway through the video, someone wearing a gorilla suit strolls through the exercise, pauses to beat his chest, and moves on. Participants were asked with a cognitive task: counting the number of passes made by players wearing white shirts, and the focus on one activity induced a kind of blindness to the extraordinary visitor.

A new study shows that inattentional deafness exists, too. Forty-five people listened to a 3D, stereo recording, lasting just over a minute, of two men and two women independently discussing preparations for a party. Half the participants were instructed to listen closely to the men’s conversation, half to the women’s. Halfway through the recording, a man moves through the audio landscape saying “I’m a gorilla. I’m a gorilla,” before exiting. This lasts 19 seconds.

Afterward, when asked if they heard anything odd, 90% of the participants who were attending to the male voices mentioned the gorilla-man — but only 30% of the participants focusing on the female voices did.

All but one of 45 people in a control group—they were asked simply to listen to the tape—mentioned the gorilla interloper immediately.

As it happens, the path the gorilla took, in this experiment, took him closer to the men than to the women—so spatial proximity to the male voices played some role. To test how great that role was, the researchers did a second experiment in which the male gorilla-voice appeared nearer to those of the women. That reduced the effect but hardly eliminated it: 55% of listeners told to pay close attention to the female speakers failed to notice the person saying, “I’m a gorilla.”

Very interesting how we can be dismissive of visual and auditory cues when we shift our attention.

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(via Wall Street Journal)

Nora Ephron on Reading

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Reading is everything. Reading makes me feel like I’ve accomplished something, learned something, become a better person. Reading makes me smarter. Reading gives me something to talk about later on. Reading is the unbelievably healthy way my attention deficit disorder medicates itself. Reading is escape, and the opposite of escape; it’s a way to make contact with reality after a day of making things up, and it’s a way of making contact with someone else’s imagination after a day that’s all too real. Reading is grist. Reading is bliss.

That’s Nora Ephron writing in I Feel Bad About My Neck: And Other Thoughts on Being a Woman. She died last night at the age of 71 in Manhattan.

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(via Brain Pickings)

Our Underground Future?

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Buried nuclear plants? Underground stadiums? The next great frontier will be underground, especially if the human population can’t find a way, above ground, to house the estimated 9.3 billion people by 2050:

The federal government has taken an interest, convening a panel of specialists under the banner of the National Academy of Engineering to produce a report, due out later this year, on the potential uses for America’s underground space, and in particular its importance in building sustainable cities. The long-term vision is one in which the surface of the earth is reserved for the things we want to see and be around—houses, schools, yards, parks—while all the other facilities that are needed to make a city run, from water treatment plants to data banks to freight systems, hum away underground.

Though the basic idea has existed for decades, new engineering techniques and an increasing interest in sustainable urban growth have created fresh momentum for what once seemed like a notion out of Jules Verne. And the world has witnessed some striking new achievements. The city of Almere, in the Netherlands, built an underground trash network that uses suction tubes to transport waste out of the city at 70 kilometers per hour, making garbage trucks unnecessary. In Malaysia, a sophisticated new underground highway tunnel doubles as a discharge tunnel for floodwater. In Germany, a former iron mine is being converted into a nuclear waste repository, while scientists around the world explore the possibility of building actual nuclear power plants underground.

Very interesting, but consider the criticism:

But even the most avid proponents of underground development agree that it’s unlikely that underground housing or even office space will become common any time soon—too many people feel unsafe, claustrophobic, or disoriented spending extended periods of time underground. Indeed, being in a confined space can be risky when something goes wrong. One study found that although traffic accidents are less frequent in tunnels than on open roads, the chances of being killed in such an accident are higher. Fire can also be particularly perilous when it breaks out underground—a 2003 arson incident in a Seoul metro station left almost 200 dead—which means it’s crucial to have in place powerful ventilation systems, well-defined emergency procedures, and a high degree of compartmentalization, to prevent the spread of smoke and flames.

As for the more psychological effects of underground life, engineers and designers are chipping away at the problem of how to make underground facilities feel less alienating. Working on the design of an underground research laboratory in South Dakota, where scientists would be spending long hours 8,000 feet under the earth’s surface, Craig Covil—a principal at the engineering firm Arup, who is also working on the LowLine—said he and his team considered imaginative design techniques involving air flow, acoustics, and light that would essentially “trick” people’s senses and reduce the discomfort they might otherwise feel.

Good read.

Hidden Tokyo

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I don’t remember how I stumbled upon this five-year-old New York Times article profiling hidden Tokyo, but it’s a good one:

Tokyo, especially after dark, is notoriously hard to penetrate. With its winding mazelike streets, the city is a challenge for even seasoned taxi drivers. (Many bicyclists have GPS devices on their handlebars.) So imagine hunting down the restaurants, bars and clubs that are stashed away in patchwork alleys, nondescript apartment buildings, faceless office towers and basement stairwells illuminated by red bulbs.

Discreet, out-of-the-way bars have been a staple of Japanese culture for decades. Before World War II, Tokyo was filled with these pocket-sized dives — called nomiya (counter bars) — with space for just six or seven stools. Behind the counter was a proprietor, whose role was both confidant and caregiver to the regulars. When the city was rebuilt, however, most were bulldozed in favor of larger, glossier, more Westernized offerings.

Now a younger, postwar creative class is reviving nomiya culture — with a decidedly modern spin.

There’s a store called Not Found:

Not Found, an appointment-only clothing boutique that opened last winter, is among the latest to play this card. Wander down a main thoroughfare in Azabu Juban near Roppongi and you might stumble across it. From the sidewalk, it looks like just another concrete office building with a signless door. The rail-thin space, which carries only a few articles of precious clothing hanging behind thick-glass displays, was opened by the 33-year-old founder of a tech company as a sort of luxe closet for his closest friends.

“Imagine trying to find the words ‘Not Found’ on Google,” Ms. Fall said. “There’s about a million entries. It’s brilliant camouflage. Japanese are hobbyists and obsessives. They’ll trek to a little town so they can eat a certain type of asparagus or mushroom that’s only available a few days out of the year because that’s when it’s in season.”

Whenever I make my first trip to Tokyo, I’ll come back to this article.

Sneaky Orbitz

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The online travel site Orbitz has found that people who use Macs spend as much as 30% more a night on hotels, so the site shows more expensive travel options to those using Macs vs. those using Windows machines. The Wall Street Journal reports:

Orbitz found Mac users on average spend $20 to $30 more a night on hotels than their PC counterparts, a significant margin given the site’s average nightly hotel booking is around $100, chief scientist Wai Gen Yee said. Mac users are 40% more likely to book a four- or five-star hotel than PC users, Mr. Yee said, and when Mac and PC users book the same hotel, Mac users tend to stay in more expensive rooms.

A Mac search for a hotel in Miami Beach for two nights in July displayed costlier boutique hotels on the first page of results, such as Sagamore, the Art Hotel and the Boulan South Beach, that weren’t displayed on the PC’s first page. Among hotels appearing in both searches, some pricier options (such as the $212 Eden Roc Renaissance and the $397 Fontainebleau) were listed higher on the Mac. Overall, hotels on the first page of the Mac search were about 11% more expensive than they were on the PC…

Two questions: 1) Is this legal? 2) How does it make you feel to pay more with the site tracking you in such an intrusive fashion?

I feel that this kind of targeting, however, is going to become more and more common.