reading

Readings: Steinbrenner, Cryonics, Caffeine, Journalism

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Here’s what I’ve been reading:

1) “Reign of ‘The Boss’ Was a Wild Ride” [ESPN] – George Steinbrenner, a long-time owner of the New York Yankees, died today. This piece by William (Bill) Knack profiles The Boss’ life beautifully. A few quotes not to miss:

On his early life (I love this description):

George M. Steinbrenner first began breathing on Independence Day, 1930, and he did so into a life of privilege and wealth — the son of a successful marine company owner who had been a star hurdler at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and who later pushed his son into the world of competitive athletics. The father, Henry Steinbrenner, had a bit of “The Great Santini” in him when it came to dealing with his son. George took up the hurdles at age 12; whenever the boy finished second in a race, his father would materialize at his side and demand an explanation.

On Steinbrenner’s influence on free agency:

Surely his most important legacy is the push he gave to the free-agency revolution, feeding his fragile ego as he threw around bags of cash. He was, in a very real sense, baseball’s first truly modern owner. Steinbrenner was always in a hurry to win, sensing his father standing at his side. He wanted to win today, not tomorrow, and certainly did not want to wait until next week, or next year. For Steinbrenner, at least in the first 20 years of his reign, developing talent in the minor leagues was a bridge too far.

On losing:

And what could be said, in sum, at the end of his run? There is this: More than he loved winning, Steinbrenner hated losing. “I hate to lose,” he said. “Hate, hate, hate to lose.” So he threw everything he had into the race not to lose those World Series titles — all his money and energy, his will and fire, all his anger and pride.

There are other Steinbrenner obituaries posted today (the one at The New York Times is notable as well), but I’ll take Roger Ebert’s advice that Bill Knack’s is the one worth reading.

2) “Until Cryonics Do Us Part” [The New York Times] – an interesting, somewhat whimsical piece on how some people want their brains frozen when they die. The piece is not as morbid as it sounds… For instance, one of my favorite passages was one couple’s dispute on the merits of The Brothers Karamazov vs. The Lord of the Rings (both of which I’ve read):

Shortly after they met, Peggy and Robin decided to read each other’s favorite works of literature. Peggy asked Robin to read “The Brothers Karamazov,” and he asked her to read “The Lord of the Rings.” She hated it. “I asked him why he loved it, and he said: ‘Because it’s so full of detail. This guy has invented this whole world.’ He asked me why I hated it, and I said: ‘Because it’s so full of detail. There was nowhere for the reader to imagine her own interpretation.’ ” Robin, less one for telling stories, describes their early days more succinctly. “There was,” he says not without tenderness, “a personality-type convergence.”

On what it takes to run a cryonics facility:

Alcor’s Patient Care Bay, filled as it is with 10-foot steel canisters packed with human bodies and connected to monitors, may appear self-regulating but in fact requires a very human vigilance against entropy. There is a man charged with topping off the liquid nitrogen. There is a man who mops the floors. Those in charge of the Patient Care Bay are only the last in a long chain of people called upon to assist “deanimated” members. Someone must perform the perfusion, for example, whereby blood is replaced with an antifreeze-like solution that will harden like glass rather than freeze like water. Someone must accompany the body from the site of death to the cryonics facility. Someone must deal with flight schedules, local coroners and byzantine hospital bureaucracies generally unfriendly to those who would march into the hospital and whisk away the freshly dead. This is all vastly more likely to succeed if the legal guardian of the remains is willing to help.

3) “What Caffeine Actually Does to Your Brain” [Lifehacker] – a good primer on the subject. Briefly:

Every moment that you’re awake, the neurons in your brain are firing away. As those neurons fire, they produce adenosine as a byproduct, but adenosine is far from excrement. Your nervous system is actively monitoring adenosine levels through receptors. Normally, when adenosine levels reached a certain point in your brain and spinal cord, your body will start nudging you toward sleep, or at least taking it easy. There are actually a few different adenosine receptors throughout the body, but the one caffeine seems to interact with most directly is the A1 receptor. More on that later.

Enter caffeine. It occurs in all kinds of plants, and chemical relatives of caffeine are found in your own body. But taken in substantial amounts—the semi-standard 100mg that comes from a strong eight-ounce coffee, for instance—it functions as a supremely talented adenosine impersonator. It heads right for the adenosine receptors in your system and, because of its similarities to adenosine, it’s accepted by your body as the real thing and gets into the receptors.

4) “Journalism Needs Government Help” [The Wall Street Journal] – a feverishly sensational piece in which Lee Bollinger argues that our media/journalism system “needs to be revised and its resources consolidated and augmented with those of NPR and PBS to create an American World Service that can compete with the BBC and other global broadcasters.” I’m surprised this piece even made it into the WSJ, frankly. What do you think?

While the Women Are Sleeping

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The best thing I read today was a short story in The New Yorker titled “While the Women Are Sleeping.” The story is by an author I haven’t heard of before: Javier Marías.

The story starts out with more questions than answers…

For three weeks, I saw them every day, and now I don’t know what has become of them. I’ll probably never see them again—at least, not her. Summer conversations, and even confidences, rarely lead anywhere.

It’s kind of an intriguing opening: who is them? What have they become? And summer conversations rarely lead to anywhere?

The story concerns a couple from Madrid vacationing on an island. While there, they observe another couple; the beautiful Inés, described as so:

She was beautiful, indolent, passive, and, by nature, languid. Throughout the three hours a day that we spent at the beach (they stayed longer, perhaps taking their siesta there and, who knows, staying until sunset), she barely moved and was, of course, concerned only with her own beautification

and her older, less attractive male companion named Alberto Viana. What the observing couple find remarkable (and so does the reader, no doubt) is that Alberto constantly, without interruption records Ines on video camera. The video camera has become an extension of him…

The story, admittedly, starts out slowly (I had to step away from reading it in the evening, and came back to it the following day)… But then it picks up and absolutely sucks you in. At least, it did for me. What could be so interesting about a guy videotaping his girlfriend? The answer is explained in the story, which begins with this conversation between the narrator and Alberto:

“I’ve noticed that you’re very keen on video cameras,” I said after that pause, that hesitation.

“Video cameras?” he said, slightly surprised or as if to gain time. “Ah, I see. No, not really, I’m not a collector. It isn’t the camera itself that interests me, although I do use it a lot. It’s my girlfriend, whom you’ve seen, I’m sure. I film only her, nothing else. I don’t experiment with it at all. That’s fairly obvious, I suppose.”

And the conversation picks up from there. What I find fascinating is our abilities to remember things; some go about life, cruising. Others write things down. Others photograph the world around them. This was an intriguing conversation between the narrator and Alberto Viana:

“You don’t have a camera? Don’t you like to be able to remember things?” Viana asked me this with genuine confusion.

“Yes, of course I do, but you can remember things in other ways, don’t you think? Memory is a kind of camera, except that we don’t always remember what we want to remember or forget what we want to forget.”

And still others prefer to record things on video, as Alberto explains to the narrator:

“How can you compare what you can remember with what you can see, with what you can see again, just as it happened? With what you can watch over and over, ad infinitum, and even freeze?

But there is something sinister (though arguably honest) in Alberto’s declaration…

I won’t say much more except that this is an incredible story of obsession, vision (literally and figuratively), memory, human misconceptions, life, and death. Shortly put, it is one of the best works of fiction I have read in 2010, so I highly recommend reading it.

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A hat tip to @etherielmusings for pointing out this story via Twitter.

The Future of News: Google

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One of the most interesting pieces I’ve read recently is James Fallows’ “How To Save the News” in The Atlantic. It’s a fantastic piece of long-form journalism, and if you’re into journalism and the way news is delivered online, it’s definitely a must-read. The article explores Google’s delivery of news, whether customers would (or in what circumstances) pay for news, the customization of news tailored to specific users, how Google and traditional media companies rely on advertising, and quite a bit more. If you think the nearly 10,000 word piece isn’t worth your time, I want to point out the most interesting passages below:

The premise of the article is that there is “a larger vision for news coming out of Google” — that the world’s largest search engine company is more than that; according to Fallows, Google is the world’s most important media organization.

Who’s behind Google News? Interesting to learn that it was someone from Georgia Tech, my alma mater:

It was Krishna Bharat who identified a more profound form of inefficiency [in news delivery]. As a student at the Indian Institute of Technology in Madras, Bharat had written for the campus newspaper while taking his computer-science degree. “In a second life, I would be a journalist,” he once told an Indian newspaper. (When the Indian newspaper asks me, I will say: In a second life, I would be a successful Google executive.) He got his Ph.D. at Georgia Tech and was an early Google hire, in 1999. After the 9/11 attacks two years later, he grew worried about the narrowness of news he was receiving through the U.S. media. “I felt that we really had to catch up with the world’s news,” he told me. “To get a broad understanding, you had to visit sites in Europe and Asia and the Middle East. I was wondering if Google could do something to make the world’s news information available.”

There are some people who claim that Google aggregating the news is bad for the news industry (because viewers wouldn’t click through the articles, occasionally). However, a rebuttal with which I strongly agree:

Google’s rebuttal to the claim of stealing is that it doesn’t sell ads on the Google News site, and moreover provides hardly any of the newspapers’ original content. Indeed, in this practice it is the opposite of “aggregators” like the Huffington Post, which often “excerpt” enough of someone else’s story that readers don’t bother to click through to the source. Google News gives only a set of headlines and two-line links meant to steer traffic (and therefore ad potential) to the news organization that first ran the story.

What grabbed my attention is how a piece of news could get thousands of “hits” on Google’s page. Is it a case of news organizations choosing to write on the same topic because it’s important, or is it a copycat effect at work?

The Google News front page is a kind of air-traffic-control center for the movement of stories across the world’s media, in real time. “Usually, you see essentially the same approach taken by a thousand publications at the same time,” he told me. “Once something has been observed, nearly everyone says approximately the same thing.” He didn’t mean that the publications were linking to one another or syndicating their stories. Rather, their conventions and instincts made them all emphasize the same things. This could be reassuring, in indicating some consensus on what the “important” stories were. But Bharat said it also indicated a faddishness of coverage—when Michael Jackson dies, other things cease to matter—and a redundancy that journalism could no longer afford. “It makes you wonder, is there a better way?” he asked. “Why is it that a thousand people come up with approximately the same reading of matters? Why couldn’t there be five readings? And meanwhile use that energy to observe something else, equally important, that is currently being neglected.”

On the three pillars of the new online business mode (distribution, engagement, and monetization):

[G]etting news to more people, and more people to news-oriented sites; making the presentation of news more interesting, varied, and involving; and converting these larger and more strongly committed audiences into revenue, through both subscription fees and ads. Conveniently, each calls on areas of Google’s expertise.

But the most insightful part of the article was my new understanding on how news can be incremental. What does that mean? For example, if you’ve never read The Wall Street Journal before, and you started reading it today, it might be a significant challenge to get into it. Why? Because some stories are built on what was reported yesterday, and the day before, and so on for quite some time. Here’s Fallows describing this incrementation:

News reporting is usually incremental. Something happens in Kabul today. It’s related to what happened there yesterday, plus 20 years ago, and further back. It has a bearing on what will happen a year from now. High-end news organizations reflect this continuous reality in hiring reporters and editors who (ideally) know the background of today’s news and in the way they present it, usually with modest additions to the sum of established knowledge day by day.

And so, prior to reading the article, this important facet of journalism didn’t really cross my mind (in the scope of Google aggregating news). So why is this incremental news important? Because a well-done journalistic piece, which took days and days of research, collaboration, interviewing, writing, and editing, might not be deemed “worthy” in the eyes of Google search (i.e., careful, insightful journalism is punished, while “tabloid-style” reporting rises to the top of Google search). To me, this is the most important take-away from the piece:

The modest daily updating of the news—another vote in Congress, another debate among political candidates—matches the cycle of papers and broadcasts very well, but matches the Internet very poorly, in terms of both speed and popularity rankings. The Financial Times might have given readers better sustained coverage of European economic troubles than any other paper. But precisely because it has done so many incremental stories, no one of them might rise to the top of a Google Web search, compared with an occasional overview story somewhere else. By the standards that currently generate online revenue, better journalism gets a worse result.

There is so much more in the article which I didn’t cover in this short post. If you have some time (more like an hour or two), this is an article definitely worth bookmarking for a later read.

Vuvuzelas at the 2010 World Cup

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If you’ve tuned in to the 2010 World Cup on television, you’ve no doubt heard the buzz of the vuvuzelas (also known as lepatatas). The vuvuzelas are these (arguably) annoying blow horns used by spectators during the football matches (or soccer, for all of you U.S. and Australian folk).

No doubt the vuvuzela is a distinctly South African cultural icon and even a tradition at football games:

The vuvuzela has become part of the official South African football fans arsenal. It is a plastic trumpet which makes a distinctive noise, comparable to an elephant blowing their trunk. A stadium can often erupt with noise from fans blowing on their vuvuzelas. The South African Football Association, in a community-building project, has helped manufacture the coloured plastic trumpet.

However, after less than a full weekend of play, the players, coaches, and commentators have expressed vociferous concern that the vuvuzelas are a major distraction. After watching the games throughout the weekend, I have to say that it was hard to make out what the commentators were saying during certain parts of the game; I can’t imagine what it’s actually like on the pitch. There are nearly 200,000 people in this Facebook group who are in favor of banning the vuvuzelas. But I think a closer scrutiny is required. Why is the vuvuzela an object of such pervasive complaint?

A Closer Look

The most elucidating article I read (which relates to this whole vuvuzela saga) is this one from The Science of Sport blog. The most interesting passage is this one, explaining how loud the vuvuzelas are:

Studies have found that the noise levels from a vuvuzela exceed what are considered safe limits for employees.  A Swiss-based company’s testing showed that at its loudest, the sound registered 127 dB, compared to a chainsaw at 100 dB.

Studies show that prolonged exposure to loud noises (!) leads to hearing loss; that hearing loss occurs at a loudness level of around 120 dB. So given the information above, you cannot doubt the frustration everyone is expressing about these “instruments of distraction.” Also of note: The OSHA Daily Permissible Noise Level Exposure is 110dB for a half-hour and 115dB for a quarter hour; given this information, the length of the football matches, and the confirmed loudness of the vuvuzelas, it is almost certain that the vuvuzelas are dangerous to the spectators’ health (i.e., great potential for hearing loss).

But perhaps even more alarming is that the vuvuzelas may be a vessel for disease (spreading of germs):

And then on a perhaps even more serious note, there are concerns over the spread of infection and illness as a result of 30,000 people blowing into the horn in an enclosed space.  South Africa has one of the highest tuberculosis (TB) infection rates in the world, and it is spread through droplets, usually when coughing, spitting or sneezing.

So, with all these considerations in mind, the calls to ban the vuvuzelas have become even more poignant over the last few days; nevertheless, the vuvuzelas making headlines isn’t new… About a year ago, FIFA gave the vuvuzelas the green light for the 2010 World Cup.

The South Africans, apparently, love these things:

Let us not make this a South Africa instrument alone…A vuvuzela is now an international instrument. People buy them and stuff them in their suitcase to go home. Only a minority are against vuvuzelas. You either love them or hate. We in South Africa love them.

The comments in this 2009 BBC piece are divisive; it seems that some people are vehemently opposed to the vuvuzelas:

It is irritating, annoying and juvenile. It is noise for noise sake alone. The vuvuzela should be banned. Music, drums, rhythmic percussion, singing, chanting and applause are all very welcome; but the onerous, droning cacophony of the vuvuzela adds nothing to the atmosphere of the stadium.

This instrument has great nuisance value, and should be banned outright. Failing that, its use should be restricted to the confines of the stadium

While others are quite supporting of the vuvuzelas:

There is no way you can just come and rob people of their own pride and customs. If you don’t know it, learn more about it. Surely they have more irritating things like name calling our African players back in Europe. Viva Vuvuzela!

The Vuvuzela is a matter of pride (and religion) for some of us on the African continent and we will not allow our enjoyment of a once-in-lifetime event be overshadowed by someone watching the games from their living room in Europe.

A Recommendation and Final Thoughts

So where do I stand on this issue? I say: don’t ban the vuvuzelas, but FIFA must absolutely do something about controlling the noise level. Here’s one idea: don’t allow the fans to bring in the vuvuzelas into the stadium. Rather, give away the vuvuzelas to the first 1,000 (or whatever limited number, perhaps up to 10,000) fans who enter the stadium. Such a move will work because it will at once restrain the overall noise in the stadium and make the fans more excited to come to the matches early. It’s a win-win situation for all: vuvuzelas are still permitted at the matches, but the noise level is under control…

Where do you stand on this issue? Do you think the vuvuzelas should be banned? What do you think of limiting the number of vuvuzelas permitted inside the stadiums?


Does the Internet Makes Us Smarter or Dumber?

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There are two excellent pieces in last weekend’s edition of The Wall Street Journal. One is how the internet is making us smarter, while the other one is how the internet is making us dumber (or more accurately, I think, more distracted).

In “Does the Internet Make You Smarter?” the author of the piece, Clay Shirky, talks about the Gutenberg press, the Reformation, self-publishing, Wikipedia, and other interesting ideas in making his point.

I really like this paragraph:

The present is, as noted, characterized by lots of throwaway cultural artifacts, but the nice thing about throwaway material is that it gets thrown away. This issue isn’t whether there’s lots of dumb stuff online—there is, just as there is lots of dumb stuff in bookstores. The issue is whether there are any ideas so good today that they will survive into the future. Several early uses of our cognitive surplus, like open source software, look like they will pass that test.

But I am not sure I agree with this thought (have you read anything written by Noam Chomsky?):

Reading is an unnatural act; we are no more evolved to read books than we are to use computers. Literate societies become literate by investing extraordinary resources, every year, training children to read. Now it’s our turn to figure out what response we need to shape our use of digital tools.

With interesting articles, I always like to check out what people are thinking. The comments in this piece are excellent; I like this one:

The internet is a tool…like anything else.

If you waste your time using the Internet to entertain yourself 24/7 to watch useless videos of cats playing the keyboard, sneezing pandas, to forward emails to coworkers that have absolutely no value then it probably won’t help you intellectually…But if you’re using it to take online classes, learn something new from Wikipedia, study and work hard using free course materials from MIT’s OpenCourseWare, watch an educational video on youtube (there are THOUSANDS of them), connect and network with people who have similar interests and aims as you, and overall harness the power of the internet for your edification, then there is no greater tool (than paying 50,000 and attending University, of course).

I couldn’t agree more: the internet is what you make of it, and perhaps a better question would be how we’re leveraging our resources to become smarter with the internet.

The author of the other piece, “Does the Internet Make You Dumber?” is Nicholas Carr, no doubt writing in The Wall Street Journal to promote his latest book, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains (the book is on my reading list). I think Carr’s piece does a better job of getting to the point:

When we’re constantly distracted and interrupted, as we tend to be online, our brains are unable to forge the strong and expansive neural connections that give depth and distinctiveness to our thinking.

I think the internet is making us hunt for the quick fix: something that we can glance over and move on to the next great thing. Gone are the days when we sit down and actually read a book in its entirety (or say, a hundred pages), in one sitting. There is a purpose to signing off from the internet and participating in focused reading:

Reading a long sequence of pages helps us develop a rare kind of mental discipline. The innate bias of the human brain, after all, is to be distracted. Our predisposition is to be aware of as much of what’s going on around us as possible. Our fast-paced, reflexive shifts in focus were once crucial to our survival. They reduced the odds that a predator would take us by surprise or that we’d overlook a nearby source of food.

My two main takeaways from the articles are:

  1. The internet isn’t necessarily making us dumber or smarter. It’s how we use our resources online to help us learn that ultimately matters.
  2. The articles, especially that from Mr. Carr, are misleading in their titles. I think a better question is: “Does the Internet Make us Distracted?” The answer, overwhelmingly so for most of us, is yes (don’t ask me how long it took me to type and publish this post)… Which I think leads to this question: now that we realize that the Internet does make us distracted, what are we going to do about it? If you’ll excuse me, I’m stepping away from the computer and grabbing that book on my bookshelf…

What are your thoughts on the two pieces? How has the Internet changed your life? I welcome your thoughts in the comments.

On Reading James Joyce’s Ulysses

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No one has ever really read Ulysses. And if they try to convince you otherwise, they’re either lying or pulling your chain.

That’s what our high school English teacher used to tell us about James Joyce’s epic novel, Ulysses. The natural skeptic that I am, the day after I first heard this proclamation, I went to my local library and decided to check out the book. However, it didn’t happen. I found the book on the shelf, opened it up, and started reading:

Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. A yellow dressinggown, ungirdled, was sustained gently behind him by the mild morning air. He held the bowl aloft and intoned: INTROIBO AD ALTARE DEI

It was at this point that I said, “Whaaa?” Nevertheless, I decided to keep reading. I finished the first page. The damage was done. I put the book back on the shelf, defeated. I realized that perhaps those who say that they have read Ulysses, they maybe read the first page, or even the first chapter. But I have a hard time believing that they’ve read the entire book and understood what they’ve read.

Here is Joseph Collins writing in the New York Times in 1922 (I echo his sentiment and appreciate the critique):

A few intuitive, sensitive visionaries may understand and comprehend Ulysses, James Joyce’s new and mammoth volume, without going through a course of training or instruction, but the average intelligent reader will glean little or nothing from it—even from careful perusal, one might properly say study, of it—save bewilderment and a sense of disgust.

I recently met someone—let’s call her Emma—who mentioned that Ulysses is one of her favorite books. Curious, I inquired further. The conversation went like this:

Eugene: Wow, so you’ve read James Joyce’s Ulysses? [Editor’s note: I am always careful to preface works of literature with an author’s name; for all I know, Emma might have thought I was talking about Tennyson’s poem of the same name]

Emma: Yes, it is one of my favorite books. I’ve put blood, toil, tears, and sweat into that book, and I am proud of having read it.

Eugene: Okay, I understand the tears, sweat, and the toil. But did you really bleed while reading Ulysses?

Emma: Yes. Paper cut!

So there you go. Apparently that’s what it takes to read Ulysses.

Question for the reader: have you read Ulysses? Have you, really?

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[Resource: Analyzing Ulysses, in which Avinash Vora estimates that the book contains a (unique) vocabulary of 30,030 words. That’s incredible!]

Readings: Oil Spill, Facebook, Babies, Time Machines

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Here’s what I’ve been reading recently:

(1) “Lessons of the Spill” [Business Week] – a well-researched piece on the Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. A few excellent tidbits:

A mile below the surface, things can go to hell in an instant. The pressures and temperatures at work are otherworldly. Imagine an elephant sitting on your chest, and you get a small sense of the weight of rock and water pressing down on the reservoir of oil and gas miles below the surface. To keep the superheated, supercompressed fluids from shooting upward like a volcanic eruption before the well is finished, drillers fill the hole completely with a heavy, synthetic “mud.” Then, to finish the well, they inject a high-tech cement. Each well requires its own unique formulation of mud and cement. The cement is supposed to go down the middle of the drill pipe—a seven-inch tube surrounded by a larger pipe called the casing. When it reaches the bottom of the drill pipe, it oozes up into the gap between the pipe and its casing before drying in place, forming an impenetrable seal.

(2) “Workers on Oil Rig Recall a Terrible Night of Blasts” [New York Times] – related to the first article, but this one is much more personal in nature; the reporters interviewed the survivors of the Deepwater Horizon explosions, and the final article reads like an adventure novel…

It happened so fast.

Just before 10 p.m., the crew was using seawater to flush drilling mud out of the pipes. Suddenly, with explosive fury, water and mud came hurtling up the pipes and onto the deck, followed by the ominous hiss of natural gas. In seconds, it touched some spark or flame.

Three stories above the deck, the blast blew Mr. Sandell out of his seat and to the back of his cab. As he scrambled down the ladder, fire leaped up to envelop him. Another explosion sent him flying 25 feet to the ground.

“I took off running,” Mr. Sandell said. “How, I can’t tell you.”

(3) “Facebook’s Gone Rogue; It’s Time for an Open Alternative” [Wired] – an excellent piece describing the recent Facebook privacy changes and the backlash the social networking site is (and should be) receiving from its users.

(4) “The Moral Life of Babies” [New York Times] – a long, well-explained piece documenting the moral capabilities of babies. If you don’t have time to read the whole thing, here are the most relevant and interesting tidbits:

A growing body of evidence, though, suggests that humans do have a rudimentary moral sense from the very start of life. With the help of well-designed experiments, you can see glimmers of moral thought, moral judgment and moral feeling even in the first year of life. Some sense of good and evil seems to be bred in the bone. Which is not to say that parents are wrong to concern themselves with moral development or that their interactions with their children are a waste of time. Socialization is critically important. But this is not because babies and young children lack a sense of right and wrong; it’s because the sense of right and wrong that they naturally possess diverges in important ways from what we adults would want it to be.

But the new studies found that babies have an actual understanding of mental life: they have some grasp of how people think and why they act as they do. The studies showed that, though babies expect inanimate objects to move as the result of push-pull interactions, they expect people to move rationally in accordance with their beliefs and desires: babies show surprise when someone takes a roundabout path to something he wants. They expect someone who reaches for an object to reach for the same object later, even if its location has changed. And well before their 2nd birthdays, babies are sharp enough to know that other people can have false beliefs.

All of this research, taken together, supports a general picture of baby morality. It’s even possible, as a thought experiment, to ask what it would be like to see the world in the moral terms that a baby does. Babies probably have no conscious access to moral notions, no idea why certain acts are good or bad. They respond on a gut level. Indeed, if you watch the older babies during the experiments, they don’t act like impassive judges — they tend to smile and clap during good events and frown, shake their heads and look sad during the naughty events (remember the toddler who smacked the bad puppet). The babies’ experiences might be cognitively empty but emotionally intense, replete with strong feelings and strong desires.

I think the entire piece is worth your time, especially if you’re into psychology and/or learning more about the human mind.

(5) “How to Build a Time Machine” [Mail Online] – in this piece for the U.K.’s newspaper, physicist Stephen Hawking explains the basics behind relativity and time travel. The conclusion? We cannot possibly travel to the past, but we may be able to travel to the future.

On why we can’t travel to the past (the paradox):

This kind of time machine would violate a fundamental rule that governs the entire universe – that causes happen before effects, and never the other way around. I believe things can’t make themselves impossible. If they could then there’d be nothing to stop the whole universe from descending into chaos. So I think something will always happen that prevents the paradox. Somehow there must be a reason why our scientist will never find himself in a situation where he could shoot himself. And in this case, I’m sorry to say, the wormhole itself is the problem.

And what do we need to do to travel to the future?

If we want to travel into the future, we just need to go fast. Really fast. And I think the only way we’re ever likely to do that is by going into space. The fastest manned vehicle in history was Apollo 10. It reached 25,000mph. But to travel in time we’ll have to go more than 2,000 times faster. And to do that we’d need a much bigger ship, a truly enormous machine. The ship would have to be big enough to carry a huge amount of fuel, enough to accelerate it to nearly the speed of light. Getting to just beneath the cosmic speed limit would require six whole years at full power.

The piece is written for the general crowd, so it’s very easy to follow. For example, there is no mention of the Minkowski space or the Lorentz factor. I think Stephen Hawking was asked to write to the broadest audience possible, and he has done an excellent job. If you’re interested in learning more about astronomy, space, time travel, and the like, I can’t recommend Briane Greene’s The Fabric of Cosmos enough. It is a spectacular book (I read it in 2009).

Readings: Counterfeiters, The Virtual University, NASA

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Here are some interesting articles I’ve read over the weekend…

(1) “Outfoxing the Counterfeiters” [Wall Street Journal] – a really interesting piece on the redesign of the $100 bill, as well as a brief history of the evolution of currency in the United States. The article is written by Stephen Mihm, an associate professor of history at the University of Georgia and the author of A Nation of Counterfeiters (I haven’t read this book, but after reading this thoughtful article, I have put the book on my to-read list). The two most interesting tidbits below.

On private currency that circulated in the United States during the Civil War era:

Santa Claus, sea serpents and rampaging polar bears, to name a few—showed up on these private currencies.

What’s the new redesign of the $100 bill?

The centerpiece of the redesign is a purple strip that runs from top to bottom of the bill. The strip is coated with hundreds of thousands of microscopic lenses in the shape of the number “100” and what seems to be the Liberty Bell. Thanks to some complex optics, these thousands of lenses combine to create a single, larger image. When the bill is angled one way or another, the strip comes alive, making it seem as if the images can move.

(2) “The Virtual University” [The American Prospect] – a thought-provoking piece by Anya Kamenetz on why cash-strapped colleges should embrace the online classroom. What are your thoughts on this topic?

(3) “Reinventing NASA” [The Washington Times] – an excellent op-ed piece, written by the president of Georgia Institute of Technology, Dr. George “Bud” Peterson, about the current state of NASA, and its future potential. [via]

The key takeaway, I think:

A commitment to working with start-up companies to develop the technologies and hardware necessary for success will inspire and create a new generation of businesses and technology-focused jobs and will nurture and strengthen our top research institutions. With this new emphasis, NASA will return to its roots as an important catalyst for innovation and economic expansion for the U.S. economy.


Readings: Alexander Ovechkin, College Life, Five Guys Burgers, Nuclear Devastation

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Here are some interesting articles I’ve read over the weekend.

(1) “Load up on Life, Not Classes” [The Tech] – a sound editorial at MIT’s student newspaper. The paragraph below is applicable to any kind of learning, and independent of where you end up going to college.

So much learning in college takes place outside of classes. By getting involved in extracurricular like clubs, sports or music groups, you learn to work with and communicate with other people — and initially, they’re usually strangers. You will learn to accomplish goals alongside people you like, but you’ll probably meet other people you don’t like. This is how the real world works, and MIT is a great place to get practice.

(2) “Alexander Ovechkin, the Mad Russian” [New York Times] – a most interesting article about the life and times of NHL’s best player, Alexander Ovechkin. In case you aren’t familiar with Ovechkin:

In 2005-6, he was the N.H.L. rookie of the year, scoring 52 goals, tied for third most in the league. In the 2007-8 and 2008-9 seasons he led the league in goals, with 65 and 56, and won back-to-back M.V.P. awards. He has been at, or near, the top of the scoring chart this year and is on track for another 50-goal season.

On Ovechkin’s most memorable, absolutely insane goal:

Ovie doesn’t just score often, he scores memorably. Against Phoenix in January of his rookie year, there was what is now known simply as the Goal. Going one on one against the Coyotes’ defenseman Paul Mara, he got knocked down and landed on his back but kept the puck on the end of his stick and, as he slid backward, flung it over his head and into the net. This magical feat was viewed so often on YouTube that Caps officials estimate ticket sales went up 15 percent as a direct result.

The following paragraph profiles other Ovechkin goals, and I’ve linked to the respective YouTube videos below:

There are now so many celebrated Ovie goals on YouTube that connoisseurs can argue over them like stamp collectors comparing the 1840 British Penny Black, say, with the 1868 Franklin Z-Grill. Which is better? The goal against Buffalo in December 2008, when he slipped the puck around a defender’s legs, fell and then, while sliding on his stomach, whipped a shot through the goalie’s leg pads? Or the one against Detroit in January 2009, when he dragged the puck between his own legs, faked a backhander and then drilled a shot into the top of the net? What about the stupefying goal against Montreal the following month, when, catching the Canadiens on a bad line change, Ovechkin spun 360 degrees, passed the puck to himself off the boards, got knocked on his side and while skidding across the goal mouth lifted a shot over the goalie’s outstretched leg? Against the New York Rangers in early February, he scored a one-hander, pushing the puck between the skates of the defenseman Michal Rozsival, picking it up on the other side and then stabbing it with one arm past the Rangers’ goalie, Henrik Lundqvist.

Also of interest is this TSN video highlighting Ovechkin’s top ten goals.

I think what makes Ovechkin appealing to the hockey fan (not just a Capitals fan) is because he’s extremely approachable and personal:

Unlike most Russian players, who are paired with a Russian-speaking minder when they come to the N.H.L., Ovie insisted on an English-speaking roommate, and his English has become steadily better (though he does refer to the Verizon Center’s corporate suites as “suits”). In January, he was made captain of the team, in part because he’s such a presence in the locker room. He seldom ducks an interview, a chance to appear in a commercial or a request to make an appearance for a charity. According to Nate Ewell, the Capitals’ director of media relations, it’s hard to persuade Ovie to say no to anything. Off ice, he enjoys full rock-star privileges. He lives in an immense pad and markets his own line of Ovie-wear. He enjoys techno-pop, fast cars, beautiful women, torn Dolce & Gabbana jeans and loud parties.

The entire NYT Magazine piece is a pleasure to read, and I encourage you to check it out.

(3) “How I Did It: Jerry Murrell, Five Guys Burgers and Fries” [Inc Magazine] – an excellent interview with Jerry Murrel, founder of Five Guys, one of the best burger joints in the United States. Three quotable gems from the interview (on soliciting reviews, creating ownership in the company, and how the name Five Guys came to be):

  1. We have never solicited reviews. That’s a policy. Yet we have hundreds of them. If we put one frozen thing in our restaurant, we’d be done. That’s why we won’t do milk shakes. For years, people have been asking for them! But we’d have to do real ice cream and real milk.
  2. We try to make kids feel ownership in the company. Boys hate to smile. It’s not macho. And it’s definitely not macho to clean a bathroom. But if the auditor walks in and the bathroom isn’t clean, that crew just lost money. Next thing he knows, the guy who was supposed to clean the bathroom has toilet paper all over his car and a potato in his tailpipe.
  3. Our lawyer said “You need a name.” I had four sons — Matt, Jim, Chad are from my first marriage, and Ben from my second to Janie, who has run our books from Day One. So I said, “How about Five Guys?” Then we had Tyler, our youngest son, so I’m out! Matt and Jim travel the country visiting stores, Chad oversees training, Ben selects the franchisees, and Tyler runs the bakery.

(4) “Dark Element” [Walrus Magazine] – a heartbreaking account of Zhovti Vody, a Ukrainian prairie city (built in the Soviet era to supply ore for nuclear weapons) on its deadly legacy: cancer and devastation. Still, life must go on, as this poignant photo essay demonstrates.

Readings: Honey Bees, Magnus Carlsen, Masculine Mystique, CNN

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Here are some interesting articles I’ve read recently.

(1) “Yellow, Black, and Blues” [Seed Magazine] – a fascinating recap on the agricultural history of honey bees. Honey bees began disappearing in 2006, and this article proposes some explanations. There isn’t a single factor attributing to the honey bees’ demise:

By June 2009 a report issued by the USDA had accepted—not without a hint of resignation—that “it now seems clear that no single factor alone is responsible for the malady.” Stopping honey bee colonies from collapsing wouldn’t be as easy as banning a pesticide or killing a new pathogen. Instead it appeared an interaction of different factors must underpin CCD—for instance, a pesticide might have weakened the bees’ immune systems enough so that a new virus proved lethal.

(2) “Magnus Carlsen on his Chess Career” [Chessbase] – Germany’s Der Spiegel conducted an interview with Magnus Carlsen, the number one chess player in the world. It’s a really interesting interview, where Magnus explains that he is a “totally normal guy” who enjoys traveling:

We travelled by car to Austria, Montenegro, Greece, Italy and Hungary. The countries in the East are poorer than I thought, by the way. In Rome I visited St. Peter’s Basilica and saw a football match at the Olympic Stadium. Wonderful. When we were in Moscow, my mother and my sisters went to the Bolshoi Theatre, I didn’t.

The most interesting part is the exchange between Der Spiegel and Carlsen regarding Kasparov:

SPIEGEL: For a year now you have been working with Garry Kasparov, who is probably the best chess player of all time. What form does your cooperation take? Kasparov is the teacher, you the pupil?

Carlsen: No. In terms of our playing skills we are not that far apart. There are many things I am better at than he is. And vice versa. Kasparov can calculate more alternatives, whereas my intuition is better. I immediately know how to rate a situation and what plan is necessary. I am clearly superior to him in that respect.

So Carlsen’s response is ambivalent: on the one hand, he respects Garry Kasparov; on the other hand, he can’t restrain stroking his ego during the interview (“I am clearly superior to him”). Also of note: Kasparov’s piece in the New York Review of Books. [via]

(3) “The Masculine Mystique” [Wall Street Journal] – new research suggests that women from countries with healthier populations prefer more feminine-looking men. The research methodology seems a bit suspicious, but it’s still an interesting read.

(4) “CNN Fails to Stop Fall in Rating” [New York Times] – who better to report on this topic than the New York Times?