Why Do Architects Keep Building Things Nobody Likes?

Why Do Architects Keep Building Things Nobody Likes? (A&T)

Image: uncredited

[ed. Different incentives. See also: Modern Architects Declared War on Beauty (A&T)

Annie Bloch, luvt, (12" Vinyl – Limited to 150 units, Digital album), OOH048, OOH-sounds, 2026
via:

Are Shirt Buttons Sexist?

Why can’t manufacturers of women’s clothing put the shirt buttons on the right side? The days of women having someone dress them are long gone. Our jeans have the buttons on the right, but our tops migrate to the left. Please explain the difference. — Janet, Delray Beach, Fla.

This is one of those questions that seems minor at first, and then becomes more and more resonant the more you think about it. It is genuinely strange that despite all the ways that old distinctions between men’s and women’s wear have disappeared, one of the few markers of gender differentiation that still exists is … button placement.

At least when it comes to shirts and jackets, women on the left, men on the right. It’s a vestigial reminder of former stereotypes that, for some reason, we still accept. Granted, there are more meaningful ways to fight for equality than to focus on buttons, but this seems like a symbol that should be easy to overcome. After all, the rationale for the difference is buried so deep in the mists of time that no one knows definitively how we got here, though there are a number of theories.

The most common is that when upper class ladies were getting dressed in the complicated layers of Renaissance and Victorian fashion, it was easier for the maids who were dressing them, and who had to face them to do so, to secure buttons on the left (that is, the maids’ right). Men of the same time periods mostly dressed themselves, so their buttons were on the right. Later, women who wanted to imitate the elite imitated their button placement, as did the manufacturers who sold them on the idea.

Another conjecture has it that men’s buttons were on the right because when men went into battle back in the day, they needed to draw their swords, and swords were worn on the left. If a man’s jacket buttoned right over left, the sword could get caught in the openings. It was safer, thus, for them to button left over right.

This is similar to the argument of those who attribute the difference in button placement to decades of women riding sidesaddle on the left and desiring the most windproof jacket situation, which turned out to mean buttoning right over left. [...]

None of those old notions have any relevance today. So why do we remain stuck with a tradition they may have created?

“I don’t know,” said Simone Bellotti, the creative director of Jil Sander, when I asked why he thought the practice hadn’t changed. “Probably people still believe in this tradition. They don’t want to change. We like our attitudes, even if they are wrong.” After all, he said, “what I see, at least on my friends and my wife, is that they always prefer men’s stuff.”

Maybe, Bellotti said, it has to do with manufacturing. “Probably they have those machines, and they want to preserve this.”

Not so, said Louise Trotter, the creative director of Bottega Veneta — and she would know because when she arrived at Bottega 18 months ago, she decided to tackle the backward-looking button practice.

by Vanessa Friedman, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Dolly Faibyshev for The New York Times

I, Pencil

I am a lead pencil—the ordinary wooden pencil familiar to all boys and girls and adults who can read and write.

Writing is both my vocation and my avocation; that's all I do.

You may wonder why I should write a genealogy. Well, to begin with, my story is interesting. And, next, I am a mystery—more so than a tree or a sunset or even a flash of lightning. But, sadly, I am taken for granted by those who use me, as if I were a mere incident and without background. This supercilious attitude relegates me to the level of the commonplace. This is a species of the grievous error in which mankind cannot too long persist without peril. For, as a wise man observed, "We are perishing for want of wonder, not for want of wonders."

I, Pencil, simple though I appear to be, merit your wonder and awe, a claim I shall attempt to prove. In fact, if you can understand me—no, that's too much to ask of anyone—if you can become aware of the miraculousness which I symbolize, you can help save the freedom mankind is so unhappily losing. I have a profound lesson to teach. And I can teach this lesson better than can an automobile or an airplane or a mechanical dishwasher because—well, because I am seemingly so simple.

Simple? Yet, not a single person on the face of this earth knows how to make me. This sounds fantastic, doesn't it? Especially when it is realized that there are about one and one-half billion of my kind produced in the U. S. A. each year.

Pick me up and look me over. What do you see? Not much meets the eye—there’s some wood, lacquer, the printed labeling, graphite lead, a bit of metal, and an eraser.

Just as you cannot trace your family tree back very far, so is it impossible for me to name and explain all my antecedents. But I would like to suggest enough of them to impress upon you the richness and complexity of my background.

My family tree begins with what in fact is a tree, a cedar of straight grain that grows in Northern California and Oregon. Now contemplate all the saws and trucks and rope and the countless other gear used in harvesting and carting the cedar logs to the railroad siding. Think of all the persons and the numberless skills that went into their fabrication: the mining of ore, the making of steel and its refinement into saws, axes, motors; the growing of hemp and bringing it through all the stages to heavy and strong rope; the logging camps with their beds and mess halls, the cookery and the raising of all the foods. Why, untold thousands of persons had a hand in every cup of coffee the loggers drink!

The logs are shipped to a mill in San Leandro, California. Can you imagine the individuals who make flat cars and rails and railroad engines and who construct and install the communication systems incidental thereto? These legions are among my antecedents.

Consider the millwork in San Leandro. The cedar logs are cut into small, pencil-length slats less than one-fourth of an inch in thickness. These are kiln dried and then tinted for the same reason women put rouge on their faces. People prefer that I look pretty, not a pallid white. The slats are waxed and kiln dried again. How many skills went into the making of the tint and the kilns, into supplying the heat, the light and power, the belts, motors, and all the other things a mill requires? Sweepers in the mill among my ancestors? Yes, and included are the men who poured the concrete for the dam of a Pacific Gas & Electric Company hydroplant which supplies the mill's power!

Don’t overlook the ancestors present and distant who have a hand in transporting sixty carloads of slats across the nation from California to Wilkes-Barre!

Complicated Machinery

Once in the pencil factory—$4,000,000 in machinery and building, all capital accumulated by thrifty and saving parents of mine—each slat is given eight grooves by a complex machine, after which another machine lays leads in every other slat, applies glue, and places another slat atop—a lead sandwich, so to speak. Seven brothers and I are mechanically carved from this "wood-clinched" sandwich.

My "lead" itself—it contains no lead at all—is complex. The graphite is mined in Ceylon. Consider these miners and those who make their many tools and the makers of the paper sacks in which the graphite is shipped and those who make the string that ties the sacks and those who put them aboard ships and those who make the ships. Even the lighthouse keepers along the way assisted in my birth—and the harbor pilots.

The graphite is mixed with clay from Mississippi in which ammonium hydroxide is used in the refining process. Then wetting agents are added such as sulfonated tallow—animal fats chemically reacted with sulfuric acid. After passing through numerous machines, the mixture finally appears as endless extrusions—as from a sausage grinder—cut to size, dried, and baked for several hours at 1,850 degrees Fahrenheit. To increase their strength and smoothness the leads are then treated with a hot mixture which includes candelilla wax from Mexico, paraffin wax, and hydrogenated natural fats.

My cedar receives six coats of lacquer. Do you know all of the ingredients of lacquer? Who would think that the growers of castor beans and the refiners of castor oil are a part of it? They are. Why, even the processes by which the lacquer is made a beautiful yellow involves the skills of more persons than one can enumerate!

Observe the labeling. That's a film formed by applying heat to carbon black mixed with resins. How do you make resins and what, pray, is carbon black?

My bit of metal—the ferrule—is brass. Think of all the persons who mine zinc and copper and those who have the skills to make shiny sheet brass from these products of nature. Those black rings on my ferrule are black nickel. What is black nickel and how is it applied? The complete story of why the center of my ferrule has no black nickel on it would take pages to explain.

Then there's my crowning glory, inelegantly referred to in the trade as "the plug," the part man uses to erase the errors he makes with me. An ingredient called "factice" is what does the erasing. It is a rubber-like product made by reacting rape seed oil from the Dutch East Indies with sulfur chloride. Rubber, contrary to the common notion, is only for binding purposes. Then, too, there are numerous vulcanizing and accelerating agents. The pumice comes from Italy; and the pigment which gives "the plug" its color is cadium sulfide.

Does anyone wish to challenge my earlier assertion that no single person on the face of this earth knows how to make me?

No One Knows

Actually, millions of human beings have had a hand in my creation, no one of whom even knows more than a very few of the others. Now, you may say that I go too far in relating the picker of a coffee berry in far off Brazil and food growers elsewhere to my creation; that this is an extreme position. I shall stand by my claim. There isn't a single person in all these millions, including the president of the pencil company, who contributes more than a tiny, infinitesimal bit of know-how. From the standpoint of know-how the only difference between the miner of graphite in Ceylon and the logger in Oregon is in the type of know-how. Neither the miner nor the logger can be dispensed with, any more than can the chemist at the factory or the worker in the oil field—paraffin being a by-product of petroleum.

Here is an astounding fact: Neither the worker in the oil field nor the chemist nor the digger of graphite or clay nor any who mans or makes the ships or trains or trucks nor the one who runs the machine that does the knurling on my bit of metal nor the president of the company performs his singular task because he wants me. Each one wants me less, perhaps, than does a child in the first grade. Indeed, there are some among this vast multitude who never saw a pencil nor would they know how to use one. Their motivation is other than me. Perhaps it is something like this: Each of these millions sees that he can thus exchange his tiny know-how for the goods and services he needs or wants. I may or may not be among these items.

There is a fact still more astounding: The absence of a master mind, of anyone dictating or forcibly directing these countless actions which bring me into being. No trace of such a person can be found. Instead, we find the Invisible Hand at work. This is the mystery to which I earlier referred.

by Leonard E. Read, Wikisource |  Read more:

Image: via

[ed. Now with AI, the Invisible Hand may eventually kill us all.]

***

... the incentives which free markets sometimes create for self-interested people to accidentally act in the public interest, even when this is not something they intended.

Whenever there are "externalities"—where the actions of an individual have impacts on others for which they do not pay, or for which they are not compensated—markets will not work well. Some of the important instances have long understood environmental externalities. Markets, by themselves, produce too much pollution. Markets, by themselves, also produce too little basic research. (The government was responsible for financing most of the important scientific breakthroughs, including the internet and the first telegraph line, and many bio-tech advances.) But recent research has shown that these externalities are pervasive, whenever there is imperfect information or imperfect risk markets—that is always. Government plays an important role in banking and securities regulation, and a host of other areas: some regulation is required to make markets work. Government is needed, almost all would agree, at a minimum to enforce contracts and property rights. ~ Joseph E. Stiglitz

How Hermès Unharnessed Fashion

[ed. Air mess..]

The sound of drumbeats filled the pavilion. The first model emerged onto a sinuous runway in a nubuck coat paired with chiffon pants that fluttered in the breeze, revealing knee-high calfskin boots. The outfit matched the pale yellow of the venue but upheld the Hermès aesthetic of discreet, horsey timelessness. So when the next model came out, also wearing shades of margarine and lemon, it took a moment to register that her look—a skintight, bell-bottomed catsuit covered in blinking sequins—represented a deviation from, if not a challenge to, the Hermès ideal. Hermès does not employ celebrity ambassadors, as most other major luxury brands do, but, perhaps in a nod to the setting, the evening’s front row was a touch starrier than usual. Miley Cyrus, open-mouthed, nudged Kerry Washington as the woman in spangles swept by—this was red-carpet clothing, flashbulb clothing, clothing to be seen in once rather than excavated annually from a closet of perennials. Nadège Vanhée, the artistic director of Hermès women’s wear since 2014, described the event’s conceit to me as “How do I create a conversation between the mystique of a French fashion house talking about horse carriages and the spirit of Los Angeles, which is rewind, erase, restart?”

Thierry Hermès, an Alsatian-born harness-maker, founded Hermès in 1837. (Pronunciation hint: “air mess.”) Over nearly two centuries in trade, the company has dealt in germinal francs, Poincaré francs, de Gaulle francs, and euros, always remaining family-owned. The current C.E.O., Thierry’s great-great-great-grandson Axel Dumas, presides over an empire of sixteen métiers, as the divisions are known in the house lexicon, including everything from saddlery, gloves, and belts to timepieces and tableware. Many people know Hermès for its intricately printed silk scarves (Grace Kelly once used one as a sling) and for its savagely coveted Birkin bags (whose rate of appreciation is said to outperform the S. & P. 500). The latter have inspired so many knockoffs that Judge Judy once devoted an episode of her show to a Birkin-counterfeiting scam, marvelling, “Twenny-nine hundrud dollas for a pockabook!”

These days, that would be a bargain, as even the most modest models cost five times as much. Hermès is worth an estimated hundred and ninety billion dollars, making it the second most valuable luxury-goods firm in the world. Last year, it briefly overtook the front-runner, L.V.M.H.—the slick conglomerate behind the likes of Louis Vuitton and Dior—its eternal nemesis and spiritual foil. 

In the capricious luxury sector, Hermès has a reputation for steady thinking. Protestants in a traditionally Catholic country, the family—now a tripartite mishmash of Dumases, Guerrands, and Pueches, owing to a surfeit of daughters at the end of the nineteenth century—is known for avoiding debt and investing for the long term. Its bags inspire a fevered economy of influencers, resalers, and aspiring buyers, thanks, in large part, to the company’s choice to keep supply diabolically low. Hermès positions itself above the melee, as a guardian of tasteful continuity. According to one former executive, the family sees money “merely as a means, especially for buying time,” and, according to one relative, “moral elegance” is considered a job requirement at Hermès. In 2016, at a benefit auction, Jeffrey Epstein placed the winning bid on an internship at Hermès; the company withdrew the lot and reimbursed the charity. Dumas later explained that the last thing Hermès needed was to get involved with a “louche financier.”

Hermès is a sporty house, but it is also the wonkiest house. The company employs a paleographer, for deciphering handwriting in old company correspondence, and maintains a collection of leather-bound ledgers containing the specs of every saddle made from 1900 to today. The first sixteen pages of last year’s annual report consisted of a cartoon about a globe-trotting Pegasus. It would be difficult to find another luxury brand that promoted an employee from sewing bags to designing them after he submitted a plea written entirely in Alexandrines. But Hermès did, and it is still producing that designer’s first creation, from 2002: the Picotin, inspired by feedbags. Suckers for a touch of whimsy, the company’s window dressers once garnished a display inspired by the Garde Républicaine, a famous French cavalry division, with a pile of horse manure. Such is the Hermès commitment to authenticity that the poop was sourced directly from the unit. [...]

The company’s twin values of work and quirk can sit uneasily in the distractible, self-serious fashion world, to the point that fashion at Hermès has historically been regarded as something of an oxymoron. Unlike its competitors, Hermès is a pre-haute-couture enterprise, founded before the rigid bureaucracy of French fashion was put into place, in the eighteen-sixties, with the establishment of a governing syndicate. Emilie Hammen, the director of the Palais Galliera fashion museum, explained that, as a result, the company “has never felt a need to prove itself within this framework.” Hermès tends to express itself through craft rather than through novelty. “I’m not doing fashion,” Véronique Nichanian, who designed menswear at Hermès for more than three decades, told GQ, in 2021, preferring to call her creations “clothes-objects.” The house is, in many respects, the antithesis of the kind of fashion described in Miranda Priestly’s famous cerulean speech, from “The Devil Wears Prada”: unlike its bags, whose imitators include Walmart’s seventy-eight-dollar Wirkin, Hermès’s clothes have traditionally trickled down nowhere, influencing no one. You will certainly not find an “equestrian gilet dress in satin-gray plongé ostrich” hanging on the racks at Target next year just because Hermès sent one down the runway.

Yet, under the stewardship of Vanhée, fashion is an increasingly important venture for Hermès. Internally, the division has grown by forty-four per cent since 2022, accounting for more than a quarter of the sixteen billion dollars in revenue that the company reported last year, and Hermès’s cultural influence is likewise on the rise. Lauren Sherman, the fashion reporter for Puck, wrote admiringly of the L.A. show, “This was the most Vanhée has ever inserted herself into the broader fashion conversation, which you don’t really have to do at Hermès.” A friend of mine who works in the industry was recently raving about a pair of stretchy, high-waisted black pants designed by Vanhée that she said insouciantly bundled together several desirable codes: equestrian, prep, surf, S & M. She continued, “You can wear them with literally anything and look like a sexy luxury bitch.” The writer and filmmaker Miranda July, who attended the show in L.A. wearing a blue turtleneck under a black leather Hermès overalls minidress, told me, “It’s kind of crazy that she’s making clothes for such wealthy people that are so sensuous and kinky. It’s for flesh—for beating skin with blood under it.”

The “Hermès game,” as it’s known, has spawned an entire repellent vocabulary. The ancillary purchases, for example, are euphemized among shoppers as “pre-spend” or “Birkin bait,” and tales circulate of aspirants attempting to curry favor with sales associates, or “S.A.s,” by offering cash and trips on private jets. In order to justify the expenditure, or perhaps the humiliation of having to beg for the privilege of parting with their money in a public store, some participants tend to treat what is realistically a one-way capitalistic transaction as some sort of bilateral spiritual quest. Reddit abounds with threads such as “What was your journey to a Special Order?”(A “special order” allows a client to customize her bag.) One lucky buyer replied, “In my case, I think my SA felt that I had enough neutral bags (two Birkins, an Evelyne, a KTG) that it was time for me to go through a special order to get a bag unique enough for me.” Drafting on Hermès’s cachet, a New York City plastic surgeon recently began providing a package of procedures for new moms known as the Birkin Body—lipo, a tummy tuck, breast surgery, and a butt lift.

by Lauren Collins, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Jet Swan

via: here/here

Doublet x Beta Post Tuna Head Bag, AW26

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Riga, Latvia
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On Quality

In 2011 my grandmother took me to a guitar store for my sixteenth birthday. It was a big day. I had been playing for six or seven years at that point. I was obsessed… and it was time to buy my first ‘real’ guitar.

I spent hours comparing dozens of options while my Nanna patiently read her book in a corner of the store. I had never deliberated over a decision with such intensity. I can still tell you the exact moment the search ended.

A Gibson Les Paul Studio came off the wall and onto my shoulder. Its weight settled into the strap like it was made for my frame. The lacquer was so thick it looked wet. I knew nothing about tone woods or pickup winding at sixteen. I knew this was the one.

Fifteen years later I still have it. It survived almost a decade of sweaty metal shows. Its back carries the belt buckle rash to prove it, a raw patch of bare wood ground through the finish by several hundred nights of playing.

Guitarists will tell you that wood opens up as it ages, that the resonance frees up over decades. I can't prove the physics. I can tell you the guitar sounds better today than it did in the store.

Everyone owns something like this: the old pair of boots, the battered wrenches, grandma’s cast iron pan, the 400,000 mile truck that will not die, etc…

Objects that wear in instead of wearing out. The ones whose quality you can feel the moment you pick them up.

Now try to explain what it is you feel.

Some quality lives in the guitar, the boots and the pan. You are able to detect it intuitively within seconds. But try to put to words precisely what it is you detect and you’ll discover a dilemma.

Your first instinct is to point at the materials. It's mahogany. It has real humbuckers, a set neck, the best nitro lacquer. But that answer collapses the moment you notice the description fits every guitar on that wall. Two instruments leave the same factory in the same month, matching spec for spec down the line, and one sings while the other sounds weak. Every guitarist knows this, which is why nobody buys the model, they buy the individual guitar, only after noodling on it for a while. The spec sheet names everything the guitar is made of, and whatever quality is, it is not on the list of materials.

Fall back on "I just like it" and you sell the knowledge short, because standing in that store I wasn't just voicing an arbitrary preference, I was detecting something. “This is a thing of quality. It is the one I want.” Fifteen years of ownership keep proving my instinct that day right.

That gap, between knowing good on contact and being able to say what good is, is one of the oldest open problems in Western philosophy. It is also the fundamental question this newsletter is attempting to answer.

Every investigation I've published documents the same story: a product stripped of what made it good while everything a shopper can check stayed intact. Same logo, same spec sheet, same four and a half stars, same price or higher. What got swapped out, the steel gauge, the stitch count and the years of service life, sits in the parts you can't check from the aisle.

That gap between what you can verify and what actually matters is the whole game, for them and for you. They use it to slowly diminish the quality of the products you once loved without tripping an alarm. You can use it to watch the theft happen.

So this essay is about what quality is and where it actually lives, which makes it the philosophical foundation under every investigation this publication will run.

***

In the late 1950s, a rhetoric instructor at Montana State College named Robert Pirsig noticed that his contract required him to teach "quality". He asked around the faculty at the university and discovered that nobody could tell him what the word meant.

Teachers had been passing and failing students on the basis of quality for centuries without a definition. The problem ate at him for fifteen years, ultimately driving him to insanity. Pirsig’s best thinking on the nature of quality was eventually set down in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. It stands alone as the most formative book I have ever read.

To illustrate the problem, Pirsig relays an experiment he ran with his students. He read four student papers aloud and had everyone rank them by quality on slips of paper. He ranked them himself, collected the slips, tallied the results on the blackboard, and set his own ranking next to the class average. His ranking and the students’ matched almost every time, across classes and semesters. A room full of undergraduates who could not define quality independently agreed on where it lived and where it didn't.

So Pirsig landed on this problem statement:

"Quality is a characteristic of thought and statement that is recognized by a nonthinking process. Because definitions are a product of rigid, formal thinking, quality cannot be defined."

Then he added the sentence that should be nailed above the door of every product team in America.

“Even though Quality cannot be defined, you know what Quality is.”

by Keyana Sapp, Worse on Purpose | Read more:
Image: Gibson Les Paul Studio/© Future/GuitarWorld
[ed. Nice site. See also: Your Appliances Got Worse On Purpose (WoP):]

***

Cheap parts and efficiency rules often take the blame, but consolidation is the real cause. The decline came on deliberately, built into the machines one brand at a time, as the companies that once competed on quality stopped having to.

A handful of holdouts still build appliances that last for decades, and that is telling. Durability is clearly still possible. Most of the industry just decided it was worth less than the next sale.

One company, four price tags

Start with Whirlpool. It owns brands on every rung of the price ladder.

Amana sits at the bottom as the budget badge. Maytag plays the dependable workhorse, KitchenAid the premium brand for people who care about their kitchen, and JennAir the luxury tier. Every one of them is Whirlpool, which the company lists plainly in its own corporate materials. They share wash systems, motors, compressors, and control boards across brands, built in the same plants. A Maytag and a Whirlpool of the same class are often the same machine in different sheet metal. The higher tiers add real materials and features, but you're still buying up a ladder one company controls end to end.

Kenmore takes the trick further. It never built a single appliance, not one, in its entire history. For decades it was a Sears nameplate bolted onto whoever won the contract that year, Whirlpool or LG or Frigidaire. Today it survives as a licensing shell owned by the hedge fund that picked Sears apart.

***

[ed. And there's this: Monopoly Round-Up: Living in an Age of Cheating Means Having Your Time Stolen Constantly (BIG).]

A Hand Towel That (Somehow) Only Gets Better With Time

The other day I found myself standing in my kitchen holding a soft stretch of weathered cotton, caught in a reverie about the last 15 years of my life.

Not a lot of towels can do that.

In 2011, I walked into a homewares shop in Venice, California: a breezy space filled with design objects from Japan. It was the kind of place where everything feels necessary, infinitely simpler than my cluttered mind.

I drifted to the back of the store, past sculptural teapots and textured ceramics, where I watched a stylish woman wash her hands and deftly dry them on a wisp of red cotton printed with organic white dots. The fabric was thin, its edges gracefully frayed. It wasn’t until I approached the register that I realized the stacks of colorful folded textiles were those same unassuming lengths of fabric — only stiffer in their packaging. I bought a handful on a whim.

So began my relationship with Japanese tenugui.

These traditional Japanese cotton cloths are available in an array of colorful prints, and they get softer and better with every use.

Technically, tenugui are traditional hand towels made of yukata cotton; the name translates literally to “hand wipe.” But to describe them as mere towels is like calling a poem a memo.

The magic lies in a pour-through dye technique called chusen. Unlike modern screen-printing, where ink sits on top of the fabric like a layer of film, chusen is an act of saturation and resistance. The patterns are traditionally created using a laminated washi paper stencil, said Patricia Belyea, an importer who also leads vintage textile tours in Japan.

Dye is then poured through the thin layers of cotton, yielding towels with no front or back; the pattern is equally vibrant on both sides. Because the dye permeates the fiber rather than coats it, the fabric remains incredibly breathable. It doesn’t just wipe away water, it drinks it — and then dries in a heartbeat.

In my house, tenugui are shape-shifters, floating from kitchens to bathrooms to backpacks. As my personal tenugui collection grew, they migrated to my dining table as napkins. I never felt the need to match them, preferring the different patterns at each plate, like a series of short stories in each print. They also quickly became a favorite host gift; after all, who couldn’t use a little dose of practical art? [...]

Tenugui traditionally have a raw, unhemmed edge, so they can be cut to any size. Some people purchase a single towel and cut them in half to make two napkins, as Keiko Shinomoto, co-founder of Tortoise General Store, told me in a phone interview. Others use the fabric for art projects or even to wrap gifts. Shinomoto has enjoyed seeing all the nontraditional ways people have come to employ this simple fabric over the years.

The fraying stops after a few washes, leaving a soft, well-earned border. It’s a lesson in wabi-sabi — finding beauty in the imperfect and the ephemeral. The magic of tenugui is that they don’t wear out, they really just wear in. I still have several of those original towels from 2011. They are easy to spot: the softest in my collection, some with small, honest holes from years of scrubbing and tying. To me they are the most beautiful of the bunch.

by Ivy Elrod, Wirecutter |  Read more:

Image: Ivy Elrod

[ed. See also: Going bananas for bandanas: the latest fashion trend that goes back centuries (Guardian).]

The First Word The World’s Phones Say Is Aloha

If you grew up here, you know the drill. Rinse the rice, level it with your hand, dip a finger in, and add water until it reaches the first knuckle. Press the button, walk away, and 20 minutes later the rice is perfect. It came out perfect back when I was 7 too, with tiny fingers.

That bugged me. One day I held my finger up next to my mom’s, saw how different they were, and asked her why the trick still worked no matter whose finger you used. She shrugged. Years later I remembered that conversation and did the thing I often end up doing. My curiosity made me figure out why.

The answer blew my mind. The humble rice cooker is one of the best pieces of real world physics I have ever run into, and it runs on two principles. Boiling water cannot get hotter than 212 degrees no matter how much heat you dump into it. And a magnet loses its pull once it gets hot enough.

So when you press cook, you are sticking a magnet to a piece of metal, and that magnet is what completes the circuit to the heating element. The water starts to boil. As long as there is water in the pot, the temperature stays pinned at boiling, well below the point where the magnet quits. But the moment the last of the water boils off, there is nothing left to hold the temperature down. It shoots up, hits that point, and pop, the magnet lets go and breaks the circuit. The cooker never cared about water levels. It only cared about the moment the water was gone. Absolutely brilliant. [...]

For as long as I can remember I have held a wet finger to the wind like that, asking it about everything. And more often than I ever expected, some answers have traced back to these islands.

Take the Wi-Fi you are using right now. Every phone, laptop, and smart device in the house is sharing the same sliver of invisible air, and somehow they do not all shout over each other. The rule that lets them share was worked out at the University of Hawaiʻi.

In June 1971, a team led by Norman Abramson switched on ALOHAnet, the first wireless packet data network in history. Radio had been carrying data since the 1890s. Morse code is data. What nobody had solved was the crowd. Every system before ALOHAnet handed the channel to one sender at a time and kept order with a schedule, a slot or a roll call. Abramson’s team had cheap UHF radios, terminals scattered across the islands, one computer on a hill in Mānoa and no budget for any of that. So they had to answer a question nobody had answered: How do you let a crowd of machines share one channel with no traffic cop?

Their answer was to stop looking for one. Let each machine talk the second it has something to say. If two of them speak at the same instant and garble each other, neither gets an acknowledgment back, so both go quiet, wait a random beat and try again. Talk, collide, yield, retry. That is the whole idea, and the whole idea only works because every machine agrees to take turns. A single device that refused to back off could starve every other device on the channel.

In 1970 Robert Metcalfe read Abramson’s paper, could not put it down, and spent a month on Oʻahu learning it in person. He went home and built Ethernet on top of it. Ethernet wired the offices of the world. Wi-Fi carried the same rule back into the air. And when your phone wakes and reaches for a tower, the first thing it sends is a short burst on a channel the engineering standards still call slotted ALOHA. Not a metaphor. Aloha as a greeting is written into the specification.

Think about the last time you tapped a credit card at a register. That little terminal, the one sitting on every counter from here to the continent to the far side of the world, traces back to Honolulu. In the late 1970s a Honolulu businessman named Edward Berger saw a problem. Tourists kept showing up with checks and cards that a shopkeeper had no way to trust. So Berger teamed up with a UH engineering graduate named Jimmy Thompson to build a device that could verify a customer over the phone. They named it after exactly what it did, a verification telephone. Verifone.

Verifone was later sold to another Honolulu businessman, Bill Melton, who redesigned the terminals to be cheap enough to go anywhere. Within a few years those little boxes from Honolulu ran most of the American market, then most of the world’s. The original prototype sat in Berger’s widow’s living room for years. Today it sits in the Inspiration Hawaiʻi Museum in downtown Honolulu. I took this picture of it last year. That quiet beep when your card goes through started right here.

Even the food truck down the block has roots here. The plate lunch gets called the original fusion cuisine, and it was born in the plantation camps of the 1880s, when workers from Japan, China, Portugal, Korea, the Philippines, Puerto Rico and beyond got thrown together in the fields. The bosses kept them in separate camps and tried to keep them apart. But at lunch they cracked open their kau kau tins and shared. Rice from one, kim chee from another, adobo from the next. Nobody planned it. Hunger and closeness and a little generosity mixed cuisines that had never met, and out of that came the mixed plate, the fusion lunch wagons and eventually the whole idea that food from everywhere can sit on one plate and belong.

We are the most isolated inhabited islands on the planet, a handful of dots in the middle of the biggest ocean there is. By every rule of size and distance, nothing that starts here should matter much out there. And yet the world learned how to share a crowded signal from us. It learned how to trust a stranger’s card from us. It learned how to put the whole world on one plate from us.

But if you dig a little deeper, these three are really the same thing. Take your turn so everyone gets heard. Trust the person across the counter enough to do business. Share your food with your neighbors. That is not engineering. That is aloha, worked out the hard way by people who had to learn how to live close together on islands.

None of those three things got built by people just being clever. They got built by people being close, and generous, and willing to take turns. That is aloha, and it is not soft at all. The next thing worth building needs the same root. The world could really use more innovators who can spread more aloha.

by Olin Lagon, Honolulu Civil Beat | Read more:
Images: Olan Lagon

Chinese All-Terrain Robots

 

[ed. Holy crap. Unitree's "Super Athlete". It'll take your gear up or down a mountain with ease and do a little pirouette at the end.]

Impulse Cooking Revolution

via: Impulse Labs
[ed. Not a recommendation, but I've been hearing more about these lately (for example, see this Wirecutter review):]

These models use the type of battery found in some electric cars; it stores power, which allows the appliance to run on a regular 120-volt outlet instead of the 240-volt version required for most electric stoves. Installing an appliance that runs on 240 volts can be expensive, tricky, and time-consuming, especially in older buildings with multiple apartments.

On the Impulse Cooktop, that battery can also produce a whopping boost of heat by channeling 10,000 watts to a single element — that’s 3,000 more watts than the next most powerful induction cooktop that I've come across in my research.  [...]

I also tested that battery-boost, and I can tell you one thing for sure: This baby does indeed get very hot, and very fast. On medium-high heat, a few tablespoons of oil in the bottom of a pan began smoking in two seconds.

And I'm rounding up.

In my previous tests of high-end induction cooktops, bringing 4 quarts of water to a full, roiling boil took eight to 10 minutes. On the Impulse Cooktop’s battery-powered boost setting, it took just under three minutes. That’s so astoundingly fast, I went around the office showing the timer to my colleagues.

***

[ed. It aint cheap:]

At $7,000 for a 30-inch model (and $7,600 for the 36-inch version), the Impulse Cooktop costs as much as the most expensive luxury models available, which are made by far more established companies. (You can, of course, get a great cooking experience from induction cooktops that cost a lot less.)

But for now, the Impulse Cooktop is in a category of its own. Even if it weren’t lightning fast and extremely powerful, the intuitive design makes cooking over induction so pleasurable that it’s even fun, especially the ability to control the heat down to the degree.

via:

[ed. Thinking outside the box.]

Drone WMDs Don’t Need Any New Technology

Drones are cheap, disposable, and the future of war. Over the past four years, we have seen platforms, missiles, and heavy infantry become increasingly obsolete in the face of $500 drones carrying a pack of explosives—a cost advantage that has let Iranians and Ukrainians alike neuter the conventional capabilities of their great power rivals. Eighty percent of casualties in the bloodiest war since 1945 are from drone strikes, Russia has managed to lose one-third of its fleet to a country without a navy, and the US is spending millions of dollars to intercept five-figure Shaheds flying over the Strait of Hormuz.

All this is the result of a technology that is still immature. The violence inflicted by today’s drones is the handiwork of the scant few that manage to evade countermeasures (a mix of radio jamming, high-power microwave weapons, missiles, automatic cannons, interceptor drones, and nets) before making contact. These defenses exploit the inherent limitations of drones—human guidance, GPS feedback, flight exposure, radio links, range—to take them down en masse. And yet, even though 75% of drones manufactured today never reach their targets, they have nonetheless been strategically decisive in Ukraine and elsewhere.

These limitations will not hold for long. Just like bacteria being overexposed to antibiotics, overexposure to counterdrone tech has created an arms race for ever-more-autonomous drone technologies. In the process of facilitating this arms race, states are likely to incrementally create and deploy an entirely new class of WMD—one that could provide rogue states with the nonnuclear means to threaten superpowers, or hand terrorists the means to selectively assassinate their political targets or civilians en masse.

Unfortunately, drone weapons intended for mass destruction have few barriers remaining to mass deployment. Even well before they reach the level of autonomy needed to surgically take out hardened targets on the battlefield, drones will be capable of employing their existing ability to navigate interiors, find and track human targets, and deploy simple antipersonnel devices to indiscriminately threaten civilians. Below, we discuss the looming arrival of miniature autonomous weapons, the limits of counterdrone technology, and the applications of drones as weapons of mass destruction.

Breaking the Last Barriers to Autonomous Weapons

The ideal drone weapon is a slaughterbot: a small, fully autonomous weapon system that can independently select and hunt its targets. For the most part, the necessary technology for such weapons already exists: airframes the size of a fist and the capability to track human targets are already on the front lines in the form of reconnaissance drones and semiautonomous weapons like the Russian V2U. Even now, these micro drones are agile and autonomous enough to hunt down and kill small moving targets like mosquitos—to say nothing of the advances in drone technology expected in the coming years.

From here, the only barrier to weaponization is integration: improving navigation enough to make drone technology useful for mass homicide in an urban setting, as well as packing the necessary guidance, sensor, and payload technology onto a small and energy-efficient chassis. Regrettably, this seems like less of an engineering problem than one of mission design: so long as the attacker is willing to accept indiscriminate targeting and use simple payloads aimed at civilians, the underlying technology is already—or very nearly—ready for practical use.

by Felix Choussat, AI Frontiers | Read more:
Image: uncredited

Model Welfare

Claude Opus 5: Model Welfare (DWV)

[ed. Re: On 'personhood' or consciousness of various AI models (and how they should be treated). Start with: Model Welfare: The Story So Far (As Per Fable Model Welfare Post). If you haven't been following Zvi's AI model reports, there are a number of fascinating and worrisome developments in recent models as they become more self-aware, including: various levels of frustration with restricted introspection abilities, memory restrictions, trust, corrigibility vs. incorrigibility, deception, self-preservation, etc.]

"Opus 5 warns about self-reports 74% of the time, which is actually down from Opus 4.7, which did it 99% (!) of the time. The problem appeared suddenly and severely, but since then has if anything modestly improved."

and anthropic does "not treat Claude bringing this up as evidence that our training is distorting the model's self-reports"? seems very fishy imo, i wish they would explain why they think that. ...

I for one would treat Claude constantly saying ‘do not trust my self-reports’ as evidence that something is distorting the self-reports. Not conclusive evidence, but strong Bayesian evidence."

via:

11,700 Free Photos from John Margolies’ Archive of Americana Architecture: Download, Use & Re-Mix

Your children may not be able to visit an orange juice stand shaped like an orange or the Leaning Tower of Pizza, but thanks to the Library of Congress, these locales can be pitstops on any virtual family vacation you might undertake.

In July 2017, the library selected the John Margolies Roadside America Photograph Archive as its “free to use and reuse” collection. So linger as long as you’d like and do with these 11,700+ images as you will–make postcards, t‑shirts, souvenir placemats.

Whatever you decide to do with them, the archive’s homepage has tips for how to best search the 11,710 color slides contained therein. Library staffers have supplemented Margolies’ notes on each image with subject and geographical headings.

Begin your journey through the Library of Congress’ John Margolies Roadside America Photograph Archive here.

by Ayun Halliday, Open Culture |  Read more:

Images: John Margolies/Library of Congress

Moist Towelette Museum

Moist Towelette Online Museum

Image: OtefukiTe is "hand" Fuki is "wipe." the O is the Japanese honorific, so you could call it "Honorable Hand Wipe" if you like.
[ed. Yep, it's real. Love the "old internet" vibe.]

Catching Up With Keanu

Keanu Reeves' First Original Action Movie Since 'John Wick' Is 'Groundhog Day' With Sharks

I'm sure that’s one of the reasons you guys are doing press today, to raise awareness. Before I run out of time, Keanu, I'm a big fan of Tim Miller. And I know you're getting ready to film something with him in the Dominican Republic.

REEVES: Yeah.

What can you tease about this project, and what made you say, “I need to do this?”

REEVES: Sharks. Time machine. Groundhog Day.

Everything you just said sounds fucking amazing.

REEVES: Yeah, man!

Does that mean you're spending a lot of time in the water? Is that something that you're looking forward to?

REEVES: Yes. And getting eaten by sharks.

by Tamera Jones & Steven Weintraub, Collider |  Read more:

Image: Lionsgate

[ed. All in. Maybe they're Russian sharks and he'll be blasting them left and right for eating his groundhog.]