The Rise of the New Global Elite

by  Chrystia Freeman

If you happened to be watching NBC on the first Sunday morning in August last summer, you would have seen something curious. There, on the set of Meet the Press, the host, David Gregory, was interviewing a guest who made a forceful case that the U.S. economy had become “very distorted.” In the wake of the recession, this guest explained, high-income individuals, large banks, and major corporations had experienced a “significant recovery”; the rest of the economy, by contrast—including small businesses and “a very significant amount of the labor force”—was stuck and still struggling. What we were seeing, he argued, was not a single economy at all, but rather “fundamentally two separate types of economy,” increasingly distinct and divergent.

This diagnosis, though alarming, was hardly unique: drawing attention to the divide between the wealthy and everyone else has long been standard fare on the left. (The idea of “two Americas” was a central theme of John Edwards’s 2004 and 2008 presidential runs.) What made the argument striking in this instance was that it was being offered by none other than the former five-term Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan: iconic libertarian, preeminent defender of the free market, and (at least until recently) the nation’s foremost devotee of Ayn Rand. When the high priest of capitalism himself is declaring the growth in economic inequality a national crisis, something has gone very, very wrong.

This widening gap between the rich and non-rich has been evident for years. In a 2005 report to investors, for instance, three analysts at Citigroup advised that “the World is dividing into two blocs—the Plutonomy and the rest”:  In a plutonomy there is no such animal as “the U.S. consumer” or “the UK consumer”, or indeed the “Russian consumer”. There are rich consumers, few in number, but disproportionate in the gigantic slice of income and consumption they take. There are the rest, the “non-rich”, the multitudinous many, but only accounting for surprisingly small bites of the national pie.

Before the recession, it was relatively easy to ignore this concentration of wealth among an elite few. The wondrous inventions of the modern economy—Google, Amazon, the iPhone—broadly improved the lives of middle-class consumers, even as they made a tiny subset of entrepreneurs hugely wealthy. And the less-wondrous inventions—particularly the explosion of subprime credit—helped mask the rise of income inequality for many of those whose earnings were stagnant.

But the financial crisis and its long, dismal aftermath have changed all that. A multibillion-dollar bailout and Wall Street’s swift, subsequent reinstatement of gargantuan bonuses have inspired a narrative of parasitic bankers and other elites rigging the game for their own benefit. And this, in turn, has led to wider—and not unreasonable—fears that we are living in not merely a plutonomy, but a plutocracy, in which the rich display outsize political influence, narrowly self-interested motives, and a casual indifference to anyone outside their own rarefied economic bubble.

Through my work as a business journalist, I’ve spent the better part of the past decade shadowing the new super-rich: attending the same exclusive conferences in Europe; conducting interviews over cappuccinos on Martha’s Vineyard or in Silicon Valley meeting rooms; observing high-powered dinner parties in Manhattan. Some of what I’ve learned is entirely predictable: the rich are, as F. Scott Fitzgerald famously noted, different from you and me.

What is more relevant to our times, though, is that the rich of today are also different from the rich of yesterday. Our light-speed, globally connected economy has led to the rise of a new super-elite that consists, to a notable degree, of first- and second-generation wealth. Its members are hardworking, highly educated, jet-setting meritocrats who feel they are the deserving winners of a tough, worldwide economic competition—and many of them, as a result, have an ambivalent attitude toward those of us who didn’t succeed so spectacularly. Perhaps most noteworthy, they are becoming a transglobal community of peers who have more in common with one another than with their countrymen back home. Whether they maintain primary residences in New York or Hong Kong, Moscow or Mumbai, today’s super-rich are increasingly a nation unto themselves.

The Winner-Take-Most Economy
The rise of the new plutocracy is inextricably connected to two phenomena: the revolution in information technology and the liberalization of global trade. Individual nations have offered their own contributions to income inequality—financial deregulation and upper-bracket tax cuts in the United States; insider privatization in Russia; rent-seeking in regulated industries in India and Mexico. But the shared narrative is that, thanks to globalization and technological innovation, people, money, and ideas travel more freely today than ever before.

Read more:

Whippersnappers

by Katherine Greider

The other day, when I confessed to my husband that I had requested a "copy" of the online journal our college-age niece edits, he bent down at the knees, pawed the air, turned his face to the ceiling, and let out a mournful roar. That would be a woolly mammoth, sinking into the tar pits at La Brea.

I get this sort of thing a lot. And I've always been a good sport about it. I surrender the keyboard or remote control at the first exasperated sigh of a child grown impatient with my fumbling. Like the elderly relative who each year exclaims, "My, how tall you are!" I make all the requisite noises of awe for the high-tech gadgetry that has allowed music, video and communications to go completely mobile, breaching all boundaries of space and time, not to mention for the skills that let people surf this extraterrestrial wavelength with aplomb. All hail the fleet and nimble thumbs of youth.

Well, maybe it's the ravages of peri-menopause, but lately I find my mood has changed. Faced with a seemingly endless torrent of hoopla over the mind-bending possibilities of this or that next-generation smartphone, I want to say, quoting a phrase from my own youth, big whoop. When my children, at 10 and 14, cock their heads, wearing an expression of forbearance, and tell me, "Mom, you don't really understand our culture," I find myself wanting to yelp, "Right back atcha, dearies!"

How could they understand? They weren't around in the Nehi-orange, slap-happy 1970s, the decade that encompassed the bulk of my childhood. We had no inkling about MP3 players, laptops, tablet computers, the Internet, video streaming, cellphones, GPS-enabled hand-held devices, or even cable television, for crying out loud. But we had just as strong a cultural and psychological investment in the technologies we did have. If today's kids are like hunter-gatherers packing their lightweight tools wherever they roam, we were homesteaders gathered around our warm and lovely technological hearths.

When I was a child, my family watched TV, listened to records, and talked on the phone only in fixed locations inside our own home, at more or less circumscribed times. All Americans did. Now, without a second thought, we're uncoupling these enjoyments from domestic life in a shift that may turn out to be as momentous as when Americans evicted childbirth and death from their homes in the early twentieth century.

I'm not saying it's bad. I'm just saying let's take a moment to reflect. I'm saying that maybe some day long hence, people will want to know what it was like when telephones were literally tethered to the kitchen wall. Come close, and I'll tell you: It was awesome.

First of all, the receiver. It was only a receiver -- no buttons, no screen, no folding mechanism, just this smooth, solid, ergonomically elegant object meant to be held to the ear. And the corkscrewy cord confined you to a small sphere where what you did was simply this: talk on the phone. I remember looping this cord around my finger as I lay on the floor next to the refrigerator, its motor gently humming and warming the linoleum. Or I'd sit on the back stairs, communing with the coats and purses and dog leashes. And the sound quality! Reach out and touch someone. That's what it was like. No traffic, no grocery clerks, no huffing and chuffing as the person you're talking to dashes for the bus.

Phone numbers were associated, not with individuals, but with households. Any number we were likely to use again we scribbled on the side of a cupboard beside the phone. Each number had its own position and style and became a little memento of the day you wrote it down; together these jottings formed a spatial representation of the whole family's relationships, formed, continued, occasionally abandoned.
My children, who use cellphones almost exclusively, are strangers to the fact that apparently separate telephones may be connected to a single line, which in turn is embedded in the walls of the house. So they don't really get certain fond traditions of my youth. Like fighting over the phone. Listening in on someone else's conversation (you must raise the receiver ever so gently from its cradle). Or bellowing across the house for a call's intended recipient to pick up! in another room. My children will never know the exquisite fright of a friend's parent breaking in to snap, "I told you to get off an hour ago!"

Read more:

The Jungle Sub

by Jim Popkin

The clatter of helicopter blades echoed across the jungles of northwestern Ecuador. Antinarcotics commandos in three choppers peered at the mangroves below, scanning for any sign of activity. The police had received a tip that a gang of Colombian drug smugglers had set up a clandestine work site here, in a dense swamp 5 miles south of Colombia’s border. And whatever the traffickers were building, the tipster had warned, was truly enormous.

For decades, Colombian drug runners have pursued their trade with diabolical ingenuity, staying a step ahead of authorities by coming up with one innovation after another. When false-paneled pickups and tractor-trailers began drawing suspicion at US checkpoints, the cartels and their Mexican partners built air-conditioned tunnels under the border. When border agents started rounding up too many human mules, one group of Colombian smugglers surgically implanted heroin into purebred puppies. But the drug runners’ most persistently effective method has also been one of the crudest—semisubmersible vessels that cruise or are towed just below the ocean’s surface and can hold a ton or more of cocaine.

Assembled in secret shipyards along the Pacific coast, they’ve been dubbed drug subs by the press, but they’re incapable of diving or maneuvering like real submarines. In fact, they’re often just cigarette boats encased in wood and fiberglass that are scuttled after a single mission. Yet despite their limitations, these semisubmersibles are notoriously difficult to track. US and Colombian officials estimate that the cartels have used them to ship hundreds of tons of cocaine from Colombia over the past five years alone.

But several years ago, intelligence agencies began hearing that the cartels had made a technological breakthrough: They were constructing some kind of supersub in the jungle. According to the persistent rumors, the phantom vessel was an honest-to-goodness, fully functioning submarine with vastly improved range—nothing like the disposable water coffins the Colombians had been using since the ’90s. US law enforcement officials began to think of it as a sort of Loch Ness Monster, says one agent: “Never seen one before, never seized one before. But we knew it was out there.”

Finally, the Ecuadoreans had enough information to launch a full-fledged raid. On July 2, 2010, a search party—including those three police helicopters, an armada of Ecuadorean navy patrol boats, and 150 well-armed police and sailors—scoured the coastline near the Colombian border. When a patrol boat happened on some abandoned barrels in a clearing off the Río Molina, the posse moved in to find an astillero, or jungle shipyard, complete with spacious workshops, kitchens, and sleeping quarters for 40. The raid had clearly interrupted the workday—rice pots from breakfast were still on the stove.

And there was something else hastily abandoned in a narrow estuary: a 74-foot camouflaged submarine—nearly twice as long as a city bus—with twin propellers and a 5-foot conning tower, beached on its side at low tide. “It was incredible to find a submarine like that,” says rear admiral Carlos Albuja, who oversees Ecuadorean naval operations along the northwest coast. “I’m not sure who built it, but they knew what they were doing.”

A cargo hold in the sub's bow can hold up to 9 tons of cocaine, worth about $250 million.

Read more:

10,000 Hours

Can a complete novice become a golf pro with 10,000 hours of practice?

by  Michael Kruse

Testing researchers’ theory that 10,000 hours of deliberate practice can lift an ordinary person to excellence, Dan McLaughlin practices chip shots at Mangrove Bay Golf Course in St. Petersburg. McLaughlin had never golfed before he conceived The Dan Plan: to put in 10,000 hours of practice and become good enough to play the game professionally.

One wet, raw day last April, at the Broadmoor public golf course in Portland, Ore., Dan McLaughlin stood in the center of one of the greens. He wore running shoes, blue jeans and a yellow rubber raincoat. He wrapped his frozen fingers around a two-buck putter and hit one-foot putts, and he did that for two hours straight, stopped for a cup of hot, decaffeinated tea, then did it for two hours more. That’s how this started.

On his 30th birthday, June 27, 2009, Dan had decided to quit his job to become a professional golfer.

He had almost no experience and even less interest in the sport.

What he really wanted to do was test the 10,000-hour theory he read about in the Malcolm Gladwell bestseller Outliers. That, Gladwell wrote, is the amount of time it takes to get really good at anything — “the magic number of greatness.”

The idea appealed to Dan. His 9-to-5 job as a commercial photographer had become unfulfilling. He didn’t want just to pay his bills. He wanted to make a change.

Could he stop being one thing and start being another? Could he, an average man, 5 feet 9 and 155 pounds, become a pro golfer, just by trying? Dan’s not doing an experiment. He is the experiment.

The Dan Plan will take six hours a day, six days a week, for six years. He is keeping diligent records of his practice and progress. People who study expertise say no one has done quite what Dan is doing right now.

Dan spent last month in St. Petersburg because winters are winters in the Pacific Northwest. “If I could become a professional golfer,” he said one afternoon, “the world is literally open to any options for anybody.”

Dan is the youngest son of a family of high achievers. One of his grandfathers was a career IBM man. The other was a civil engineer. His father is an actuary. So is his brother. Actuaries calculate risk. They make statistical predictions about the future based on past performance. His brother graduated with high honors as a math major from Georgia Tech and then did it again in the divinity program at Boston University and now lives and works in New York City and is married with a young daughter. His sister is a dermatologist in Atlanta and a mother of four. She regularly runs marathons.
Dan? He’s the only one of his siblings who wasn’t confirmed in the Methodist church in which they grew up. He didn’t understand why he had to do this just because everybody else was doing this. He was 12.

Within his immediate family, he said, “I’m definitely the one with the most wander in my heart.”


Read more:

Mondays

image:

On the Effectiveness of Aluminium Foil Helmets: An Empirical Study

Ali Rahimi¹, Ben Recht ², Jason Taylor ², Noah Vawter ² 17 Feb 2005

1: Electrical Engineering and Computer Science department, MIT.
2: Media Laboratory, MIT.

Abstract

Among a fringe community of paranoids, aluminum helmets serve as the protective measure of choice against invasive radio signals. We investigate the efficacy of three aluminum helmet designs on a sample group of four individuals. Using a $250,000 network analyser, we find that although on average all helmets attenuate invasive radio frequencies in either directions (either emanating from an outside source, or emanating from the cranium of the subject), certain frequencies are in fact greatly amplified. These amplified frequencies coincide with radio bands reserved for government use according to the Federal Communication Commission (FCC). Statistical evidence suggests the use of helmets may in fact enhance the government's invasive abilities. We speculate that the government may in fact have started the helmet craze for this reason. 

Introduction

It has long been suspected that the government has been using satellites to read and control the minds of certain citizens. The use of aluminum helmets has been a common guerrilla tactic against the government's invasive tactics [1]. Surprisingly, these helmets can in fact help the government spy on citizens by amplifying certain key frequency ranges reserved for government use. In addition, none of the three helmets we analyzed provided significant attenuation to most frequency bands.

We describe our experimental setup, report our results, and conclude with a few design guidelines for constructing more effective helmets. 

Experimental Setup

The three helmet types tested

The Classical	The Fez
The Centurion

We evaluated the performance of three different helmet designs, commonly referred to as the Classical, the Fez, and the Centurion. These designs are portrayed in Figure 1. The helmets were made of Reynolds aluminium foil. As per best practices, all three designs were constructed with the double layering technique described elsewhere [2].

Pedal Power

The velomobile: high-tech bike or low-tech car?

by  Kris De Decker, Lo-tech Magazine

Recumbent bikes with bodywork evoke a curious effect. They look as fast as a racing car or a jet fighter, but of course, they're not.

Nevertheless, thanks to the recumbent position, the minimal weight and the outstanding aerodynamics, pedalling a "velomobile" requires three to four times less energy than pedalling a normal bicycle.

This higher energy efficiency can be converted felt in terms of comfort, but can also be utilised to attain higher speeds and longer distances - regular cyclists can easily maintain a cruising speed of 40 km/h (25 mph) or more. The velomobile thus becomes an excellent alternative to the automobile for medium distances, especially in bad weather.

Basically, a velomobile is a recumbent bike with the addition of a bodywork. Recumbent bikes are considered a bit weird, but they have some interesting advantages over normal bicycles. For example, a recumbent bike has no saddle but a comfortable seat with back support, so that you sit or lie more comfortably and can keep pedalling for longer. Because of their superior aerodynamic capabilities, pedalling on a recumbent takes less effort, allowing you to travel more quickly and further than on a normal bicycle. Recumbent bikes can have two, three or four wheels. Trikes (3 wheels) and quads (4 wheels) offer the additional benefit of stability.


Picture: the Scorpion.

A velomobile - almost always a trike - offers two extra advantages over normal recumbent tricycles. The bodywork protects the rider (and mechanical parts) from the weather, so that the vehicle can be used in any season or climate. Furthermore, the aerodynamic shape of the bodywork further improves the efficiency of the vehicle, with spectacular results.

Know Your Strengths

Eff You

by  Stephen Squibb, N+1 Magazine

In week six of the 2007 NFL season, Kyle Eckel, the fourth-string running back for the New England Patriots, ran for a one-yard touchdown with nineteen seconds left. Given that his team was already beating Dallas by fourteen points, reigning sports theorist Bill Simmons offered the play as an example of the ”Eff You TD.” Four weeks after that, playing against the venerable Joe Gibbs, New England created a second category, the Eff You Second Half, going for it on fourth and one from the Redskins’ seven, up 38-0 in the third quarter. New England’s motivation was clear. Following the opening game of that same season, the Patriots had been caught video-taping their opponent’s defensive coordinator signaling on the sidelines. This practice, widespread, largely useless and actually legal until the 2006 season, nevertheless looked like grand larceny when attributed to the decade’s most successful franchise by a media already hysterical over steroids in the dugout and point-shaving on the court.

The resulting outcry left the new NFL commissioner, Roger Goodell, with two unpalatable options. The first was to punish the Patriots negligibly, in proportion to the seriousness of the crime. But two decades of willful Major League blindness to the hat size of its star players made this impossible. Had Goodell stood up and said what most professionals knew, namely that SpyGate, as it came to be called, was the football equivalent of picking one’s nose, football would have appeared just as compromised as baseball or basketball. The second option, which Goodell chose, was overkill. He fined the franchise half a million dollars and Pats coach Bill Belichick a personal quarter million, and docked the team a first-round draft choice—which, given the importance of young talent in the salary-cap era, effectively sent the entire organization to bed without supper for the year.

This saved the league’s reputation at the expense of New England’s. The team’s owner, Bob Kraft, was said to be privately furious despite his public mea culpas, while Belichick, never one for the spotlight, did an ungainly two-step to highlight what had been a general and widespread indifference to a benign practice without openly contradicting the league’s stated position on its nefariousness. Meanwhile Tom Brady, the overachieving sixth-round pick, remained largely silent, the chip suddenly restored to his shoulder. As had become custom, he and his did their talking on game day, tilling salt into the hallowed fields of NFL stadiums from Buffalo to San Diego. When they arrived in Glendale, Arizona, for Super Bowl XXLII, the Patriots brought the first 18-0 record in league history, having outscored their opponents 589-274 while shattering every conceivable offensive record. They were hated coast to coast with a vigor and intensity worthy of the greatest team in the most popular sport in the largest and most powerful empire in the history of the world. And a little more than a month after Tom Brady’s desperate last-second Hail Mary flew just past the outstretched hands of Randy Moss through the cool desert evening and into the turf, Bear Stearns collapsed overnight.

The NFL lockout, which officially began last Friday, will not have the same effect as the evaporation of one of the world’s most notorious investment banks. Nor will it present anything as epic as the Sophoclean climax of the 2007 season. Instead, the lockout feels like an eff you TD: a practically superfluous cruelty designed to prove a larger point. In the case of the Patriots, the thrust was clear: we are victimizing your defense without a camcorder, verily, we never needed it in the first place. Imagine if Barry Bonds, whose seventy-three home runs broke the single-season record in 2001, had returned as his old beanpole self in 2002, having quit the dope in the offseason, and hit a hundred home runs. You can’t imagine it, and that’s why we continue to hear about PEDs, but not so much about Spygate. The league’s message to the players and the fans in the recent struggle is not much different from the Patriots’ in 2007: we own you, regardless.

Typically assumed to be a billionaires’ club, NFL owners are actually a delightfully eclectic mix. Only half are actual billionaires; the rest are merely multi-multi-multi-millionaires. There are first of all the scrappy family businesses made good, like the Rooneys of Pittsburgh and the Halases of Chicago, the descendants of patriarchs who put down impossibly small sums of money to start teams. George Halas not only organized the Bears but also sold tickets and played wide receiver. There are also the less scrappy but still venerable families like the Hunts of Kansas City and the Adamses of Tennessee, oil legacies both. More famous are late-comers Jerry Jones, Pat Bowlen, Paul Allen, Jerry Richardson, and Arthur Blank, who represent oil, oil, Microsoft, Hardees, and Home Depot, respectively. Each of these groups has different reasons for wanting to lockout the players, but all of them are to some extent motivated by the one team that has no single owner at all but is instead collectively operated by 111,968 of its fans: your world champion Green Bay Packers.

Islands And The Law

by Sina Najafi, Cabinet Magazine

Bounded by water, circumscribed, and discrete, islands arguably constitute a natural geographical model for the classic territorial conception of a state (where sovereignty is thought to extend homogenously across a defined terrestrial region and terminate at the border). At the same time, the historical evolution of imperialism in both the East and the West has meant that most of the world’s actual islands became, at some point, off-shore colonial possessions of a distant metropolitan power. Treated as way stations, outposts, and resupply harbors, these outre-mer acquisitions tended to be spatially and legally marginal, regardless of their economic importance.

Christina Duffy Burnett is a professor of law at Columbia University, where she teaches legal history, immigration, citizenship, and the US Constitution. Much of her work deals with the legal problems that arise at the margins of empire. She spoke with Sina Najafi by phone in June of 2010.

This is a very general question, but let’s take a stab at it anyway: do islands matter in the law?

The best way to get at this may be to start with something quite specific. In the summer of 2003, I stumbled on a 969-page typescript treatise which is kept in the library of the US State Department. Flipping through this great leather-bound brick of onion-skin pages, I gradually absorbed that the whole massive volume had been put together in the 1930s by a lawyer working for the US Government who’d been given a killer assignment. Apparently somebody had walked over to the desk of this poor functionary, scribbling away in some basement office, and said something along the lines of: “You know, we have a bunch of islands in the Pacific and the Caribbean—little islands. How about you figure out what the deal is with all these places, legally speaking.” I was holding the result: The Sovereignty of Islands Claimed Under the Guano Act and of the Northwest Hawaiian Islands, Midway, and Wake. And it was splendid to behold: nearly a thousand pages of intricate legal arguments and historical documentation on the strange history of the United States’ nearly invisible, but surprisingly vast, insular empire.

The Guano Act? What is guano? It’s bat excrement, right?

Yes. And bird doo, too. In this case, it refers to the bird version.

So there was a US law about bird droppings that somehow proves important for thinking about the law of sovereignty?

Indeed. The Guano Islands Act of 1856 arguably laid the legal groundwork for American imperialism.

No More Mr. Bald Guy

Cures for baldness: hair-raising science

by Tim Lott

It is some time now since I started to worry about baldness – somewhere between the retreat of the already fine hair at my temples in my early 30s and the final failing of the last growth of hair at my crown a few years back.

I had been trying to convince myself that things might not be too bad for the past 20 years. But at the beginning of this year, at the age of 55, an encounter with a ceiling-mounted mirror revealed to me what was doubtless obvious to others – a monkish, thinning crown. There was no longer any doubt about it. I was definitely more bald than not.

My wife, Rachael, wanted me to take it all off and be done with it. It was an option that made me nervous. My brother, Jack, a professional hairdresser for 20-odd years, advised me to hold on to what little I had. He had witnessed many times the shock, usually unpleasant, that men felt when they finally did clip or shave their hair.

I retained a sentimental attachment to what remained of my hair. After all, it had once been my pride and joy. In my teenage years, during the summer, it was cornstalk yellow, and I wore it long and wild. I considered it to be one of the few effective items of mating display available to me, and its relentless disappearance was a matter of grave regret.

But regrets were not going to get my locks back. So, against the advice of my own brother, I turned up at Jack's salon, determined, at last, to go for The Chop.

I may be one of the last generation of men who face this dilemma. In December last year, scientists at the Berlin Technical University revealed they had grown the world's first artificial hair follicles from stem cells. The leader of the research team claimed that within five years millions of hair-loss sufferers could grow new hair from their own stem cells and have it implanted into their bald spots. In January this year a study by the University of Pennsylvania suggested that bald men were not bald at all – it was simply that their stem cells were producing growths too fine to be visible to the human eye. According to the team leader, Dr George Cotsarelis, "The fact that there are normal numbers of stem cells in a bald scalp gives us hope for reactivating those stem cells."

Saturday Night Mix

Letting The Days Go By

by Lad Tobin

Outside the 9:30 Club it’s almost 9:45 and I’m still more than 20 Phishheads from the doors—and more than 30 years too late. The only thing adolescent about me now is that I feel excruciatingly exposed standing in the long line of college students waiting in a freezing drizzle in a dreary D.C. neighborhood to see what I had assumed was an obscure jazz band called Karl Denson’s Tiny Universe. Apparently I’m not the only one unprepared for the cold and the crowd; the guy behind me, who seems to be working on a here’s-what-Bob-Marley-would-look-like-if-he-were-a-young-middle-class-white-kid-from-Fairfax-Virginia look, seems to be losing his groove.

“What is the friggin’ hang-up, man? I mean, shit, how long could it take to grab someone’s money and stamp someone’s friggin’ hand?”

I’m wondering the same thing along with wondering what my teenage line mates must think of me, a guy clearly old enough to be their father, even if I feel like I’m doing a fairly convincing version of here’s-what-Cat-Stevens-might-look-like-if-he-had-not-turned-into-Yusuf-Islam-but-instead-were-a-Jewish-guy-in-his-early-50s-who-had-gained-some-weight-and-lost-some-hair. The way some of these kids are staring at me makes me worry that they think I’m a narc, which is odd, since I’m feeling more like an addict in search of a fix. How else to explain why I’m shivering on this street corner, rocking back and forth, checking my watch, rather than enjoying the thermostat-controlled heat of my hotel room where I could have ordered room service, taken a bath, and then watched TV before going to sleep at a reasonable hour so that I’d be ready for my 9 a.m. breakfast meeting?

Fifteen minutes later, we find out what’s been taking so long: In between the ticket-taking and hand-stamping, the bouncer is doing some serious ID-studying. And, I now realize, with good reason: The show is 21 and over and, even if we take my 50-plus years into account, the average age is still decidedly 20 and under. Just as I finally get to the front of the line, a bouncer comes out of the club, walks a few steps past me, cups his hands around his mouth and yells, “This show is sold out!” The little white suburban Bob Marley groans and starts to flip out: “Sold out? What the . . . !” The bouncer turns to the ticket seller, holds up four fingers, and says: “Just let in four more and that’s it.”

Given that I appear to be one of the only people in line without a fake ID, I expect to be waved right in. But out of some sense of fairness or protocol, the ticket seller asks to see my license. As he scans it, I squirm from the awkwardness of being carded by a guy who is probably not much older than my daughters. When I look up, I can see from his frown that I’ve pushed him to a new territory or at least into New Math, and I’m certain I can read his thoughts: “2009 minus 1953. Damn, this guy is old!”

Each time the Rolling Stones or the Who head out on another last tour, we drag out the usual jokes about aging rock stars with prostate problems and apparently insufficient pension plans, about what Mick Jagger said about his future (“I’d rather be dead than singing ‘Satisfaction’ when I’m 45”), about what Roger Daltrey must be thinking when he sings “I hope I die before I get old.”
In spite of the jokes, I have a grudging respect for the perseverance of aging rock stars, backed up by the argument that musicians of other genres—classical, folk, blues, jazz—have always played into their old age and, anyway, a guy’s got to make a living.

But while that may explain what a middle-aged rock musician is doing at, say, midnight in a loud, crowded, smoky club with a bunch of 21-year-olds, it does not explain what a middle-aged rock fan is doing there. And I really do mean a middle-aged rock fan (as in one, singular, weird). I can no longer count the number of times I’ve looked around at the crowd in some jam-band, reggae, or funk show and realized that I’m the only one there over 25, let alone the only one there long past 25 times two. As long as the band is playing, as long as I’m caught up in the beat and can be just another limb in the amoebic-moving crowd, I’m fine. But in between songs and sets, there’s always the danger that I feel my all-too-active head separate from my all-too-middle-aged body and suddenly see myself the way I fear others see me: as Aqualung, the old man in the Jethro Tull song, or as Willy Loman in the scene from Death of a Salesman when his sons ditch him in a nightclub and, wandering out of the bathroom, he has no idea how he got there.

Read more:

Punt Guns

Punt guns were enormous shotguns used to hunt waterfowl in the 19th and early 20th Centuries. They were so heavy that they were normally attached to small boats called punts and the boats were then pointed as birds resting on the water’s surface:

Punt guns were usually custom-designed and so varied widely, but could have bore diameters exceeding 2 inches (51 mm) and fire over a pound (0.5 kilos) of shot at a time.

A single shot could kill over 50 waterfowl resting on the water’s surface. They were too big to hold and the recoil so large that they were mounted directly on the punts used for hunting, hence their name. Hunters would maneuver their punts quietly into line and range of the flock using poles or oars to avoid startling them.

Generally the gun was fixed to the punt; thus the hunter would maneuver the entire boat in order to aim the gun. The guns were sufficiently powerful, and the punts themselves sufficiently small, that firing the gun often propelled the punt backwards several inches or more. To improve efficiency, hunters could work in fleets of up to around ten punts.

The practice faded as wild waterfowl stocks were depleted. It was eventually banned in the United States, though I gather it is still legal in the United Kingdom.

via:

Special Effects

[ed. I don't understand any of this but it's still cool to see how the new Tron Legacy film was created.  More photos here]

I spent a half year writing software art to generate special effects for Tron Legacy, working at Digital Domain with Bradley "GMUNK" Munkowitz, Jake Sargeant, and David "dlew" Lewandowski. This page has taken a long time to be published because I've had to await clearance. A lot of my team's work was done using Adobe software and Cinema 4D. The rest of it got written in C++ using OpenFrameworks and wxWidgets, the way I've always done it with this team ;) Uniquely however, Digital Domain's CG artists were able to port my apps over to Houdini for further evolution and better rendering than OpenGL could ever provide. Special thanks to Andy King for showing me that what seasoned CG artists do at DD is actually not so far off from what's going on in the Processing community.

In addition to visual effects, I was asked to record myself using a unix terminal doing technologically feasible things. I took extra care in babysitting the elements through to final composite to ensure that the content would not be artistically altered beyond that feasibility. I take representing digital culture in film very seriously in lieu of having grown up in a world of very badly researched user interface greeble. I cringed during the part in Hackers (1995) when a screen saver with extruded "equations" is used to signify that the hacker has reached some sort of neural flow or ambiguous destination. I cringed for Swordfish and Jurassic Park as well. I cheered when Trinity in The Matrix used nmap and ssh (and so did you). Then I cringed again when I saw that inevitably, Hollywood had decided that nmap was the thing to use for all its hacker scenes (see Bourne Ultimatum, Die Hard 4, Girl with Dragon Tattoo, The Listening, 13: Game of Death, Battle Royale, Broken Saints, and on and on). In Tron, the hacker was not supposed to be snooping around on a network; he was supposed to kill a process. So we went with posix kill and also had him pipe ps into grep. I also ended up using emacs eshell to make the terminal more l33t. The team was delighted to see my emacs performance -- splitting the editor into nested panes and running different modes. I was tickled that I got emacs into a block buster movie. I actually do use emacs irl, and although I do not subscribe to alt.religion.emacs, I think that's all incredibly relevant to the world of Tron.

via:

Listen to Your Heart

via:

20 Years Later, Seattle Music Scene Still Channels Spirit Of Nirvana

by Marcie Sillman, NPR

Twenty-five years ago, if you thought about Seattle at all, you might have known it as the home of Boeing airplanes. Then along came a band that shook up the world's ideas about rock music. In September 1991, Nirvana released its major-label debut, Nevermind.

Nirvana's success helped transform Seattle from an isolated working-class city to an international hub of art, technology and cafe society. On Saturday, Seattle's Experience Music Project opens the first major exhibition ever devoted to Nirvana and the music scene that spawned the band.

When Alice Wheeler came to Seattle 30 years ago, she was a teenager who loved punk rock.

"This was a great neighborhood when I first moved here in the early '80s," Wheeler says. "There were three punk-rock clubs on this block." She says her favorite was one called The Grey Door. Today, it's a coffeehouse.

Wheeler has spent the past three decades photographing Seattle's fringe scene: her fellow punks, musicians and disaffected kids. She also shot the grunge scene.

In the late '80s, that word — grunge — was shorthand for rock bands with a heavy, distorted guitar sound and for flannel shirts and long johns under cutoff jeans. Grunge was synonymous with Seattle. Grunge was a gritty sound that developed in a gritty port city.

"Before the Internet, you had Boeing and the naval shipyards. I ended up working at the naval shipyard for a few years," musician and producer Jack Endino says. Endino left the shipyards to join a band called Skinyard. To support his music, he got a day job at a recording studio. That's where he got a call from a kid living in Aberdeen, a logging town southwest of Seattle.

"January of '88," Endino says. "Here comes this band with no name. Kurt Cobain and his friends. They could only afford one reel of tape, and they filled the tape up. It ran out in the middle of the 10th song. They said, 'That's OK, put a fade ending on that song. We're done. We don't have any more money.'

"Then," Endino says, "I played it for Jon Poneman." In 1987, Poneman and his partner Bruce Pavitt started a company called Sub Pop Records to put out singles by local bands.

"I was halfway through the first song," Poneman says, "and Kurt launches into a roar, and I was just, 'Oh my god.' "

The Great African Land Rush

by Drew Hinshaw

KEUR MOUSSA, Senegal -- Hours into the interior of this agrarian nation sits a cabbage, onion, sorghum, and lettuce field the size of Gibraltar that once belonged, it is said, to the villagers of Keur Moussa. They may never get it back.

In 1999, a well-to-do religious leader managed to acquire the title for the 1,500 acres of farmland that this village had long held in trust. Since he nabbed it, the plot has sprouted sheds, power lines, a water tower, tractors, and pick-up trucks that give it more the look of Iowa corn country than a Senegalese lot. Village women who used to grow, sell, and profit off its produce are now trucked in and out daily, tilling their grandparents' soil like migrant workers. It earns them two to four dollars a day.

"It's better than nothing," one of the women, Maty Ngom said.

Across the dirt road, the president of Senegal's Senate holds a 250-acre stretch, while a second religious leader claims another 2,200 acres. There is also the mystery businessman -- one "Baba Diop," a Senegalese name as generic as John Smith -- whose title to 285 acres, village gossip says, is a front for a foreign investor. A Lebanese, Ngom claims.

Whoever this land once belonged to, it's just a fraction of the hundreds of thousands of square miles of farmland that have been procured -- some bought, some leased, some stolen -- from the villagers of the tropics. The speed and scale at which ground in the developing world is being auctioned up is extraordinary: between 2008 and 2009 alone, the World Bank catalogued 174,000 square miles of land acquisitions in poor countries -- an acreage the size of Sweden. The lion's share of it, 124,000 square miles -- the size of Norway -- sits in Africa, in nations like Sudan, Ethiopia, Madagascar, and Mali. All are famous for their famines. None, not incidentally, are famous for good governance.

Those 174,000 square miles, meanwhile, are only the plots the World Bank could confirm. The local religious leader in Keur Moussa -- whose minders chase away camera-wielding journalists -- may or may not be on the list. Colonel Muammar Qaddafi is. The Brother Leader boasts a 99-year lease on a 386-square-mile, Dallas-sized plot of Malian corn land, plus a chicken farm in Togo. That puts him in the company of such landholders as Saudi Arabia's Sheikh Mohammed al-Amoudi, who holds a century-long lease on Ethiopian rice valleys; Indionesia's Sime Darby, a conglomerate that charters 850 square miles of Liberia's palm oil marsh; the South Korean government (Sudan, wheat); and a host of hedge funds that scout out the cheapest rents left on the meager eight percent of the planet that is arable land.

This is the fire sale of a continent lurching from the farm to the factory. At the turn of the century, Africa is trying once more, as it did in independence days, to industrialize. It's an endeavor that will set it back a fortune. In the past decade, governments like that of Guinea or the Democratic Republic of Congo have swapped billions of dollars worth of mining rights in return for ports, dams, and railroads. Normally possessive governments are selling off their biggest assets -- like Nigeria's electric company -- and taking out historically large bonds to borrow whatever start-up cash the World Bank won't front them.

In Senegal's capital, a two-hour drive from Keur Moussa, the government is calculating ways to boost its $2.3 billion in state revenue by $500 million a year. And it needs $1.2 billion beyond that -- ten percent of its economy -- just to buy the petrol and grid improvements to power low-level industry, never mind its mammoth cement and car factories. To raise that colossal sum, the state is hiking visa fees, piling on new phone taxes, bullying customs agents into stricter suitcase searches, and has asked everyone from Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to one of Rahm Emanuel's brothers for help.

Failing all that, Africa's industrial hopeful's like Senegal can sell land, the one resource -- more than mines or high-profile foreign assistance -- each has in abundance. And that, three years after China became a net food importer, and two years after catastrophic spikes in food prices, is a resource worth selling.

Read more:

The Dating Pool

via:

How Underdogs Can Win

by  Malcolm Gladwell

When Vivek Ranadivé decided to coach his daughter Anjali’s basketball team, he settled on two principles. The first was that he would never raise his voice. This was National Junior Basketball—the Little League of basketball. The team was made up mostly of twelve-year-olds, and twelve-year-olds, he knew from experience, did not respond well to shouting. He would conduct business on the basketball court, he decided, the same way he conducted business at his software firm. He would speak calmly and softly, and convince the girls of the wisdom of his approach with appeals to reason and common sense.

The second principle was more important. Ranadivé was puzzled by the way Americans played basketball. He is from Mumbai. He grew up with cricket and soccer. He would never forget the first time he saw a basketball game. He thought it was mindless. Team A would score and then immediately retreat to its own end of the court. Team B would inbound the ball and dribble it into Team A’s end, where Team A was patiently waiting. Then the process would reverse itself. A basketball court was ninety-four feet long. But most of the time a team defended only about twenty-four feet of that, conceding the other seventy feet. Occasionally, teams would play a full-court press—that is, they would contest their opponent’s attempt to advance the ball up the court. But they would do it for only a few minutes at a time. It was as if there were a kind of conspiracy in the basketball world about the way the game ought to be played, and Ranadivé thought that that conspiracy had the effect of widening the gap between good teams and weak teams. Good teams, after all, had players who were tall and could dribble and shoot well; they could crisply execute their carefully prepared plays in their opponent’s end. Why, then, did weak teams play in a way that made it easy for good teams to do the very things that made them so good?

Ranadivé looked at his girls. Morgan and Julia were serious basketball players. But Nicky, Angela, Dani, Holly, Annika, and his own daughter, Anjali, had never played the game before. They weren’t all that tall. They couldn’t shoot. They weren’t particularly adept at dribbling. They were not the sort who played pickup games at the playground every evening. Most of them were, as Ranadivé says, “little blond girls” from Menlo Park and Redwood City, the heart of Silicon Valley. These were the daughters of computer programmers and people with graduate degrees. They worked on science projects, and read books, and went on ski vacations with their parents, and dreamed about growing up to be marine biologists. Ranadivé knew that if they played the conventional way—if they let their opponents dribble the ball up the court without opposition—they would almost certainly lose to the girls for whom basketball was a passion. Ranadivé came to America as a seventeen-year-old, with fifty dollars in his pocket. He was not one to accept losing easily. His second principle, then, was that his team would play a real full-court press, every game, all the time. The team ended up at the national championships. “It was really random,” Anjali Ranadivé said. “I mean, my father had never played basketball before.”

David’s victory over Goliath, in the Biblical account, is held to be an anomaly. It was not. Davids win all the time. The political scientist Ivan Arreguín-Toft recently looked at every war fought in the past two hundred years between strong and weak combatants. The Goliaths, he found, won in 71.5 per cent of the cases. That is a remarkable fact. Arreguín-Toft was analyzing conflicts in which one side was at least ten times as powerful—in terms of armed might and population—as its opponent, and even in those lopsided contests the underdog won almost a third of the time.

In the Biblical story of David and Goliath, David initially put on a coat of mail and a brass helmet and girded himself with a sword: he prepared to wage a conventional battle of swords against Goliath. But then he stopped. “I cannot walk in these, for I am unused to it,” he said (in Robert Alter’s translation), and picked up those five smooth stones. What happened, Arreguín-Toft wondered, when the underdogs likewise acknowledged their weakness and chose an unconventional strategy? He went back and re-analyzed his data. In those cases, David’s winning percentage went from 28.5 to 63.6. When underdogs choose not to play by Goliath’s rules, they win, Arreguín-Toft concluded, “even when everything we think we know about power says they shouldn’t.”