Sky High Fly Buy

by  Olivia Solon

Two booksellers using Amazon's algorithmic pricing to ensure they were generating marginally more revenue than their main competitor ended up pushing the price of a book on evolutionary biology -- Peter Lawrence's The Making of a Fly -- to $23,698,655.93.

The book, which was published in 1992, is out of print but is commonly used as a reference text by fly experts. A post doc student working in Michael Eisen's lab at UC Berkeley first discovered the pricing glitch when looking to buy a copy. As documented on Eisen's blog, it was discovered that Amazon had 17 copies for sale -- 15 used from $35.54 and two new from $1,730,045.91 (one from seller  profnath at that price and a second from bordeebook at $2,198,177.95).

This was assumed to be a mistake, but when Eisen returned to the page the next day, he noticed the price had gone up, with both copies on offer for around $2.8 million. By the end of the day, profnath had raised its price again to $3,536,674.57. He worked out that once a day, profnath set its price to be 0.9983 times the price of the copy offered by bordeebook (keen to undercut its competitor), meanwhile the prices of bordeebook were rising at 1.270589 times the price offered by profnath.

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What's Left of the Left

Paul Krugman’s lonely crusade.

by Benjamin Wallace-Wells

If you are looking not only for clues into Barack Obama’s character but for a definition of what his presidency will mean to the country, then the speech on fiscal policy that he delivered at George Washington University the Wednesday before last is the most significant one he has ever given. It is, in its own way, an astonishing document, alive with the themes that undergirded his Philadelphia speech on race and his Nobel Prize acceptance, on the tragic enmeshment of American limitations and American strength. Obama was responding mostly to the Republican budget plan, and he understood exactly what its author, Representative Paul Ryan, had in his sights: “This vision,” Obama said, “is less about reducing the deficit than it is about changing the basic social compact in America.”

And yet, having defined the fight so starkly, Obama delivered a plea for compromise. He ended a stirring defense of the welfare state by explaining his plans to gut it. Then he said that even this proposed $2 trillion cut in government spending was only a starting point for negotiation: “I don’t expect the details in any final agreement to look exactly like the approach I laid out today,” he said. “This is a democracy; that’s not how things work.” There were notes of deference, and passivity: If Obama believed that his vision of society was at stake, why place it so squarely on the partisan bargaining table—or why not at least begin with a stronger gambit? This was, at any rate, the point of view of one particular strain of liberal reaction, whose position was summed up with poignant resignation by New York Times columnist Paul Krugman. “I could live with this as an end result,” he wrote. “If this becomes the left pole, and the center is halfway between this and Ryan, then no.”

For the first two years of the Obama administration, Krugman has been building, in his columns and on his blog, not just a critique of this presidency but something grander and more expansively detailed, something closer to an alternate architecture for what Obamaism might be. The project has remade Krugman’s public image, as if he had spent years becoming a chemically isolate form of himself—first a moderate, then an anti-Bush partisan, and now the leading exponent of a kind of liberal purism against which the compromises of the White House might be judged. Krugman’s counterfactual Obama would have provided far more stimulus money and would have nationalized Citigroup and Bank of America. He would have written off Republicans and worked only with Democrats to fashion a health-care reform bill that included a so-called public option. The president of Krugman’s dreams would have made his singular long-term goal the preservation of the welfare state and the middle-class society it was designed to create.

This purism is not a role Krugman is altogether comfortable with, but it is one he has sought: His blog is titled The Conscience of a Liberal. He uses it as a kind of workroom for his column, and it is now, according to Technorati, the most popular single-author blog online—a more statistically rigorous counterpart to Rachel Maddow’s show and the Huffington Post. The comment section has become a repository for a certain form of liberal anguish, and a community unto itself: “His campaign promised a better, more equitable America. Those who believed him feel betrayed,” wrote one commenter in regard to a recent column titled “The President Is Missing.”And another: “Come on, Professor Krugman, will you lead the people out?”

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Do Secretaries Have a Future?

by  Lynne Peril

THE 1950s and ’60s brought many new things to American offices, including the Xerox machine, word processing and — perhaps less famously — the first National Secretaries Day, in 1952. Secretaries of that era envisioned a rosy future, and many saw their jobs as a ticket to a better life.

In 1961, the trade magazine Today’s Secretary predicted that, 50 years hence, the “secretary of the future” would start her workday at noon and take monthlong vacations thanks to the “electronic computer.” According to another optimistic assessment, secretaries (transported through office hallways “via trackless plastic bubble”) would be in ever-higher demand because of what was vaguely referred to as “business expansion.”

But nearly 60 years later, on the date now promoted as Administrative Professionals Day, we’re living through the end of a recession in which around two million administrative and clerical workers lost their jobs after bosses discovered they could handle their calendars and travel arrangements online and rendered their assistants expendable. Clearly, while the secretary hasn’t joined the office boy and the iceman in the elephant’s graveyard of outmoded occupations, technological advancements haven’t panned out quite the way those midcentury futurists imagined. There are satisfactions to the job, to be sure, but for many secretaries, it remains often taxing, sometimes humiliating and increasingly precarious.

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Odd Couples

Charlie Chaplin and Albert Einstein

Marlon Brando and Charlie Chaplin

Alice Cooper and Salvadore Dali

Muhammad Ali and Bill Cosby

Michael Jackson and Stevie Wonder

Steve Jobs and Bill Gates

Hugh Hefner and Doris Day

William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy

Teddy Roosevelt and Moose

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Digital Peasants

The digital peasants are getting restless. The first signs of unrest are evident in the stirrings of the bloggers filing a suit against the Huffington Post and its parent AOL, which acquired the publication in February for $315 million. The same writers who were happy to contribute for free before the sale are now accusing the publication of turning them into “modern-day slaves on Arianna Huffington's plantation." The suit claims that about 9,000 people wrote for the Huffington Post on an unpaid basis, and it argues that their writings helped contribute about a third of the sale value of the site. These bloggers weren’t paid a single penny in the sale—the money went mostly to Huffington and a few investors.

Whether the bloggers have a case or not remains to be seen. The suit, however, brings to the fore tensions inherent in a new kind of production that is emerging today—what we might call “social production.” This kind of work involves micro-contributions from large networks of people who often receive “payment” in the form of fun, peer recognition, and a sense of belonging—that is, in social rather than monetary currencies. Facebook, Twitter, Google, Flickr, and many other stalwarts of today’s digital economy are enablers and beneficiaries of such production. They couldn’t possibly exist without the content of social producers, without their unpaid, albeit fun, labor. It is we who create Facebook profiles and post to them, we who share our thoughts on Twitter, we who upload our pictures to Flickr, we who post our medical data on PatientsLikeMe—it is we who are the new producers. Without us making these daily micro-contributions, none of these platforms could persist and grow and create value at the scale of hundreds of millions of dollars.

But the Huffington case brings us face-to-face with the reality that we, as social producers, are all becoming digital peasants. By turn, we are the heroic commoners feeding revolutions in the Middle East and, at the same time, “modern serfs” working on Mark Zuckerberg’s and other digital plantations.

John James Audubon: America's Rare Bird

by  Richard Rhodes

The handsome, excitable 18-year-old Frenchman who would become John James Audubon had already lived his way through two names when he landed in New York from Nantes, France, in August 1803. His father, Jean, a canny ship’s captain with Pennsylvania property, had sent his only son off to America to escape conscription in the Napoleonic Wars. Jean Audubon owned a plantation near Valley Forge called Mill Grove, and the tenant who farmed it had reported a vein of lead ore. John James was supposed to evaluate the tenant’s report, learn what he could of plantation management, and eventually—since the French and Haitian revolutions had significantly diminished the Audubon fortune—make a life for himself.

He did that and much, much more. He married an extraordinary woman, opened a string of general stores on the Kentucky frontier and built a great steam mill on the Ohio River. He explored the American wilderness from GalvestonBay to Newfoundland, hunted with Cherokee and Osage, rafted the Ohio and the Mississippi. Throughout his travels, he identified, studied and drew almost 500 species of American birds. Singlehandedly, Audubon raised the equivalent of millions of dollars to publish a great, four-volume work of art and science, The Birds of America. He wrote five volumes of “bird biographies” chock-full of narratives of pioneer life and won fame enough to dine with presidents. He became a national icon—“the American Woodsman,” a name he gave himself. The record he left of the American wilderness is unsurpassed in its breadth and originality of observation; the Audubon Society, when it was initially founded in 1886, decades after his death, was right to invoke his authority. He was one of only two Americans elected Fellows of the Royal Society of London, the preeminent scientific organization of its day, prior to the American Civil War; the other was Benjamin Franklin.

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Shrimp and Mango Tacos

by Martha Rose Schulma, NY Times

This sweet and pungent combination of mango, shrimp, chilies and cumin is as quick to put together as a stir-fry. Indeed, if you don’t have corn tortillas on hand, serve the shrimp with rice.

2 tablespoons canola oil
1 pound medium or small shrimp, peeled and deveined
2 garlic cloves, sliced
2 teaspoons cumin seeds, lightly toasted and ground
2 Serrano or bird chilies, or 1 large jalapeño, minced
1 large mango, peeled, seeded and finely chopped
1/4 cup chopped cilantro
4 to 5 tablespoons lime juice
8 corn tortillas

1. Heat a large, heavy skillet or wok over medium-high heat, and add the canola oil. When the oil is hot, add the shrimp, salt to taste and the garlic. Sauté, stirring or shaking the pan, until the shrimp begins to color, about two minutes. Add the cumin, and continue to cook until the shrimp is pink and opaque, about three minutes. Add the chilies, mango and cilantro, and stir together for one minute. Stir in the lime juice, and remove from the heat. Taste and adjust seasonings.

2. Wrap the tortillas in a heavy kitchen towel, and place in a steamer basket over 1 inch of boiling water. Cover the pot, and steam for one minute. Turn off the heat, and allow to sit for 15 minutes without uncovering. Alternatively, wrap the tortillas in a towel, and heat in the microwave for one minute.

Warm the shrimp briefly in the pan. Place 2 tortillas on each plate, top with the shrimp, fold over the tortillas and serve with rice.

Yield: Serves four.

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It's Not a Secret

[ed.  This is not uncommon.  When I worked in a bookstore (quite a while ago), we used to tear the covers off a couple hundred unsold paperbacks and magazines each week.  It was a cheaper way to document returns to the distribution agency, and the contents got shredded.  What a waste.]

A regular Victoria's Secret shopper, Marie Wolf brought an unworn pair of "Pink" brand sweatpants back to the store at Westshore Plaza a few weeks ago, and planned to buy something else. The clerk happily gave her a refund, then took a pair of scissors and started cutting the pants in half.

"I was shocked, because, mind you, these were $70 sweatpants, and there's nothing wrong with them," Wolf said. "The clerk just said, 'I know, but it's our policy.' "

Outraged, Wolf confronted a store manager, then called the parent company and found, indeed, Victoria's Secret does cut up some returned items so they can't be resold — even if they're in fine condition.

Apparently, the clerk's only mistake, Wolf said, was to cut up the clothes in front of customers, and not in a back room out of sight.

"I asked about donating them to Salvation Army, what about Goodwill, what about all the people who lost everything in the tsunami?" Wolf said. "I told them I won't ever shop with them anymore, and neither will anyone in my family."

Officials with Victoria's Secret owner Limited Brands declined to comment on the record about their return policy and procedures, though calls to local stores confirmed the practice. And they're not the only big retailer that destroys some items that customers return.

Winter Coat

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Bad Education

by  Malcolm Harris

The Project On Student Debt estimates that the average college senior in 2009 graduated with $24,000 in outstanding loans. Last August, student loans surpassed credit cards as the nation’s single largest source of debt, edging ever closer to $1 trillion. Yet for all the moralizing about American consumer debt by both parties, no one dares call higher education a bad investment. The nearly axiomatic good of a university degree in American society has allowed a higher education bubble to expand to the point of bursting.

Since 1978, the price of tuition at US colleges has increased over 900 percent, 650 points above inflation. To put that number in perspective, housing prices, the bubble that nearly burst the US economy,  then the global one, increased only fifty points above the Consumer Price Index during those years. But while college applicants’ faith in the value of higher education has only increased, employers’ has declined. According to Richard Rothstein at The Economic Policy Institute, wages for college-educated workers outside of the inflated finance industry have stagnated or diminished. Unemployment has hit recent graduates especially hard, nearly doubling in the post-2007 recession. The result is that the most indebted generation in history is without the dependable jobs it needs to escape debt.

What kind of incentives motivate lenders to continue awarding six-figure sums to teenagers facing both the worst youth unemployment rate in decades and an increasingly competitive global workforce?

During the expansion of the housing bubble, lenders felt protected because they could repackage risky loans as mortgage-backed securities, which sold briskly to a pious market that believed housing prices could only increase. By combining slices of regionally diverse loans and theoretically spreading the risk of default, lenders were able to convince independent rating agencies that the resulting financial products were safe bets. They weren’t. But since this wouldn’t be America if you couldn’t monetize your children’s futures, the education sector still has its equivalent: the Student Loan Asset-Backed Security (or, as they’re known in the industry, SLABS).

SLABS were invented by then-semi-public Sallie Mae in the early ’90s, and their trading grew as part of the larger asset-backed security wave that peaked in 2007. In 1990, there were $75.6 million of these securities in circulation; at their apex, the total stood at $2.67 trillion. The number of SLABS traded on the market grew from $200,000  in 1991 to near $250 billion by the fourth quarter of 2010. But while trading in securities backed by credit cards, auto loans, and home equity is down 50 percent or more across the board, SLABS have not suffered the same sort of drop. SLABS are still considered safe investments—the kind financial advisors market to pension funds and the elderly.

Time Flies

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Hacker Typer

[ed.  Want to show off in front of your co-workers and look like one of those the brainy computer geeks you see in the movies?  Here's your chance.  Just click on the "Hack!" prompt at this site or the image below and start typing.  Gee, I'm feeling smarter already.]

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There's Always a Catch

Due to the increasing obsession with quick solutions to excess fat mass, liposuction has become one of the most popular cosmetic procedures.

And as far as simply removing large volumes of subcutaneous fat from one’s body, it just may be the most effective method – certainly, far superior to diet/exercise or bariatric surgery.

But there are a few catches.

As I have previously discussed, in contrast to losing weight via lifestyle modification or bariatric surgery, liposuction does not make an obese person healthier.  In fact, the removal of benign subcutaneous fat stores may actually make you worse off in terms of metabolic health.

Also, as I suggested in an earlier post, there was some very preliminary evidence suggesting that after the removal of fat from the buttocks, thighs, and abdomen, women see a compensatory increase in the fat deposition in other places – namely, their breasts. A 2-for-1 deal, if you will.

However, a hot-off-the-press study by Hernandez and colleagues suggests something less ideal than this scenario. Indeed, the authors found that a year after liposuction was performed the fat initially removed is basically all replaced, but not necessarily where you’d want it to go.

In My Life

by Shine Jacob

To Jawaharlal Nehru, it was a symbol of independent India. C Rajagopalachari considered it a masterpiece of Swadeshi manufacturing. For the country’s industry, it was a perfect launch pad. But for a slice of what is soon going to be history, this might be the last chance. Godrej — the last manufacturer of typewriters in the world — has just 500 machines left for sale.

“We stopped production in 2009 and were the last company in the world to manufacture office typewriters. Currently, the company has only 500 machines left. The machines are of Godrej Prima, the last typewriter brand from our company, and will be sold at a maximum retail price of Rs 12,000,” said Milind Dukle, general manager-operations, Godrej & Boyce Manufacturing Company.

When the company started making typewriters, the whole nation considered it the first step to an industrialised India.

During its golden age in the 1990s, the company used to produce 50,000 machines every year, while the total output in India was about 150,000.

“From the early 2000 onwards, computers started dominating. All the manufacturers of office typewriters stopped production, except us. Till 2009, we used to produce 10,000 to 12,000 machines a year,” said Dukle.

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Terrorist Watch List

This item in the Guardian's coverage of the latest Wikileaks dump is not the first time I've heard that the Casio F-91W digital watch is thought to be "the sign of al-Qaida," and "a contributing factor to continued detention of prisoners by the analysts stationed at Guantánamo Bay."

But like so much revealed by Wikileaks, when stuff like this is proven out in the State Department's own pen, the absurdity levels really spike:

Briefing documents used to train staff in assessing the threat level of new detainees advise that possession of the F-91W - available online for as little as £4 - suggests the wearer has been trained in bomb making by al-Qaida in Afghanistan.

The report states: "The Casio was known to be given to the students at al-Qaida bomb-making training courses in Afghanistan at which the students received instruction in the preparation of timing devices using the watch.

Don't forget, folks, that you too can own the Casio F91W, the wristwatch considered by America's crack anti-terrorist experts as a sure sign of terrorist affiliations. Just $12! They are also available in a range of classic terrorist colors such as lavender and pumpkin. (Don't worry if they're sold out: you can always go on the terrorist watch list.)


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When Nature Calls

[ed.  Beware:  high ewww factor; but seriously, this would impose severe restrictions on your independence and quality of life.  What a terrible affliction to have.] 

by Cedar Burnett

You never quite forget the first time you crap yourself. Sure, there are the preambles -- the day you barely made it, running down the hall looking like a middle school boy hiding his erection, the many pairs of lightly soiled underwear thrown out in random bathrooms, and the spares you now carry in your purse. But nothing can really prepare you for the real deal. Once you cross that line, there’s no turning back.

I was about a month into my stressful new job selling radio ads when it happened. I spent my days making demoralizing cold calls that ended in rejection, and my nights trying to forget. The best way I knew to forget involved gorging on delicious food. Specifically Indian food. And donuts.

High on sugar and fat, my friend Jordan, my husband, John, and I set out for a postprandial walk from the donut emporium. We made it several blocks when it became clear something had gone horribly awry in my intestinal track.

"Get the car!" I squeaked to my companions, feeling the pressure mount in my guts and heat course through my body. "Get the car NOW!"

One look at my sweating, bug-eyed face was all the encouragement they needed.

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The Art of Seeing

by James Le Fanu

It is well known that towards the end of his life Monet’s sight was seriously impaired by cataracts. Still, it comes as quite a shock to see the effect on his paintings in the flesh, as it were, at the exhibition of his works currently showing at the Royal Academy.

In the early paintings, the reflections in the water of the famous pond at Giverny are so limpid that one has the impression it would only be necessary to reach out to feel the water running through one’s hands.

As time passed, his brushwork became much cruder and the colouring drearier. Writing in 1918, Monet observed: "I no longer perceive colours with the same intensity. Reds appear muddy to me, pinks insipid. What I paint is darker and darker, and when I compare it to my former works, I am seized by a frantic rage and slash at my canvases with a penknife."

Contemporary critics, true to form, stuck their knives in as well. "Monet’s coloured symphony has become increasingly monochromatic," one observed; and another described his paintings as "very unpleasant indeed with their coarse handling of paint and bilious colouring".

This "coarseness and bilious colouring" was due to the two distinct types of visual distortion induced by cataracts. The first, predictably enough, is simply a loss of visual acuity, but less well appreciated is that the cataract also has a yellowish discolouration, which makes the external world seem dirty. This yellowness also blocks out light from the blue end of the spectrum, to which the retina adapts by increasing its sensitivity to blues and greens.

In 1920, after the French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau had commissioned Monet to paint a series of enormous canvases of the water lilies in the Giverny pond, he realised he could "no longer make something of beauty". Finally, he agreed to having his cataracts operated on.

The standard procedure at the time was crude but effective, taking less than five seconds in skilled hands. With the eye anaesthetised with cocaine, the surgeon made an incision at the margin of the iris with a scalpel and scooped out the lens, together with its cataract. Then, while the incision healed, Monet had to spend the next 10 days flat on his back, with bandages over the eyes and his head immobilised by sandbags to prevent any movement.

Lava Men

photos:  markk

Understanding Your Unemployed Friend

by  Stephanie Georgopulos

Like pregnancy, divorce and anal sex, unemployment is one of those things you can’t possibly understand until it happens to you. Whether you left your job voluntarily or not, you never know what to expect until you’re knee-deep in “I have absolutely nothing to do.” Every day feels like the last day of a too-long vacation—you’re eager to get back to something, anything.

Likewise, the people in your life may not know how to deal with your predicament. There’s a good reason for this: unemployed people don’t like to talk about being unemployed. It's hard enough to find someone to talk to between the wasteland hours of 8 am and 7 pm—when you do find someone, you don't want to spend that conversation dragging them down into the dark caverns that you now affectionately refer to as “life." Really, given the choice, you'd rather discuss the season premiere of "Treme."

But on behalf of the unemployed people who refuse to express themselves, I’m breaking the silence. So here is the deal: Life is not the same as it once was, and neither is our friendship. Here is how to maintain a relationship with your unemployed friend. 

Stop calling it ‘funemployment.’

Coined by the unemployed masses, ‘funemployment’ was added to the lexicon when the recession hit in 2008. It makes unemployment sound young and sexy. Employed people? They want some of that. But you shouldn’t encourage the use of this word. ‘Funemployment’ is a myth; something unemployed people created as a coping mechanism. Unless eating a bag of Tostitos in one sitting and surfing craigslist for nine hours straight is your idea of fun, there’s not much enjoyment to be found in being idle all day. Unemployment is not Disney World. Dreams do not come true here.

Stiff Upper Lip

You have to hand it to the Brits when it comes to golf. This notice was posted in war-torn Britain in 1940 in a north-country golf club.

German aircraft from Norway would fly on missions to northern England; because of the icy weather conditions, the barrels of their guns had a small dab of wax to protect them. As they crossed the coast, they would clear their guns by firing a few rounds at the golf courses. Golfers were urged to take cover.

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