The Little Things

by David Cain

My friend Neil makes an interesting point about happiness: those “peak” moments in life — the big achievements and big releases that we imagine to be exactly what happiness is made of — will never amount to more than a tiny proportion of a person’s life. They are infrequent and quickly give way to the ordinary again. We invest a lot of energy getting to those exceptional highs, but they are exactly that: exceptions to the normal course of life.

In between these “violin crescendo moments” life unfolds without much fanfare, in its familiar way. But within these ordinary stretches of life lie frequent, intensely gratifying moments that arise out of the most mundane activities: waiting in line, parking your car, watching a TV movie.

Even in the context of a really bad day, there are humble little details that seem to hit some kind of “smile” button in the brain, and for those moments, life is unfettered. It’s great. Life is great just knowing that each day will contain them no matter what else the cat drags in.

Other than Ben Franklin’s two dreadful certainties, nothing in life is guaranteed — except (if you’re paying attention) that there will be a steady stream of these humble little awesome things, regardless of your situation, as long as you live. This is a powerful thought and even throughout the worst days I’ve never been able to forget it for long because the reminders come along so frequently.

Ever since I included him in a quick piece on three extraordinary blogs two years ago, Neil has been a friend of mine. I love his perspective on gratitude — it recognizes that the present moment really is the place to find everything you look for in life (and not just “in theory”), yet doesn’t stray into ego-dismantling, self-mortification or Stuart Smally-like affirmations. It takes playfulness, rather than determination.

I am not his only fan. Neil’s blog, 1000 Awesome Things hit its stride pretty quickly in 2008. He won the Webby Award the following year for Best Blog, leading to his first book The Book of Awesome, which became an international bestseller. Its sequel, The Book of (Even More) Awesome launched Tuesday.

There is something about couch cushion forts and the other side of the pillow that huge numbers of people seem to be able to identify with. I don’t recommend many (any?) products on this blog, but I’m all over this one. In terms of a practical, non-striving approach to cultivating quality of life, it’s hard to do better than to learn to celebrate these very things, just for what they are.

Recently I talked with Neil about the role of unhappiness in happiness, the role of “little thing” when it comes to quality of life, and cavemen. He’s a riot. Enjoy.

What's Cookin'?

 

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Hoverboard

[ed.  For my son the physicist, who always wanted one of these.]

by Evan Ackerman

Scientists could be months away from discovering antigravity

Scientists at CERN have announced that they've been able to trap 309 atoms of antihydrogen for over 15 minutes. This is long enough that soon, they'll be able to figure out whether antimatter obeys the law of gravity, or whether it's repelled by normal matter and falls "up" instead. It would be antigravity, for real.

While it's never been tested experimentally due to how difficult it is to create and store the stuff, it's disappointingly likely that antimatter will fall "down" just like regular matter. The thinking behind this is that antimatter (despite the "anti-") is made of regular ordinary energy, and even if it's got an opposite charge, it should still obey the same general rules as matter does. Antimatter falling up would mean a violation of the law of conservation of energy, among other things.

That said, if antimatter were to exhibit antigravity, it would go a long way towards explaining some of the peculiarities of our universe. For example, the universe is supposed to have just as much antimatter as it does matter, but we don't know where the antimatter is. If antimatter and normal matter repelled each other, it could mean that there are entire antimatter galaxies out there. Also, that repulsion would explain why the universe is not just expanding, but speeding up its expansion, something that's tricky to figure out when everything in the universe is always attracted towards everything else.

In either case, the team at CERN should be able to put the debate to rest within a couple months, when they plan to trap a blob of antihydrogen and then just watch it to see which way it falls. Down, and the laws of physics stay in place. Up, and you might just get that hoverboard you've always wanted.

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Forever Online

We are the first people in history to create vast online records of our lives. How much of it will endure when we are gone?

by  Sumit Paul-Choudhury

NOT long before my wife died, she asked me to do something for her. "Make sure people remember me," she said. "Not the way I am now. The way I was." Having spent most of her life as an assertive, ambitious and beautiful woman, Kathryn didn't want people's memories to be dominated by her final year, in which the ravages of disease and continual chemotherapy had taken her spirit, vitality and looks.

To me, the internet seemed to offer an obvious way to fulfil Kathryn's wish - certainly more so than a dramatic headstone or funerary monument. So I built a memorial website to celebrate her life through carefully selected pictures and text. The decision was unorthodox at the time, and I suspect that some in our circle thought it tasteless.

Six years on, things are very different. As the internet's population has grown and got older, memorial pages and tribute sites have become commonplace. But when you and I shuffle off this mortal coil, formal remembrances won't be the only way we are remembered. I manage myriad websites and blogs, both personal and professional, as well as profiles on Facebook, Flickr, Twitter and more. All of those will be left behind, and many other people will leave a similar legacy.

We are creating digital legacies for ourselves every day - even, increasingly, every minute. More than a quarter of a million Facebook users will die this year alone. The information about ourselves that we record online is the sum of our relationships, interests and beliefs. It's who we are. Hans-Peter Brondmo, head of social software and services at Nokia in San Francisco, calls this collection of data our "digital soul".

Thanks to cheap storage and easy copying, our digital souls have the potential to be truly immortal. But do we really want everything we've done online - offhand comments, camera-phone snaps or embarrassing surfing habits - to be preserved for posterity? One school of thought, the "preservationists", believes we owe it to our descendants. Another, the "deletionists", think it's vital the internet learns how to forget. These two groups are headed for a struggle over the future of the internet - and the fate of your digital soul is hanging in the balance.

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Want To Work At Google?

by Courtney Fielding

Since word of the company’s gourmet cafeterias and bring-your-puppy-to-work atmosphere first began circulating in the national media way back in 2006, becoming a Google employee has held a special place in the American imagination, somewhere between graduating from space explorer school and winning the Power Ball lottery. The result: a lot of speculation — and hyperbole — surrounding the company’s hiring process.

While we’ve all heard rumors of mandatory 3.7 GPAs and the ability to answer math questions over the phone with no calculator, the world might sadly never know just exactly how Google makes its hiring decisions. But perhaps former CEO Eric Schmidt has a little more insight into the process. Schmidt discussed the company’s personnel philosophy and corporate culture with McKinsey director James Manyika at a McKinsey conference in mid-March.

Be exceptional. Duh. We’ve all heard the company likes to stick interviewees with brain teasers to parse out their thought process and job candidates should always be prepared to explain how they’d stick an elephant in a refrigerator or figure out how many piano tuners work in New York. Says Schmidt: “We spent more time — and pretty ruthlessly — on academic qualifications, intelligence, intellectual creativity, passion and commitment. What bothers me about management books, they all say these things generically, but nobody does it.”

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Give Me A Kiss

[ed.  I don't know...this seems strangely disturbing for some reason.]

Of Course Japan Would Pioneer the Kissing Controller

Not content with cruder simulations of physical affection like the love pillow or mousepads with soft, wrist-comforting cleavage, researchers at Tokyo's Kajimoto Laboratory at the University of Electro-Communications have developed a kissing transmitter that aims to deliver the sensation of making out with someone over the internet.

Or, at least, making out with the business end of a hamster water bottle. Close enough!

Kajimoto Laboratory researcher Nobuhiro Takahashi demonstrates the device for DigInfo News, explaining that the PC controller currently works with a single computer but could effectively be networked to allow for online tonsil-hockey. The lab specializes in researching tactile feedback technology, including a vest that simulates the feeling of hugging oneself.

"The elements of a kiss include the sense of taste, the manner of breathing, and the moistness of the tongue," Takahashi explains. "If we can recreate all of those I think it will be a really powerful device." And how. Attach this to a PC release of Konami's Love Plus dating sim and they'd fly off the shelves.

Of course, we've already seen kissing control innovation in video games, but an online ready controller that services the lonelier gamer in their times of frenching need seems like an exciting step forward for science.

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Here Come the VCs

by Courtney Fielding 

Venture capitalist William Quigley, managing director of Clearstone Venture Partners, will release his State of Venture Capital in America today. The 20-year-industry veteran details a VC community at a crossroads and poised for comeback after a rocky decade. But only the strongest firms survived the shakeout. While there were 712 active technology investors at the start of the decade, only 313 remained in 2009.

We caught up with Quigley at his Santa Monica office and asked the VC to explain to us just what the heck is going on in this cooky market and hand over some advice for internet-based startups looking to attract the remaining VC players.

Q. The U.S. economy has grown nearly 50 percent since 2000, yet there are half as many venture firms in existence today as there were in 2000. That’s pretty shocking. What’s the effect of that contraction on the market?

A. Well, our entire asset class was pretty much abandoned over the last decade. But it’s actually great for those of us left standing! We have half as many firms as we did as ten years ago. We also have far fewer assets under management than we did ten years ago — $225 billion in 2000 versus $179 billion in 2009. What that tells me is the venture market is really poised for some really great returns. Whenever there is less capital it will generate a better return.

Plus, there are far fewer venture capitalists, and especially far fewer experienced venture capitalists around today. The angel markets have been deployed, but I don’t think there is a substitute for an experienced VC within your company who has weathered multiple IPOs and can assist when M&A heats up. The ones who are there are going to win big.

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Enforcing Copyrights Online, for a Profit

by Dan Frosch

When Brian Hill, a 20-year-old blogger from North Carolina, posted on his Web site last December a photograph of an airport security officer conducting a pat-down, a legal battle was the last thing he imagined.

A month later, Mr. Hill received an e-mail from a reporter for The Las Vegas Sun who was looking into a Nevada company that files copyright lawsuits for newspapers. The e-mail informed Mr. Hill that he was one of those that the company, Righthaven, was suing. Though the airport photo had gone viral before Mr. Hill plucked it off the Web, it belonged to The Denver Post, where it first appeared on Nov. 18.

Mr. Hill took down the photo. He was too late. A summons was delivered to his house. The lawsuit sought statutory damages. It did not name a figure, but accused Mr. Hill of “willful” infringement, and under federal copyright law up to $150,000 can be awarded in such cases.

“I was shocked,” Mr. Hill said. “I thought maybe it was a joke or something to scare me. I didn’t know the picture was copyrighted.”

Over the last year, as newspapers continue to grapple with how to protect their online content, Righthaven has filed more than 200 similar federal lawsuits in Colorado and Nevada over material posted without permission from The Denver Post or The Las Vegas Review-Journal.

The company has business relationships with both newspapers. Like much of the industry, the papers see the appropriation of their work without permission as akin to theft and harmful to their business, and are frustrated by unsuccessful efforts to stem the common practice, whether it’s by a one-man operation like Mr. Hill’s, or an established one like Matt Drudge’s.

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Ultimate Dog Tease

Thanks to: TYKIWDBI

The High Cost of Teacher's Salaries

by Dave Eggers and Ninive Clements Calegari

When we don’t get the results we want in our military endeavors, we don’t blame the soldiers. We don’t say, “It’s these lazy soldiers and their bloated benefits plans! That’s why we haven’t done better in Afghanistan!” No, if the results aren’t there, we blame the planners. We blame the generals, the secretary of defense, the Joint Chiefs of Staff. No one contemplates blaming the men and women fighting every day in the trenches for little pay and scant recognition.

And yet in education we do just that. When we don’t like the way our students score on international standardized tests, we blame the teachers. When we don’t like the way particular schools perform, we blame the teachers and restrict their resources.

Compare this with our approach to our military: when results on the ground are not what we hoped, we think of ways to better support soldiers. We try to give them better tools, better weapons, better protection, better training. And when recruiting is down, we offer incentives.

We have a rare chance now, with many teachers near retirement, to prove we’re serious about education. The first step is to make the teaching profession more attractive to college graduates. This will take some doing.

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Seared Lamb With Anchovies

by Melissa Clark, NY Times

Slipping a few anchovies into the stew pot is one of those sneaky little tricks that boosts flavor with virtually no effort. Unscrew the jar, plop in a couple of whole fillets, then watch them disappear into the sauce.

They act as flavor enhancers, bringing out the character of the other ingredients while adding a salty, complex nuance but with none of the fishiness that the anchovy-averse might expect.

A lifelong anchovy enthusiast, I embraced this secret the minute I heard about it. Now, I rarely stew a leg of lamb or chunk of pork shoulder without tossing in a few small fish.

I don’t know why it took me so long to think of adding them to a pan of quickly sautéed meat, but it makes perfect sense. Anchovies don’t require long simmering to disintegrate into a pan sauce. They don’t even need to be chopped. As any puttanesca fan knows, a few minutes of lazy stirring in a pan of simmering liquid or fat (usually olive oil or butter) will turn them into tasty paste.

In fact, that method is the basis of one of my favorite instant, there’s-nothing-in-the-house snacks. Just empty a drained jar of anchovies into a saucepan and melt them down with a stick of butter. After five minutes, stir in a little minced garlic and spread the resulting savory mush onto crostini, topping them with slices of ripe tomato or shavings of prosciutto.

In this recipe, I concoct a similarly flavored sauce for juicy little lamb chops. I use olive oil in place of butter and throw in a handful of capers. The pungent garlic and anchovies bring out the sweetness of the meat while a few sage leaves add a musky note.

The dish comes together in minutes but tastes as if you’d spent hours over the stove fussing and fine-tuning. And because the salted fish and olive oil meld into a smooth sauce, you can serve the dish to people who think they don’t like anchovies, then tell them when only the lamb bones remain.

6 baby lamb chops (1 1/4 pounds)
Salt and pepper
3 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
3 anchovy fillets
3 tablespoons drained capers
15 sage leaves
1/8 teaspoon red pepper flakes
2 garlic cloves, finely chopped
Lemon wedges, for serving.

1. Rinse the lamb chops and pat them dry. Season them with salt and pepper, and let rest for 15 minutes.

2. Over medium-high heat, warm a skillet large enough to hold all the chops in one layer. Add the oil and when it shimmers, add the anchovies and capers. Cook, stirring, until the anchovies break down, about 3 minutes.

3. Arrange the lamb chops in the skillet and fry, without moving them, until brown, about 3 minutes. Turn them over, and toss the sage leaves and pepper flakes into the pan. Cook until lamb reaches the desired doneness, about 2 minutes for medium-rare.

4. Arrange the chops on serving plates. Add the garlic to the pan and cook for 1 minute, then spoon the sauce over the lamb. Serve with the lemon wedges.

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Twins

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Struggling To Adjust

Man Raised By Parents Struggling To Adjust To Human Society

by The Onion

Two years after his discovery by a team of developmental psychologists, David Sullivan, a man raised by a pair of mated parents, is still struggling to adapt to normal human society, sources confirmed Friday.

According to researchers at the University of Minnesota, Sullivan, 25, has made significant progress since moving into his own apartment in 2009, but the decades he spent being reared by parents has made joining civilization a desperately difficult task.

"The chances of David ever becoming socialized to the point where he can function normally among humans is very slim," said Dr. Lisa Reynolds, a psychologist who has observed Sullivan since he was first introduced into the real world. "The sheltered, isolated environment in which he spent his adolescence has left him completely unequipped to deal with modern life. Tasks that may seem simple to us, such as doing laundry or grocery shopping, completely baffle David."

Reynolds explained Sullivan's assimilation into society had been hindered to a large extent by his extremely limited communication abilities. Though he has learned basic takeout-ordering commands, he will often relapse into the grunts and mumbles he is believed to have learned from the male parent, and will occasionally emit a high-pitched whine when he does not receive something he wants.

Sullivan reportedly has trouble navigating even the most simple situations, often becoming frustrated to the point of tears by an attempt to mail a letter at the post office, or shutting down completely when forced to have a conversation with a person he doesn't feel comfortable with.

"Whenever David enters a social gathering, for example, he quickly becomes fearful and anxious," Reynolds said. "He'll back himself into a corner, rapidly consume alcohol and snack foods, avoid eye contact, and, in some cases, lash out with sarcasm in reaction to perceived threats. Within an hour, he invariably becomes spooked and flees."

Aquatic Chicken

[ed. Where I grew up, tilapia were considered a trash fish, easily caught  in any brackish pond with a bamboo pole and a piece of bread.  The fact that they've now become a major component of our nation's fish diet says much about the status of other more desireable fish stocks and the industrialization (and marketing) of our fisheries.]

by Elisabeth Rosenthal

A common Bible story says Jesus fed 5,000 people with five loaves and two fish, which scholars surmise were tilapia.

But at the Aquafinca fish farm here, a modern miracle takes place daily: Tens of thousands of beefy, flapping tilapia are hauled out of teeming cages on Lake Yojoa, converted to fillets in a cold slaughterhouse and rushed onto planes bound for the United States, where some will appear on plates within 12 hours.

Americans ate 475 million pounds of tilapia last year, four times the amount a decade ago, making this once obscure African native the most popular farmed fish in the United States. Although wild fish predominate in most species, a vast majority of the tilapia consumed in the United States is “harvested” from pens or cages in Latin America and Asia.

Known in the food business as “aquatic chicken” because it breeds easily and tastes bland, tilapia is the perfect factory fish; it happily eats pellets made largely of corn and soy and gains weight rapidly, easily converting a diet that resembles cheap chicken feed into low-cost seafood.

“Ten years ago no one had heard of it; now everyone wants it because it doesn’t have a fishy taste, especially hospitals and schools,” said Orlando Delgado, general manager of Aquafinca.

Farmed tilapia is promoted as good for your health and for the environment at a time when many marine stocks have been seriously depleted. “Did you know the American Heart Association recommends eating fish twice a week?” asks the industry Web site, abouttilapia.com. But tilapia has both nutritional and environmental drawbacks.

Compared with other fish, farmed tilapia contains relatively small amounts of beneficial omega-3 fatty acids, the fish oils that are the main reasons doctors recommend eating fish frequently; salmon has more than 10 times the amount of tilapia. Also, farmed tilapia contains a less healthful mix of fatty acids because the fish are fed corn and soy instead of lake plants and algae, the diet of wild tilapia.

“It may look like fish and taste like fish but does not have the benefits — it may be detrimental,” said Dr. Floyd Chilton, a professor of physiology and pharmacology at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center who specializes in fish lipids.

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Litmus Test

by David Sarota

The killing of Osama bin Laden is one of those events which, especially in the immediate aftermath, is not susceptible to reasoned discussion. It's already a Litmus Test event: all Decent People -- by definition -- express unadulterated ecstacy at his death, and all Good Americans chant "USA! USA!" in a celebration of this proof of our national greatness and Goodness (and that of our President). Nothing that deviates from that emotional script will be heard, other than by those on the lookout for heretics to hold up and punish. Prematurely interrupting a national emotional consensus with unwanted rational truths accomplishes nothing but harming the heretic (ask Bill Maher about how that works).

I'd have strongly preferred that Osama bin Laden be captured rather than killed so that he could be tried for his crimes and punished in accordance with due process (and to obtain presumably ample intelligence). But if he in fact used force to resist capture, then the U.S. military was entitled to use force against him, the way American police routinely do against suspects who use violence to resist capture. But those are legalities and they will be ignored even more so than usual. The 9/11 attack was a heinous and wanton slaughter of thousands of innocent civilians, and it's understandable that people are reacting with glee over the death of the person responsible for it. I personally don't derive joy or an impulse to chant boastfully at the news that someone just got two bullets put in their skull -- no matter who that someone is -- but that reaction is inevitable: it's the classic case of raucously cheering in a movie theater when the dastardly villain finally gets his due.

But beyond the emotional fulfillment that comes from vengeance and retributive justice, there are two points worth considering. The first is the question of what, if anything, is going to change as a result of the two bullets in Osama bin Laden's head? Are we going to fight fewer wars or end the ones we've started? Are we going to see a restoration of some of the civil liberties which have been eroded at the alter of this scary Villain Mastermind? Is the War on Terror over? Are we Safer now?

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Cranes

Cycles of Time

What if the Big Bang wasn't the beginning but the end?

by Manjit Kumar

When I first encountered the work of MC Escher, I couldn't understand how he managed to depict the seemingly impossible. I was nine, and the two pieces that puzzled me were Waterfall and Ascending and Descending. In the first, water at the bottom of a waterfall flows along a channel back to the top without defying gravity in a never-ending cycle. The second is even more striking, with one set of monks climbing an endless staircase while another group walk down it without either ever getting any higher or lower. Years later I learnt that both works were inspired by Roger Penrose.

As a student in 1954, Penrose was attending a conference in Amsterdam when by chance he came across an exhibition of Escher's work. Soon he was trying to conjure up impossible figures of his own and discovered the tri-bar – a triangle that looks like a real, solid three-dimensional object, but isn't. Together with his father, a physicist and mathematician, Penrose went on to design a staircase that simultaneously loops up and down.  An article followed and a copy was sent to Escher. Completing a cyclical flow of creativity, the Dutch master of geometrical illusions was inspired to produce his two masterpieces.

Doing what most find impossible has long been Penrose's stock in trade in mathematics and physics, even when it comes to publishing. His previous book, The Road to Reality, was a 1,049-page bestseller, although it was mostly a textbook. Penrose doesn't do "popular", as he peppers his books with equation after equation in defiance of the publishing maxim that each one cuts sales in half. By that reckoning Cycles of Time will have about four readers, though it's probably destined to be another bestseller. As Penrose puts forward his truly Extraordinary New View of the Universe, that the big bang is both the end of one aeon and the beginning of another in an Escheresque endless cycling of time, he outlines the prevailing orthodoxy about the origins of the cosmos.

In the late 20s it was discovered that the light from distant galaxies was stretched towards the red end of the visible spectrum. This redshift was found to be greater the further away the galaxy was, and was accepted as evidence of an expanding universe. This inevitably led theorists to extrapolate backwards to the big bang – the moment of its birth some 13.7bn years ago, when space and time exploded into being out of a single point, infinitely hot and dense, called a singularity. That at least was the theory, with little more to back it up until 1964, when two American scientists discovered "cosmic background radiation" – the faint echo of the big bang. In the decades since, further evidence has accumulated and theoretical refinements made to accommodate it. Yet in recent years a few physicists have challenged the big bang model by daring to ask and answer questions such as: was the big bang the beginning of the universe?

Traditionally such questions have been dismissed as meaningless – space and time were created at the big bang; there simply was no "before". Although it's possible to work out in incredible detail what happened all the way back to within a fraction of a second of the big bang, at the moment itself the theory of general relativity breaks down, or as Penrose puts it: "Einstein's equations (and physics as a whole, as we know it) simply 'give up' at the singularity." However, he believes we should not conclude from this that the big bang was the beginning of the universe.

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Recycle

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The Man Who Groomed The Game

by  John Paul Newport

When Deane Beman took over as its commissioner in 1974, the PGA Tour was a middling collection of tournaments, many hosted by celebrities like Bob Hope, Jackie Gleason and Dean Martin, flimsily synchronized by a headquarters staff of 27. The total purse that year was $8 million. On television, golf was less popular and less lucrative than bowling.

Over the ensuing 20 years, Beman reinvented virtually every aspect of professional tournament golf. Almost all of the signal attributes of today's prosperous PGA Tour—the corporate title sponsorships, the emphasis on charitable giving, the network of Tournament Players Clubs where many events are staged (including the Players Championship the week after next at the famous island-green TPC Sawgrass course in Florida)—were his innovations. When he retired in 1994 at the young age of 56, total annual Tour prize money had grown to about $100 million, on its way to $276 million last year.

How Beman pulled this off is the subject of a new book by Adam Schupak called "Deane Beman, Golf's Driving Force: The Inside Story of the Man Who Transformed Professional Golf Into a Billion-Dollar Business" (East Cottage Press). It's as much a business narrative as a sports book, and all the more fascinating for it.

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Still Be My Friend

After the divorce can my stepson still be my friend?

by Deborah Gaines

I met my future stepson on a hot summer day outside the playground at Brooklyn's Prospect Park. Aaron was 6 years old and soaking wet from the sprinklers, his Tasmanian Devil T-shirt plastered to his skinny back.

"Dad says I don't have to talk to you" were his first words.

I stifled the urge to run. Instead, I introduced him to my 2-year-old daughter, Lila, who stared up at him in awe.

Without breaking eye contact, he took her juice box, crushed it in his hand, and dropped it on the ground. Then he turned to his father. "Can we go?"

So much for meeting cute.

Tom and I moved in together three months later, but it took four years, five therapists and another baby to turn us into a family. I remember the turning points: the day 8-year-old Aaron knocked down a boy who had pushed Lila in the McDonald's play area. The first time I helped him study for a test and, later, saw the triumph in his eyes when he got an A. As the years passed, the bonds strengthened. Lila, whose father had abandoned her when she was 2, started calling her stepfather "Daddy."

The older kids banded together to torment their little brother but defended him with fists and kickboards when he was bullied at the town pool. We survived learning disabilities, braces, bad grades and annoying questions about our different last names.

But as our family unit grew stronger, the marriage began to weaken. Maybe Tom and I gave so much to the children that we had nothing left for each other. When job loss, financial instability and health problems were added to the burden, it became too heavy to bear.

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