Thinking Beyond the Janitor's Closet

by Chris Wright

The Central European Journal of Engineering may not be the most widely read publication in the world, but an essay published in it earlier this year contained the nugget of an idea that could very well alter the course of human history. The author’s name is Brent Sherwood, and his article — titled “Inhabiting the Solar System” — will have been heavy going for people unfamiliar with Whipple bumpers and solar proton events. Behind the arcane language, though, was a rallying cry every bit as ambitious as President John F. Kennedy’s famous 1962 Space Race speech, in which the president argued that we do not explore the universe because it is easy, but because it is hard.

Sherwood is a strategic planner for NASA, and his main point was that it’s time to reverse Kennedy’s formulation. Our long, heroically reckless journey to the stars, Sherwood proclaimed, is about to trundle into the arena of the everyday. “We should anticipate that in the second half of the 21st century, with large numbers of people traveling, living, and working in space,” he wrote, “the technically challenging issues that dominate design and operation of habitable space systems today will have been largely solved and reduced to practice. As a result...more atavistic needs will come to the fore.”

What he meant by this, Sherwood explained in an e-mail interview, is that people who are doing more than “camping” in space will want the same things they’ve always wanted. “A typical day would parallel typical days on Earth,” he says. “What do people in integrated societies do? They feed their families breakfast, send the kids to school, go to work, do errands, and reconvene in the evening for dinner and entertainment.”

In the rarefied world of people who think about human space travel, this remark would likely raise eyebrows, if not blood pressures. Since the beginning, space travel has been ruled by questions of safety and expediency, in which nearly any adaptation beyond survival was dismissed as an expensive, and potentially perilous, luxury. “Failure,” said NASA flight director Gene Kranz during the harrowing Apollo 13 mission, “is not an option.” You get the sense that he would have felt the same way about breakfast nooks.

Sherwood’s argument is that space travel of the not-too-distant future will have little in common with the white-knuckle drama of the Apollo era. Yes, he says, people living and working in space will require reliable airlocks. But they will also need something else: They’ll need potted plants and swimming pools, libraries, parks, and police stations. They will want to be photographed standing in front of grand municipal structures, and to sit on their space porches sipping a nice Moontini. These people will not just be emigrants: They will be aliens. And to survive — to thrive — they will need to create a home away from home, and it is time we started thinking seriously about how to build it.

“None of this is fanciful,” says Sherwood. “It is essential.”

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Daily Kos: Markos Moulitsas's Website Changed Politics

by Jessica Lussenhop

In a faded casino in Las Vegas, venerable New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd zeroed in on a man she'd decided would be the topic of her next column.

The man, a baby-faced political blogger with darting brown eyes, faced a volley of questions from Dowd: What future did he envision for old-school journos like herself? What did he make of the fact that after only two years of blogging at Wonkette, Ana Marie Cox had just landed a gig at Time magazine?

As the man answered each question, Dowd's assistant took notes on a laptop.

Once satisfied, Dowd whisked down the garishly carpeted hallways and disappeared into a crowd of people wearing orange lanyards marked "YearlyKos Convention."

A short time later, when another reporter asked what it had been like to be the singular focus of the best-selling author and Pulitzer Prize winner's attention, Markos Moulitsas Zúniga was blunt in his assessment.

"Maureen Dowd," Moulitsas said, "is an insecure, catty bitch."

Moulitsas is not the type to mince words. It is his army nickname, "Kos," that is splashed across every balloon, tote bag, and lanyard at the conference, which had grown out of his influential political blog, www.DailyKos.com.

His fellow bloggers weren't there to kiss the ring of old-media celebs; they were checking nametags for the internet handles of fellow Daily Kos comrades: "pontificator," "Meteor Blades," "mcjoan," "dday." Until today, even their most ardent fans had no idea what they looked like.

Despite the crappy hotel, the fact that few of the workshop presenters had ever spoken in public, and the horror of learning at the last minute that the Riviera Casino had no Wi-fi, the event had drawn over 1,000 bloggers from all over the country. The media and politicians followed—Harry Reid delivered the keynote, and by day three, 147 journalists roamed the halls with cameras and microphones.

So it stood to reason that Moulitsas felt ballsy enough to spark a feud with one of the biggest names in the building. It was also his calling card: Many of the Daily Kos regulars who shook his hand for the first time that weekend agreed that "kos" the internet entity and Moulitsas the man were one and the same: acerbic, irascible, unapologetic.

Even five years later, as the sixth annual conference is set to descend on the Minneapolis Convention Center on June 16, Moulitsas expresses few regrets. He should not, he concedes, have called Dowd a "bitch." But, he adds, "she was catty and definitely insecure."

Her problem, Moulitsas argues, and the problem of many of the mainstream media writers who peeked behind the blogosphere curtain for the first time in that Las Vegas casino, was that she was too shortsighted to see the big picture.

"She's threatened," Moulitsas says. "She was trying figure out what her job security was. The political reporters, this was them trying to grapple with how credible and how serious this movement was."

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Lives Cut Short

by Danielle Ofri, M.D.

There is something about a first friend that is irreplaceable. No matter how disparately your lives travel, the first friend you ever had occupies a special place in your heart. I was lucky that Michael was considerate enough to be born four months before me, waiting next door, ready to join me in elaborate childhood games of hide-and-seek, multilevel couch forts and family camping trips in the Catskills.

Michael was quirky and inquisitive, equally adept at dismantling the innards of a telephone, figuring out how to sing “Hey Jude” backward, and testing the physics of fire escape ladders. We both became vegetarians at sleep-away camp — I because I thought it was cool, Michael because he literally couldn’t hurt a fly, protesting the flypaper strips that dangled from the ceilings and carrying spiders out of the cabin to set them free in a thicket of blackberry bushes.

When Michael killed himself during his sophomore year of college, it was a horrible shock. I’d known he’d been depressed, but we’d lost touch, so I hadn’t known the extent of it. But it was the fact the he’d shot himself in the face, in his childhood bedroom, while his parents and brother were watching TV downstairs that caused the most intense pain. How could someone who defended flies against the barbarity of flypaper find in himself the capacity for such violence?

As a physician, I know that suicide is the third leading cause of death for Michael’s cohort — 15- to 24-year-olds. Every year an estimated million people worldwide take their lives. It’s not just one million lives, but millions of families, friends and neighbors left with thorns in their hearts, black holes that may scab over but will never disappear.

Despite all the advances in depression treatment, mors voluntaria, or voluntary death, the Latin term for suicide, remains stubbornly persistent. I had always thought of suicide as what lay at the tarry depths of the funnel of mental illness. Then I came across an essay that offered a slightly different take.

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Howlin' Wolf

[ed. In recognition of Mr. Wolf's birthday today, June 10, 1910...no one like him.]

Born in White Station, Mississippi, near West Point, he was named after Chester A. Arthur, the 21st President of the United States, and was nicknamed Big Foot Chester and Bull Cow in his early years because of his massive size. He explained the origin of the name Howlin’ Wolf thus: “I got that from my grandfather [John Jones].” His Grandfather would often tell him stories about the wolves in that part of the country and warn him that if he misbehaved, the howling wolves would “get him”. According to the documentary film The Howlin’ Wolf Story, Howlin’ Wolf’s parents broke up when he was young. His very religious mother Gertrude threw him out of the house while he was still a child for refusing to work around the farm; he then moved in with his uncle, Will Young, who treated him badly. When he was 13, he ran away and claimed to have walked 85 miles (137 km) barefoot to join his father, where he finally found a happy home within his father’s large family. During the peak of his success, he returned from Chicago to his home town to see his mother again, but was driven to tears when she rebuffed him and refused to take any money he offered her, saying it was from his playing the “Devil’s music”.

In 1930, Howlin’ Wolf met Charley Patton, the most popular bluesman in the Delta at the time. Wolf would listen to Patton play nightly from outside of a nearby juke joint. There he remembered Patton playing “Pony Blues,” “High Water Everywhere,” “A Spoonful Blues,” and “Banty Rooster Blues.” The two became acquainted and soon Patton was teaching him guitar. “The first piece I ever played in my life was … a tune about hook up my pony and saddle up my black mare” (Patton’s “Pony Blues”). Wolf also learned about showmanship from Patton: “When he played his guitar, he would turn it over backwards and forwards, and throw it around over his shoulders, between his legs, throw it up in the sky.” “Chester [Wolf] could perform the guitar tricks he learned from Patton for the rest of his life.” “Chester learned his lessons well and played with Patton often [in small Delta communities].”

Howlin’ Wolf was also inspired by other popular blues performers of the time, including the Mississippi Sheiks, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Ma Rainey, Lonnie Johnson, Tampa Red, Blind Blake, and Tommy Johnson (two of the earliest songs he mastered were Jefferson’s “Match Box Blues” and Leroy Carr’s “How Long, How Long Blues”). Country singer Jimmie Rodgers, who was Wolf’s childhood idol, was also an influence. Wolf tried to emulate Rodgers’ “blue yodel,” but found that his efforts sounded more like a growl or a howl. “I couldn’t do no yodelin’,” Barry Gifford quoted him as saying in Rolling Stone, “so I turned to howlin’. And it’s done me just fine.” His harmonica playing was modeled after that of Rice Miller (also known as Sonny Boy Williamson II), who had taught him how to play when Howlin Wolf had moved to Parkin, Arkansas, in 1933.

Holy Cow, I Just Met the President

by Courtney Comstock

On Wednesday, I met President Obama.

I realize I'm supposed to act all cool and hard-bitten about this, as though it was just another day in the office.

But it wasn't.

I was at the Eisenhower Executive Offices (the building is almost next to the White House, where most of the staff works) for a press conference.

I was sitting around a table with a group of reporters and White House aide Heather Zichal, who was briefing us on how the White House is dealing with rising gas prices.

Then the President walked in.

Until that moment, just the press meeting alone had been exciting for me because I'd never been inside the White House. (My boss, Henry Blodget officially got the invite. Lucky for me he was booked and I raised my hand first when he asked the office, "Ok, who wants to go to the White House?").

We weren't expecting to meet the President. We had been given a general idea of who would be at the press conference -- people "like" Tim Geithner and Elizabeth Warren -- but we had no idea who the actual speakers would be. But of course, we were inside the Executive Offices, so anything was possible.

So there I was, happily sitting hearing how Eric Holder is monitoring speculation in oil and gas markets, and then behind me I heard a deep, "Hello, Everybody."

I spun around. President Obama walked past me and took a seat at the table.

First reaction: My jaw dropped. (Literally, there might be a video of it on the White House website soon. Embarrassing.)

Then I came back to earth and remembered where I was and why. The purpose of the meeting was to discuss economic policy, rising gas prices, and the economic recovery. Okay, reality check achieved. Then I told myself: Hold on, you just met the President. This might not happen again in your lifetime. It's okay to be dazzled.

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The Accidental Bricoleurs

by Rob Horning

I’ve always thought that Forever 21 was a brilliant name for a fast-fashion retailer. These two words succinctly encapsulate consumerism’s mission statement: to evoke the dream of perpetual youth through constant shopping. Yet it also conjures the suffocating shabbiness of that fantasy, the permanent desperation involved in trying to achieve fashion’s impossible ideals. The 21 posits that age as a fulcrum, tenuously balancing the teenage idea of maturity grounded in the uninhibited freedom of self-presentation against the presumptive regrets of everyone older, who must continually be reminded of when it all began to go wrong for them, the day they turned 22.

Forever 21 began in 1984 as a single store called Fashion 21 in Los Angeles. After expanding locally, it spread to malls beginning in 1989, but it has only truly proliferated in the last decade. It now has 477 stores in fifteen countries, and projected revenue of more than $2.3 billion in 2010. The worldwide success of Forever 21 and the other even more prominent fast-fashion outlets, like H&M (2,200 stores in thirty-eight countries), Uniqlo (760 stores in six countries), and Zara (more than 4,900 stores in seventy-seven countries) epitomize how the protocols of new capitalism—flexibility, globalization, technology-enabled logistical micromanaging, consumer co-creation—have reshaped the retail world and with it the material culture of consumer societies.

Though retailers have long employed trend spotters to try to capitalize on bottom-up innovation, fast-fashion companies have organized their business models around the principle, relying on logistics and data capture to respond rapidly to consumer behavior. With small-batch production runs and a global labor market to exploit, fast fashion accelerates the half-life of trends and ruthlessly turns over inventory, pushing the pace of fashion to a forced march. Fast fashion’s accelerated rate—and its unscrupulousness about copying branded designs—means that luxury houses and name designers, which once dictated fashion seasonally, now must increasingly adapt to the ramifications of fast fashion’s trial-and-error approach.

Despite apparently democratizing style and empowering consumers, fast fashion in some ways constitutes a dream sector for those eager to condemn contemporary capitalism, as the companies almost systematically heighten some of its current contradictions: the exhaustion of innovative possibilities, the limits of the legal system in guaranteeing property rights, the increasing immiseration of the world workforce. Their labor practices are in the long tradition of textile-worker exploitation, offering paltry piecemeal rates to subcontracted suppliers and overlooking how they treat employees. For instance, before the GATT Multifiber Agreement lapsed in 2005, allowing Forever 21 and other garment-makers to outsource much of their manufacturing to Asia, the company’s domestic labor practices generated lawsuits filed on behalf of workers who alleged sweatshop conditions. In a press release, the Garment Worker Center, a California-based workers’ rights group, noted some of the conditions that prompted the suits: withheld wages, long hours without legally mandated breaks, rat and cockroach infestations, and a lack of bathrooms and access to drinking water. The plaintiffs’ lead lawyer claimed that companies like Forever 21 “create and demand these conditions. They squeeze their suppliers and make it necessary for them to get things done as quickly and cheaply as possible, no matter what the cost to the workers.”

But why would the companies create these conditions? What logic drives the imperative to accelerate, regardless of the toll on workers? The all-purpose excuse for sweatshop practices once was the overriding need to offer bargain prices to Western consumers who have come to regard inexpensive clothes as an entitlement. Fast fashion has added the justification of better responsiveness to consumers’ fickleness. The companies overheat production schedules abroad so that they can constantly provide novelty and variety to customers who have come to expect it, who count on the stores not necessarily to meet their wardrobe needs but to relieve ennui. Shoppers come to witness and partake in the spectacle of pure novelty. On the chaotic retail floor and in the frantic dressing rooms of Forever 21’s stores, amid the disheveled racks and the items abandoned by shoppers distracted by something else, creative destruction ends up being staged as semi-prurient guerrilla theater, in which an endless series of hurried consumer costume changes is the essence of the performance.

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Friday Book Club: Ender's Game

by Thomas M. Wagner

Ender's Game is one of the great ones, a novel of extraordinary power that is among the very best the genre has ever produced. Written at a stage in Orson Scott Card's career when it seemed as if he could genuinely do no wrong, Ender's Game takes a familiar theme from war fiction — war as seen through the eyes of a child, as in Ballard's Empire of the Sun — and reframes it by making the child the war's central figure. It is a tale defined by a sense of both tragic inevitability and cold irony. It is not merely about the loss of innocence, as so many stories are with children at their center. It is about innocence systematically deceived and purposefully destroyed in the fanatical pursuit of a misguided higher ideal.

Andrew Wiggin, aka Ender, is a six-year-old boy born into a future that has suffered two devastating invasions from an alien hive-mind species commonly called the buggers. Human population controls are now strictly in place, and Ender is the third child born to his family. The International Fleet, whose task it is to prepare for the next bugger invasion, monitors children through devices implanted on their necks, to determine who can be trained from a very young age to be the next generation of soldiers defending Earth from these marauding beasts. The I.F. originally had its sights set on Ender's big brother Peter. But when it became clear Peter was not exactly what they were looking for, the Wiggins were authorized to have Ender, their Third. This is usually a stigma, but Ender shakes it off by excelling in every way.

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Man Eats Bear

[ed.  I've eaten bear on several occasions and it's actually pretty good (and sometimes awful depending on how it's stored and prepared).  Like pork, fear of trichinosis used to require that bear meat be thoroughly cooked - as in, dry as shoe leather.  However, improved cooking methods and a better understanding of food safety have made bear, when it's available, a welcome and interesting alternative to other meat dishes.  Like moose.]

by Hank Shaw

I finally ate bear last night, and it was good.

For some of you, the fact that bear can be good eating is no great surprise: The hunting and eating of bears has been going on since long before we out-competed the horrific (and thankfully extinct) cave bear for the best places to shelter ourselves from the rigors of the Ice Age. Bear hunting has been part of American life since we arrived in the 17th century, and roast bear was on the menu for more than a few state dinners during our nation's youth.

Bear regularly made its way to market before the sale of wild game was outlawed in the early 1900s, and it retained a place in the American palate right through the late 1950s. One of the best-selling cookbooks of all time, Meta Given's Modern Encyclopedia of Cooking (first written in 1947) includes a section on bear with helpful butchering tips, such as how to remove the scent glands behind the animal's hind legs.

Even more telling is that the 1957 edition of the Gourmet Cookbook includes three recipes for bear. Gourmet magazine never catered to the redneck hunter crowd: Putting bear in their cookbook means it was a legitimate facet of haute cuisine.

So why have I (and, I daresay, many of you) always felt ambivalent about eating bears? Was it watching Grizzly Adams as a kid? Winnie the Pooh? Maybe it was because I clutched a teddy bear every night when I was tucked into bed as a toddler. Hard to say.

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Death of the Phone Number

by Nilay Patel

I hate phone numbers. They’re a relic of an outmoded system that both wireless and wireline carriers use to keep people trapped on their services — a false technological prison built of nothing but laziness and hostility to consumers. In fact, I can’t think of a single telecom service that is as restrictive as the phone number: email can be accessed from any device, Skype makes apps for nearly every platform, IM works across any number of clients, there are web-based messaging solutions that transcend platforms entirely — the list goes on. We expect modern telecom services to be universal, cheap, and easily-accessible, and those that aren’t tend to be immediate failures. Ask Cisco how Umi went for them sometime.

Yet the phone number remains stubbornly fixed with a single carrier and single device, even as consumers begin to move every other aspect of their lives to the cloud. And the more I think about it, the more ridiculous it seems: Why can’t I open a desktop app and use my wireless minutes to make VoIP calls? Why can’t I check and respond to my text messages online? Why can’t I pick up any phone from any carrier, enter my phone service information, and be on my way, just as with email or IM or Skype? Why are we still pretending that phone service is at all different from any other type of data? The answer to almost all of these questions is carrier lock-in — your phone number is a set of handcuffs that prevents you from easily jumping ship, and they know it.

Happily, it seems like the industry is beginning to fight back. No platform provider wants to be limited by something as archaic and stupid as the phone number, and Apple, Google, and Microsoft have each taken serious steps towards eliminating phone number as we know it. What’s interesting is that each company has taken a dramatically different approach, with different tradeoffs along the way — let’s take a look.

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Baby

[ed.  Thanks, Barbara.]

How to Avoid Credit Card Problems Abroad

by Michelle Higgins

Like many Americans who have tried to use their credit cards in Europe, Elliot E. Porter, a historian from San Francisco, has encountered his share of payment headaches. Perhaps the most aggravating occurred a few months ago at Amsterdam Centraal Station, where he learned only after waiting in line to purchase train tickets that none of his credit cards, which include a MasterCard, Visa and American Express, would be accepted. The problem? They rely on magnetic-strip technology rather than embedded microprocessor chips, which are becoming increasingly common outside the United States.

“This is a big deal when traveling,” said Mr. Porter, who trekked back to his hotel to get cash, which he then had to exchange for local currency before returning to the train station to wait in a long line to pay for his tickets. He encountered similar problems at train stations in Belgium and Britain. “It just got super frustrating,” he said.

There may be some good news on the horizon for Americans like Mr. Elliot. A few banks have begun testing cards with the newer chip technology, known as E.M.V. (for Europay, MasterCard and Visa) and are beginning to offer the cards to select customers. Wells Fargo has issued cards with the embedded chips to about 15,000 United States-based clients who travel internationally, in a trial program. JPMorgan Chase is offering the cards to some of its high-net-worth customers this month. Meanwhile, Travelex, a major currency exchange company, began selling a preloaded E.M.V.-enabled debit card last year. Some credit unions have also begun offering credit or debit cards with chips, including the State Employees’ Credit Union of Raleigh, N.C., and the United Nations Federal Credit Union in New York.

It’s about time. Over the last decade, such cards (commonly referred to as chip-and-PIN cards because users punch in a personal identification number instead of signing for the purchase) have been widely adopted in Europe as a means to reduce credit card fraud; the information stored in the magnetic strips used in traditional cards can be stolen fairly easily. E.M.V.-enabled chip cards, requiring a PIN for authentification, are harder to counterfeit and are becoming the standard in other regions, including Canada, Latin America and the Asia-Pacific region. More than a third of the world’s payments cards (approximately 1.2 billion) are E.M.V. capable, along with roughly two-thirds of cashier terminals (18.7 million), according to EMVCo, the standards body owned by American Express, JCB, MasterCard and Visa.

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Ruling Favors a 10-Inch Citizen of France

[ed.  I like hamsters, so this is good news.]

by Steven Erlanger

France was punished on Thursday for not taking proper care of its hamsters.

The Court of Justice in Luxembourg, the European Union’s highest court, ruled Thursday that France had failed to protect the Great Hamster of Alsace, sometimes known as the European hamster, the last wild hamster species in Western Europe. If France does not adjust its agricultural and urbanization policies sufficiently to protect it, the court said, the government will be subject to fines of as much as $24.6 million.

The Great Hamster, which can grow up to 10 inches long, has a brown-and-white face, white paws and a black belly. There are thought to be about 800 left in France, with burrows in Alsace along the Rhine. That is an improvement: the number had dropped to fewer than 200 four years ago, according to figures from the European Commission, which brought the lawsuit in 2009.

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Sloshed: Maybe We Should Be Judging Wines by Their Labels

by Matthew Latkiewicz

Like plenty of normal people, I buy wine mostly based on the label. Sure, price is important — and those little cards with the scores help, too — but, frankly, if I do not like the label, I will not buy the wine, simple as that. You know that wine with the three moose wearing sunglasses? It’s called 3 Blind Moose? Yeah: I hate that label. I will never buy that wine. This is actually reasonable, I think. Unless you have an extensive knowledge of regions and grapes, the wine you choose is simply not going to matter all that much. What’s the worst that can happen? Unless it literally tastes like those sweat socks that wine people insist on using as a flavor comparison, you still end up with a bottle of wine you can drink. And last time I checked, a bottle of wine will get you nicely buzzed with your friends over the course of an evening no matter what you choose. So why not choose based on the label?

And so, a proposal: If labels are so important to our wine-buying choices — and I am saying they are — then we should understand labels just as we understand the other non-label parts of the wine (e.g., the grapes and the regions and stuff).

But while you can go on the Internet and find very detailed wheel-based charts for wine aromas and tastes, there is woefully little label categorization.

Not to worry: I have gone into the field and done some research. I wanted to know whether I could identify the types of labels I liked and which turned me off. I think I have identified seven major wine-label groupings along with several subclasses. I also tasted a bunch of wines according to their labels and have made wildly ill-advised extrapolations about what the label means for your drinking experience. And so, here is the wine label kingdom.

The French

The grand-cestor of all wine labels; the French is very word-heavy and relies on classic fonts most of the time. Owing to French wine laws, this label must contain specific data on where this wine was made, where the grapes were grown, and who made it. This standardization means that most French wine labels look the same and are all equally intimidating.

What to Expect: The words Appellation Bordeaux Contrlôlée Mis En Bouteille a La Propriété should tell you everything you need to know. It's the fancy stuff, and it will taste sort of like dirt, but in a good way.

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Hard Drive

Today's picture is from 1956, and shows an IBM hard drive. This unit would be used to store information, not unlike your memory stick, thumb drive, or camera memory card. The hard drive pictured weighed over 1 ton, and was capable of storing 5 Mb or data. For comparison, it would take over 1,000 of these units to store the information held in a modern thumb drive.

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