IBM 100

by Michael Hill and Jordan Robertson

Google, Apple and Facebook get all the attention. But the forgettable everyday tasks of technology — saving a file on your laptop, swiping your ATM card to get 40 bucks, scanning a gallon of milk at the checkout line — that's all IBM.

International Business Machines turns 100 on Thursday without much fanfare. But its much younger competitors owe a lot to Big Blue.

After all, where would Groupon be without the supermarket bar code? Or Google without the mainframe computer?

"They were kind of like a cornerstone of that whole enterprise that has become the heart of the computer industry in the U.S.," says Bob Djurdjevic, a former IBM employee and president of Annex Research.

IBM dates to June 16, 1911, when three companies that made scales, punch-clocks for work and other machines merged to form the Computing Tabulating Recording Co. The modern-day name followed in 1924.

With a plant in Endicott, N.Y., the new business also made cheese slicers and — significantly for its future — machines that read data stored on punch cards. By the 1930s, IBM's cards were keeping track of 26 million Americans for the newly launched Social Security program.

These old, sprawling machines might seem quaint in the iPod era, but they had design elements similar to modern computers. They had places for data storage, math processing areas and output, says David A. Mindell, professor of the history of technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Punch cards carted from station to station represented what business today might call "data flow."

"It was very sophisticated," Mindell says.

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Swoosh

by Allen Brettman

When the Nike pioneers caught their first glimpse of the black, curvy checkmark, the graphic designer waited patiently for a reaction.

Nothing. Then, what else you got?

Carolyn Davidson, pushing back disappointment that spring day in 1971, pressed on. One by one, she presented a handful of sketches. But ultimately the three men circled back to the checkmark, her favorite.

 "Well, I don't love it," Phil Knight said at the time, "but maybe it will grow on me."

Today, on the cusp of its 40th year, the symbol borne of necessity and a chance meeting at Portland State is one of the most recognizable in the world -- so much so that it can stand alone, without even naming the Oregon sports apparel empire it signifies.

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iCufflinks v1.0

iCufflinks by Adafruit from adafruit industries on Vimeo.

Phil from Adafruit Industries announces the iCufflink: "Open source electronic cufflinks, pulsate like Apple Macs - a very last minute ultimate geek gift for Father's day. I co-designed these little cufflinks; I wanted something that was futuristic but still classy enough to wear for special events when I need to get dressed up. There will be a necklace version too, of course."

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Underworld

by Jeanne Marie Laskas

He handed me a salt-and-vinegar potato chip. We were more than 500 feet underground, sitting on a blanket of powdered limestone, up in Section Two and a Half South. I asked him if there was anything he enjoyed about coal mining.

He thought a moment.

“I’m gonna say no,” he said.

“Oh, come on,” I said.

“You gotta stop shining your frickin’ light in my eye,” he said. “What did I tell you about that?”

He told me that the one thing that was going to piss off Billy, Smitty, Pap, Ragu, and the rest of the guys in the crew was if I pointed my light directly in their eyes. It’s a common early mistake. The normal human urge is to look a person in the eye, and when your only visibility is from a hard hat shining a pinpoint of light through the darkness, naturally you’re going to aim that sucker right at the eyeball.

“Sorry,” I said.

“Go for the shoulder,” he said. “Or the chin.”

I asked him how he got the nickname Foot.

“The first day I went into the coal mine, a guy looked down and said, ‘Damn, how big are your feet?’ I said, ‘15.’ He said, ‘You’re a big-footed son of a bitch.’ And that was it. One guy had a huge head, so of course we called him Pumpkin. One guy had a big red birthmark on his face, so of course his name was Spot. They don’t cut you any slack. They’ll get right on you. A coal miner will get right on you.”

I shined my light on his boots and he wagged them, like puppets.

It was tough getting used to identifying people, in the darkness, just as feet, shoulders, chin, teeth. As for Foot, he was a truck of a man, 49 years old, a wide load in both girth and spirit. He had a messy mop of gray hair and a rugged, intelligent face that often wore one expression: “You gotta be kidding me.” He was proud of a lot of what he’d done with his life—his three kids, his stint as a county commissioner, his coal-mining expertise—but his heart, he said, belonged to his fifty-two head of beef cattle: Pork Chop, Frick and Frack, and, aw, Bonehead, with the amazing white eyelashes.

He’d been in and out of coal mines since graduating high school and had just been promoted to assistant safety director of the Hopedale Mining coal company in Cadiz, Ohio, a small operation in the eastern part of the state, just beyond the panhandle of West Virginia. Aboveground, the area looks a lot more New England—rolling farmland dotted with tall oaks, white church steeples, geranium pots hanging on front porches—than it does the tar-paper-shack Appalachia people tend to associate with coal mining. Underground, I wasn’t permitted to go anywhere without Foot, even though I did. He got sick of me, and I got sick of him, and so he got even more sick of me in what became, over a four-month period, an easy friendship.

“It’s kind of peaceful down here,” I said to him.

“Yeah,” he said.

We were not at the face, not “up on section,” where the bellow and whir and hucka-chucka-hucka-chucka of the toothy, goofy, phallic continuous miner machine was extracting coal and dumping it, load after load, onto buggies that zoomed like lunatic roaches through the darkness. We were over in B entry, or A entry, or perhaps room 3; I had no idea. I rarely knew where I was in that endless catacomb of tunnels, on and on and on, about fifteen square miles in all, where the quiet, when you found it, felt like an 
embrace. You could sit there. You could shut your light off, sit there in the perfectly dark silence. Nothing. Just—nothing.

Until: Pop!

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The Indignity of Industrial Tomatoes

by Barry Estabrook

My obituary's headline would have read "Food Writer Killed by Flying Tomato."

On a visit to my parents in Naples, Florida, I was driving I-75 when I came up behind one of those gravel trucks that seem to be everywhere in southwest Florida's rush to convert pine woods and cypress stands into gated communities and shopping malls. As I drew closer, I saw that the tractor trailer was heavy with what seemed to be green apples. When I pulled out to pass, three of them sailed off the truck, narrowly missing my windshield. Every time it hit the slightest bump, more of those orbs would tumble off. At the first stoplight, I got a closer look. The shoulder of the road was littered with green tomatoes so plasticine and so identical they could have been stamped out by a machine. Most looked smooth and unblemished. A few had cracks in their skins. Not one was smashed. A 10-foot drop followed by a 60-mile-per- hour impact with pavement is no big deal to a modern, agribusiness tomato.

If you have ever eaten a fresh tomato from a grocery store or restaurant, chances are good that you have eaten a tomato much like the ones aboard that truck. Florida alone accounts for one-third of the fresh tomatoes raised in the United States, and from October to June, virtually all the fresh-market, field-grown tomatoes in the country come from the Sunshine State, which ships more than one billion pounds every year. It takes a tough tomato to stand up to the indignity of such industrial scale farming, so most Florida tomatoes are bred for hardness, picked when still firm and green (the merest trace of pink is taboo), and artificially gassed with ethylene in warehouses until they acquire the rosy red skin tones of a ripe tomato.

Beauty, in this case, is only skin deep. According to figures compiled by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Americans bought $5 billion worth of perfectly round, perfectly red, and, in the opinion of many consumers, perfectly tasteless fresh tomatoes in 2009—our second most popular vegetable behind lettuce. We buy winter tomatoes, but that doesn't mean we like them. In survey after survey, fresh tomatoes fall at or near the bottom in rankings of consumer satisfaction. No one will ever be able to duplicate the flavor of garden-grown fruits and vegetables at the supermarket, but there's a reason you don't hear consumers bemoaning the taste of supermarket cabbages, onions, or potatoes. Of all the fruits and vegetables we eat, none suffers at the hands of factory farming more than a tomato grown in the wintertime fields of Florida.

Perhaps our taste buds are trying to send us a message. Today's industrial tomatoes are as bereft of nutrition as they are of flavor. According to analyses conducted by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, fresh tomatoes today have 30 percent less vitamin C, 30 percent less thiamin, 19 percent less niacin, and 62 percent less calcium than they did in the 1960s. But the modern tomato does shame its 1960s counterpart in one area: It contains fourteen times as much sodium.

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Black Ops and Blood Money

by Matthew Teague

Hearing the American’s name whispered in his ear, the chief of police in Lahore, Pakistan, turns from his desk and nods toward a nondescript side door in his office. His desk sits surrounded by concentric rings of chairs, occupied by visitors hoping for a moment of Chief Aslam Tareen’s time. Lahore is a city of 10 million people, and justice demands constant attention. But before he’ll discuss the American — perhaps the most notorious American in Pakistan’s history — Tareen needs privacy. He leaves his desk and slips through the side door into a smaller, more secluded office. A bed is in the corner, along with a television, and an attendant brings a pair of slippers and sets them before the chief’s leather recliner. In Pakistan the truth is like a woman; it stays veiled in public, only fully revealing itself behind closed doors. And this particular subject is a treacherous one.

“Raymond Davis,” Tareen says, settling into his chair. “Spy.”

Davis operated in the darkest shadows of the war against terrorism. He worked for the CIA as an independent contractor, gathering information on the jihadist group behind some of the most cruel and spectacular attacks in recent years. The intelligence operation collapsed violently in January when two Pakistani men accosted Davis on a crowded street and he shot them both dead with a skill rarely seen outside spy novels. A botched attempt to rescue him in the -aftermath left a third man dead and Davis under arrest.

The episode inflamed the Pakistani people and set up a tricky showdown between two governments. It also pierced the cloak covering a clandestine world, exposing a realm of surveillance and countersurveillance, suspicion and political exploitation. For the United States, the consequences were profound: Pakistan is the CIA’s most important arena, a hiding spot for Al Qaeda and home of a dangerous, rising terrorist militia called Lashkar-e-Taiba. But Davis’s eventual release cost America much more than the money that was paid to compensate victims’ families: Backroom deals have forced the withdrawal of CIA operatives from the heartland of terrorism.

In the days after the incident, Police Chief Tareen announced to an outraged public that the American had murdered young Pakistani men “in cold blood.” But now, in his private chamber, Tareen can’t disguise a tone of professional admiration.

He had questioned Davis himself, but “from day one to day 14, he would not talk,” he says. Two weeks of silence. And then?

“He was in solitary,” Tareen says. “He said he wanted something to read.” They gave him magazines.

“He was very well trained,” says the chief. “Very calm.”

But what about the incident, I ask — the one that brought on the greatest intelligence crisis in America’s history with Pakistan? What about the shooting?

Tareen smiles.

“The shooting was expert.”

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Greece Riots

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Isley Brothers

Living For The Love of You.

Rover's Run

by Rick Sinnott

In May, a federal judge in Utah awarded $1.95 million to the family of an 11-year-old boy killed by a black bear in 2007. Meanwhile, Anchorage Mayor Dan Sullivan is still betting the city’s brown bears will behave. But how much is it worth to him? And whose money is he wagering?

In his decision, U.S. District Judge Dale Kimball found the U.S. Forest Service liable for failing to close a campsite and not warning the victim’s family of a bear attack at the same campsite earlier the same day. The judge ruled the agency would not have been at fault if they had posted signs warning of the earlier attack on a gate leading into the area and cordoned off the tent site. But someone dropped the ball. Judge Kimball found no evidence that the family had been warned, verbally or by a posted sign, and concluded the fatal attack was “foreseeable” and that “the whole area could have been closed off by simply closing the gate” blocking a 1.2-mile-long access road to the dispersed camping area.

I wonder what Judge Kimball would think of Rover’s Run. Last summer, when Mayor Sullivan had a similar opportunity to act when a biker was mauled by a brown bear on Rover’s Run, a two-mile-long trail in Far North Bicentennial Park, he refused to close the trail. He did allow his staff to post a few warning signs, however.

A year later, Sullivan is still obstinately refusing to heed the advice of local experts -- including his parks department, wildlife biologists with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, and the interagency Anchorage Bear Committee (ABC) -- as well as two municipal advisory boards.

The management coordinator for Fish and Game’s Southcentral region, Gino Del Frate, recently met with municipal staff. He reiterated last year’s recommendation: close Rover’s Run from June 15 through October 10, the period when spawning salmon attract a high level of brown bear activity along Campbell Creek. The mayor refused to consider it.

The go-to trail for maulings

Anchorage has hundreds of miles of publicly maintained trails, located mostly in Chugach State Park and several large municipal parks and greenbelts. Of these, Rover’s Run has become the go-to trail for anyone wanting to be mauled by a bear. That dubious distinction used to belong to the Albert Loop Trail, in Chugach State Park near the Eagle River Nature Center, where three hikers were mauled by brown bears during a four-year period in the late 1990s. Park rangers have closed the Albert Loop Trail in late summer and early fall every year since. No one has been attacked or injured on that trail in 13 years.

In comparison, three people -- two bikers and one runner -- have been mauled on Rover’s Run in the last three summers. The trail was closed by then-Mayor Mark Begich after the second person was mauled in mid-August 2008 and remained closed until mid-October, when brown bears were less likely to be attracted by salmon spawning in nearby Campbell Creek. Begich also closed Rover’s Run in 2009, from mid-June to mid-October. No bear attacks occurred on the trail during the closures despite continued use, mostly by bikers. However, after Mayor Sullivan refused to close the trail in summer 2010, a third person was mauled on June 15 at the intersection of Rover’s Run and the Gasline Trail. If Rover’s Run users had been mauled in the past three years at the same rate when the trail was closed as when it was open, at least six people would have required emergency medical attention.

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You Are Listening To

You are listening to Los Angeles.

Listen: New York | San Francisco | Chicago | Montréal

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Chaka Khan

M, Northern Kentucky

by Gary Percesepe

M is a journalist in Kentucky who went through a nasty divorce a few years back. She was drinking white wine in those days and coping with an abusive ex-husband but she pulled herself together, went through rehab, and raised two kids who adore her. The kids are out of the house now, and M is six years sober. She lives alone in a small town along the I-75 corridor just south of Cincinnati.

During the recent recession, jobs went away for journalists in the rural part of northern Kentucky where she lives. M found a job tutoring kids in English that paid $13 per hour, but a new Republican governor was elected and the program was cut. M strung some freelance work together, found some other part-time work. But none of her three jobs come with benefits or health care. She has some help from her family and her house is paid off. Of the nineteen million Americans classified as “the working poor,” she is better off than most. Still, in 2009 she made $20,000. In 2010 she made $10,000, well below the poverty line.

I went to see M just before Christmas. She’d just had some teeth pulled at the free clinic. Her mouth looked swollen and puffy. She’d been dreading the oral surgery for weeks, she told me on the phone. Every time she went to the “free clinic,” it cost $30 to be seen. Plus, getting there was a major pain in the ass. The clinic told her she wouldn’t be able to drive after the surgery, so a friend drove her, a sixty mile round trip.

I was there to provide consolation, M said when I walked through the door. In the Catholic sense, she added, presenting her tender mouth for a kiss. M had a Catholic girlhood, eight years of private Catholic schools, and could quote Julian of Norwich from memory, but these days she refers to herself as a pagan and is more likely to invoke the Goddess. She is mad at Jesus, who spoke so glowingly of the poor. There is nothing fucking virtuous about poverty, she groused.

Leaving my house in Ohio to make the drive to see her, I had reached down and picked up from the floor the remains of a case of chicken noodle soup, as an afterthought. When I swung the soup onto her kitchen counter, I sheepishly counted six cans. Oh, she said. You brought soup!

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The Brain On Trial

By David Eagleman

On the steamy first day of August 1966, Charles Whitman took an elevator to the top floor of the University of Texas Tower in Austin. The 25-year-old climbed the stairs to the observation deck, lugging with him a footlocker full of guns and ammunition. At the top, he killed a receptionist with the butt of his rifle. Two families of tourists came up the stairwell; he shot at them at point-blank range. Then he began to fire indiscriminately from the deck at people below. The first woman he shot was pregnant. As her boyfriend knelt to help her, Whitman shot him as well. He shot pedestrians in the street and an ambulance driver who came to rescue them.

The evening before, Whitman had sat at his typewriter and composed a suicide note:

I don’t really understand myself these days. I am supposed to be an average reasonable and intelligent young man. However, lately (I can’t recall when it started) I have been a victim of many unusual and irrational thoughts.

By the time the police shot him dead, Whitman had killed 13 people and wounded 32 more. The story of his rampage dominated national headlines the next day. And when police went to investigate his home for clues, the story became even stranger: in the early hours of the morning on the day of the shooting, he had murdered his mother and stabbed his wife to death in her sleep.

It was after much thought that I decided to kill my wife, Kathy, tonight … I love her dearly, and she has been as fine a wife to me as any man could ever hope to have. I cannot rationa[l]ly pinpoint any specific reason for doing this …

Along with the shock of the murders lay another, more hidden, surprise: the juxtaposition of his aberrant actions with his unremarkable personal life. Whitman was an Eagle Scout and a former marine, studied architectural engineering at the University of Texas, and briefly worked as a bank teller and volunteered as a scoutmaster for Austin’s Boy Scout Troop 5. As a child, he’d scored 138 on the Stanford-Binet IQ test, placing in the 99th percentile. So after his shooting spree from the University of Texas Tower, everyone wanted answers.

For that matter, so did Whitman. He requested in his suicide note that an autopsy be performed to determine if something had changed in his brain—because he suspected it had.

I talked with a Doctor once for about two hours and tried to convey to him my fears that I felt [overcome by] overwhelming violent impulses. After one session I never saw the Doctor again, and since then I have been fighting my mental turmoil alone, and seemingly to no avail.

Whitman’s body was taken to the morgue, his skull was put under the bone saw, and the medical examiner lifted the brain from its vault. He discovered that Whitman’s brain harbored a tumor the diameter of a nickel. This tumor, called a glioblastoma, had blossomed from beneath a structure called the thalamus, impinged on the hypothalamus, and compressed a third region called the amygdala. The amygdala is involved in emotional regulation, especially of fear and aggression. By the late 1800s, researchers had discovered that damage to the amygdala caused emotional and social disturbances. In the 1930s, the researchers Heinrich Klüver and Paul Bucy demonstrated that damage to the amygdala in monkeys led to a constellation of symptoms, including lack of fear, blunting of emotion, and overreaction. Female monkeys with amygdala damage often neglected or physically abused their infants. In humans, activity in the amygdala increases when people are shown threatening faces, are put into frightening situations, or experience social phobias. Whitman’s intuition about himself—that something in his brain was changing his behavior—was spot-on.

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Something Old, Something New

[ed.  And now something Blue, as the wedding has apparently been canceled.]

by Abby Aguirre

There are May-December marriages, and then there is Crystal Harris and Hugh Hefner, twenty-four and eighty-four, respectively, whose engagement, when it was announced by Hefner on Christmas Eve, via Twitter, attracted particular interest. The founder of Playboy told his hundreds of thousands of followers that he gave Harris, 2009’s Miss December, “a ring,” leaving open the question of what sort of ring it was.

“He did it on purpose,” Harris said on a recent Monday morning. “Once he had everyone, like, hanging for a day, he wrote, ‘To clear things up, the ring I gave Crystal was an engagement ring.’ ” Harris, who wore a black tank top, a white miniskirt, and black boots, was sitting at a glass table in a small room off the Playboy Mansion’s kitchen, eating scrambled egg whites before a day of bridal errands. “And then all of a sudden it was everywhere,” she said. “I had, like, fans in Sweden, Slovakia, Russia—everywhere.”

A little more than two years ago, Harris was a senior at San Diego State University. She and a friend drove up to the mansion for a Halloween party, where, dressed as a French maid, she caught Hefner’s eye. Two weeks later, she quit school and moved into the mansion. “I was a psychology major, and I didn’t want to be a psychologist,” she said. “I thought it would be cool to come up here and just, you know, hang with Hef. School will always be there, I guess.”

She starred in the following season of “The Girls Next Door,” a reality show about the women who live at the mansion. In her December centerfold, she wore a black bowler hat, a sprig of holly tucked in its band. (Turn-ons: “Real-life Prince Charmings.” Turn-offs: “Muscle heads with too much hair product.”) She is recording an album, developing a makeup brand, and designing a line of workout clothes. She tweets frequently. (Twitter bio: “Entrepreneur/Playmate/Hefs girl.”)

It was Harris who set up Hefner’s Twitter account. At first, Hefner wrote his messages on paper, counting the characters himself, and Harris would tweet them. Now he uses an iPad.

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Invisible, Inc.

by Bruce Barcott

I drove past Guy Cramer’s office twice before I finally realized it was the place I was looking for. Which was exactly how Cramer planned it. A quiet, affable Canadian who favors close-cropped hair and olive slacks, Cramer is one of the world’s top designers of military camouflage. His patterns are modeled by at least 1 million soldiers in more than a dozen countries including Canada, the United States, and Jordan. Late last year, the Afghan National Army took delivery of more than 130,000 new uniforms, all printed with a Guy Cramer design.

Cramer’s company, HyperStealth Biotechnology Corporation, sounds like one of those large, villainous military contractors in a Matt Damon thriller. But it’s really just him and a part-time assistant. HyperStealth’s research lab is an unmarked office in a former grade school in Maple Ridge, British Columbia. Local industry consists of a sawmill. Once you get to know Cramer, you realize the environs express his aesthetic of concealment. He practices the fine art of not being noticed.

Over the past 10 years, Cramer, 43, has created more than 8,000 unique camouflage patterns. Ultimately none may have more influence than his most recent design. In April, the United States Army issued a request for proposals for a new family of camouflage patterns to replace the Universal Camouflage Pattern design that’s been the Army’s general-issue print since 2004. Cramer is expected to be among the top contenders for the contract to create a family of patterns and palettes that can function nearly anywhere in the world. The winner of this Pentagon Project Runway will walk away with one of the most prestigious—and possibly most lucrative—contracts in military fashion. Nobody knows yet how much the winning bid will net, because each design shop will propose its own licensing fee. (Cost will be one of many factors in choosing a winner.) When I visited his office, it was clear that Cramer wasn’t losing any sleep over the bid. “We’ve been developing our pattern over the past six years,” he said. “We know it is effective.” In keeping with camo-designing custom, though, Cramer declined to show it to me. As you might expect, the concealment industry is fraught with secrecy.

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