Sunday, July 24, 2011
A Whiff of History
by Courtney HumphriesThink of some of your most powerful memories, and there’s likely a smell attached: the aroma of suntan lotion at the beach, the sharpness of freshly mown grass, the floral trail of your mother’s perfume. “Scents are very much linked to memory,” says perfumer Christophe Laudamiel. “They are linked to remembering the past but also learning from experiences.”
But despite its primacy in our lives, our sense of smell is often overlooked when we record our history. We tend to connect with the past visually - we look at objects displayed in a museum, photographs in a documentary, the writing in a manuscript. Sometimes we might hear a vintage speech, or touch an ancient artifact and imagine what it was like to use it. But our knowledge of the past is almost completely deodorized.
“It seems remarkable to me that we live in the world where we have all the senses to navigate it, yet somehow we assume that the past was scrubbed of smells,” says sensory historian Mark Smith.
It seems far-fetched to think we could actually start to smell the past - or somehow preserve a whiff of our daily lives. But increasingly, technology is making it possible, and historians, scientists, and perfumers are now taking the idea of smells as historical artifacts more seriously. They argue that it’s time to delve into our olfactory past, trying harder to understand how people experienced the world with their noses - and even save scents for posterity. Their efforts have already made it possible to smell fragrances worn a century ago, to re-create the smell of a rare flower even if it goes extinct, and to better understand the smells that ancient cultures appreciated or detested.
Read more:
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Astronomers Find Largest, Most Distant Reservoir of Water
Two teams of astronomers have discovered the largest and farthest reservoir of water ever detected in the universe. The water, equivalent to 140 trillion times all the water in the world's ocean, surrounds a huge, feeding black hole, called a quasar, more than 12 billion light-years away."The environment around this quasar is very unique in that it's producing this huge mass of water," said Matt Bradford, a scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. "It's another demonstration that water is pervasive throughout the universe, even at the very earliest times." Bradford leads one of the teams that made the discovery. His team's research is partially funded by NASA and appears in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.
A quasar is powered by an enormous black hole that steadily consumes a surrounding disk of gas and dust. As it eats, the quasar spews out huge amounts of energy. Both groups of astronomers studied a particular quasar called APM 08279+5255, which harbors a black hole 20 billion times more massive than the sun and produces as much energy as a thousand trillion suns.
A Conversation with the Dalai Lama
The sun is shining on Tsuglakhang temple, in the foothills of the Indian Himalayas, and hundreds of Tibetans have gathered in the courtyard for a feast. As Buddhist monks ladle out white rice and stewed vegetables, horns blow and cymbals crash. Such celebrations are common here — the monks often feed local villagers as an act of service to earn karmic merit — but the festive air seems to capture the mood of the man who lives next to the temple. The Dalai Lama, despite many heartfelt petitions by his constituents, has finally been granted his wish for official retirement from government duties.
The Tibetan Parliament had twice urged His Holiness to reconsider, but he had declined even to read a message from them or meet with legislators. His mind was made up. On May 29th, the papers were signed and the Tibetan charter amended. The act marks a remarkable and voluntary separation of church and state: For the first time in more than 350 years, the Dalai Lama is no longer the secular as well as the spiritual leader of the Tibetan people.
Although the Tibetan government-in-exile has been largely democratic for decades, the Dalai Lama still had the final say in every major political decision within the diaspora. He appointed foreign envoys, determined the scope and timing of negotiations with China, had the power to sign or veto bills and could even dismiss Parliament. Now, with his signature, his formal title has changed from "Head of Nation" to "Protector and Symbol of Tibet and Tibetan People." Many of his political responsibilities will rest on the shoulders of Lobsang Sangay, a 43-year-old Harvard legal scholar who was elected in April to the post of prime minister.
China, dismissing the transfer of power as a "trick," has refused to meet with Sangay. The Communist government believes that the struggle for Tibetan autonomy will die with the Dalai Lama; all they have to do is wait him out. But by turning the reins of government over to the governed, His Holiness is banking on democracy's ability to serve as an effective bulwark against Chinese oppression. At 76, he knows he won't be around to steer the ship of state forever. Tibetans, he believes, must learn to steer it for themselves.
Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama, was born in 1935, the son of a farmer in a small Tibetan village. In accordance with ancient tradition, the dreams and visions of high lamas and oracles eventually led a search party to the boy. At age two, he successfully identified people and possessions from his past life and was officially recognized as the reincarnation of the 13th Dalai Lama. At four, he entered the capital of Lhasa and was named the spiritual leader of his people. At 15, he became head of state. In 1959, as tensions with the Chinese army reached a flash point, he fled to India, where he has led the Tibetan diaspora ever since.
Looking back over his 60 years of leadership, he has much to be proud of. He has established a successful and stable government in exile and stood firm against a brutal regime. As the first Dalai Lama to travel to the West, he has also extolled the virtues of nonviolence to millions, a lifelong effort that earned him a Nobel Peace Prize. As the spiritual leader of Tibet, he remains the personification of his nation's struggle.
I have known His Holiness since 1990, when I wrote Kundun, a movie about his childhood directed by Martin Scorsese. Since then, we have developed a lasting friendship. I continue to work as an activist for Tibetan autonomy and serve on the board of the International Campaign for Tibet. Every day I pray for Tenzin Gyatso's long life.
When we meet on June 2nd in his reception area behind the busy main temple in the dusty Indian hill town of McLeod Ganj, he asks if he still looks as healthy as the last time we met. Yes, I tell him — even younger, if possible. But, I add, his eyes look older. "That's right," he says. He wishes to inform me, however, that he hasn't needed to increase his eyeglass prescription — in part because he doesn't use a computer. "I never even tried," he says, breaking into his distinct, ebullient laugh. "I don't know how!"
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She Looks Too Much Like Me
by Shauna Miller
I joked about our age difference the first time we hung out. When Kurt Cobain died, I was in a pub in Germany. She was in the second grade. I made some crack about watching MTV News and feeling old. She was pretty cocky about not knowing who Kurt Loder was.
I joked about our age difference the first time we hung out. When Kurt Cobain died, I was in a pub in Germany. She was in the second grade. I made some crack about watching MTV News and feeling old. She was pretty cocky about not knowing who Kurt Loder was.
She was 23, opinionated, and emotional, with lots of orange hair on top. “Fiery” is the word I think I assigned the overall package. I liked arguing with her. She made me nervous. She had complicated hobbies, like making her own beer and playing archaic musical instruments. She had big, passionate ideas about what was wrong with the world and how to save it. We met while volunteering, because that's how every lesbian meets every other lesbian in Washington, D.C.She also had my haircut. To be fair, I had her haircut, too. Doppelbanger Syndrome—banging one’s clone—is a scourge of the lesbian community, and we had a critical case: same Bieber haircut, same thick-framed glasses. “You guys sisters?” everyone wondered, from pervy guys to sweet old ladies. D.C. doesn’t really do butch-femme, so there we were, left to haggle out the gray areas in the same dressing room at H&M.
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Notorious Ph.D.
Adam J. Ruben spent seven years working on a Ph.D. in molecular biology at Johns Hopkins. On the side, he performed at open mikes and wrote a book that didn’t count toward his publish-or-perish count. “Surviving Your Stupid, Stupid Decision to Go to Grad School” was published by Broadway Books last year. Now Dr. Ruben teaches an undergraduate class on the stand-up comic in society at Johns Hopkins, when he’s not at his day job at Sanaria, working on a vaccine for malaria. Another hobby: rapping.
Personal DNA Sequencing Machine One Step Closer
A new, low cost semiconductor-based gene sequencing machine has been developed and may unlock the door to advanced medicines and life itself.
A team led by Jonathan Rothberg of Ion Torrent in Guilford, Conn is working on a system which uses semiconductors to decode DNA, dramatically reducing costs and taking them closer to being able to reach the goal of a $1000 human genome test.
"DNA sequencing and, more recently, massively parallel DNA sequencing has had a profound impact on research and medicine," the study reads.
Typical DNA sequencing machines use optical technology instead of semi-conductors. While fast, optical technology is expensive and complex.
The current optical based system costs around $49000 and is already on the market and being used in over 40 countries.
The team hopes that the new development will allow them to tap into ever growing computing power that gets cheaper and more powerful over time, essentially riding the backs of the $50 billion chip industry.
"The reductions in cost and time for generating DNA sequence have resulted in a range of new sequencing applications in cancer, human genetics, infectious diseases, and the study of personal genomes,, as well as in fields as diverse as ecology, and the study of ancient DNA," the team said.
Read more:
image credit:
A team led by Jonathan Rothberg of Ion Torrent in Guilford, Conn is working on a system which uses semiconductors to decode DNA, dramatically reducing costs and taking them closer to being able to reach the goal of a $1000 human genome test. "DNA sequencing and, more recently, massively parallel DNA sequencing has had a profound impact on research and medicine," the study reads.
Typical DNA sequencing machines use optical technology instead of semi-conductors. While fast, optical technology is expensive and complex.
The current optical based system costs around $49000 and is already on the market and being used in over 40 countries.
The team hopes that the new development will allow them to tap into ever growing computing power that gets cheaper and more powerful over time, essentially riding the backs of the $50 billion chip industry.
"The reductions in cost and time for generating DNA sequence have resulted in a range of new sequencing applications in cancer, human genetics, infectious diseases, and the study of personal genomes,, as well as in fields as diverse as ecology, and the study of ancient DNA," the team said.
Read more:
image credit:
Saturday, July 23, 2011
Chain World
by Jason Fagone Jason Rohrer is known as much for his eccentric lifestyle as for the brilliant, unusual games he designs. He lives mostly off the grid in the desert town of Las Cruces, New Mexico. He doesn’t own a car or believe in vaccination. The 33-year-old works out of a home office, typing code in a duct-taped chair. He takes his son Mez to gymnastics and acting class on his lime-green recumbent bicycle, and on weekends he paints with his son Ayza. (He got Mez’s name from a license plate, and Ayza’s by mixing up Scrabble tiles.)
On the morning of February 24, Rohrer took a break from coding and pedaled to the local Best Buy. He paid $19.99 for a 4-gigabyte USB memory stick sheathed in black plastic. The next day he sanded off the memory stick’s logos, giving it a brushed-metal texture that reminded him of something out of Mad Max. Then, using his kids’ acrylics, he painted a unique pattern on both sides, a chain of dots that resembled a piece of Aboriginal art he had seen.
The stick would soon hold a videogame unlike any other ever created. It would exist on the memory stick and nowhere else. According to a set of rules defined by Rohrer, only one person on earth could play the game at a time. The player would modify the game’s environment as they moved through it. Then, after the player died in the game, they would pass the memory stick to the next person, who would play in the digital terrain altered by their predecessor—and on and on for years, decades, generations, epochs. In Rohrer’s mind, his game would share many qualities with religion—a holy ark, a set of commandments, a sense of secrecy and mortality and mystical anticipation. This was the idea, anyway, before things started to get weird. Before Chain World, like religion itself, mutated out of control.
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U.S. Wastes 34 Billion in Afghan and Iraq Contracting
[ed. Surprised? Think about this when you read how social spending cuts are needed as a concession to raising the debt ceiling.]
by Phil Stewart
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States has wasted some $34 billion on service contracts with the private sector in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to a study being finalized for Congress.
The findings by a bipartisan congressional commission were confirmed to Reuters by a person familiar with the draft of the study, which is due to be completed in coming weeks.
The analysis by the Commission on Wartime Contracting, details of which were first reported by the Wall Street Journal, offers the most complete look so far at the misuse of U.S. contracting funds in Afghanistan and Iraq, where more than $200 billion has been doled out in the contracts and grants over nearly a decade.
It also gives the most complete picture of the magnitude of the U.S. contracting workforce in the two countries.
The source, who declined to be named, said more than 200,000 contractors have been on the U.S. payroll at times in Iraq and Afghanistan -- outstripping the number of U.S. troops currently on the ground in those countries.
The United States has fewer than 100,000 troops in Afghanistan and some 46,000 forces in Iraq.
The tally of private sector contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan can be surprisingly difficult to obtain since many U.S. contractors are outsourced to subcontractors who depend on temporary labor, the source said.
The report blames a lack of oversight by federal agencies for misuse of funds and warns of further waste when the programs are transferred to Iraqi or Afghan control as the United States withdraws its troops.
The U.S. military is on course to withdraw all of its troops from Iraq by the end of the year and started drawing down its force in Afghanistan this month.
via:
by Phil Stewart
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States has wasted some $34 billion on service contracts with the private sector in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to a study being finalized for Congress.
The findings by a bipartisan congressional commission were confirmed to Reuters by a person familiar with the draft of the study, which is due to be completed in coming weeks.
The analysis by the Commission on Wartime Contracting, details of which were first reported by the Wall Street Journal, offers the most complete look so far at the misuse of U.S. contracting funds in Afghanistan and Iraq, where more than $200 billion has been doled out in the contracts and grants over nearly a decade.
It also gives the most complete picture of the magnitude of the U.S. contracting workforce in the two countries.
The source, who declined to be named, said more than 200,000 contractors have been on the U.S. payroll at times in Iraq and Afghanistan -- outstripping the number of U.S. troops currently on the ground in those countries.
The United States has fewer than 100,000 troops in Afghanistan and some 46,000 forces in Iraq.
The tally of private sector contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan can be surprisingly difficult to obtain since many U.S. contractors are outsourced to subcontractors who depend on temporary labor, the source said.
The report blames a lack of oversight by federal agencies for misuse of funds and warns of further waste when the programs are transferred to Iraqi or Afghan control as the United States withdraws its troops.
The U.S. military is on course to withdraw all of its troops from Iraq by the end of the year and started drawing down its force in Afghanistan this month.
via:
A Goodbye to Ambien in Dubai
by Amy Schumer
I look in the mirror one more time to see if I can get away without wearing a bra, and decide it's fine. Then I'm in the back of some sweaty cab that smells like chicken noodle soup, suggesting alternate routes and half-yelling at a cabbie. I need to get to JFK in under an hour. Fuck, why do I always do this?
I don't plan well. I think it's because secretly I hope I miss my flight. Actually, I'm mad I ever have to go anywhere. I got this offer to perform one night in Dubai at the Palladium theater about a month ago. Images of different rap videos flashed through my head: Puffy on a tank in the desert. Kanye in a Range Rover with dunes behind him. Biggie in Bed-Stuy, standing in a sandbox. Plus, my layover is in Istanbul. Scenes from Midnight Express appear in my mind and then I remember how delicious Turkish delight sounded in The Lion, The Witch, & The Wardrobe. Food wins."Yes" I say.
This is a new thing I’m doing. My first instinct is always to say no (which certainly isn't reflected in the number of people I've had sex with). But I was ready for this. I was in the mood to see some shit, to hand someone my passport in a foreign land and feel alive. About three days before I leave, more paperwork comes in. I sign a contract saying that while on stage I won't talk about their political leader. Um, no problem. I don't know who their leader is. Don't talk about religion. Done and done.
Still, it’s a foreign concept to censor my material, and it takes traveling halfway around the world to understand just how oppressive that country can be. It literally and figuratively keeps me up at night, too; in the coming two weeks, I’ll struggle with an Ambien addiction while claiming my independence in a country that treats women as possessions.
First I have to get there. My cab arrives at JFK and I immediately walk to the biz class lounge, putting cheddar wedges and water crackers on my plate the way I think a rich person would. The goal is to match everyone else’s silent snobbery and act like I'm always in these privileged shit holes. I now realize I should have worn a bra. I'm trying to look regal balancing chardonnay, cheese and a laptop and flopping all over the place near children and possible diplomats. I open up my computer after a healthy sip of vino, deciding now will be a good time to Google the places I'm going. This is my normal routine. Like I said, I don’t plan well. I don't look at the weather of my destination until my bags are checked, which has meant borrowing coats in Denver and buying gross bathing suits in Virginia Beach. It’s 120 degrees in Dubai, and apparently I have to cover up all my lady parts. Oh well, too late. Other topics pop up, and the one that catches my eye (other than the indoor ski slope) is the one with the words, "Arrested for Ambien.”
My stomach drops. I specifically Google “Ambien in Dubai.” I discover it's illegal there. Of course it is. Even people who come with their pills in the prescription bottle and a note from their doctor? Jail time. It's a gray area, some people say on the message boards. I am pretty sure “Gray Area” is not a term used in Sharia Law. (I have been following Amanda Knox since day one and she is innocent.) I’d rather not do a real life reenactment of Brokedown Palace. I don't want to be a story people learn from.
Why is this alarming? Amy, don't you know you're not supposed to take Ambien every night? Yes, yes I have heard that. But no one ever told me that if you take it every night and want to get off of it, the withdrawal is comparable to that of heroin.
I look in the mirror one more time to see if I can get away without wearing a bra, and decide it's fine. Then I'm in the back of some sweaty cab that smells like chicken noodle soup, suggesting alternate routes and half-yelling at a cabbie. I need to get to JFK in under an hour. Fuck, why do I always do this?
I don't plan well. I think it's because secretly I hope I miss my flight. Actually, I'm mad I ever have to go anywhere. I got this offer to perform one night in Dubai at the Palladium theater about a month ago. Images of different rap videos flashed through my head: Puffy on a tank in the desert. Kanye in a Range Rover with dunes behind him. Biggie in Bed-Stuy, standing in a sandbox. Plus, my layover is in Istanbul. Scenes from Midnight Express appear in my mind and then I remember how delicious Turkish delight sounded in The Lion, The Witch, & The Wardrobe. Food wins."Yes" I say. This is a new thing I’m doing. My first instinct is always to say no (which certainly isn't reflected in the number of people I've had sex with). But I was ready for this. I was in the mood to see some shit, to hand someone my passport in a foreign land and feel alive. About three days before I leave, more paperwork comes in. I sign a contract saying that while on stage I won't talk about their political leader. Um, no problem. I don't know who their leader is. Don't talk about religion. Done and done.
Still, it’s a foreign concept to censor my material, and it takes traveling halfway around the world to understand just how oppressive that country can be. It literally and figuratively keeps me up at night, too; in the coming two weeks, I’ll struggle with an Ambien addiction while claiming my independence in a country that treats women as possessions.
First I have to get there. My cab arrives at JFK and I immediately walk to the biz class lounge, putting cheddar wedges and water crackers on my plate the way I think a rich person would. The goal is to match everyone else’s silent snobbery and act like I'm always in these privileged shit holes. I now realize I should have worn a bra. I'm trying to look regal balancing chardonnay, cheese and a laptop and flopping all over the place near children and possible diplomats. I open up my computer after a healthy sip of vino, deciding now will be a good time to Google the places I'm going. This is my normal routine. Like I said, I don’t plan well. I don't look at the weather of my destination until my bags are checked, which has meant borrowing coats in Denver and buying gross bathing suits in Virginia Beach. It’s 120 degrees in Dubai, and apparently I have to cover up all my lady parts. Oh well, too late. Other topics pop up, and the one that catches my eye (other than the indoor ski slope) is the one with the words, "Arrested for Ambien.”
My stomach drops. I specifically Google “Ambien in Dubai.” I discover it's illegal there. Of course it is. Even people who come with their pills in the prescription bottle and a note from their doctor? Jail time. It's a gray area, some people say on the message boards. I am pretty sure “Gray Area” is not a term used in Sharia Law. (I have been following Amanda Knox since day one and she is innocent.) I’d rather not do a real life reenactment of Brokedown Palace. I don't want to be a story people learn from.
Why is this alarming? Amy, don't you know you're not supposed to take Ambien every night? Yes, yes I have heard that. But no one ever told me that if you take it every night and want to get off of it, the withdrawal is comparable to that of heroin.
Mastering the Machine
by John Cassidy
Ray Dalio, the sixty-one-year-old founder of Bridgewater Associates, the world’s biggest hedge fund, is tall and somewhat gaunt, with an expressive, lined face, gray-blue eyes, and longish gray hair that he parts on the left side. When I met him earlier this year at his office, on the outskirts of Westport, Connecticut, he was wearing an open-necked blue shirt, gray corduroy pants, and black leather boots. He looked a bit like an aging member of a British progressive-rock group. After a few pleasantries, he grabbed a thick briefing book and shepherded me into a large conference room, where his firm was holding what he described as its weekly “What’s going on in the world?” meeting.
Of the fifty or so people present, most were clean-cut men in their twenties or thirties. Dalio sat down near the front of the room. A colleague began describing how the European Central Bank had just bought some Greek bonds from investors at a discount to their face value—a move that the speaker described as a possible precursor to an over-all restructuring of Greece’s vast debts. Dalio interrupted him. He said, “Here’s where you are being imprecise,” and then explained at length what a proper debt restructuring would entail, dismissing the E.C.B.’s move as an exercise in “kicking it down the road.”
Dalio is a “macro” investor, which means that he bets mainly on economic trends, such as changes in exchange rates, inflation, and G.D.P. growth. In search of profitable opportunities, Bridgewater buys and sells more than a hundred different financial instruments around the world—from Japanese bonds to copper futures traded in London to Brazilian currency contracts—which explains why it keeps a close eye on Greece. In 2007, Dalio predicted that the housing-and-lending boom would end badly. Later that year, he warned the Bush Administration that many of the world’s largest banks were on the verge of insolvency. In 2008, a disastrous year for many of Bridgewater’s rivals, the firm’s flagship Pure Alpha fund rose in value by nine and a half per cent after accounting for fees. Last year, the Pure Alpha fund rose forty-five per cent, the highest return of any big hedge fund. This year, it is again doing very well.
The discussion in the conference room moved on to Spain, the United Kingdom, and China, where, during the previous week, the central bank had raised interest rates in an attempt to slow inflation. Dalio said that the Chinese economy was in danger of overheating, and somebody asked how a Chinese slowdown would affect the price of oil and other commodities. Greg Jensen, Bridgewater’s co-chief executive and co-chief investment officer, who is thirty-six, said he thought that even a stuttering China would still grow fast enough to push world commodity prices upward.
Dalio asked for another opinion. From the back of the room, a young man dressed in a black sweatshirt started saying that a Chinese slowdown could have a big effect on global supply and demand. Dalio cut him off: “Are you going to answer me knowledgeably or are you going to give me a guess?” The young man, whom I will call Jack, said he would hazard an educated guess. “Don’t do that,” Dalio said. He went on, “You have a tendency to do this. . . . We’ve talked about this before.” After an awkward silence, Jack tried to defend himself, saying that he thought he had been asked to give his views. Dalio didn’t let up. Eventually, the young employee said that he would go away and do some careful calculations.
After the meeting, Dalio told me that the exchange had been typical for Bridgewater, where he encourages people to challenge one another’s views, regardless of rank, in what he calls a culture of “radical transparency.” Dalio had no qualms about upbraiding a junior employee in front of me and dozens of his colleagues. When confusions arise, he said, it is important to discuss them openly, even if that involves publicly pointing out people’s mistakes—a process he referred to as “getting in synch.” He added, “I believe that the biggest problem that humanity faces is an ego sensitivity to finding out whether one is right or wrong and identifying what one’s strengths and weaknesses are.”
Dalio is rich—preposterously rich. Last year alone, he earned between two and three billion dollars, and reached No. 55 on the Forbes 400 list. But what distinguishes him more from other hedge-fund managers is the depth of his economic analysis and the pretensions of his intellectual ambition. He is very keen to be seen as something more than a billionaire trader. Indeed, like his sometime rival George Soros, he appears to aspire to the role of worldly philosopher. In October, 2008, at the height of the financial crisis, he circulated a twenty-page essay immodestly titled “A Template for Understanding What’s Going On,” which said the economy faced not just a common recession but a “deleveraging”—a period in which people cut back on borrowing and rebuild their savings—the impact of which would be felt for a generation. This line of analysis wasn’t unique to Dalio, but almost three years later, with economic growth stagnating again, it does not seem off the mark.
Read more:
Ray Dalio, the sixty-one-year-old founder of Bridgewater Associates, the world’s biggest hedge fund, is tall and somewhat gaunt, with an expressive, lined face, gray-blue eyes, and longish gray hair that he parts on the left side. When I met him earlier this year at his office, on the outskirts of Westport, Connecticut, he was wearing an open-necked blue shirt, gray corduroy pants, and black leather boots. He looked a bit like an aging member of a British progressive-rock group. After a few pleasantries, he grabbed a thick briefing book and shepherded me into a large conference room, where his firm was holding what he described as its weekly “What’s going on in the world?” meeting.
Of the fifty or so people present, most were clean-cut men in their twenties or thirties. Dalio sat down near the front of the room. A colleague began describing how the European Central Bank had just bought some Greek bonds from investors at a discount to their face value—a move that the speaker described as a possible precursor to an over-all restructuring of Greece’s vast debts. Dalio interrupted him. He said, “Here’s where you are being imprecise,” and then explained at length what a proper debt restructuring would entail, dismissing the E.C.B.’s move as an exercise in “kicking it down the road.”Dalio is a “macro” investor, which means that he bets mainly on economic trends, such as changes in exchange rates, inflation, and G.D.P. growth. In search of profitable opportunities, Bridgewater buys and sells more than a hundred different financial instruments around the world—from Japanese bonds to copper futures traded in London to Brazilian currency contracts—which explains why it keeps a close eye on Greece. In 2007, Dalio predicted that the housing-and-lending boom would end badly. Later that year, he warned the Bush Administration that many of the world’s largest banks were on the verge of insolvency. In 2008, a disastrous year for many of Bridgewater’s rivals, the firm’s flagship Pure Alpha fund rose in value by nine and a half per cent after accounting for fees. Last year, the Pure Alpha fund rose forty-five per cent, the highest return of any big hedge fund. This year, it is again doing very well.
The discussion in the conference room moved on to Spain, the United Kingdom, and China, where, during the previous week, the central bank had raised interest rates in an attempt to slow inflation. Dalio said that the Chinese economy was in danger of overheating, and somebody asked how a Chinese slowdown would affect the price of oil and other commodities. Greg Jensen, Bridgewater’s co-chief executive and co-chief investment officer, who is thirty-six, said he thought that even a stuttering China would still grow fast enough to push world commodity prices upward.
Dalio asked for another opinion. From the back of the room, a young man dressed in a black sweatshirt started saying that a Chinese slowdown could have a big effect on global supply and demand. Dalio cut him off: “Are you going to answer me knowledgeably or are you going to give me a guess?” The young man, whom I will call Jack, said he would hazard an educated guess. “Don’t do that,” Dalio said. He went on, “You have a tendency to do this. . . . We’ve talked about this before.” After an awkward silence, Jack tried to defend himself, saying that he thought he had been asked to give his views. Dalio didn’t let up. Eventually, the young employee said that he would go away and do some careful calculations.
After the meeting, Dalio told me that the exchange had been typical for Bridgewater, where he encourages people to challenge one another’s views, regardless of rank, in what he calls a culture of “radical transparency.” Dalio had no qualms about upbraiding a junior employee in front of me and dozens of his colleagues. When confusions arise, he said, it is important to discuss them openly, even if that involves publicly pointing out people’s mistakes—a process he referred to as “getting in synch.” He added, “I believe that the biggest problem that humanity faces is an ego sensitivity to finding out whether one is right or wrong and identifying what one’s strengths and weaknesses are.”
Dalio is rich—preposterously rich. Last year alone, he earned between two and three billion dollars, and reached No. 55 on the Forbes 400 list. But what distinguishes him more from other hedge-fund managers is the depth of his economic analysis and the pretensions of his intellectual ambition. He is very keen to be seen as something more than a billionaire trader. Indeed, like his sometime rival George Soros, he appears to aspire to the role of worldly philosopher. In October, 2008, at the height of the financial crisis, he circulated a twenty-page essay immodestly titled “A Template for Understanding What’s Going On,” which said the economy faced not just a common recession but a “deleveraging”—a period in which people cut back on borrowing and rebuild their savings—the impact of which would be felt for a generation. This line of analysis wasn’t unique to Dalio, but almost three years later, with economic growth stagnating again, it does not seem off the mark.
Read more:
Spirits of the South Pole
Aboard the Nimrod, from left, Frank Wild, Ernest Shackleton, Eric Marshall and Jameson Adams.
by Charles McGrath
“It’s daft,” a man settled in a Glasgow pub said to me not long ago, talking about the sums that rare Scotch whiskies sometimes fetch at auction — the bottle of Dalmore 64-year-old, for example, that sold last month for nearly $200,000. “If you pay that much, you canna drink it, and wha’s the use a just lookin’ at the bottle?”
But just as there are wine geeks, there are people who get carried away over Scotch. The rituals are the same — the swirling, the sniffing, the mouth sluicing — and so is much of the vocabulary. Hint of pear, cinnamon, crushed almonds, marzipan; whiff of tobacco, leaf-smoke, moist leather. Geography matters for whisky just as much as for wine. Not only are the products of Scotland’s main whisky-making regions — Lowland, Highland, Speyside, Islay and Campbeltown — characteristically distinct, but even whiskies from distilleries just a couple of miles apart can taste vastly different. This one is sweet and grassy, with a hint of barn straw and damp car seat; that one smoky and peaty, with notes of dried moss and wet sheepdog. There are no vintages for whisky — the distiller’s aim is a product that is consistent from year to year — and once bottled, whisky doesn’t age. But before bottling, it does age in the cask, taking on flavor from the wood and the bourbon or sherry that used to be stored there. So as with wine, older is generally better, and whisky collectors regularly shell out huge sums for rare bottles.
For $160 or so, collectors in America will shortly be able to buy, nestled in a little crate made in China to look authentically Scottish, not a rarity, exactly, but a replica of one: whisky fabricated to resemble the whisky that the explorer Ernest Shackleton took with him to the Antarctic so long ago that people had forgotten all about it. In February 2007, workers trying to restore Shackleton’s hut there accidentally came across three cases of Scotch — “Rare old Highland malt whisky, blended and bottled by Chas. Mackinlay & Co.” — frozen in the permafrost. The labels on the whisky say it was intended for what Shackleton was planning to call the Endurance expedition but ended up being known as the Nimrod expedition of 1907, which was the earlier and lesser-known of his two great journeys but the more successful. He actually got to within about 100 miles of the South Pole, farther south than anyone had gone previously.
Shackleton would have loved the idea of a replica whisky. An improvident man, always in debt, he was partial to get-rich-quick schemes, including a Hungarian gold mine. By today’s standards, he was an unlikely explorer, with little scientific training or interest. He wasn’t even particularly enthralled by snow and ice. What motivated him was the lure of fame and wealth, and exploration was the best way he knew to get them. Shackleton’s great gift was his personality. He was irresistibly charming, especially to women, and for his time — he was born in 1874 — was a highly advanced adulterer, who liked sharing his girlfriends with their husbands. Men adored him, too, in part because he ignored social hierarchy and treated everyone the same. He was an instinctive, natural leader who somehow inspired others to share impossible hardships with him.
The whole Nimrod expedition was almost comically ill equipped, partly because it was underfinanced but also because of Shackleton’s stubbornness. He believed in doing things the hard way — in manly, British fashion. Norwegian explorers like Fridtjof Nansen and Roald Amundsen had already demonstrated that the best way to get around in the polar regions was to use cross-country skis and to have sled dogs pull the supplies. Shackleton had skis, but neither he nor anyone on his team could be bothered to really learn how to use them. Robert Scott, whose 1901 Discovery expedition included Shackleton, detested dogs, because they had the ungentlemanly habit of eating their own excrement, and Shackleton seems to have inherited the prejudice. For the Nimrod expedition, he took along Manchurian ponies, who sank in the snow up to their bellies and proved more useful as food than as transport, and a motorcar, which repeatedly became stuck in the drifts. For most of the journey, he and his men pulled their own sledges, as Scott’s team had, sometimes trudging through waist-deep snow.
There was no fresh fruit or vegetables, but in all there were 25 cases of whisky — for warmth and a little perk-up, presumably — along with 12 of brandy and 6 of port. They were a hard-drinking crowd. The excellent and helpful “Shackleton,” by Roland Huntford, describes how at a midwinter Christmas party in June 1908, the men wore paper hats and funny noses; Alistair Mackay, the second surgeon, passed out after drinking two-thirds of a bottle of whisky; another of the team, Frank Wild, got moody and tried to pick a fight, as he tended to do. Shackleton himself liked to pull a cork, and heavy drinking and smoking may account for his death of a heart attack at age 47.
Why was the whisky found under the hut and not inside with the other rations? One theory is that Shackleton himself put it there in the fall of 1908, before setting off for the pole, in anticipation of a victory celebration when he returned. But the fact that one case was found pried open, with a bottle missing, suggests that the whisky there may have been someone’s secret stash. Wild, who was known to have a drinking problem, is a possible candidate.
Whisky lovers also like to imagine that the occasional bracing, restorative tot helped Shackleton and his three companions — Wild, Eric Marshall and Jameson Adams — withstand the hardship of their 1,700-mile trek south and back. On Christmas Day, we know, they celebrated with crème de menthe. It’s unlikely, though, especially on the return leg, when exhausted and malnourished and racing to get back before the Nimrod left, that they would have wanted the burden of whisky bottles. What really got them through was cocaine — in the form of pills called Forced March, which at one point Marshall fed the group every hour or so.
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