Equation: Radiocarbon Dating

by Julie Rehmeyer

Right now, 40,000 feet overhead, a cosmic ray is sending a neutron smashing into a nitrogen atom, smacking a proton out of its nucleus and forming an isotope called carbon-14. Armed with the equation below, archaeologists use these atoms to pinpoint how old the Dead Sea Scrolls are, or the drawings in Chauvet Cave, or Ötzi the Iceman.

Living things constantly consume carbon—through photosynthesis, for plants, and for animals, ingestion of those plants. The atmospheric ratio of carbon-14 to regular carbon-12 remains consistent at one part per trillion, so if something is alive, one-trillionth of its carbon atoms will be C-14. But once a plant or animal dies, its carbon-14 is no longer replenished. C-14 is radioactive and unstable, with a half-life of 5,730 years, which means that half the atoms will turn back into nitrogen over that period. That rate of decay is key to gauging age.

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Illustration: Mario Hugo

Photo:  Aerial Photography, Flickr
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The Next Big Bank Bailout

[ed.  Lots of bank and business news these days on Wall Street protests, increased debit card fees, European bail-out maneuvers, and lobbying efforts to repatriate massive offshore tax shelter profits at reduced tax rates.  Then there's this, which has been flying under the radar for the last few weeks.]   

by Matt Taibbi

Amidst all the bad news coming out of Wall Street and the economy, here’s something good: California has backed out of the talks for the long-awaited foreclosure settlement, now making it far from likely that the so-called “Attorneys General” deal will happen anytime soon.

California Attorney General Kamala Harris sent a letter to state and federal regulators explaining that she pulled out because the proposed settlement amount for banks guilty of bad securitization practices leading up to the mortgage crisis – said to be in the $20 billion range – was too small. From Business Week:

Harris says in a letter to state and federal negotiators that the pending settlement is "inadequate" and gives bank officials too much immunity.

I’m convinced that the deal will eventually go through, however, after some further concessions are made. Certainly the absence of both New York (whose Attorney General Eric Schneiderman gamely started this mess by refusing to sign on or abandon his own investigation into corrupt securitization practices) and California will make it difficult for the banks to do any kind of a deal. But there is such an awesome amount of political will to get this deal done in Washington that it almost has to happen before the presidential election season really gets going.

If it does get done, expect a great deal of public debate over whether or not the size of the settlement was sufficient. Did the banks pay enough? Should they have paid ten billion more? Twenty? Even I engaged in a little bit of that some weeks ago.

But if and when that debate takes place, it will actually obscure the real issue, because this settlement is not about getting money from the banks. The deal being contemplated is actually the opposite: a giant bailout.

In fact, any federal foreclosure settlement along the lines of what’s been proposed will amount to a last round of post-2008-crisis bailouts. I talked to one foreclosure activist over the weekend who put it this way: “[The AG settlement] will be a bigger bailout than TARP.”

How? The math actually makes a hell of a lot of sense, when you look at it closely.

Any foreclosure settlement will allow the banks to pay one relatively small bill to cover all of their legal liabilities stemming from the monstrous frauds they all practiced in the years leading up to the 2008 crash (and even afterward), when they all schemed to create great masses of dicey/junk subprime loans and then disguise them as AAA-rated paper for sale to big private investors and institutions like state pension funds and union funds.

To recap the crime: the banks lent money to firms like Countrywide, who in turn created billions in dicey loans, who then sold them back to the banks, who chopped them up and sold them to, among other things, your state’s worker retirement funds.

So this is bankers from Deutsche and Goldman and Bank of America essentially stealing the retirement nest eggs of firemen, teachers, cops, and other actors, as well as the investment monies of foreigners and hedge fund managers. To repeat: this was Wall Street hotshots stealing money from old ladies. 

Along the road to this systematic thievery, a great many other, sometimes smaller offenses were committed. One involved the use of the MERS electronic registration system. By law, banks were supposed to register with county-level offices in each state every time they sold or resold a mortgage, and pay fees each time.

But they didn’t, instead registering with the private deed-transfer agency MERS, allowing them to systematically, and illegally, bypass local taxes.

So any “AG settlement” might allow the banks to avoid legal damages being sought from three different set of enraged creditors: the public institutions who invested in these sham securities, the private investors who did the same, and the localities who were cheated out of their taxes.

Let’s take a look at each of those three categories.

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photo: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

Max Hayslette, Woman and Child Playing Cards
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Geoffrey Johnson, The Made Shop
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Current Events: Even a Slovak 'Yes' Will Make No Difference

[ed.  I saw a great comment about Slovakia's vote yesterday and the current state of the European Union: like a flea on the tail wagging the dog.]

by Ambrose Evans-Pritchard

Slovakia’s "Nie" last night will not stop the approval of Europe’s revamped bail-out fund (EFSF).

The ultimate outcome has never been in doubt. As in Germany, the opposition backs the bill. In any case, Slovakia’s political class knows that their country will pay a fearful diplomatic price if this drama in the Národná Rada drags on for much longer.

What the Slovak debate has shown us yet again – as if the political storm in Germany over the last two months has not been enough – is that escalating bail-outs are nearing their political limits.

The traumatic affair almost brought down the German government. It has in fact brought down the Slovak government. You can’t keep doing this. Democracies are not to be toyed with.

***

Slovakia’s cry of defiance has not been entirely pointless. Richard Sulik – the speaker of parliament – has caught a mood of popular disgust that goes far beyond his own country.

His objections are unanswerable. How can there be any justification for a state of affairs where a poor but rule-abiding EMU state must bail out a serial violator with twice the per capita income, and triple the level of the pensions – a country which is in any case irretrievably bankrupt? How can it be that the no-bail clause of the Lisbon treaty has been ripped up?

But he also touched on the most neuralgic issue, reminding everybody that the EFSF is "mainly for saving foreign banks". These are French, German, British, Dutch, and Belgian banks, of course.

Mr Sulik is right. The EU-IMF rescue loans have not helped Greece pull out of its downward spiral. They have pushed the country further into bankruptcy. Greek public debt will rise from around 120pc of GDP to 160pc under the rescue programme, and the IMF is pencilling in figures above 180pc.

The rescue loans have rotated into the hands of creditor banks, life insurers, pension funds, and even a few hedge funds. ECB bond purchases have allowed to investors to dump their holdings at reduced loss, shifting the risk to EMU taxpayers. It is a racket for financial elites. A pickpocketing of taxpayers, including poor Slovak taxpayers.

"I’d rather be a pariah in Brussels than have to feel ashamed before my children," he said.

Bravo.

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Tadashige Nishida
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New iPhone Conceals Sheer Magic

by David Pogue

What's in a name?

A lot, apparently. Apple’s new iPhone is called the iPhone 4S. But what people really wanted was the iPhone 5.

The rumors online had predicted the second coming — or, rather, the fifth coming. It would be wedge-shaped! It would be completely transparent! It would clean your basement, pick you up at the airport and eliminate unsightly blemishes!

Instead, what showed up was a new iPhone that looks just like the last one: black or white, glass front and back, silver metal band around the sides. And on paper, at least, the new phone does only four new things.

THING 1: There’s a faster chip, the same one that’s in the iPad 2. More speed is always better, of course. But it’s not like people were complaining about the previous iPhone’s speed.

THING 2: A much better, faster camera — among the best on a phone. It has a resolution of eight megapixels, which doesn’t matter much, and a new, more light-sensitive sensor, which does. Its photos are crisp and clear, with beautiful color. The low-light photos and 1080p high-definition video are especially impressive for a phone. There’s still no zoom and only a tiny LED flash — but otherwise, this phone comes dangerously close to displacing a $200 point-and-shoot digital camera.

THING 3: The iPhone 4S is a world phone. As of Friday, you will be able to buy it from AT&T, Verizon and, for the first time, Sprint ($200, $300 or $400 for the 16-, 32- or 64-gigabyte models). But even if you get your iPhone 4S from Verizon, whose CDMA network is incompatible with the GSM networks used in most other countries, you’ll still be able to make calls overseas, either through Verizon or by inserting another carrier’s SIM card. Call ahead for details.

Each carrier has its selling points. Sprint is the only one with an unlimited iPhone data plan (example: $110 a month for unlimited calling, texting and Internet). AT&T says it has the fastest download speeds. But if you care about calling coverage, Verizon is the way to go.

THING 4: Speech recognition. Crazy good, transformative, category-redefining speech recognition.  Exactly as on Android phones, a tiny microphone button appears on the on-screen keyboard; whenever you have an Internet connection, you can tap it when you want to dictate instead of typing. After a moment, the transcription appears. The sometimes frustrating on-screen keyboard is now a glorified Plan B.

Apple won’t admit that it’s using a version of Dragon Dictation, the free iPhone app, but there doesn’t seem to be much doubt; it works and behaves identically. (For example, it occasionally seems to process your utterance but then types nothing at all, just as the Dragon app does.) This version is infinitely better, though, because it’s a built-in keyboard button, not a separate app.

But dictation is only half the story — no, one-tenth of the story. Because in 2010, Apple bought a start-up called Siri, whose technology it has baked into the iPhone 4S.

Siri is billed as a virtual assistant: a crisply accurate, astonishingly understanding, uncomplaining, voice-commanded minion. No voice training or special syntax is required; you don’t even have to hold the phone up to your head. You just hold down the phone’s Home button until you hear a double beep, and then speak casually.

You can say, “Wake me up at 7:35,” or “Change my 7:35 alarm to 8.” You can say, “What’s Gary’s work number?” Or, “How do I get to the airport?” Or, “Any good Thai restaurants around here?” Or, “Make a note to rent ‘Ishtar’ this weekend.” Or, “How many days until Valentine’s Day?” Or, “Play some Beatles.” Or, “When was Abraham Lincoln born?”

In each case, Siri thinks for a few seconds, displays a beautifully formatted response and speaks in a calm female voice.

It’s mind-blowing how inexact your utterances can be. Siri understands everything from, “What’s the weather going to be like in Tucson this weekend?” to “Will I need an umbrella tonight?” (She has various amusing responses for “What is the meaning of life?”)

It’s even more amazing how Siri’s responses can actually form a conversation. Once, I tried saying, “Make an appointment with Patrick for Thursday at 3.” Siri responded, “Note that you already have an all-day appointment about ‘Boston Trip’ for this Thursday. Shall I schedule this anyway?” Unbelievable.

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illustration: Stuart Goldenberg

More Evidence Against Vitamin Use

by Tara Parker-Pope

Two new studies add to the growing body of evidence that taking extra doses of vitamins can do more harm than good.

A study of vitamin E and selenium use among 35,000 men found that the vitamin users had a slightly higher risk of developing prostate cancer, according to a report published Tuesday in The Journal of the American Medical Association. A separate study of 38,000 women in Iowa found a higher risk of dying during a 19-year period among older women who used multivitamins and other supplements compared with women who did not, according to a new report in The Archives of Internal Medicine.

The findings are the latest in a series of disappointing research results showing that high doses of vitamins are not helpful in warding off disease.

“You go back 15 or 20 years, and there were thoughts that antioxidants of all sorts might be useful,” said Dr. Eric Klein, a Cleveland Clinic physician and national study coordinator for the prostate cancer and vitamin E study. “There really is not any compelling evidence that taking these dietary supplements above and beyond a normal dietary intake is helpful in any way, and this is evidence that it could be harmful.”

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photo:  Asimulator, Flickr, Creative Commons

Current Events: Elizabeth Warren Announces Her Bid for Senate

[ed.  She'll fix this @#$%$ herself if she has to.  Note: parody alert]

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Prescribed Epidemic

by Guy Taylor

An epidemic of Oxycodone abuse has struck America in the last decade. The number of emergency room visits stemming from non-medical abuse of the narcotic prescription painkiller drug rose by 256 percent between 2004 and 2009, according to the U.S. government’s Drug Abuse Warning Network.

In March 2010, Washington state Attorney General Rob McKenna said his state was “losing more people to prescription drug overdoses in a typical year than to traffic accidents.” In Florida, the Medical Examiners commission found more than 1,500 people died of Oxycodone overdose in 2010, a four-fold increase over the 350 who died in 2005. The supply of Oxycodone, says Jim Hall, director of the Center for the Study and Prevention of Substance Abuse at Nova Southeastern University, went “far beyond the legitimate medical need of the state.”

The epidemic is not likely to abate soon. The explosion of pain management clinics in Florida, dubbed “pill mills,” prompted the state Legislature last year to close a loophole that had allowed physicians to fill Oxy prescriptions on the spot. Authorities say a half-billion doses of Oxycodone and its generic equivalents were distributed in the state during 2009 alone. An unknown number wound up in the hands of “patients” who had come from out of state to have prescriptions filled by multiple pill mills, before driving home to resell the pills on the black market.

The scope of damage wrought by Oxycodone’s oversupply in Florida is felt nationwide. In Maine, an official from the state’s Office of Substance Abuse sent me an internal spreadsheet showing that more than 4 million prescription painkiller pills had been legally prescribed by state physicians in 2010, five times the amount legally dispensed in 2006. Officials in Ohio went one step further, identifying the per capita amount of opioids being prescribed county-by-county. Jackson County, in the southern part of the state, won the alarming distinction of having more than 130 doses for every resident in 2010. The number of pills prescribed in Ohio has risen by 900 percent since 1997, a powerful indicator that the market for pills has become oversaturated.

“There’s just no way that there’s been a 900 percent increase in pain,” says Stacey Frohnapfel-Hasson, chief of communications for Ohio’s Department of Alcohol and Drug Addiction Services.

A 1,200 percent increase

One of the most disturbing things about the prescription pain pill abuse epidemic is that it could have been avoided, or at least mitigated, if the DEA had fulfilled the responsibilities vested in it under federal law.

***

It’s well known that narcotic prescription drugs sold in the United States must first be approved by U.S. Food and Drug Administration before they can be legally mass produced and marketed. Less known is the fact that the DEA – and specifically, the Office of Diversion Control – then has the power and responsibility to decide how much of a particular drug can be legally manufactured and sent to market each year.

The pharmaceutical companies that make Oxycodone and its two dozen generic equivalents — such as Endocodone, Oxyfast and Percocet — are required by law to present an annual application to the Office of Diversion Control seeking approval for a quota of the drug’s annual production. Should a company desire to manufacture more than the previous year, it must request an increase — and the DEA must approve.

***

In 1997, a year after prescription drugmaker Purdue Pharma first brought Oxycontin (the first branded version of Oxycodone) to market, the total production quota approved by the Office of Diversion Control was 8.3 tons. By 2011, it had risen to 105 tons, an officially sanctioned 1,200 percent increase over the same period that saw Oxycodone emerge as what Haislip calls “the Cadillac of America’s prescription drug abuse crisis.”

That the DEA allowed for the increases in the face of widespread illegal and non-medical use shows a ”serious lack of accountability and oversight,” says Haislip.

“The DEA is the lone federal agency with the power to decide how much of the drug gets made and put out there; it alone has had all the responsibility to do something about this problem,” he said. “The way I did it for 17 years, which was basically the way it had always been done even before the DEA was the DEA, is that when a significant diversion problem occurred, the quota increase requests would come under greater scrutiny.”

“With Oxy,” said Haislip, “there has been a significant diversion problem since the late 1990s, so the requests should have come under greater scrutiny.” That apparently didn’t happen, he says.

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Do It Yourself Series: Landscape - Andy Warhol, 1962
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All the Single Ladies

by Kate Bolick

In 2001, when I was 28, I broke up with my boyfriend. Allan and I had been together for three years, and there was no good reason to end things. He was (and remains) an exceptional person, intelligent, good-looking, loyal, kind. My friends, many of whom were married or in marriage-track relationships, were bewildered. I was bewildered. To account for my behavior, all I had were two intangible yet undeniable convictions: something was missing; I wasn’t ready to settle down.

The period that followed was awful. I barely ate for sobbing all the time. (A friend who suffered my company a lot that summer sent me a birthday text this past July: “A decade ago you and I were reuniting, and you were crying a lot.”) I missed Allan desperately—his calm, sure voice; the sweetly fastidious way he folded his shirts. On good days, I felt secure that I’d done the right thing. Learning to be alone would make me a better person, and eventually a better partner. On bad days, I feared I would be alone forever. Had I made the biggest mistake of my life?

Ten years later, I occasionally ask myself the same question. Today I am 39, with too many ex-boyfriends to count and, I am told, two grim-seeming options to face down: either stay single or settle for a “good enough” mate. At this point, certainly, falling in love and getting married may be less a matter of choice than a stroke of wild great luck. A decade ago, luck didn’t even cross my mind. I’d been in love before, and I’d be in love again. This wasn’t hubris so much as naïveté; I’d had serious, long-term boyfriends since my freshman year of high school, and simply couldn’t envision my life any differently.

Well, there was a lot I didn’t know 10 years ago. The decision to end a stable relationship for abstract rather than concrete reasons (“something was missing”), I see now, is in keeping with a post-Boomer ideology that values emotional fulfillment above all else. And the elevation of independence over coupling (“I wasn’t ready to settle down”) is a second-wave feminist idea I’d acquired from my mother, who had embraced it, in part, I suspect, to correct for her own choices.

***

This unfettered future was the promise of my time and place. I spent many a golden afternoon at my small New England liberal-arts college debating with friends the merits of leg-shaving and whether or not we’d take our husband’s surname. (Even then, our concerns struck me as retro; hadn’t the women’s libbers tackled all this stuff already?) We took for granted that we’d spend our 20s finding ourselves, whatever that meant, and save marriage for after we’d finished graduate school and launched our careers, which of course would happen at the magical age of 30.

That we would marry, and that there would always be men we wanted to marry, we took on faith. How could we not? One of the many ways in which our lives differed from our mothers’ was in the variety of our interactions with the opposite sex. Men were our classmates and colleagues, our bosses and professors, as well as, in time, our students and employees and subordinates—an entire universe of prospective friends, boyfriends, friends with benefits, and even ex-boyfriends-turned-friends. In this brave new world, boundaries were fluid, and roles constantly changing. Allan and I had met when we worked together at a magazine in Boston (full disclosure: this one), where I was an assistant and he an editor; two years later, he quit his job to follow me to New York so that I could go to graduate school and he could focus on his writing. After the worst of our breakup, we eventually found our way to a friendship so deep and sustaining that several years ago, when he got engaged, his fiancée suggested that I help him buy his wedding suit. As he and I toured through Manhattan’s men’s-wear ateliers, we enjoyed explaining to the confused tailors and salesclerks that no, no, we weren’t getting married. Isn’t life funny that way?

I retell that moment as an aside, as if it’s a tangent to the larger story, but in a way, it is the story. In 1969, when my 25-year-old mother, a college-educated high-school teacher, married a handsome lawyer-to-be, most women her age were doing more or less the same thing. By the time she was in her mid-30s, she was raising two small children and struggling to find a satisfying career. She’d never had sex with anyone but my father. Could she have even envisioned herself on a shopping excursion with an ex-lover, never mind one who was getting married while she remained alone? And the ex-lover’s fiancée being so generous and open-minded as to suggest the shopping trip to begin with?

What my mother could envision was a future in which I made my own choices. I don’t think either of us could have predicted what happens when you multiply that sense of agency by an entire generation.

But what transpired next lay well beyond the powers of everybody’s imagination: as women have climbed ever higher, men have been falling behind. We’ve arrived at the top of the staircase, finally ready to start our lives, only to discover a cavernous room at the tail end of a party, most of the men gone already, some having never shown up—and those who remain are leering by the cheese table, or are, you know, the ones you don’t want to go out with.

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Paul Simon

[ed. Paul Simon to tour on the 25th Anniversary of Graceland.]

The Curse of Having a Cute Dog

by Dorri Olds

I reached for my iPhone right-handed while holding Buddy’s leash in my left. It was my best friend, Maddy. I launched into a tirade. “If one more person asks me what kind of dog Buddy is I’m going to scream.”

“Why?”

“I’ve walked one block and four people…”

“It’s because he’s so cute.”

I imitated passersby in falsetto, “‘Oooh, what’s his name? How old is he? Where did you get him?’ When they ask what breed he is I have to say, ‘Cavalier King Charles Spaniel.’ It’s a mouthful and they never get it. ‘What kind?’ After three or four times I get so sick of chewing my cabbage twice I start barking, ‘He’s a MUTT!’”

“I think they’re just being friendly.”

“I don’t want friendly. I want to be left alone. For Pete’s sake, I work twelve-hour days. When I take a break I need peace and quiet.”

“Peace and quiet? You live in New York City! Maybe you need to work less so you won’t be so cranky.”

“Cranky? CRANKY?”

* * *

Buddy came into my life seven years ago, right after a devastating split. I’d found out the guy was married and the breakup nearly broke me. I felt splintered, defective, and out-of-order. Depression yanked me down and that’s where I stayed, wallowing.

One day, still telling everyone who’d listen how doomed I was, I ran into a neighbor who said. “You need a puppy. It’ll change everything.” I looked down at her dog. “He’s a Blenheim Cavalier King Charles Spaniel,” she said proudly.”

He had soft white fur with cow-like patches of auburn brown. His ears flopped like a beagle. He looked about the size of a cocker spaniel, but shrunken like a T-shirt in a dryer. His long lashes and dark eyes made him look like Bambi. When I smiled at him his tail wagged frantically and rhythmically like a windshield wiper.

I mulled over my neighbor’s suggestion. I called Maddy to discuss. “Puppies are a huge responsibility. You have to be home all the time.” I said.

“You’re home all the time anyway!”Hmm, she had a point. I work at my Mac in my living room. My only commute is to trek to the kitchen for snacks. I began to weigh the pros and cons of getting a dog. I thought about my ex and how much I’d wanted a baby with him. I ruminated. Pets are expensive—con. The cost of a dog pales in comparison to raising a kid. There’d be no braces—pro. No college tuition—Pro. He’d never wreck a car—Pro! Pro!

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Paris

Paris depuis Charles V jusqu’a Charles IX, d’après le plan de l’Abbaye St. Victor.
Publisher: [Paris : Lemoine Libraire Carpentier-Mericourt, 1839.].

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Ten Things You Should Know About Ecommerce

by Christopher Butler

Imagine you decide to quit your job, move to a cozy, small town, and set up a shop of your own. It'd be great. Nothing flashy, of course; something nice, like a fine hats shop. Yeah, that's the ticket. You've always liked hats, and really, there aren't enough hat shops out there. Your new community will thank you for bringing hats back, not to mention a little slice of the good old-fashioned American dream. Of course, you'll make new friends. They'll stop by your shop to shoot the breeze over coffee around the hat counter and you'll join them for weekend picnics in their back yards. Hats all around, of course. That'd be the life...

That is, after you wrote up a plan, registered your business, opened a merchant account, secured funding of some kind—whether that means draining your saving or convincing some other hat-enthusiast to invest—found a location, signed a lease, found and purchased furniture, storage, shelving, counters, a cash register, and all kinds of other materials, picked up inventory, worked out your schedule, hired some help, did some advertising, and then, you know, sold some hats. Phew! By then, if you still could stand the sight of a hat, you would certainly know you made the right decision.

Ok, so maybe you'll start small. Something online. That would definitely be easier, right?

Wrong. It turns out that setting up an online business can be just as complicated as setting up a traditional bricks-and-mortar store. There sure are just as many details, and since many of them are technical, they're often misunderstood—which, of course, leads to the misconception that ecommerce is easy. Well, that's what this article is all about. I'd like to give you a survey of ecommerce, from the details—the checkout process, data security, calculating sales tax and shipping, discount codes, etc.—to the big picture. Let's get started...

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