Wednesday, November 23, 2011
Burger Queen
One night in March of last year, Jay-Z showed up at the Spotted Pig, on West Eleventh Street, with his wife, Beyoncé, and another couple. Jay-Z, an investor in the restaurant, and a frequent patron, wanted the smoked-trout salad, but the kitchen was out. He and his group settled on the house specialty—burgers, which the restaurant’s chef, April Bloomfield, serves one way: char-grilled, on a brioche bun, topped with crumbled Roquefort. Only Lou Reed, a fixture in the neighborhood, is allowed to have his burger with onions, and that is owing to precedent: an awestruck employee took his order one afternoon when Bloomfield was out. Mayonnaise is forbidden. The condiments policy has long been a subject of contention between Bloomfield and her business partner, Ken Friedman, who schmoozes while she cooks. He dispenses surreptitious dollops to favored customers from a jar of Hellman’s that he keeps hidden on a high shelf.
The Spotted Pig opened in February of 2004—New York’s first gastropub. It is a nookish place, crammed with all manner of porcine paraphernalia and presided over by offbeat waiters and bartenders. “If you’re going to spend an hour and a half with somebody, it should be somebody kooky,” Friedman says. New Yorkers didn’t quite know what to make of it. Was it a bar with good food? A restaurant that was fun? In any case, it was an immediate hit, a seat at one of its cramped tables so coveted that Frank Bruni, in a mostly admiring review in the Times, deemed the place a “gastromelee.” Message boards abounded with proudly masochistic anecdotes about what one blogger called the “hipster bloodsport” of trying to get in. (A pregnant woman told a waiter she couldn’t have the blue cheese, and, she wrote, “he promptly barked at me, ‘Yes you can, it’s ricotta you can’t have.’ ”)
Along with the food and the atmosphere, the restaurant’s clientele has helped to make it a success. By December, 2005, USA Today had published a story about the place headlined “WHERE STARS ARE SPOTTED.” Friedman recalled, “Every night there was some guy saying he was the biggest proctologist at Mount Sinai jabbing his finger in my chest.” A Chasen’s on the Hudson, by way of the Thames, the Spotted Pig is a place where normal people go to feel like celebrities and celebrities go to feel like normal people. Those who are not Jay-Z have been known to spend hours waiting to be granted a tartan-covered tuffet. Sometimes they want to be cool. Sometimes they want a really good cheeseburger.
One of Jay-Z’s friends wasn’t sure about the Roquefort. Bloomfield hates to leave the kitchen, but Friedman dragged her to the table, where she prevailed upon the friend to have the dish the way she had intended it.
“Who’s that golfer dude you made me meet?” Bloomfield asked Friedman later.
“He’s not a golfer,” Friedman replied. “He’s Kobe Bryant.”
“Oh. How did he like his burger?”
Bloomfield—five feet four, with a compact build and a pugnacious chin—is the food world’s oblivious savant. Her single-mindedness in the kitchen has propelled her from Birmingham, England, where she grew up on a diet of fried-egg sandwiches and steaks “that would come out a little gray,” to the apex of New York City’s restaurant scene, where she is renowned for her brawny menus, teeming with trotters and terrines. This summer, Saveur held a barbecue, to which prominent chefs contributed various dishes. Bloomfield’s was a chickpea-lentil-and-feta salad. “The Village Voice said something about ‘Why did the Queen of Meat do a salad?’ and she answered, ‘I like salad,’ ” Friedman recalled. “That was kind of a ‘Rain Man’ thing to say.” Bloomfield doesn’t swim; she doesn’t drive. She has a Michelin star for the Spotted Pig and one for the Breslin—a dark, boozy restaurant that she and Friedman opened last year in the Ace Hotel, on West Twenty-ninth Street—but she has never been to Paris. “It’s pretty lame,” she said one day. “But, you know, I’m a girl from Birmingham. What am I going to say, ‘I’ll have that right there’?” she said, in a jacked-up Brummie accent, pointing to an air menu.
Most days, Bloomfield wakes up around nine o’clock. She wallows in bed for an hour or two, with a cookbook, or a recipe she’s fiddling with, and a glass of PG tips. (She likes it milky, without sugar, and just hot enough to scorch the back of her throat.) Around noon, she arrives at the Pig or, more often, the Breslin, where she stays until midnight. On a sunny afternoon in late spring, Bloomfield was holed up in a plaid-curtained booth at the back of the Breslin’s dining room, rustling through a sheaf of papers stained with olive oil. She was dressed, as she usually is, in a black Pig T-shirt, black Dickies, and Birkenstock clogs. Her hair, the color of gingersnaps, was scraped into a bun. She was just back from Sydney, where she had appeared at a food-and-wine festival, but her skin was as pale as gooseflesh. I asked her how the trip had been. She pulled out her iPhone (apps: Epic Chef, zombies, vampires, ninjas, World War, iMobsters) and showed me a picture of her sous-chef sprawled on his back in the sand. Her cooks had surfed, she had watched.
Bloomfield was working on a fried-chicken special for the evening’s menu. The inspiration was some buffalo wings she had eaten at the Waterfront Ale House, a bar in Murray Hill. (It’s close to her apartment.) “Their chicken has a really great sort of fruity habañero taste,” Bloomfield said. Her take on the idea was intense, a concentration, rather than a refinement, of the original’s punch. She had chosen to fry a breast and a thigh in duck fat and serve them with a salad (blue-cheese dressing, red onion) and hot sauce (habañero, tomato, vinegar, butter). Someone brought a platter of the chicken for Bloomfield to test. It was delicious; the batter had an almost caramel flavor. Bloomfield could barely admit that she had anything to do with it. “These poussins, oh, my goodness,” she said. “They’re actually really hard to fuck up. They’re unfuckable. You can’t fuck them up.”
“What’s the most fuckable?” I asked.
“The simple stuff.”
by Lauren Collins, New Yorker | Continue reading:
Photograph by Martin Schoeller
George's God
Given the vastness and variety of the literature, it would be incorrect to say that the Beatles story has been whitewashed, not when it includes so many get-even tell-alls and book-sized sumps of sensational gossip. But there is a quasi-official version of events, and when it is reissued periodically from the tireless Beatles public relations machine, the narrative does tend to take on the unblemished pallor of approved history. For 50 years the Beatles have been the rock group you could take home to meet Mom, and nobody close to their stupendous commercial enterprise seems eager to undo the image.Paul, Ringo, the two widows, and what remains of the original Liverpool crowd keep the history tidy for reasons that are surely as much personal as fiduciary. Beatles Anthology, the eight-hour, supposedly definitive documentary the Beatles machine released in 1995, omitted any unpleasantness that might cast a shadow on the sunny version of the Beatles story, aside from a few inescapable anecdotes about illegal drug-taking. There was no mention of the now-legendary sybaritic excesses of Beatles tours, or the friends, wives, lovers, children, and employees betrayed or discarded on the way to the top. The sulfurous rancor that at last pulled the group apart, and which continued in punishing and pointless legal maneuvers for another generation, was mostly ignored. Even today, Paul and Ringo have stalled the rerelease of the 1970 documentary Let It Be owing to its glaring display of the group’s lassitude, self-loathing, and crisscrossing bitterness. And they’re right to keep it locked away, if the point is preserving the image of the moptops. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen Let It Be, but I don’t recall wanting to take any of those Beatles home to meet Mom.
The authorized version has been buffed in recent weeks with commemorations of the tenth anniversary of George Harrison’s death, at age 58, from cancer. There he was again, peering out from the cover of Rolling Stone, just like old times. Life magazine, always a codependent in Beatles mythmaking, disinterred itself long enough to get out a special celebratory issue. HBO aired a four-hour documentary put together by Martin Scorsese, Living in the Material World, which is also the title of a companion book of quotes and pictures released by Harrison’s widow Olivia.
The book is the size of a paving stone and as sumptuously produced as any coffee-table accessory can be. Scorsese’s movie, on the other hand, is a mess. Like too many documentaries nowadays, it lacks a single narrator, leaving the viewer helpless as the movie jumps back and forth through each stage of the Beatles story, from blitzed-out Liverpool to blissed-out Rishikesh. Anyone unfamiliar with the small but necessary roles in the dramatis personae will find himself wondering who all these people are. (...)
The theme that emerges from this dog’s breakfast involves Harrison’s split personality—or as he might prefer to put it, his dual nature, the yin and yang—as a religious seeker on the one side and a decadent, heedless rock star on the other. If you had even a passing acquaintance with Harrison’s career you know about the religion part, but nobody in the movie or book ever gets specific enough to fill us in on the other half.
“He had two personalities,” Ringo says. “One was this bag of [prayer] beads, the other was this big bag of anger.” Yoko Ono seconds that emotion: “He had two aspects,” she says. “Sometimes he was very nice. Sometimes he was [long pause] too honest.” Paul McCartney, coy as ever, says, “He was my mate, so I can’t say too much. But he was a guy, a red-blooded guy, and he liked what guys like.”
by Andrew Ferguson, Weekly Standard | Continue reading:
Photo: Getty Images
BPA Lurks in Canned Soups and Drinks
Most of the research on BPA, a so-called endocrine disruptor that can mimic the body’s hormones, has focused on its use in plastic bottles. It has been linked in some studies to a higher risk of cancer, heart disease, diabetes and obesity, and health officials in the United States have come under increasing pressure to regulate it. Some researchers, though, counter that its reputation as a health threat to people is exaggerated. (...)
The new study, which was published Tuesday in The Journal of the American Medical Association, is the first to measure the amounts that are ingested when people eat food that comes directly out of a can, in this case soup. The spike in BPA levels that the researchers recorded is one of the highest seen in any study.
In general, most studies have found that urinary BPA levels in typical adults average somewhere around 2 micrograms per liter. That was roughly the levels the Harvard researchers found in the subjects after a week of eating the soup made from fresh ingredients. After eating the canned soup, though, their levels rose above 20 micrograms per liter, a 1,221 percent increase. (...)
Dr. Michels said that the increases in BPA were most likely temporary and would go down after hours or days. “We don’t know what health effects these transient increases in BPA may have,” she added
But she also pointed out that the findings were probably applicable to other canned goods, including soda and juices. “The sodas are concerning, because some people have a habit of consuming a lot of them throughout the day,” she said. “My guess is that with other canned foods, you would see similar increases in bisphenol-A. But we only tested soups, so we wouldn’t be able to predict the absolute size of the increase.”
by Anahad OcConner, NY Times | Continue reading:
Tuesday, November 22, 2011
How to Tap Your Retirement Accounts
How much can you withdraw from your nest egg each year without running out of money before you die?
Never has more been riding on the answer. The nation's 78 million baby boomers started turning 65 this year — and nearly 30 million of them have a "defined contribution" retirement plan such as a 401(k) account, according to the Employee Benefit Research Institute.
The market's wild swings in the past few years have made it impossible for new retirees to figure out with any certainty how much of their nest eggs they can tap each year.
"It's like bowling," says Sheryl Garrett, founder of the Garrett Planning Network, which has about 320 planners. "If you retire when the market goes up for a few years, you're going to be sitting pretty — like when you get a strike or spare and then keep doing well. But if you have a few bad years in a row, you're in trouble."
Before the 2008 market meltdown, some financial advisers encouraged people to pull as much as 7% from their retirement portfolio each year. The rationale: If withdrawals equal the average return on investments, then the size of the portfolio would stay about the same. With stocks returning about 10% annually since 1926, the idea didn't seem farfetched.
But as investors learned to their dismay in the past decade, any one year's returns can vary wildly from the average: The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell from 2000 to 2002, rose to a record high in 2007 and then plunged 34% in 2008.
If a new retiree pulled 7% from a $2 million nest egg each year starting in 2000, he or she would have been left with only $394,634 by the end of last year — and might need to stretch that two decades or longer.
A more conservative strategy, the "4% rule," hasn't panned out for some retirees, either. Devised in the 1990s by William Bengen, a financial planner in El Cajon, Calif., the rule — 4.15%, to be exact — quickly spread through the retirement industry.
Mr. Bengen analyzed historical returns of stocks and bonds and found that portfolios with 60% of their holdings in large-company stocks and 40% in intermediate-term U.S. bonds could sustain withdrawal rates starting at 4.15% (adjusted each year for inflation) for every 30-year span going back to 1926. Assuming $3 million in savings and average inflation of 3%, you could withdraw $124,500 the first year, $128,235 the second year, $132,082 the third year, and so forth.
But timing is everything. If you had retired Jan. 1, 2000, with an initial 4% withdrawal rate and a portfolio of 55% stocks and 45% bonds, your portfolio would have fallen by a third through 2010, and you would be left with only a 29% chance of making it through three decades, according to investment firm T. Rowe Price Group.
In the wake of the 2008 market meltdown, advisers have been scrambling to tweak their withdrawal recommendations. Trade publications are crammed with new research on drawdown strategies, and advisers and academics are revising, republishing and blogging so frequently that it is hard even for financial planners, let alone investors, to keep up.
Staying Vigilant
Whichever strategy you use, one thing is clear: "You can't just set it and forget it," says Christine Fahlund, a senior financial planner at T. Rowe Price. She encourages people to examine their portfolios and adjust their withdrawals at least once a year.
by Kelly Greene, WSJ via Yahoo | Continue reading:
Never has more been riding on the answer. The nation's 78 million baby boomers started turning 65 this year — and nearly 30 million of them have a "defined contribution" retirement plan such as a 401(k) account, according to the Employee Benefit Research Institute.
The market's wild swings in the past few years have made it impossible for new retirees to figure out with any certainty how much of their nest eggs they can tap each year.
"It's like bowling," says Sheryl Garrett, founder of the Garrett Planning Network, which has about 320 planners. "If you retire when the market goes up for a few years, you're going to be sitting pretty — like when you get a strike or spare and then keep doing well. But if you have a few bad years in a row, you're in trouble."
Before the 2008 market meltdown, some financial advisers encouraged people to pull as much as 7% from their retirement portfolio each year. The rationale: If withdrawals equal the average return on investments, then the size of the portfolio would stay about the same. With stocks returning about 10% annually since 1926, the idea didn't seem farfetched.
But as investors learned to their dismay in the past decade, any one year's returns can vary wildly from the average: The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell from 2000 to 2002, rose to a record high in 2007 and then plunged 34% in 2008.
If a new retiree pulled 7% from a $2 million nest egg each year starting in 2000, he or she would have been left with only $394,634 by the end of last year — and might need to stretch that two decades or longer.
A more conservative strategy, the "4% rule," hasn't panned out for some retirees, either. Devised in the 1990s by William Bengen, a financial planner in El Cajon, Calif., the rule — 4.15%, to be exact — quickly spread through the retirement industry.
Mr. Bengen analyzed historical returns of stocks and bonds and found that portfolios with 60% of their holdings in large-company stocks and 40% in intermediate-term U.S. bonds could sustain withdrawal rates starting at 4.15% (adjusted each year for inflation) for every 30-year span going back to 1926. Assuming $3 million in savings and average inflation of 3%, you could withdraw $124,500 the first year, $128,235 the second year, $132,082 the third year, and so forth.
But timing is everything. If you had retired Jan. 1, 2000, with an initial 4% withdrawal rate and a portfolio of 55% stocks and 45% bonds, your portfolio would have fallen by a third through 2010, and you would be left with only a 29% chance of making it through three decades, according to investment firm T. Rowe Price Group.
In the wake of the 2008 market meltdown, advisers have been scrambling to tweak their withdrawal recommendations. Trade publications are crammed with new research on drawdown strategies, and advisers and academics are revising, republishing and blogging so frequently that it is hard even for financial planners, let alone investors, to keep up.
Staying Vigilant
Whichever strategy you use, one thing is clear: "You can't just set it and forget it," says Christine Fahlund, a senior financial planner at T. Rowe Price. She encourages people to examine their portfolios and adjust their withdrawals at least once a year.
by Kelly Greene, WSJ via Yahoo | Continue reading:
Less Human Than Human: The Design Philosophy of Apple
[ed. Aesthetics, design, conformity, and commerce. Another perspective on Steve Jobs and Apple.]
The late Steve Jobs is known to have been very keen on "taste." Microsoft has absolutely no taste, he said, going on to explain that by this he meant that "they don't think of original ideas, and they don't bring much culture into their product." Great products, he said, were a "triumph of taste." The exquisite taste of Jobs himself has long been a matter of doctrine in the tech world. Kevin Kelly's remarks after his death expressed the general sentiment: "Steve Jobs was a CEO of beauty. In his interviews and especially in private, Jobs often spoke about Art. Taste. Soul. Life. And he sincerely meant it, as evidenced by the tasteful, soulful products he created over 30 years."
The widespread admiration for Apple's design ethos is in two parts: one functional, the other aesthetic. The functional aspects of Apple's products can indeed be magical and thrilling. But the vibe of Apple's product design is uniformly cool and impersonal, and the monolithic sterility of their glassy retail palaces is really something shocking. So far as design goes, it's an imperial aesthetic, entirely lacking a human dimension—or a potted plant. And this remains so, no matter how much the marketers have tried to soften things up with the aid of Justin Long, John Hodgman and sassy dancing silhouettes. Bow down, Apple seems to say. And in the cold, Big Brotherly sway of uniformity that it holds over millions upon millions of people, Apple seems to deny or even thwart the natural world, and with it the individual, the mutable, the unscientific, the instinctive, the flesh and blood. It won't surprise me a bit when they provide snow-white Matrix plugs to poke tidily into the back of your head. Or maybe even the heart plugs from Dune. (...)
For someone who thought that taste was connected to originality, one can't help noting that Jobs's taste was derivative in the extreme; he attempted a mid-century minimalism very much in the mold of Dieter Rams, for many decades the chief designer at Braun. (Rams' influence came to Apple largely through its own chief designer, Jonathan Ive, who has long acknowledged the debt.) It's not clear that taste borrowed at two removes can be characterized as exquisite, let alone visionary. And both Rams and Raymond Loewy, that other titan of mid-century industrial design, displayed such absolute originality that one can't help thinking that the efforts of Apple haven't quite reached the bar they set.
Still more strikingly, there is a huge disconnect between the ethos of Rams and that of Jobs—and Apple. Rams is an instinctive meliorist who believes that design can influence the world in a positive way: that is to say morally, not only aesthetically.
by Maria Bustillos, The Awl | Continue reading:
Photo by vpisteve.
MF Global and Rule 1.25
[ed. Most detailed explanation yet of the MF Global debacle. For added background read this story on CFTC Rule 1.25 and MF's efforts to have this regulation modified (ultimately successful) thereby hastening their demise. The big shoe yet to drop - figuring out where all the money went, why it went where it went, and the rippling effects on counterparties.]
To read the original pdf by Janet Tavakoli with links click here.
MF Global Revelations Keep Getting Worse
By Janet Tavakoli
November 21, 2011
When MF Global collapsed on October 21, it was the biggest financial firm to collapse since Lehman in September 2008. Then Chairman and CEO Jon Corzine is connected to the head of one of his key regulators, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), through his former protégé at Goldman Sachs, Gary Gensler. He also knows the Fed’s William Dudley, a key member of the Fed’s Open Market Committee, from their days at Goldman Sachs. The Fed approved MF Global’s status as a primary dealer, a participant in the Fed’s Open Market Operations, just before Jon Corzine took its helm and beached it on a reef called leveraged credit risk.
MF Global’s officers admitted to federal regulators that before the collapse, the firm diverted cash from customers’ accounts that were supposed to be segregated:
In layman’s terms, you may buy a Rolls Royce with customers’ excess cash, sell it at a profit, and pocket part of the profits. You may buy a Rolls Royce and try to resell it at a profit with your firm’s cash. But you aren’t allowed to take customers’ money to make the car payments on your firm’s Rolls Royce. If one engages in this impermissible activity, it becomes almost impossible to cover up if you have an accident driving your Rolls Royce.
From Jesse's Cafe' Americain | Read more:
To read the original pdf by Janet Tavakoli with links click here.
MF Global Revelations Keep Getting Worse
By Janet Tavakoli
November 21, 2011
When MF Global collapsed on October 21, it was the biggest financial firm to collapse since Lehman in September 2008. Then Chairman and CEO Jon Corzine is connected to the head of one of his key regulators, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), through his former protégé at Goldman Sachs, Gary Gensler. He also knows the Fed’s William Dudley, a key member of the Fed’s Open Market Committee, from their days at Goldman Sachs. The Fed approved MF Global’s status as a primary dealer, a participant in the Fed’s Open Market Operations, just before Jon Corzine took its helm and beached it on a reef called leveraged credit risk.
MF Global’s officers admitted to federal regulators that before the collapse, the firm diverted cash from customers’ accounts that were supposed to be segregated:
MF Global Holdings LTD. “violated requirements that it keep clients’ collateral separate from its own accounts…Craig Donohue, CME Group’s chief executive officer, said on a conference call with analysts today that MF Global isn’t in compliance with the rules of the exchange and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.”Cash in customers’ accounts may be invested in allowable transactions, and MF was allowed to make extra revenue from the income. But what isn’t allowed, and what MF Global apparently admitted to doing, is to commingle customers’ money with its own and take money from customers’ accounts to meet margin calls on MF Global’s own allowable transactions. Even if all of the money is eventually clawed back and recovered, this remains an impermissible act. Moreover, full recovery—even if it is possible—is not the same as restitution. People have been denied access to their money, and businesses and reputations have been tarnished.
“MF Global Probe May Involve Hundreds of Millions in Funds,” Bloomberg News – November 1, 2001 by Silia Brush and Matthew Leising
In layman’s terms, you may buy a Rolls Royce with customers’ excess cash, sell it at a profit, and pocket part of the profits. You may buy a Rolls Royce and try to resell it at a profit with your firm’s cash. But you aren’t allowed to take customers’ money to make the car payments on your firm’s Rolls Royce. If one engages in this impermissible activity, it becomes almost impossible to cover up if you have an accident driving your Rolls Royce.
From Jesse's Cafe' Americain | Read more:
Birth of a Meme
If you want to vanquish the enemy, render him absurd. Most recent case in point? The viral stardom of University of California, Davis, police Lt. John Pike. A week ago, you didn’t know his name. Now, he’s Pepper Spray Cop. And Pepper Spray Cop is considerably more entertaining than Lt. John Pike.
Lt. John Pike, as the world was made painfully aware last Friday, is the officer who pepper sprayed a phalanx of peacefully linked protesters who refused to move from the university’s quad. The gung-ho Pike, it should be noted, was swiftly joined by several of his similarly pepper-spray-happy cohorts. But it was the image of him and his confident, casual, almost bored delivery of a torrent of orange that ignited outrage — and then, inevitably, parody. (...)
But easily the most Facebook wall-ready appropriation of Pike’s moment of infamy has been his sudden, often hilariously Photoshopped appearance “cracking down on so many famous moments in history.” The cleverest have already been neatly gathered on the Pepper Spraying Cop Tumblr, which depicts Pike unleashing his orange rain in the midst of Picasso’s “Guernica” and “Washington Crossing the Delaware,” upon a noble George Bailey, and, of course, the deeply troubled star of Munch’s “The Scream.” Sample caption, accompanying an image of Pike going to town on Rosa Parks: “Sitting is a perfectly peaceful form of activism. What are they gonna do about somebody calmly sitting down to make a pointAUUUAHAHAGHAGHAGHGHGHHH.” (...)
But as Megan Garber pointed out Monday for the Nieman Journalism Lab, there’s power in the way that instantly iconic image of Pike — so cool, so brazen — has become something unto itself. It’s something that “demands, in trending topic terms, attention.” And whereas once the old maxim used to be that comedy is tragedy plus time, who has time anymore?
Instead, what we have is the meme. And yes, it’s dopey and pretty juvenile. But for as long as we’ve been human, we’ve had satire. We turn to the Onion after 9/11 to make us laugh at one of the worst human disasters in our nation’s history. We cling to Colbert and Stewart, groping to make mockery of the bad news of the day. Even Harry Potter had to learn a “riddikulus” spell to chase away the boggarts. Humor gives us context. It shrinks the monsters down to size. It can’t make a guy with an itchy trigger finger and an inflated sense of purpose any less real a threat, but it diminishes his power to scare us. And when we’re not afraid, that’s when we find the courage to stand up again.
by Mary Elizabeth Williams, Salon | Continue reading:
[ed. Hundreds of images here. Click on a picture to enlarge:]
Descending Into Hawaii's Haleakala Crater
Entering Haleakala Crater, the enormous mouth of Maui’s largest volcano, in the Hawaiian Islands, feels like an exercise in sensory deprivation. At the crater floor, a desolate expanse of twisted, dried lava reached after a two-hour hike down a trail carved into its wall, the silence is absolute. Not a breath of wind. No passing insects. No bird songs. Then I thought I detected drumming. Was it the ghostly echo of some ancient ritual? No, I finally realized, it was my own heartbeat, thundering in my ears.
In 2008, National Park Service acoustic experts found that the ambient sound levels within Haleakala crater were near the very threshold of human hearing—despite the popularity of the park. Around one million people a year visit the park, many of whom also ascend to its highest point—Haleakala’s 10,023-foot summit—and peer down at the vast field of dried lava below, which, in 1907, the writer and adventurer Jack London called “a workshop of nature still cluttered with the raw beginnings of world-making.”
The now-dormant volcano, which emerged from the Pacific Ocean more than a million years ago, takes up fully three-quarters of Maui’s landmass. Although its interior, whose rim is 7 1/2 miles long and 2 1/2 miles wide, is commonly called a crater, geologists refer to it as an “erosional depression” because it was created not by an eruption but by two valleys merging. Still, there has been frequent volcanic activity on its floor. Carbon dating and Hawaiian oral history suggest that the last eruption occurred between 1480 and 1780, when a cone on the mountain’s southern flank sent lava surging down to La Pérouse Bay, about two miles from Maui’s southernmost tip, near the modern resort town of Wailea.
Only a small number of visitors to Haleakala descend to the crater floor. Those who make the effort, as London did on horseback with his wife, friends and a band of Hawaiian cowboys, find themselves in a strangely beautiful world of brittle, contorted lava. “Saw-toothed waves of lava vexed the surface of this weird ocean,” wrote the author of The Call of the Wild, “while on either hand arose jagged crests and spiracles of fantastic shape.” Initial impressions of the crater as a lifeless wasteland are quickly dispelled. Delicate lichens and wildflowers dot the landscape, along with a bizarre plant found nowhere else on earth called the ahinahina, or Haleakala silversword. The plant grows for up to half a century as a dense ball of metallic-looking leaves, produces a single tall spire that flowers only once, with a brilliant, blood-red blossom, then dies. Endangered Hawaiian birds thrive here, including the largest nesting colony of Hawaiian petrels, or uau, which let out a peculiar barking cry, and Hawaiian geese, called nene. (...)
On my solitary expedition, the silence of Haleakala did not last long. As I picked my way across the lava fields, the first gusts of wind arrived, then dense clouds that were filled with icy drizzle. Soon the temperature was plummeting and I could barely see my feet for the fog. Thunder was booming by the time I reached Holua cabin, one of three public refuges crafted in 1937 from redwood with help from the Civilian Conservation Corps. They’re the only man-made shelters in the crater other than park ranger cabins. I lit a wood-burning stove as the sky erupted in lightning. For the rest of the night, tongues of crackling light illuminated the ghostly, contorted lava fields. Pele, the volatile ancient Hawaiian goddess of fire and volcanoes, must have been displeased.
The story of Haleakala National Park is inseparable from that of Hawaii itself, whose transformation from independent Pacific kingdom to 50th U.S. state has largely been forgotten on the mainland. When the federal government created the park in 1916, less than two decades after it seized the archipelago, it ignored the crater’s cultural importance for native Hawaiians. But in recent years, Haleakala’s ancient status has gained new attention.
by Tony Perrottet, Smithsonian | Read more:
Photographs by Susan Seubert
[ed. Also this link about the Garden of the Gods (Lanai) for future reference.]
The News Forecast
The 20 employees of Recorded Future aren't foreign-policy experts. They aren't traders either, but if you'd started using Recorded Future's predictions to buy US stocks on January 1, 2009, you would have made an annual return of 56.69 per cent. (The S&P 500 had an annualised return of 17.22 per cent over the same period.) Between May 13 and August 5 this year, as markets behaved with vertiginous abandon, their strategy returned 10.4 per cent; in contrast, the S&P 500 lost 9.9 per cent of its value. They're data experts: computer scientists, statisticians and experts in linguistics. And in the data, they think, lies the future.
All Recorded Future's predictions, whatever the field, are based on publicly available information -- news articles, government sites, financial reports, tweets -- fed into the company's own algorithms. The result, it claims, is a "new tool that allows you to visualise the future" -- one that is changing how government intelligence agencies gather information and how giant hedge funds place bets. On its website, Recorded Future states: "We don't grant interviews and we don't issue press releases." But behind closed doors, the company is developing the technology that has been described be one tech blog as an "information weapon".
The company, cofounded by Christopher Ahlberg, an entrepreneur who sold his first business for $195 million and served in the Swedish special forces, has $8.5 million in funding. Its first two investors were Google and the CIA. Recorded Future counts US government agencies, banks and hedge funds among the clients paying million-dollar contracts. But its true ambition is to organise all the data on the internet for similar predictive analysis -- to make the future calculable. (...)
The first generation of search engines, such as Lycos and Alta Vista, used traditional text search to deliver web pages, deploying their own algorithms, but essentially looking at individual documents in isolation. Google changed this in 1998. Its PageRank algorithm analysed the links between web pages, promoting those that had more links pointing to them from other sites. Recorded Future is part of the third generation: instead of explicit link analysis, it examines implicit links -- what it calls "invisible links" between documents that refer to the same entities or events. It does this by separating the documents and their content from what they talk about, identifying canonical entities and events that exist outside of the article.
"What matters is that it's freaking complicated," says Ahlberg. In practice, Recorded Future harvests 25,000 data sources as RSS feeds, which could include Companies House and US Securities and Exchange Commission filings, a New York Times article, Twitter and Facebook posts, obscure blogs (there's one on Norwegian salmon fishing) or transcripts from earnings calls or political speeches -- "just a flood of stuff", says Ahlberg. It does the same for Chinese and Arabic sources. "Then we look for entities -- people, places, technologies; and events -- a murder, a bomb explosion, a person moving from A to B, product launches."
by Tom Cheshire,Wired | Read more:
Photo: Natalie Lees
4.74 Degrees
[ed. New study of 721 million Facebook users says there may be only 4.74 degrees of separation between you and George Clooney.]
“We are close, in a sense, to people who don’t necessarily like us, sympathize with us or have anything in common with us,” Dr. Kleinberg said. “It’s the weak ties that make the world small.”
Still, he noted that such ties were hardly meaningless. “We should ask what things spread well on weak ties,” he said. “News spreads well on weak ties. Those people I met on vacation, if they send me some cool news, I might send that to my friends. If they send me something about a protest movement, I might not.”
Matthew O. Jackson, an economist at Stanford who studies social networks, raised questions about the bias built into a study based on random samples. He said the study confirmed Facebook’s success in being where millions of people communicate. “It’s more evidence that they’ve been enormously successful at connecting a large number of people very well,” he said.
The research underscores the growing power of the emerging science of social networks, in which scientists study the ways people interact by crunching gigantic sets of Internet data.
“These social network tools provide individuals with tremendous reach,” said Dr. Horvitz, the Microsoft researcher. “People can share ideas with only a few jumps to a large portion of the world’s population and with even fewer steps to the entire population of a nation.”
by John Markoff and Somini Sengupta, NY Times | Read more:
“We are close, in a sense, to people who don’t necessarily like us, sympathize with us or have anything in common with us,” Dr. Kleinberg said. “It’s the weak ties that make the world small.”
Still, he noted that such ties were hardly meaningless. “We should ask what things spread well on weak ties,” he said. “News spreads well on weak ties. Those people I met on vacation, if they send me some cool news, I might send that to my friends. If they send me something about a protest movement, I might not.”
Matthew O. Jackson, an economist at Stanford who studies social networks, raised questions about the bias built into a study based on random samples. He said the study confirmed Facebook’s success in being where millions of people communicate. “It’s more evidence that they’ve been enormously successful at connecting a large number of people very well,” he said.
The research underscores the growing power of the emerging science of social networks, in which scientists study the ways people interact by crunching gigantic sets of Internet data.
“These social network tools provide individuals with tremendous reach,” said Dr. Horvitz, the Microsoft researcher. “People can share ideas with only a few jumps to a large portion of the world’s population and with even fewer steps to the entire population of a nation.”
by John Markoff and Somini Sengupta, NY Times | Read more:
Monday, November 21, 2011
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