Painting by 德珍 (Der-Jen)
via:

90 Degrees in Winter: This Is What Climate Change Looks Like

The National Weather Service is kind of the anti–Mike Daisey, a just-the-facts operation that grinds on hour after hour, day after day. It’s collected billions of records (I’ve seen the vast vaults where early handwritten weather reports from observers across the country are stored in endless rows of ledgers and files) on countless rainstorms, blizzards and pleasant summer days. So the odds that you could shock the NWS are pretty slim.

Beginning in mid-March, however, its various offices began issuing bulletins that sounded slightly shaken. “There’s extremes in weather, but seeing something like this is impressive and unprecedented,” Chicago NWS meteorologist Richard Castro told the Daily Herald. “It’s extraordinarily rare for climate locations with 100+ year long periods of records to break records day after day after day,” the office added in an official statement.

It wasn’t just Chicago, of course. A huge swath of the nation simmered under bizarre heat. International Falls, Minnesota, the “icebox of the nation,” broke its old temperature records—by twenty-two degrees, which according to weather historians may be the largest margin ever for any station with a century’s worth of records. Winner, South Dakota, reached 94 degrees on the second-to-last day of winter. That’s in the Dakotas, two days before the close of winter. Jeff Masters, founder of WeatherUnderground, the web’s go-to site for meteorological information, watched an eerie early morning outside his Michigan home and wrote, “This is not the atmosphere I grew up with,” a fact confirmed later that day when the state recorded the earliest F-3 strength tornado in its history. Other weathermen were more… weathermanish. Veteran Minneapolis broadcaster Paul Douglas, after noting that Sunday’s low temperature in Rochester broke the previous record high, blogged “this is OFF THE SCALE WEIRD even for Minnesota.”

It’s hard to overstate how impossible this weather is—when you have nearly a century and a half of records, they should be hard to break, much less smash. But this is like Barry Bonds on steroids if his steroids were on steroids, an early season outbreak of heat completely without precedent in its scale and spread. I live in Vermont, where we should be starting to slowly thaw out—but as the heat moved steadily east, ski areas shut down and golf courses opened.

And truth be told, it felt pretty good. Most people caught in the torrid zones probably reacted pretty much like President Obama: “It gets you a little nervous about what is happening to global temperatures,” he told the audience assembled at a fundraiser at Tyler Perry’s Atlanta mansion (records were falling in Georgia too). “On the other hand I have really enjoyed the nice weather.”

Anyone thinking about the seasons ahead was at least as ambivalent, and most were scared. Here are a few of the things that could happen with staggering warmth like this early in the year:

by Bill McKibben, The Nation |  Read more:
Photo: Reuters/Ivan Alvarado

via:

Why Some Words Die

[ed. From the "For What It's Worth" department. I'm amazed someone even undertook such a massive analysis.]

Words are competing daily in an almost Darwinian struggle for survival, according to new research from scientists in which they analysed more than 10 million words used over the last 200 years.

Drawing their material from Google's huge book-digitisation project, the international team of academics tracked the usage of every word recorded in English, Spanish and Hebrew over the 209-year period between 1800 and 2008. The scientists, who include Boston University's Joel Tenenbaum and IMT Lucca Institute for Advanced Studies' Alexander Petersen, said their study shows that "words are competing actors in a system of finite resources", and just as financial firms battle for market share, so words compete to be used by writers or speakers, and to then grab the attention of readers or listeners.

There has been a "drastic increase in the death rate of words" in the modern print era, the academics discovered. They attributed it to the growing use of automatic spellcheckers, and stricter editing procedures, wiping out misspellings and errors. "Most changes to the vocabulary in the last 10 to 20 years are due to the extinction of misspelled words and nonsensical print errors, and to the decreased birth rate of new misspelled variations and genuinely new words," the scientists write in their just-published study. "The words that are dying are those words with low relative use. We confirm by visual inspection that the lists of dying words contain mostly misspelled and nonsensical words."

But it is not only "defective" words that die: sometimes words are driven to extinction by aggressive competitors. The word "Roentgenogram", for example, deriving from the discoverer of the x-ray, William Röntgen, was widely used for several decades in the 20th century, but, challenged by "x-ray" and "radiogram", has now fallen out of use entirely. X-ray had beaten off its synonyms by 1980, speculate the academics, owing to its "efficient short word length" and since the English language is generally used for scientific publication. "Each of the words is competing to be a monopoly on who gets to be the name," Tenenbaum told the American Physical Society.

The phrase "the great war", meanwhile, used for a period to describe the first world war, fell out of use around 1939 when another war of equal proportions hit the world.

by Alison Flood, The Guardian |  Read more:
Photograph: Markos Dolopikos/Alamy

The Age of Double Standards

“But, Yossarian, suppose everyone felt that way.”

“Then,” said Yossarian, “I’d certainly be a damned fool to feel any other way, wouldn’t I?” —Joseph Heller, Catch-22

Last November 29, American Airlines declared bankruptcy under Chapter 11, the provision of the bankruptcy code that allows a corporation to stiff its creditors, break contracts, and keep operating under the supervision of a judge. This maneuver, politely termed a “reorganization,” ends with the corporation exiting bankruptcy cleansed of old debts. In opting for Chapter 11, American joined every other major airline, including Delta, Northwest, United, and US Airways, which has been in and out of Chapter 11 twice since 2002. No fewer than 189 airlines have declared bankruptcy since 1990. As the sole large carrier that had not gone bankrupt, American missed out on savings available to its rivals and thus was increasingly uncompetitive.

Bankruptcy is intended to give a fresh start to persons and enterprises overwhelmed by creditors. In the case of American (like other airlines before it), the main “creditors” are its employees. The costs of American’s bankruptcy will be borne mainly by its workers and secondarily by taxpayers. The contracts being broken are union contracts and legal promises to honor pension obligations. American is laying off 13,000 workers, slashing wages, and reducing its annual pension contribution from $97 million to $6.5 million. The airline hopes to stick the federal Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation with liability for much of the $6.5 billion that it owes its workers and retirees.

This national indulgence for corporate bankruptcy has a certain logic. The Wall Street Journal editorial page recently termed bankruptcy “one of the better ways in which American capitalism encourages risk-taking,” and that is the prevailing view. Thanks to Chapter 11, a potentially viable insolvent enterprise is given a fresh start as a going concern, rather than being cannibalized for the benefit of its creditors.

However, what’s good for corporate capitalism is evidently too good for the rest of us. Suppose everyone felt that way?

by Robert Kuttner, The American Prospect |  Read more:

via:

The solution is not to suppress our thoughts and desires, for this would be impossible, it would be like trying to keep a pot of water from boiling by pressing down tightly on the lid. The only sensible approach is to train ourselves to observe our thoughts without following them. This deprives them of their compulsive energy and is therefore like removing the pot of boiling water from the fire.

Lama Thubten Yeshe.
via:

Jungleland

“We have snakes,” Mary Brock said. “Long, thick snakes. Kingsnakes, rattlesnakes.”

Brock was walking Pee Wee, a small, high-strung West Highland terrier who darted into the brush at the slightest provocation — a sudden breeze, shifting gravel, a tour bus rumbling down Caffin Avenue several blocks east. But Pee Wee had reason to be anxious. Brock was anxious. Most residents of the Lower Ninth Ward in New Orleans are anxious. “A lot of people in my little area died after Katrina,” Brock said. “Because of too much stress.” The most immediate sources of stress that October morning were the stray Rottweilers. Brock had seen packs of them in the wildly overgrown lots, prowling for food. Pee Wee, it seemed, had seen them, too. “I know they used to be pets because they are beautiful animals.” Brock corrected herself: “They were beautiful animals. When I first saw them, they were nice and clean — inside-the-house animals. But now they just look sad.”

The Lower Ninth has become a dumping ground for unwanted dogs and cats. People from all over the city take the Claiborne Avenue Bridge over the Industrial Canal, bounce along the fractured streets until they reach a suitably empty area and then toss the animals out of the car. But it’s not just pets. The neighborhood has become a dumping ground for many kinds of unwanted things. Contractors, rather than drive to the city dump in New Orleans East, sweep trailers full of construction debris onto the street. Auto shops, rather than pay the tire-disposal fee ($2 a tire), dump tires by the dozen. The tire problem has become so desperate that the city is debating changes to the law. (One humble suggestion: a $2 reward per tire.) You also see burned piles of household garbage, cotton-candy-pink tufts of insulation foam, turquoise PVC pipes, sodden couches tumescing like sea sponges and abandoned cars. Sometimes the cars contain bodies. In August, the police discovered an incinerated corpse in a white Dodge Charger that was left in the middle of an abandoned lot near the intersection of Choctaw and Law, two blocks from where Mary Brock was walking Pee Wee. Nobody knew how long the car had been there; it was concealed from the closest house, half a block away, by 12-foot-high grass. That entire stretch of Choctaw Street, for that matter, was no longer visible. It had been devoured by forest. Every housing plot on both sides of the street for two blocks, between Rocheblave and Law, was abandoned. Through the weeds, you could just make out a cross marking the spot where Brock’s neighbor had drowned.

by Nathaniel Rich, NY Times |  Read more:
Photo: Andrew Moore

Some kind of flowers I found in Seattle but haven't a clue what they're called. They look like little tomatoey Japanese lanterns.
Photo: markk
* I was close. They at least have an asian name: Chinese Lanterns (also called Winter Cherry or Love in a Cage). Thanks Barbara!

Kate Bush

Hey Dude

Slang rarely has staying power. That is part of its charm; the young create it, and discard it as soon as it becomes too common. Slang is a subset of in-group language, and once that gets taken up by the out-group, it’s time for the in-crowd to come up with something new. So the long life of one piece of American slang, albeit in many different guises, is striking. Or as the kids would say, “Dude!”

Though the term seems distinctly American, it had an interesting birth: one of its first written appearances came in 1883, in the American magazine, which referred to “the social ‘dude’ who affects English dress and the English drawl”. The teenage American republic was already a growing power, with the economy booming and the conquest of the West well under way. But Americans in cities often aped the dress and ways of Europe, especially Britain. Hence dude as a dismissive term: a dandy, someone so insecure in his Americanness that he felt the need to act British. It’s not clear where the word’s origins lay. Perhaps its mouth-feel was enough to make it sound dismissive.

From the specific sense of dandy, dude spread out to mean an easterner, a city slicker, especially one visiting the West. Many westerners resented the dude, but some catered to him. Entrepreneurial ranchers set up ranches for tourists to visit and stay and pretend to be cowboys themselves, giving rise to the “dude ranch”.

By the 1950s or 1960s, dude had been bleached of specific meaning. In black culture, it meant almost any male; one sociologist wrote in 1967 of a group of urban blacks he was studying that “these were the local ‘dudes’, their term meaning not the fancy city slickers but simply ‘the boys’, ‘fellas’, the ‘cool people’.”

From the black world it moved to hip whites, and so on to its enduring associations today—California, youth, cool. In “Easy Rider” (1969) Peter Fonda explains it to the square Jack Nicholson: “Dude means nice guy. Dude means a regular sort of person.” And from this new, broader, gentler meaning, dude went vocative. Young men the world over seem to need some appellation to send across the net at each other that recognises their common masculinity while stopping short of the intimacy of a name. It starts in one country or subculture, and travels outwards. Just as the hippies gave us “man”, and British men are “mate” to one another, so, by the late 1970s or early 1980s, “dude” was filling that role. And all three words are as likely to go at the start of the sentence as the end.

by Robert Lane Greene, Intelligent Life |  Read more:

Edoardo De Falchi
flickr.com:people:trexray
via:

Japan's Obsession with Perfect Fruit

Giving fruit as a gift is a common custom in Japan. But this fruit is not your normal greengrocers’ produce, complete with bumps, bruises and blemishes. The pick of the crop is grown with exquisite care and attention to detail - and commands an eye-watering price when it comes to market.

Classical music plays softly over the speakers in the Senbikiya shop in central Tokyo. The uniformed members of staff are politely attentive, ushering the customers to chairs and crouching down beside them to take their orders.

The ceilings are high, the fittings elegant, the lighting tasteful and the displays are beautiful. But this is not some designer handbag emporium or high-end jewellery store. Senbikiya is a greengrocers.

Ushio Oshima is showing us around. He is a sixth-generation member of the shop’s founding family. The business began back in the 19th century, piling fruit high and selling it cheap.

Gift of gratitude

That was until the wife of the second-generation owner astutely realised the real money was to be made by inverting the business model. Now Senbikiya must surely be the most expensive fruit shop in the world.

There are apples, the size of a child’s head, with evenly red, blemish-free skin on sale for 2,100 yen, or $25 (£15.80). That’s each, not for a bag. Senbikiya Queen Strawberries come in boxes of twelve perfectly matched fruits at 6,825 yen, $83 (£52.40). Even on a slow day they sell 50 boxes.

Then there are the melons, each perfect, of course, and topped with identical T-shaped green stalks. They’re 34,650 yen, or $419 (£264.50), for three.

“We specialise in gift-giving, fruits as gifts,” says Mr Oshima. “So it really needs to look good. The appearance is a very important part of it. Then there’s the service. The combination is what you pay for.”

Japan has two gift-giving seasons a year, one in summer and one in winter. Family members exchange presents but the tradition goes well beyond that. People offer presents to express gratitude, such as to their bosses. Companies often send gifts to customers and business partners.

Senbikiya has carved out a niche for itself at the very top of the market. For the Japanese it is similar to Issey Miyake’s status among fashion lovers, or Rolls Royce to car aficionados. But the desire for fruit perfection goes well beyond that.

by Roland Buerk, BBC |  Read more:
Photo: Alfie Goodrich

Fictional Futures and the Conspicuously Young

Excerpted from an essay by David Foster Wallace

Television’s greatest appeal is that it is engaging without being at all demanding. One can rest while undergoing stimulation. Receive without giving. It’s the same in all low art that has as goal continued attention and patronage: it’s appealing precisely because it’s at once fun and easy. And the entrenchment of a culture built on Appeal helps explain a dark and curious thing: at a time when there are more decent and good and very good serious fiction writers at work in America than ever before, an American public enjoying unprecedented literacy and disposable income spends the vast bulk of its reading time and book dollar on fiction that is, by any fair standard, trash. Trash fiction is, by design and appeal, most like televised narrative: engaging without being demanding. But trash, in terms of both quality and popularity, is a much more sinister phenomenon. For while television has from its beginnings been openly motivated by—has been about—considerations of mass appeal and L.C.D. and profit, our own history is chock full of evidence that readers and societies may properly expect important, lasting contributions from a narrative art that under- stands itself as being about considerations more important than popularity and balance sheets. Entertainers can divert and engage and maybe even console; only artists can transfigure. Today’s trash writers are entertainers working artists’ turf. This in itself is nothing new. But television aesthetics, and television-like economics, have clearly made their unprecedented popularity and reward possible. And there seems to me to be a real danger that not only the forms but the norms of televised art will begin to supplant the standards of all narrative art. This would be a disaster.

by David Foster Wallace |  Read more: (PDF)

h/t: YMFY

Thank You for Attempting to Unsubscribe

We have received your request to unsubscribe from our newsletter. We hope that you enjoyed those issues of our informative and entertaining newsletter that you received after you voluntarily and under no duress asked to be added to our newsletter mailing list and before you decided to ask to be removed. And why wouldn’t you have? In fact, we’re so confident that you did enjoy the newsletters you received, and have submitted your unsubscribe request inadvertently, or under duress, that, as a one-time courtesy, we will disregard your request and keep your name and email address on our newsletter mailing list.

We understand that your time is valuable. You simply can’t read every newsletter that arrives in your email inbox! Some just have to be ignored. As an additional courtesy, we have searched your email archives and identified other email newsletters to which you were subscribed and submitted unsubscribe requests in your name, from your account, to the publishers of those other newsletters. Because an unsubscribe request can in some instances take weeks to process, we have also created filters for your email account that will relocate newsletters mailed from other publishers to your spam folder. If any other newsletter publisher’s mass-mailing software required confirmation of your unsubscribe request, we have sent that confirmation as well, providing as necessary your username and/or password, which we gleaned when possible from the archived emails confirming your initial subscriptions. Otherwise, we found your personal data on your hard drive.

In addition, we have changed your response to any brand name Evite or generic electronic invitation from “Will Attend” to “Will Not Attend” (or the equivalents). Further, any event of which you were identified as the organizer has been canceled. Not attending events will free up more time that you can devote to reading our newsletter, which you will continue to receive.

If you believe that our decision to disregard your request to unsubscribe was in error, you may reinstate your request in writing, sent to the mailing address set forth in the FAQ on our website. (Please note that accessing our website constitutes a grant of permission to add your name and email address to our newsletter mailing list.) Your written request must be accompanied by one of the following: (1) a letter from a licensed physician advising that you have a medical condition that does not permit you to receive newsletters, whether or not you (can) read them; (2) proof that you have moved your principal place of residence to a location more than 25 miles from the Internet; or (3) an affidavit, signed by you in the presence of a notary public, averring that you have irreversibly died.

by Matthew David Brozik, McSweeney's |  Read more:

The Love Competition

The Love Competition is an unusual hybrid of a short documentary film and scientific study.

Brent Hoff, a filmmaker and editor of the video magazine Wholphin, teamed up with Stanford University’s Center for Cognitive and Neurobiological Imaging to investigate the neurochemical nature of love, with a competitive twist.

The beauty of the film, and the study, lies in how sincerely the research subjects tackle the task at hand. They share the stories of their greatest loves in amazingly heartfelt on-camera interviews.

From a 10-year-old kid to a couple that has been happily married for over 50 years, everyone describes love (or lack of it) differently.

For some, their time in the fMRI scanner has a transformative effect. In the end, of course, it isn’t really about winning anyway.

h/t GS

Two Tesla Coils, "Sweet Home Alabama"

Because why not, here are two Tesla coils covering Lynyrd Skynyrd's classic rock standard. Will the two Tesla coils remain together as a musical duo, or will one decide to experience the larger acclaim of solo stardom while the other descends into a harrowing maelstrom of addiction and debauchery? Only time will tell. [Via]

h/t: The Awl

Living With Your Wanderlust

So you want to go away! Let’s talk about it. Do you have your list? You know, your list, the list of countries you want to visit ranked in order of desire. I keep mine handy at all times. Right now it goes: Mongolia, Egypt, India, Iceland, Greece, the Czech Republic, Poland, Ukraine, Argentina, New Zealand, Antarctica, Thailand, Finland, everywhere else in the history of everything ever. (Antarctica is a recent addition.)

While I’m still gathering experience in the sphere of actually going away, I am considered a master in wanting-to-go. Fourteen years in suburban New Jersey allowed me the time to cultivate such skills as map collecting, airplane doodling, and fantasy packing, which is when you imagine fitting your life into one piece of carry-on luggage and walking out of this town for good. You know that game, right? I sat in Geometry class, inked in the margins of my notebook, and made strict rules for my suitcase. No more than two pairs of shoes. One lightweight jacket. One ready camera.

Recently, a friend wrote me an email that included the line “I do really want to be on my own for a bit in a new place.” “I feel like I need more independence and to get away from the crazy awesome but intense and co-dependent support network I have here so that I can figure out what I am doing with my life,” she said. I responded immediately and in all caps, like this: “AHHHHHH.” Only more and more H’s could express how fully I agree with her. The thing is, I’m away right now. I’m away yet I still want to go.

Like I said, I don’t have much experience in this. After high school, I enrolled in a college 20 miles away from my hometown. After college, I moved five neighborhoods south of campus. Every few weekends I took a bus back to my parents’ house to eat roast chicken and then lie in a post-dinner haze in front of their fireplace. In a short lifetime, I’ve managed to find some of the most incredible friends in the world, who forgave me years of suburban rage, indulged my cravings for Ethiopian food, and organized slumber parties around the movie Jumanji. Life was perfect and whole.

Still, I checked airfarewatchdog.com on my lunch breaks.

Still, I flung myself against my boyfriend’s futon and whined, “I’ve never been anywhere. Not anywhere!” as he patted my back.

Still, after a while, I left.

I only moved six months ago, so time isn’t on my side — but if we’re awarding points for distance, then listen up: I’m in Kamchatka. Oh, you didn’t watch that PBS nature documentary? Or you don’t know this place from the board game Risk, because you don’t play Risk, because you’re not my dad? Kamchatka is a volcanic peninsula on the far eastern edge of Russia. It holds titles like “highest recorded density of brown bears on Earth,” “only geyser field in Eurasia,” and “longest occupier of the top spot on my places-to-go list.” It’s a fantasy suspended on the end of the world.

At the end of August, I finally packed my suitcase, extorted promises from the boy I love to wait for my eventual return, and flew 20 hours away from home to this distant, hissing, beautiful land. Here, I rent a brown and yellow two-bedroom apartment that comes complete with a cat. And aren’t I happy? Didn’t I dream of this? A master of wanting, didn’t I fantasize about this exact existence for three years before my plane took off for Russia? (Yes, yes, yes.) Why, then, do I sit in my bedroom in Kamchatka, watch movies about Kamchatka on my computer, and long to travel to the place I already am? Why do I ride the public bus here and start shaking with the sudden awful desire to flee?

Wanting to go is a hard habit to break.

by Julia Philips, The Hairpin |  Read more:

Charlie Haden Quartet West feat. Norah Jones

via: