Tuesday, May 1, 2012
Snacks for a Fat Planet
PepsiCo is the largest food-and-beverage company in the United States, and the second-largest in the world, after Nestlé. If PepsiCo were a country, the size of its economy—sixty billion dollars in revenues in 2010—would put it sixty-sixth in gross national product, between Ecuador and Croatia. Although the flagship brand, Pepsi-Cola, has always been second to Coca-Cola, the Frito-Lay division is ten times larger than its largest competitor, Diamond Foods, Inc., of San Francisco. Its products take up whole aisles at Walmart. They are the first thing you see when you enter a deli or a convenience store, and they’re in pharmacies, office-supply stores, schools, libraries, and the vending machines at work. PepsiCo’s snacks are also deeply embedded in our social rituals and national institutions. (At the climactic moment of the national college-football championship game, in January, when Auburn was about to kick the winning field goal, the sportscaster Brent Musberger yelped, “This is for all the Tostitos!”) If grazing on snacks throughout the day eventually comes to replace eating regular meals—a situation that already exists in some households—we’ll have PepsiCo to thank.
PepsiCo is also an empire of mind share. Pepsi is the second-most-recognized beverage brand in the world, after Coke, and eighteen of PepsiCo’s other brands, which include Tropicana, Gatorade, and Quaker Oats, are billion-dollar businesses in their own right. In 2010, the company spent $3.4 billion marketing and advertising its brands. They represent a kind of promise to its customers—a guarantee that the drinks and snacks are safe, and that the taste of them, that irresistible combination of flavors, will be the same every time. But in another sense the brands are abstractions. The taste is the rootstock onto which PepsiCo grafts desires (“aspirations,” as they say in the branding business) that have nothing to do with the products themselves. This duality in PepsiCo’s products—part sensory, part aspirational—extends throughout the company’s culture and its mission, as defined by Indra Nooyi, who has been its C.E.O. since October, 2006. It is not enough to make things that taste good, she says. PepsiCo must also be “the good company.” It must aspire to higher values than the day-to-day business of making and selling soft drinks and snacks. Nooyi calls this “performance with purpose.” The phrase is on the screen savers that pop up on idle computers around headquarters.
And yet, for all its riches, its vast reach, and its sense of high purpose, the PepsiCo empire is built on shifting sands. Over the course of the past half century, during which PepsiCo’s revenues have increased more than a hundredfold, a public-health crisis has been steadily growing along with it. People are getting fatter. In the nineteen-eighties, rates of obesity started to rise sharply in the U.S. and around the world. By the nineteen-nineties, obesity reached epidemic proportions. One study cited by federal health officials estimates that, in 2008, obesity cost the U.S. a hundred and forty-seven billion dollars in health-care charges and resulted in about three hundred thousand deaths.
Many studies point to the ubiquity of high-calorie, low-cost processed foods and drinks as one of the major drivers of this condition. Snacks, in particular, play a role in childhood obesity, which is growing even faster than obesity in adults. Americans consume about fifty gallons of soda a year, more than four times the average per-capita consumption sixty years ago. Americans also ingest about thirty-four hundred milligrams of sodium per day, twice the recommended amount; sodium has long been linked to high blood pressure. And the oils and fats used in some fried potato and corn chips elevate cholesterol and can cause heart disease. In other words, that great taste promised by PepsiCo’s brands, which relies heavily on sugar, salt, and fat, appears to be making some people sick, and its most devoted fans, the “heavy users,” as they’re known in the food industry, could be among the worst afflicted. Cutting short the lives of your best customers isn’t much of a strategy for long-term success.
by John Seabrook, The New Yorker (May, 2011) | Read more:
Illustration by Robert Risko
FiveBooks Interviews > Stephen Cave on Immortality
Why do we have this compelling, addictive interest in the idea of living forever?
It’s a human universal. Among all of the animals, we probably uniquely are aware that we’re going to die. We try to avoid the worst, to keep going one way or another, yet we must live in the knowledge that it is futile – that ultimately, the worst thing that can possibly happen will happen. That all our projects and all our dreams, everything we’re striving for, one day it will all be over. And this is terrifying. So we are very keen to hear any story that can allay this fear and say death isn’t what it seems, and we can just keep on going indefinitely.
In your book Immortality, just out, you identify four paths to that goal. Will you take us through them?
These four paths are, I think, the only ways in which we can imagine living forever. They have a logical relationship that takes us from one to the next. The first one is simply living on, in this body and on this earth. That might seem a rather implausible idea initially, given the success rate of it during history, but almost every culture dreams of this in one way or another – whether through an elixir of life or biotech.
If we think that isn’t likely to work, and we need a plan B, the next step is to think maybe this body that has to die can nonetheless rise again and live for a second time. This is the hope that we can be resurrected, and it has played an important role in various religions, in particular Christianity, Islam and ancient Egypt. We have modern conceptions of this too, such as cryonics – the idea that we can freeze our corpses and revive them at some later point.
But if you think this physical body is too unreliable, that ultimately we will crumble from disease and ageing, then you want instead an immaterial thing that is immune to all this. This is the third path, the belief in the soul. Something pure, some spark of the divine that won’t age or succumb to disease, that we can live on through. Belief in the soul is probably the most widespread of all the immortality narratives, but it too has problems from the philosophical perspective.
And for those who don’t believe in anything as definite as an immaterial soul that can preserve our personality, then there is the more indirect route to immortality of legacy, which is the fourth route. There are different forms of legacy – biological legacy, in our genes and children, or cultural legacy, living on through our works and fame. Every culture has some kind of story about why death is not the end. And this story will draw on one or more of these four fundamental forms of how we might live forever.
by Stephen Cave, The Browser | Read more:
Illustration: Florian Prischl. The Ladder of Divine Ascent
Monday, April 30, 2012
How Online Black Markets Work
The internet is no stranger to crime. From counterfeit and stolen products, to illegal drugs, stolen identities and weapons, nearly anything can be purchased online with a few clicks of the mouse. The online black market not only can be accessed by anyone with an Internet connection, but the whole process of ordering illicit goods and services is alarmingly easy and anonymous, with multiple marketplaces to buy or sell anything you want.
Understanding how the market thrives—unregulated and untraceable—can give you a better sense of the threats (or resources) that affect you and your business.
In our scenario we are going to legally transfer $1,000 USD out of a regular bank account and into a mathematical system of binary codes, and then enter a neighborhood of the Internet largely used by criminals. This hidden world anyone lets anyone purchase bulk downloads of stolen credit cards, as well as a credit card writer, blank cards, some "on stage" fake identities—and maybe even a grenade launcher they've had their eyes on.
A journey into the darker side of the Internet starts with two open-source programs: Bitcoin and the Tor Bundle.
Moving Money
Bitcoin (www.bitcoin.org) is system tool that will act as a personal bank for storing and investing digital currency on your computer. Once it's installed on your system, it sits empty like a piggy bank, waiting to be filled with untraceable digital cash.
Getting it filled is the tricky part.
The digital monetary system online is predominately operated by the likes of Paypal, Western Union, and banking companies that try to follow government regulations to prevent fraud and money laundering. There are two steps to legally take money and have it converted at the current Bitcoin rate into BTCs in our digital and anonymous bank.
Start by opening a Dwolla (www.dwolla.com) banking account with no fees. You can use your real information—you aren't doing anything illegal. In about three days you will be given a fraud test and have to identify small transfers in your Dwolla and personal bank account. Once your account is confirmed, wire any amount from your personal bank to Dwolla from a lump sum or the estimated price of your purchase you have in mind. After you confirm the transfers, your legit money will now be stored in a new global bank with less restriction than US banks.
Next you need to set up an account with the largest bitcoin exchanger, MtGox. Due to fraud concerns, MtGox will only allow transfers from banks like Dwolla.
After your Dwolla transfer moves to MtGox, you can use the money to purchase Bitcoins on the open market for a small percentage-based fee. Once this sale is complete, your bitcoins are best stored in your own bank account that is residing digitally on your computer.
The whole process can be completed in less than a week, and the $1,000 USD is now exchanged to $191 BTC. Now you are ready to go shopping on the black market.
by Brandon Gregg, CSO Online, Read more:
Photo via:
In our scenario we are going to legally transfer $1,000 USD out of a regular bank account and into a mathematical system of binary codes, and then enter a neighborhood of the Internet largely used by criminals. This hidden world anyone lets anyone purchase bulk downloads of stolen credit cards, as well as a credit card writer, blank cards, some "on stage" fake identities—and maybe even a grenade launcher they've had their eyes on.
A journey into the darker side of the Internet starts with two open-source programs: Bitcoin and the Tor Bundle.
Moving Money
Bitcoin (www.bitcoin.org) is system tool that will act as a personal bank for storing and investing digital currency on your computer. Once it's installed on your system, it sits empty like a piggy bank, waiting to be filled with untraceable digital cash.
Getting it filled is the tricky part.
The digital monetary system online is predominately operated by the likes of Paypal, Western Union, and banking companies that try to follow government regulations to prevent fraud and money laundering. There are two steps to legally take money and have it converted at the current Bitcoin rate into BTCs in our digital and anonymous bank.
Start by opening a Dwolla (www.dwolla.com) banking account with no fees. You can use your real information—you aren't doing anything illegal. In about three days you will be given a fraud test and have to identify small transfers in your Dwolla and personal bank account. Once your account is confirmed, wire any amount from your personal bank to Dwolla from a lump sum or the estimated price of your purchase you have in mind. After you confirm the transfers, your legit money will now be stored in a new global bank with less restriction than US banks.
Next you need to set up an account with the largest bitcoin exchanger, MtGox. Due to fraud concerns, MtGox will only allow transfers from banks like Dwolla.
After your Dwolla transfer moves to MtGox, you can use the money to purchase Bitcoins on the open market for a small percentage-based fee. Once this sale is complete, your bitcoins are best stored in your own bank account that is residing digitally on your computer.
The whole process can be completed in less than a week, and the $1,000 USD is now exchanged to $191 BTC. Now you are ready to go shopping on the black market.
by Brandon Gregg, CSO Online, Read more:
Photo via:
Take The Skyway
There wasn't a damn thing I could do or say
Up in the skyway
~The Replacements
Walking has been much in the news lately, or rather, how little Americans seem to be doing it. It’s obvious that walking is good for individual health, but what should perhaps be even more emphasized is the importance of walking for the overall health of the urban fabric. So, in addition to asking ourselves the question of how we can get people to walk more, we also ought to consider equally beneficial ways for designing the built environment, such that all this walking will bring about a result for society. Walking may be an end in itself, but if it is only considered as such, we forego the opportunity that it is a means as well.
The history of walking in American cities is one of the steady erosion of an activity that was so natural that its importance was almost entirely tacit. It is always amazing to realize how malleable our norms are: during the automobile’s first few decades, pedestrian fatalities were commonly greeted with criminal charges such as ‘technical manslaughter’. Drivers were viewed with mistrust, considered reckless and even represented class division. However, pedestrians became increasingly regarded as impediments to the velocity of modern life, and economic progress became increasingly associated with the automobile and the infrastructure that made its hegemony possible.
How did this change come about? As Sarah Goodyear writes in the Atlantic Cities blog,
This was the beginning of a long and effective campaign that saw walking legislated and planned almost out of existence. Even now, designers and planners are often hobbled by a perspective which continues to favour the automobile over pedestrian – most ironically, in the name of safety.
by Misha Lepetic, 3 Quarks Daily | Read more:
Up in the skyway
~The Replacements
Walking has been much in the news lately, or rather, how little Americans seem to be doing it. It’s obvious that walking is good for individual health, but what should perhaps be even more emphasized is the importance of walking for the overall health of the urban fabric. So, in addition to asking ourselves the question of how we can get people to walk more, we also ought to consider equally beneficial ways for designing the built environment, such that all this walking will bring about a result for society. Walking may be an end in itself, but if it is only considered as such, we forego the opportunity that it is a means as well. The history of walking in American cities is one of the steady erosion of an activity that was so natural that its importance was almost entirely tacit. It is always amazing to realize how malleable our norms are: during the automobile’s first few decades, pedestrian fatalities were commonly greeted with criminal charges such as ‘technical manslaughter’. Drivers were viewed with mistrust, considered reckless and even represented class division. However, pedestrians became increasingly regarded as impediments to the velocity of modern life, and economic progress became increasingly associated with the automobile and the infrastructure that made its hegemony possible.
How did this change come about? As Sarah Goodyear writes in the Atlantic Cities blog,
One key turning point…came in 1923 in Cincinnati. Citizens’ anger over pedestrian deaths gave rise to a referendum drive. It gathered some 7,000 signatures in support of a rule that would have required all vehicles in the city to be fitted with speed governors limiting them to 25 miles per hour.Local auto clubs and dealers recognized that cars would be a lot harder to sell if there was a cap on their speed. So they went into overdrive in their campaign against the initiative. They sent letters to every individual with a car in the city, saying that the rule would condemn the U.S. to the fate of China, which they painted as the world’s most backward nation. They even hired pretty women to invite men to head to the polls and vote against the rule. And the measure failed…The industry lobbied [for] the adoption of traffic statutes to supplant common law. The statutes were designed to restrict pedestrian use of the street and give primacy to cars. The idea of "jaywalking” – a concept that had not really existed prior to 1920 – was enshrined in law.
This was the beginning of a long and effective campaign that saw walking legislated and planned almost out of existence. Even now, designers and planners are often hobbled by a perspective which continues to favour the automobile over pedestrian – most ironically, in the name of safety.
by Misha Lepetic, 3 Quarks Daily | Read more:
Let’s just say it: The Republicans are the problem
Rep. Allen West, a Florida Republican, was recently captured on video asserting that there are “78 to 81” Democrats in Congress who are members of the Communist Party. Of course, it’s not unusual for some renegade lawmaker from either side of the aisle to say something outrageous. What made West’s comment — right out of the McCarthyite playbook of the 1950s — so striking was the almost complete lack of condemnation from Republican congressional leaders or other major party figures, including the remaining presidential candidates.
It’s not that the GOP leadership agrees with West; it is that such extreme remarks and views are now taken for granted.
We have been studying Washington politics and Congress for more than 40 years, and never have we seen them this dysfunctional. In our past writings, we have criticized both parties when we believed it was warranted. Today, however, we have no choice but to acknowledge that the core of the problem lies with the Republican Party.
The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.
When one party moves this far from the mainstream, it makes it nearly impossible for the political system to deal constructively with the country’s challenges.
“Both sides do it” or “There is plenty of blame to go around” are the traditional refuges for an American news media intent on proving its lack of bias, while political scientists prefer generality and neutrality when discussing partisan polarization. Many self-styled bipartisan groups, in their search for common ground, propose solutions that move both sides to the center, a strategy that is simply untenable when one side is so far out of reach.
It is clear that the center of gravity in the Republican Party has shifted sharply to the right. Its once-legendary moderate and center-right legislators in the House and the Senate — think Bob Michel, Mickey Edwards, John Danforth, Chuck Hagel — are virtually extinct.
The post-McGovern Democratic Party, by contrast, while losing the bulk of its conservative Dixiecrat contingent in the decades after the civil rights revolution, has retained a more diverse base. Since the Clinton presidency, it has hewed to the center-left on issues from welfare reform to fiscal policy. While the Democrats may have moved from their 40-yard line to their 25, the Republicans have gone from their 40 to somewhere behind their goal post.
What happened? Of course, there were larger forces at work beyond the realignment of the South. They included the mobilization of social conservatives after the 1973Roe v. Wade decision, the anti-tax movement launched in 1978 by California’s Proposition 13, the rise of conservative talk radio after a congressional pay raise in 1989, and the emergence of Fox News and right-wing blogs. But the real move to the bedrock right starts with two names: Newt Gingrich and Grover Norquist.
by Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein, Washington Post | Read more:
It’s not that the GOP leadership agrees with West; it is that such extreme remarks and views are now taken for granted.
We have been studying Washington politics and Congress for more than 40 years, and never have we seen them this dysfunctional. In our past writings, we have criticized both parties when we believed it was warranted. Today, however, we have no choice but to acknowledge that the core of the problem lies with the Republican Party.
The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.
When one party moves this far from the mainstream, it makes it nearly impossible for the political system to deal constructively with the country’s challenges.
“Both sides do it” or “There is plenty of blame to go around” are the traditional refuges for an American news media intent on proving its lack of bias, while political scientists prefer generality and neutrality when discussing partisan polarization. Many self-styled bipartisan groups, in their search for common ground, propose solutions that move both sides to the center, a strategy that is simply untenable when one side is so far out of reach.
It is clear that the center of gravity in the Republican Party has shifted sharply to the right. Its once-legendary moderate and center-right legislators in the House and the Senate — think Bob Michel, Mickey Edwards, John Danforth, Chuck Hagel — are virtually extinct.
The post-McGovern Democratic Party, by contrast, while losing the bulk of its conservative Dixiecrat contingent in the decades after the civil rights revolution, has retained a more diverse base. Since the Clinton presidency, it has hewed to the center-left on issues from welfare reform to fiscal policy. While the Democrats may have moved from their 40-yard line to their 25, the Republicans have gone from their 40 to somewhere behind their goal post.
What happened? Of course, there were larger forces at work beyond the realignment of the South. They included the mobilization of social conservatives after the 1973Roe v. Wade decision, the anti-tax movement launched in 1978 by California’s Proposition 13, the rise of conservative talk radio after a congressional pay raise in 1989, and the emergence of Fox News and right-wing blogs. But the real move to the bedrock right starts with two names: Newt Gingrich and Grover Norquist.
by Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein, Washington Post | Read more:
They Dressed Like Groucho
You could say, with partial plagiarism: It was the best of nights. It was the worst of nights.
I remember thinking that it might be a long time before I saw so many happy people in one place. The place was Carnegie Hall and the people were fans — worshipers might be the more appropriate word — of Groucho Marx.
At least half the eager throng was a young, college-type crowd; it was at the peak of the time when the Marx Brothers — and I, to some extent — were campus heroes. The controversial (mildly put) Erin Fleming (see previous column), the young woman who was running Groucho’s life and household for both good and ill — had hauled the frail fellow out into public once more.
To the dismay of friends and relatives, who feared that in these sadly waning years, Groucho, with formidable powers decreasing noticeably, lacked the stamina, let alone the desire to perform again, Erin had lined up a series of “concerts,” the true purpose of which many felt was less to get Groucho back in the limelight than to get Fleming into it with him.
There were two fears. Would he be physically able to get through a full-length concert, enfeebled as he was most days then, and what would it do to him if only a handful of people showed up? Could he survive that? That last fear proved unfounded.
When the big night came, I had the cabdriver let me off out front, instead of at the stage door, to assess the crowd.
There was a touching aspect to the milling, chatting, laughing throng. Some carried pictures of Groucho and his siblings, some had painted on Groucho mustaches. Hurrying back to the stage door I must have seen at least a dozen fully-got-up Grouchos complete with swallow-tail coat. There were even a few Harpos and Chicos. (I saw no Zeppos.) Nice kids in a troubled time.
It was 1972 — not a nice time in the country — and there was something so sweet about these kids that I couldn’t manage to ditch the thought that some equally nice kids might have loved to be there but for their having been, just two years earlier, shot dead by the National Guard at Kent State.
Pushing dark thoughts aside, I went inside and up to the dressing room. I recall now that the words and melody of Groucho’s friend Harry Ruby’s “Everyone Says I Love You” began to play in my head in Groucho’s voice, sung by him on my show a few years earlier. This was going to be a great evening.
I entered the dressing room and was horrified. Groucho was slumped on a couch looking more frail and papery than I had ever seen him. The famous voice was a hoarse whisper. I thought of those milling kids outside in a near frenzy to see their hero and here he (all but) lay before me, looking like moribundity warmed over. Clearly it would be a miracle if we could get him downstairs and to the stage, let alone through a two-hour concert.
“How do you feel, Grouch?” I asked with forced brightness.
“Tired.”
by Dick Cavett, NY Times | Read more:
Photo: Wikipedia
I remember thinking that it might be a long time before I saw so many happy people in one place. The place was Carnegie Hall and the people were fans — worshipers might be the more appropriate word — of Groucho Marx.
At least half the eager throng was a young, college-type crowd; it was at the peak of the time when the Marx Brothers — and I, to some extent — were campus heroes. The controversial (mildly put) Erin Fleming (see previous column), the young woman who was running Groucho’s life and household for both good and ill — had hauled the frail fellow out into public once more.To the dismay of friends and relatives, who feared that in these sadly waning years, Groucho, with formidable powers decreasing noticeably, lacked the stamina, let alone the desire to perform again, Erin had lined up a series of “concerts,” the true purpose of which many felt was less to get Groucho back in the limelight than to get Fleming into it with him.
There were two fears. Would he be physically able to get through a full-length concert, enfeebled as he was most days then, and what would it do to him if only a handful of people showed up? Could he survive that? That last fear proved unfounded.
When the big night came, I had the cabdriver let me off out front, instead of at the stage door, to assess the crowd.
There was a touching aspect to the milling, chatting, laughing throng. Some carried pictures of Groucho and his siblings, some had painted on Groucho mustaches. Hurrying back to the stage door I must have seen at least a dozen fully-got-up Grouchos complete with swallow-tail coat. There were even a few Harpos and Chicos. (I saw no Zeppos.) Nice kids in a troubled time.
It was 1972 — not a nice time in the country — and there was something so sweet about these kids that I couldn’t manage to ditch the thought that some equally nice kids might have loved to be there but for their having been, just two years earlier, shot dead by the National Guard at Kent State.
Pushing dark thoughts aside, I went inside and up to the dressing room. I recall now that the words and melody of Groucho’s friend Harry Ruby’s “Everyone Says I Love You” began to play in my head in Groucho’s voice, sung by him on my show a few years earlier. This was going to be a great evening.
I entered the dressing room and was horrified. Groucho was slumped on a couch looking more frail and papery than I had ever seen him. The famous voice was a hoarse whisper. I thought of those milling kids outside in a near frenzy to see their hero and here he (all but) lay before me, looking like moribundity warmed over. Clearly it would be a miracle if we could get him downstairs and to the stage, let alone through a two-hour concert.
“How do you feel, Grouch?” I asked with forced brightness.
“Tired.”
by Dick Cavett, NY Times | Read more:
Photo: Wikipedia
Aspirin Really Is Kind of a Wonder Drug
The evidence that over-the-counter (OTC) medications can benefit our long-term health in meaningful ways keeps accruing. Aspirin, ibuprofen, and acetaminophen all have various health benefits, but aspirin is emerging as a key player in the fight against cancer. Three new studies by the same research team have shown that aspirin over the long term can reduce the risk of cancer - and its spread through the body.
One type of cancer called metastatic adenocarcinoma, which can affect the prostate, lungs, and colon, was reduced by 46 percent in people who took aspirin.
The team's earlier work had shown that daily aspirin could reduce cancer risk over the next 20 years. Now, Peter M. Rothwell and his team have expanded on their original findings. In one large scale review of 51 earlier studies, people who took less than 300 mg of aspirin every day had a 25 percent reduced risk of developing any type of cancer after three years. It reduced the risk of death from cancer by about 15 percent. The longer people took aspirin, the better: after five years, the risk of death was reduced by 37 percent in aspirin-takers.
Another study determined how aspirin affected the spread of cancer once it had developed. People who took at least 75 mg of aspirin a day had a 36 percent reduced risk of metastatic cancer than non-aspirin takers. One type of cancer called metastatic adenocarcinoma, which can affect the prostate, lungs, and colon, was reduced by 46 percent in people who took aspirin.
by Alice G. Walton, The Atlantic | Read more:
Photo: Melinda Fawver/Shutterstock
Sunday, April 29, 2012
A Universe from Nothing?
First Lawrence Krauss came out with a new book, A Universe From Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather Than Nothing (based in part on a popular YouTube lecture), which addresses this question from the point of view of a modern cosmologist. Then David Albert, speaking as a modern philosopher of science, came out with quite a negative review of the book in the New York Times. And discussion has gone back and forth since then: here’s Jerry Coyne (mostly siding with Albert), the Rutgers Philosophy of Cosmology blog (with interesting voices in the comments), a long interview with Krauss in the Atlantic, comments by Massimo Pigliucci, and another response by Krauss on the Scientific American site.
Executive summary
This is going to be kind of long, so here’s the upshot. Very roughly, there are two different kinds of questions lurking around the issue of “Why is there something rather than nothing?” One question is, within some framework of physical laws that is flexible enough to allow for the possible existence of either “stuff” or “no stuff” (where “stuff” might include space and time itself), why does the actual manifestation of reality seem to feature all this stuff? The other is, why do we have this particular framework of physical law, or even something called “physical law” at all? Lawrence (again, roughly) addresses the first question, and David cares about the second, and both sides expend a lot of energy insisting that their question is the “right” one rather than just admitting they are different questions. Nothing about modern physics explains why we have these laws rather than some totally different laws, although physicists sometimes talk that way — a mistake they might be able to avoid if they took philosophers more seriously. Then the discussion quickly degrades into name-calling and point-missing, which is unfortunate because these are smart people who agree about 95% of the interesting issues, and the chance for productive engagement diminishes considerably with each installment.
How the universe works
Let’s talk about the actual way physics works, as we understand it. Ever since Newton, the paradigm for fundamental physics has been the same, and includes three pieces. First, there is the “space of states”: basically, a list of all the possible configurations the universe could conceivably be in. Second, there is some particular state representing the universe at some time, typically taken to be the present. Third, there is some rule for saying how the universe evolves with time. You give me the universe now, the laws of physics say what it will become in the future. This way of thinking is just as true for quantum mechanics or general relativity or quantum field theory as it was for Newtonian mechanics or Maxwell’s electrodynamics.
Quantum mechanics, in particular, is a specific yet very versatile implementation of this scheme. (And quantum field theory is just a particular example of quantum mechanics, not an entirely new way of thinking.) The states are “wave functions,” and the collection of every possible wave function for some given system is “Hilbert space.” The nice thing about Hilbert space is that it’s a very restrictive set of possibilities (because it’s a vector space, for you experts); once you tell me how big it is (how many dimensions), you’ve specified your Hilbert space completely. This is in stark contrast with classical mechanics, where the space of states can get extraordinarily complicated. And then there is a little machine — “the Hamiltonian” — that tells you how to evolve from one state to another as time passes. Again, there aren’t really that many kinds of Hamiltonians you can have; once you write down a certain list of numbers (the energy eigenvalues, for you pesky experts) you are completely done.
We should be open-minded about what form the ultimate laws of physics will take, but almost all modern attempts to get at them take quantum mechanics for granted. That’s true for string theory and other approaches to quantum gravity — they might take very different views of what constitutes “spacetime” or “matter,” but very rarely do they muck about with the essentials of quantum mechanics. It’s certainly the case for all of the scenarios Lawrence considers in his book. Within this framework, specifying “the laws of physics” is just a matter of picking a Hilbert space (which is just a matter of specifying how big it is) and picking a Hamiltonian. One of the great things about quantum mechanics is how extremely restrictive it is; we don’t have a lot of room for creativity in choosing what kinds of laws of physics might exist. It seems like there’s a lot of creativity, because Hilbert space can be extremely big and the underlying simplicity of the Hamiltonian can be obscured by our (as subsets of the universe) complicated interactions with the rest of the world, but it’s always the same basic recipe.
So within that framework, what does it mean to talk about “a universe from nothing”? We still have to distinguish between two possibilities, but at least this two-element list exhausts all of them.
by Sean Carroll, Discover Magazine | Read more:
China Digs It: How Beijing Cornered the Rare Earths Market
Today, China produces more than 90 percent of the global supply of rare earths but sits on just about one-third of the world's reserves of the elements -- with the rest scattered from the United States (13 percent) to Australia (5 percent). That was not always the case. A few decades ago, the United States led production, primarily through a large mine in California owned by the mining firm Molycorp. But as California's environmental regulations tightened in the 1990s, costs rose and profits declined, prompting the American industry eventually to shutter.
In the meantime, China started assuming the role of global supplier, spurred on by the Chinese patriarch Deng Xiaoping's supposed proclamation that "there is oil in the Middle East, but there are rare earths in China." In the last few decades, Chinese production of rare earths skyrocketed, more than offsetting declining production elsewhere. And consumers grew accustomed to what seemed to be a low-cost and reliable supplier in China.
Yet behind the façade of stability was an industry marked by mismanagement. First, a perceived abundance of the resources led to a general disregard for efficient and scalable production. In the early days of the Chinese rare-earths rush, preservation of resources was an afterthought, as private entrepreneurs, sensing a lucrative market, dove in. Many of these small-scale miners operated off the books and with little concern for environmental degradation. They were so numerous that the Chinese government could not keep track of them.
Even so, their efforts added up. Between 1990 and 2000, Chinese production of rare earths skyrocketed from just 16,000 tons to 73,000 tons. And in the decade since, China has essentially come to monopolize rare-earths mining. At its peak in 2009, China accounted for 129,000 of the 132,000 tons produced worldwide -- in other words, 97 percent of total global output. Meanwhile, it exported roughly 40-50 percent of what it produced.
Yet as demand for these raw materials rose, Beijing became increasingly unhappy that it was "selling gold to foreigners at the price of Chinese radishes," as one Chinese expression had it. Nationalistic voices in Chinese op-ed pages argued that China should create an OPEC-like rare-earths cartel or strategic reserve. Those calls were colored by an unsubstantiated belief among many Chinese that Japan was keeping just such a strategic reserve of its own, in which it had squirreled away 20 years' worth of rare earths that it had imported from China.
by Damien Ma, Foreign Affairs | Read more:
Photo: Smelting lanthanum in Inner Mongolia. (David Gray / Courtesy Reuters)
My Mom Is My BFF
Amid the weeknight din of Ruby Foo’s,
the hostess bore complimentary cocktails—a peace offering, for making
Julie and Samantha wait twenty minutes for their reserved table. She
offered one drink to Julie and one to … Wait a minute. Peering at
Samantha, she said, “I want to give this to you, but …”
Samantha, who had just been listening to her mother describe what an “awful, awful slob” she was as a teenager, nodded toward Julie and said, “You should give it to her.”
At one point at Ruby Foo’s, it occurred to me that the hostess had made an honest calculation when settling on her genre of olive branch. The gift of pretty drinks assumed a friendship. The cocktails said, “Enjoy your girls’ night out!”
And from a distance anyone might’ve figured mother and daughter for pals. Samantha refrained from the typical teenage indicators of mother-induced misery. No mortified slumping, no glassy stare, no snapping, no sighing, no episodic glaring, no thumbing out one cell-phone SOS after another. And Julie? When Samantha spoke, Julie listened until her daughter had completed her thought. Which I assumed happened only in dreams and completely unrealistic movies.
Seriously, was there no discord? They assured me that there was. Sometimes they fought “all day long.”
Over what?
Hmm. “Clean up your room?” “Don’t make me clean my room? I like my stuffed animals on the floor. I’m comfortable with my stuffed animals on the floor. Let me be me!”
I watched them closely. Humans are only so good at hiding jealousies and tensions, even for short periods of time. We all come with our little tells, and mothers and daughters are human control panels of buttons waiting to be pushed. There’s not a teenager alive who hasn’t considered her mom intolerable and embarrassing, or pretended not to know her in public, but based on what I was seeing, it was possible to achieve the opposite.
Watching Julie and Samantha felt a little like seeing a fantasy come to life. My mom hasn’t let me finish a sentence since 1975. We have never shared clothes. We do not text. She often e-mails me, hilariously, in all-caps, because it’s easier than finding the uncap key. Neither she nor I have ever uttered the word sex in the other’s presence. In fact, I’m positive my mom has never spoken the word at all. I now understand all of that; her parenting approach was a generational mandate. But sometimes, as a pre-Gilmore Girls teenager, I had this idea that mothers and daughters should walk arm-in-arm down leafy autumn roads wearing artfully knotted scarves, exchange gentle information on mean-girl management and boyfriends, and race home through the dappled sunlight to make cocoa. Once, in college, I tried to achieve this scenario with an aunt. It just felt weird.
Now mother-daughter BFFdom is a thing, having morphed its way onto the radar of sociologists, psychologists, authors, designers, marketers, and reality-show creators. The willingness to exploit one’s pubescent daughter for adult dating and fashion advice must be a Real Housewives casting prerequisite, and there’s no telling what the upcoming VH1 reality show Mama Drama will bring as it focuses on the turbo version of bestie mothers: “the partying parent who shares drinks, wardrobe, and social life with her daughter, and occasionally needs to be reminded that she’s the parent.”
Now that the phenomenon is here, it’s a little like watching the genie leave the bottle. You hope you’ve made the right wish.
by Paige Williams, New York Magazine | Read more:
Photo: Gillian Laub
Samantha, who had just been listening to her mother describe what an “awful, awful slob” she was as a teenager, nodded toward Julie and said, “You should give it to her.”At one point at Ruby Foo’s, it occurred to me that the hostess had made an honest calculation when settling on her genre of olive branch. The gift of pretty drinks assumed a friendship. The cocktails said, “Enjoy your girls’ night out!”
And from a distance anyone might’ve figured mother and daughter for pals. Samantha refrained from the typical teenage indicators of mother-induced misery. No mortified slumping, no glassy stare, no snapping, no sighing, no episodic glaring, no thumbing out one cell-phone SOS after another. And Julie? When Samantha spoke, Julie listened until her daughter had completed her thought. Which I assumed happened only in dreams and completely unrealistic movies.
Seriously, was there no discord? They assured me that there was. Sometimes they fought “all day long.”
Over what?
Hmm. “Clean up your room?” “Don’t make me clean my room? I like my stuffed animals on the floor. I’m comfortable with my stuffed animals on the floor. Let me be me!”
I watched them closely. Humans are only so good at hiding jealousies and tensions, even for short periods of time. We all come with our little tells, and mothers and daughters are human control panels of buttons waiting to be pushed. There’s not a teenager alive who hasn’t considered her mom intolerable and embarrassing, or pretended not to know her in public, but based on what I was seeing, it was possible to achieve the opposite.
Watching Julie and Samantha felt a little like seeing a fantasy come to life. My mom hasn’t let me finish a sentence since 1975. We have never shared clothes. We do not text. She often e-mails me, hilariously, in all-caps, because it’s easier than finding the uncap key. Neither she nor I have ever uttered the word sex in the other’s presence. In fact, I’m positive my mom has never spoken the word at all. I now understand all of that; her parenting approach was a generational mandate. But sometimes, as a pre-Gilmore Girls teenager, I had this idea that mothers and daughters should walk arm-in-arm down leafy autumn roads wearing artfully knotted scarves, exchange gentle information on mean-girl management and boyfriends, and race home through the dappled sunlight to make cocoa. Once, in college, I tried to achieve this scenario with an aunt. It just felt weird.
Now mother-daughter BFFdom is a thing, having morphed its way onto the radar of sociologists, psychologists, authors, designers, marketers, and reality-show creators. The willingness to exploit one’s pubescent daughter for adult dating and fashion advice must be a Real Housewives casting prerequisite, and there’s no telling what the upcoming VH1 reality show Mama Drama will bring as it focuses on the turbo version of bestie mothers: “the partying parent who shares drinks, wardrobe, and social life with her daughter, and occasionally needs to be reminded that she’s the parent.”
Now that the phenomenon is here, it’s a little like watching the genie leave the bottle. You hope you’ve made the right wish.
by Paige Williams, New York Magazine | Read more:
Photo: Gillian Laub
Yelp, You Cost Me $2000 by Suppressing Genuine Reviews, Here’s How You Fix It
Dear Yelp,
It’s highly likely that you’re costing your users millions of dollars by offering some astonishingly bad recommendations.
For example, I did business with a moving company based on 5 star recommendations that you presented.
As a result I was strong-armed into paying $2000 more than originally quoted. I spent 40 days without any furniture and quite a few of my belongings have been misplaced – forever.
I’ve always loved your site. I love your startup story. I love your crowd sourcing review model. For years now I’ve been using Yelp to help me make decisions about where to eat and what to purchase. Yelp has never steered me wrong. So what happened this time? How come your reviewers were so far off the mark?
They weren’t.
Your reviewers described exactly what I experienced and warned against this company again and again. But you hid all of those reviews.
Wait, what? Why would you do that?
After Googling the issue I found out that some time back you introduced a very difficult to notice and access filter link (screen shot here) to hide reviews that seem to be fake. You also introduced an automated algorithm that flags suspicious looking reviews and shuffles them into the filtered section.
Your algorithm typically hides entries by people who only post one review and who don’t otherwise engage in Yelp. Your assumption is that if a user only posts one review, posts no comments, has no friends etc. then most likely they are fake and trying to game the system.
Let’s call this “Assumption X”.
In the case of the company that I mention above (the one that ripped me off) Assumption X is exactly wrong at least 10 out of 14 times. Just to be clear, 10 honest one star reviews have been hidden from public view. That’s a 71% false positive hit rate.
So why did Yelp get it wrong 10 times?
In each case the one star review was left by someone who would never normally leave a review… they were simply so outraged that they were motivated to signup to Yelp and try to warn others how bad this company is. None of them ever used Yelp again. Furthermore, they didn’t have the knowledge or inclination to try to make their Yelp profile look acceptable to Yelp’s automated suppression systems.
by Justin Vincent, Building Stuff | Read more:
It’s highly likely that you’re costing your users millions of dollars by offering some astonishingly bad recommendations.
For example, I did business with a moving company based on 5 star recommendations that you presented.
As a result I was strong-armed into paying $2000 more than originally quoted. I spent 40 days without any furniture and quite a few of my belongings have been misplaced – forever.
I’ve always loved your site. I love your startup story. I love your crowd sourcing review model. For years now I’ve been using Yelp to help me make decisions about where to eat and what to purchase. Yelp has never steered me wrong. So what happened this time? How come your reviewers were so far off the mark?
They weren’t.
Your reviewers described exactly what I experienced and warned against this company again and again. But you hid all of those reviews.
Wait, what? Why would you do that?
After Googling the issue I found out that some time back you introduced a very difficult to notice and access filter link (screen shot here) to hide reviews that seem to be fake. You also introduced an automated algorithm that flags suspicious looking reviews and shuffles them into the filtered section.
Your algorithm typically hides entries by people who only post one review and who don’t otherwise engage in Yelp. Your assumption is that if a user only posts one review, posts no comments, has no friends etc. then most likely they are fake and trying to game the system.
Let’s call this “Assumption X”.
In the case of the company that I mention above (the one that ripped me off) Assumption X is exactly wrong at least 10 out of 14 times. Just to be clear, 10 honest one star reviews have been hidden from public view. That’s a 71% false positive hit rate.
So why did Yelp get it wrong 10 times?
In each case the one star review was left by someone who would never normally leave a review… they were simply so outraged that they were motivated to signup to Yelp and try to warn others how bad this company is. None of them ever used Yelp again. Furthermore, they didn’t have the knowledge or inclination to try to make their Yelp profile look acceptable to Yelp’s automated suppression systems.
by Justin Vincent, Building Stuff | Read more:
MF Global: Will Anyone Ever go to Jail?
So the Senate Banking Committee is beginning hearings today on the MF Global scandal, hearings entitled, "The Collapse of MF Global: Lessons Learned and Policy Implications." Apparently the government has already moved to the reflective, introspective, South Park-ian, "You know, I learned something today!" stage in its examination of the scandal, despite the fact that the government’s official "response" hasn’t even started yet, i.e. authorities have yet to arrest a single person in this brazen billion-dollar theft story. (...)
Nobody disputes the fact that MF Global officials dipped into customer accounts and took over $1.6 billion of customer money. We not only know that company officials reached into customer accounts, we know they brazenly lied to bondholders, ratings agencies and investors about the firm's financial condition ("MF Global's capital and liquidity has never been stronger," wrote the CFO of MF Global’s holding company, on the same day Moody’s downgraded it to junk status).
We even know that eighteen days before the firm went bust, company officers discussed how quickly to return money to customers, and even contemplated, in writing, the possibility of not returning the money right away. This is from a risk-assessment document prepared by company officers entitled "Break the Glass":
…Who do we want to be after the storm? How quickly do we want to send cash back to clients, what is the message if we do not send immediately, what is the strategy if we want to keep the customer and wait until the storm passes?In the wake of the 2008 crash it’s often been said that one of the major problems in getting the public to grasp the crimes committed by banks and financial companies is the extreme complexity of the transactions used. The mortgage-backed-securities scam by itself was really just a common fraud scheme, but it was cloaked in the extremely complex verbiage and advanced math of derivatives transactions, which made it possible for bankers to bluff their way through an argument that no crimes had been committed.
But MF Global is different. This is not complicated at all. This is just stealing. You owe money, you don’t have the cash to cover it, and so you take money belonging to someone else to cover your debts. There’s no room at all here for an argument that this money was just lost due to a bad investment, an erroneous calculation based on someone's poor understanding of a complex transaction, etc. It’s straight-up embezzlement.
Nonetheless, there’s been an intense effort at trying to convince the public that no crime has been committed. Whoever is handling MF Global’s P.R. (according to Pam Martens in this excellent piece, it’s APCO worldwide, a former Big Tobacco spin factory) appears to have convinced the company’s officers to emphasize the word “chaos” in describing the last days of the firm – as though $1.2 billion wasn’t intentionally stolen, per se, but simply lost in a kind of uncontrolled whirlwind of transactions that magically carried the money out of accounts off to worlds unknown.
I call this the “Wizard of Oz” defense: a Big Twister hit the firm’s customer accounts, chaos ensued, and when the dust settled, no one knew where the heck little Dorothy and her money had gone.
by Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone | Read more:
Photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
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