Bruno Ravera
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Jean-Louis Forain: Le Pêcheur, 1884.
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Offensive Play

How different are dogfighting and football?

The stained tissue of Alzheimer’s patients typically shows the two trademarks of the disease—distinctive patterns of the proteins beta-amyloid and tau. Beta-amyloid is thought to lay the groundwork for dementia. Tau marks the critical second stage of the disease: it’s the protein that steadily builds up in brain cells, shutting them down and ultimately killing them. An immunostain of an Alzheimer’s patient looks, under the microscope, as if the tissue had been hit with a shotgun blast: the red and brown marks, corresponding to amyloid and tau, dot the entire surface. But this patient’s brain was different. There was damage only to specific surface regions of his brain, and the stains for amyloid came back negative. “This was all tau,” Ann McKee, who runs the hospital’s neuropathology laboratory, said. “There was not even a whiff of amyloid. And it was the most extraordinary damage. It was one of those cases that really took you aback.” The patient may have been in an Alzheimer’s facility, and may have looked and acted as if he had Alzheimer’s. But McKee realized that he had a different condition, called chronic traumatic encephalopathy (C.T.E.), which is a progressive neurological disorder found in people who have suffered some kind of brain trauma. C.T.E. has many of the same manifestations as Alzheimer’s: it begins with behavioral and personality changes, followed by disinhibition and irritability, before moving on to dementia. And C.T.E. appears later in life as well, because it takes a long time for the initial trauma to give rise to nerve-cell breakdown and death. But C.T.E. isn’t the result of an endogenous disease. It’s the result of injury. The patient, it turned out, had been a boxer in his youth. He had suffered from dementia for fifteen years because, decades earlier, he’d been hit too many times in the head.

McKee’s laboratory does the neuropathology work for both the giant Framingham heart study, which has been running since 1948, and Boston University’s New England Centenarian Study, which analyzes the brains of people who are unusually long-lived. “I’m looking at brains constantly,” McKee said. “Then I ran across another one. I saw it and said, ‘Wow, it looks just like the last case.’ This time, there was no known history of boxing. But then I called the family, and heard that the guy had been a boxer in his twenties.” You can’t see tau except in an autopsy, and you can’t see it in an autopsy unless you do a very particular kind of screen. So now that McKee had seen two cases, in short order, she began to wonder: how many people who we assume have Alzheimer’s—a condition of mysterious origin—are actually victims of preventable brain trauma? (...)

McKee’s laboratory occupies a warren of rooms, in what looks like an old officers’ quarters on the V.A. campus. In one of the rooms, there is an enormous refrigerator, filled with brains packed away in hundreds of plastic containers. Nearby is a tray with small piles of brain slices. They look just like the ginger shavings that come with an order of sushi. Now McKee went to the room next to her office, sat down behind a microscope, and inserted one of the immunostained slides under the lens.

“This is Tom McHale,” she said. “He started out playing for Cornell. Then he went to Tampa Bay. He was the man who died of substance abuse at the age of forty-five. I only got fragments of the brain. But it’s just showing huge accumulations of tau for a forty-five-year-old—ridiculously abnormal.”

She placed another slide under the microscope. “This individual was forty-nine years old. A football player. Cognitively intact. He never had any rage behavior. He had the distinctive abnormalities. Look at the hypothalamus.” It was dark with tau. She put another slide in. “This guy was in his mid-sixties,” she said. “He died of an unrelated medical condition. His name is Walter Hilgenberg. Look at the hippocampus. It’s wall-to-wall tangles. Even in a bad case of Alzheimer’s, you don’t see that.” The brown pigment of the tau stain ran around the edge of the tissue sample in a thick, dark band. “It’s like a big river.”

McKee got up and walked across the corridor, back to her office. “There’s one last thing,” she said. She pulled out a large photographic blowup of a brain-tissue sample. “This is a kid. I’m not allowed to talk about how he died. He was a good student. This is his brain. He’s eighteen years old. He played football. He’d been playing football for a couple of years.” She pointed to a series of dark spots on the image, where the stain had marked the presence of something abnormal. “He’s got all this tau. This is frontal and this is insular. Very close to insular. Those same vulnerable regions.” This was a teen-ager, and already his brain showed the kind of decay that is usually associated with old age. “This is completely inappropriate,” she said. “You don’t see tau like this in an eighteen-year-old. You don’t see tau like this in a fifty-year-old.”

McKee is a longtime football fan. She is from Wisconsin. She had two statuettes of Brett Favre, the former Green Bay Packers quarterback, on her bookshelf. On the wall was a picture of a robust young man. It was McKee’s son—nineteen years old, six feet three. If he had a chance to join the N.F.L., I asked her, what would she advise him? “I’d say, ‘Don’t. Not if you want to have a life after football.’ ”

by Malcolm Gladwell, The New Yorker (Oct. 2009) |  Read more:
Photo: Bill Frakes/Sports Illustrated/Getty

Michelangelo - The Sistine Chapel; Prophets Ezekiel, Zechariah, Daniel, Isaiah, Jeremiah and Joel, 1508-12. Fresco
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Peace, Adam

[ed. See also: From brat to activist - Salon]

I first met Adam Yauch in 1982, in Brooklyn, when I was fifteen. I was sitting on the red steps in the lobby of St. Ann’s, where I was a sophomore in high school. His bandmate, Michael Diamond, was a grade ahead of me. Occasionally Mike and I would talk about records and argue. We talked about doing a newsletter, but that was also just talk. His hardcore band, the Beastie Boys, was getting bigger in the very small pond of downtown Manhattan. (In the nineteen-eighties, folks didn’t play rock music in Brooklyn. You had to go to “The City” for that.) The Beasties had managed to open for the Bad Brains, which was about the best thing that could happen to a young punk in 1982. People sometimes made fun of the Beasties for not being real or hard enough or some other imaginary variable. I only heard Mike complain once, about their name being spelled as Beasty Boys, because it sounded like a pet food store.

Yauch walked up, into the lobby, wearing a dark trenchcoat, even though it was sunny out. He came up the steps slowly and asked me, in an impossibly low voice, “You seen Mike?” I hadn’t. He left.

The last time I saw Adam Yauch was in the early aughts, in a Lower Manhattan playground. He was walking under a rope spiderweb, holding his daughter’s hand as she pointed at things. My two boys, roughly the same age, were jockeying for positions on a maddening bicycle-powered carousel that inevitably made somebody cry for going too fast or not going fast enough. Adam’s hair was gray, mine was largely gone, and we waved to each other.

Yauch died today, at the age of forty-seven. In 2009, he was diagnosed with a cancerous tumor he described at the time, in this interview with The Stool Pigeon, as “located in the perotic gland and the neighbouring lymph node.” He fought back, ebbing and strengthening and dimming, as the disease progressed. Friends exchanged messages. “Adam’s doing O.K.” “He’s kinda tired.” Minimizing the situation by using simple language felt like the least hysterical trick you could play on yourself. Sometimes, it felt like a memory might work. “Your remember when Tom and Adam went under the bridge with that car and they almost went into the river?” Nope. Just made it worse, recalling the skinny, loopy kid who took any dare and inflated it until it was beyond foolish. The kid who would think the only problem with cancer is that it wasn’t a good enough punchline.

The ideal memorial is written from distance, a generous calculation of merit that proceeds honorably without abandoning accuracy. I have to apologize right now for being unable to give you that—Adam Yauch was a part of my childhood, an ambassador to America from our New York, which is now gone, as is he.

by Sasha Frere-Jones, The New Yorker |  Read more:
Photograph by Marcus Brandt/AP Photo.

What Amazon's ebook strategy means

You're probably familiar with predatory pricing. A big box retailer moves into a small town with a variety of local grocery and supermarket stores. They stock a huge range of products and hold constant promotions, often dumping goods at or below their wholesale price. This draws customers away from the local incumbents, who can't compete and who go bust. Of course the big box retailer can't keep up the dumping forever, but if losing a few million dollars is the price of driving all the local competitors out of business, then they will have many years of profits drawn from a captive market to recoup the investment. (Meanwhile, helpful laws allow them to write down the losses on this store as a loss against tax, but that's just the icing on the cake.) Once the big box store has killed off every competiting mom'n'pop store within a 50-mile radius, where else are people going to shop?

Amazon has the potential to be like that predatory big box retailer on a global scale. And it's well on the way to doing so in the ebook sector.

Until 2008, the ebook side of publishing was a vestigial, if not irrelevant, irritation from the point of view of the major publishers—at less than 1% of their turnover it was lost in the line noise. However, as subsidiaries of large media conglomerates, the executives who ran the big six had all been given their marching orders about the internet: DRM restrictions would be mandatory on all ebook sales, lest rampant piracy cannibalize their sales of paper books.  (...)

Amazon has a history of investing hundreds of millions of dollars in loss-leading products and ventures solely to build market share. For AMZN, the big six insistence on DRM on ebooks was a windfall: it made the huge investment in the Kindle platform worthwhile, and by 2010 Amazon had come close to an 85% market share in the ebook sector (which was growing at a dizzying compound rate of 100-200% per annum, albeit from a small base). And now we get to 2012, and ebooks are likely to hit 40% of total publishing sales by the end of this year, and are on the way to 60% within five years (per Tim Hely Hutchinson, CEO of Hachette UK). In five years, we've gone from <1% to >40%. That's disruption for you!

Now, most ebook customers are not tech-savvy. It is possible to unlock the DRM on a Kindle ebook and transcode it to epub format for use on other readers; but it's non-trivial. (Not to mention being a breach of the Kindle terms and conditions of use. Because you don't own an ebook; in their short-sighted eagerness to close loopholes the publishers tried to make ebooks more like software, where you merely buy a limited license to use the product, rather than actual ownership of an object.) So, because Amazon had shoved a subsidized Kindle reader or a free Kindle iPhone app into their hands, and they'd bought a handful of books using it, the majority of customers found themselves locked in to the platform they'd started out on. Want to move to another platform? That's hard; you lose all the books you've already bought, because you can't take them with you.

By foolishly insisting on DRM, and then selling to Amazon on a wholesale basis, the publishers handed Amazon a monopoly on their customers—and thereby empowered a predatory monopsony.

by Charles Stross, Charlie's Diary |  Read more:
Image via: Wikipedia

SAGAMIHARA KOINOBORI

Koinobori (Koi-nobori), meaning “carp streamer” in Japanese, are carp-shaped wind socks traditionally flown in Japan to celebrate Tango no Sekku, a traditional calendrical event which is now designated a National holiday; Children’s Day (MAY 5)

Children’s Day (Kodomo no hi) is a Japanese national holiday which takes place annually on May 5, the fifth day of the fifth month, and is part of the Golden Week. It is a day set aside to respect children’s personalities and to celebrate their happiness. It was designated a national holiday by the Japanese government in 1948.

Source: Flickr / ajpscs

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Is Origami the Future of Tech?

When we think of mass production, the image is of a factory floor. Take a car. The engine block is cast, either from iron or aluminum. The hood, doors, and roof are stamped out on 100-ton presses. Gears are carved from metal blocks by milling machines or punched out by dies. The console and interior handles are injection-molded or carved, the mats and seats woven or stitched together. Some of these processes date to the Industrial Revolution, others to the Iron Age. The natural world doesn’t use any of them. One of its favorite methods is to take something flat and fold it into a three-dimensional form. Flowers, leaves, wings, proteins, mountain ranges, eyelids, ears, DNA—all are created by folding.

Today researchers in robotics, biology, math, and computer science are immersing themselves in that method. Scientists are looking at how materials and molecules wrinkle, drape, flex, and crease. They’re using folding to design everything from robots to cancer drugs, from airbags to mirrors for satellite telescopes. An Oxford University engineer named Zhong You has used origami to design better-crumpling car bumpers and flexible, low-cost stents. A team at Wake Forest University has used origami folding to create a fabric of densely layered nanotubes that can generate power from body heat. In a range of fields, fabrication by folding has the potential to be far faster, cheaper, and less energy-intensive than traditional methods and to work at very, very small scales, where even the most precise mills and lathes have all the accuracy of an earthquake. Makers of medical equipment and consumer electronics are looking at folding as a way to streamline manufacturing processes.

“We have a paradigm where we want to build things by having a solid block and then etching away at the block until you get whatever shape that you want,” says William Shih, a Harvard University biochemistry professor. Think of Michelangelo chiseling his forms from boulders of marble, or a milling machine carving an engine part out of a hunk of steel. “The way that nature does things is different,” Shih says. “It uses a folding algorithm, and it’s something that seems to be very efficient. We can look to nature for inspiration.” Shih himself has designed devices at the nanoscale that assemble themselves out of DNA strands, a process known as DNA origami.

Folding is, at heart, a geometry problem, and the groundwork for much of the new research is being laid by mathematicians. The increasingly ingenious applications, though, are driven by collaborations between engineers, scientists, and programmers: “Biologically inspired engineering” is an ambitious new way of doing science that treats living organisms like mechanical systems. Just as the diameter of a gear or the strength of a spring determines how a clock works, the shape and tensile qualities of folded proteins determine their roles in the countless processes that keep the human body running. Deciphering those relationships and building off of them are part of what the new science of folding is about.

by Drake Bennett, Bloomberg Businessweek |  Read more:
Photograph by Leonard Greco

How to Live Unhappily Ever After

"I just want to be happy."

I can't think of another phrase capable of causing more misery and permanent unhappiness. With the possible exception of, "Honey, I'm in love with your youngest sister."

In our super-positive society, we have a zero-tolerance policy for negativity. But who feels 'Great!' all the time?

Yet at first glance, it seems so guileless. Children just want to be happy. So do puppies. Happy seems like a healthy, normal desire. Like wanting to breathe fresh air or shop only at Whole Foods.

But "I just want to be happy" is a hole cut out of the floor and covered with a rug. Because once you say it, the implication is that you're not. The "I just want to be happy" bear trap is that until you define precisely, just exactly what "happy" is, you will never feel it. Whatever being happy means to you, it needs to be specific and also possible. When you have a blueprint for what happiness is, lay it over your life and see what you need to change so the images are more aligned.

Still, this recipe of defining happiness and fiddling with your life to get it will work for some people—but not for others. I am one of the others. I am not a happy person. There are things that do make me experience joy. But joy is a fleeting emotion, like a very long sneeze. A lot of the time what I feel is, interested. Or I feel melancholy. And I also frequently feel tenderness, annoyance, confusion, fear, hopelessness. It doesn't all add up to anything I would call happiness. But what I'm thinking is, is that so terrible?

I know a physicist who loves his work. People mistake his constant focus and thought with unhappiness. But he's not unhappy. He's busy. I bet when he dies, there will be a book on his chest. Happiness is a treadmill of a goal for people who are not happy by nature. Being an unhappy person does not mean you must be sad or dark. You can be interested, instead of happy. You can be fascinated instead of happy.

The barrier to this, of course, is that in our super-positive society, we have an unspoken zero-tolerance policy for negativity. Beneath the catchall umbrella of negativity is basically everything that isn't super-positive. Seriously, who among us is having a "Great!" day every day? Who feels "Terrific, thanks!" all the time?

by Augusten Burroughs, WSJ | Read more:
Photo: F. Martin Ramin for The Wall Street Journal

Chill Pill

Better than all the rest.
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Susan H. (by eduardoizq)

Source: Flickr / odreiuqzide

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Christian Engelmann
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A New Wind Energy Concept

Apparently only at the concept stage now, but one advantage over wind turbines is that it eliminated the rotating blades, with their consequent noise and risk to birds:

New York design firm Atelier DNA has an alternative concept that ditches blades in favor of stalks. Resembling thin cattails, the Windstalks generate electricity when the wind sets them waving...

The proposed design calls for 1,203 "“stalks," each 180-feet high with concrete bases that are between about 33- and 66-feet wide. The carbon-fiber stalks, reinforced with resin, are about a foot wide at the base tapering to about 2 inches at the top. Each stalk will contain alternating layers of electrodes and ceramic discs made from piezoelectric material, which generates a current when put under pressure. In the case of the stalks, the discs will compress as they sway in the wind, creating a charge. 

Further details at Discovery News.
h/t via: TYWKIWDBI

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Outgrowing Oneself

A certain strain of neoclassical economics holds that subjective individual preferences have no ultimate analytical significance. This is the ideological upshot of a laissez-faire attitude toward taste: All tastes are just residual, a revealed preference for x over y, and the difference between x and y is immaterial, a local phenomenon beneath study. It has the illusion of significance to the individual, but from the Olympian perspective required to grapple with human socioeconomic behavior, it’s just noise.

One of the tragedies of getting old is seeing this perspective confirmed in the indifferent destinies of commodities that were once far more than mere commodities to you. Distinctions that seemed crucial, epochal, even existential, are slowly eroded until you are forced to admit to yourself that maybe they never existed at all. Or at best, the distinctions were not ontological, not in the intrinsic nature of the things you cared about, but were instead historically contingent. Which in turn means your sense of self, the differences that were so salient and so definitive of how you thought of yourself, were also contingent, historical artifacts.

Anyway, I was prompted to these bathetic thoughts this morning by reading Philip Mirowski’s Machine Dreams while having breakfast at a diner counter near a radio blasting a classic rock station. “Dance the Night Away” by Van Halen was playing, and next came “Mysterious Ways” by U2. The transition was seamless and unremarkable, only I can remember when I was in high school, when listening to U2 and not Van Halen was of intense social importance, when the difference was glaring, and it dictated how one wanted to perceived and whom one felt comfortable hanging around with. It seems incredibly silly now, but growing up in semi-rural, semi-suburban Upper Bucks County, the discontinuity between Van Halen and U2 created a space in which to exist, and a hope that one might turn out to be something other than what the suburban environment seemed to promise. You could listen to something like the Beastie Boys and think your friends were the only other people who got it — them and maybe some idealized people out there who also would have been your friends if you weren’t so isolated. The special few who would redeem the future.

But of course, that nascent sense of personal uniqueness and destined escape was wholly internal to the suburban experience; it was part of the program, an essential component of what detached houses and cars and the rest of it inculcated. With its veneer of conformity, suburbia imparts a sense of aggrieved, threatened individuality, but more important, it gives its children a constitutive myopia about it, making it impossible for them to see that the ambitious discontentedness, the certitude that one is far more special than the mediocrity of shopping malls and chain restaurants and the rest, is part of the code for reproducing the suburbs, not a disruptive mutation. In short, it would be weird if you didn’t feel alienated. Radical alienation is the first step toward cynicism and pliancy. You meet people at a high school reunion and discover that actually you all hated the same thing back then — yourself. It just got expressed in different ways: listening to Van Halen, listening to U2.

One of the first and more memorable moments that I had a premonition of what being old would be like was when I came back to college in January 1992 after a holiday break. I was at a party and the customary Steve Miller Band songs were blasting, and then suddenly, with no fuss, Nirvana was playing. I felt instantly as if I had been completely exposed. I thought there was something special about being into a certain kind of music — and Nirvana in the summer of 1991 was very much that music. It was supposed to be a bulwark against being perceived as mediocre. Suddenly I saw that the distinctions I was investing myself in were always already unimaginative, insignificant — superficial distractions that had preoccupied me and protected me from pursuing some other kind of self-knowledge. The future didn’t promise escape but re-enclosure and surrender. The escape routes you learned were already traced on commercial maps. They led deeper into enemy territory. You wake up to discover that you are in fact enlisted in the enemy’s army.

Moreover, at that moment “Smells Like Teen Spirit” was playing, I saw instantly that the distinctions that made me in my mind who I was didn’t really belong to me, and they could be wiped away in an instant, by some frat bro playing a certain CD on his boombox. I realized I didn’t even know what could belong to me, in that sense. I had an intimation of that bitter-old-man insight that there is in fact no distinction to be found in consuming and projecting allegiance to those sorts of commercial products. I was lifted up for a moment to the bleak promontory from which I could see that all those cultural commodities are basically the same. It was terrifying, because from that perch one can see the higher one, from which all “individuals” are essentially the same mortal creatures, preoccupied with distinctions that are indistinguishable from the perspective of eternity. And now a Beastie Boy is dead.

by Rob Horning, Marginal Utility |  The New Inquiry

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Restaurant Moneyball

Timothy used to be struggling at work. He’s a waiter at the Landmarc restaurant at the Time Warner Center, a classy-but-accessible eatery that serves bistro fare to Manhattan shoppers. By some measures Timothy has always been a great worker — he clocks in on time and never forgets an order. But his sales of beverages and side dishes were falling short last year.

In one month, Timothy (not his real name) served 426 customers, pulling in $17,991.50 in gross sales with a per-check average of $42.23. That’s $3.84 below the overall per-check average at the Landmarc. It turns out that while Timothy was beating the rest of the waitstaff in add-on sales like bacon or cheese on a burger, he was lagging 2 percent behind everybody else in red wine and liquor sales, and a whopping 14 percent behind his peers in sides like French fries and creamed spinach.

The bottom line was $1,636 of lost sales opportunity in a month — the money Timothy would have made if he’d hit the server average.

We know all this because every item sold at Landmarc — down to the last malbec, martini and red quinoa pilaf — is individually logged and enumerated by a sophisticated software package called Slingshot. The software slices, dices and crunches the data every night, and then serves it to managers with breakfast the next morning.

So when Timothy was up for a performance review last summer, the restaurant’s general manager knew everything about him — information she incorporated into a heart-to-heart talk about improving his average.
Some of the nation’s top eateries are quietly embracing data mining to eke out profit in a tough economy.

“It used to be that a manager would say, ‘That server’s great! He’s a nice guy, he shows up on time and keeps the salt shakers full,’” says Damian Mogavero, the entrepreneur behind Slingshot. “Now they can tell a server, ‘You sell 40 percent less red wine than your peers and you work in a steakhouse!’”

Welcome to the data-driven, number-crunching future of restauranteering. With the food business thriving again in the midst of America’s economic upswing – consistently claiming a whopping 4 percent of GDP — some of the nation’s top eateries are quietly embracing data mining to eke out profit in a tough economy. Software systems like Compeat, Hotschedules and Eatec help restaurants track complex metrics like sales trends, employee overtime, and food orders from suppliers.

by Joe Ray, Wired |  Read more:
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The Four Noble Truths

The Four Noble Truths:

1. Life means suffering.

• To live means to suffer, because the human nature is not perfect and neither is the world we live in. During our lifetime, we inevitably have to endure physical suffering such as pain, sickness, injury, tiredness, old age, and eventually death; and we have to endure psychological suffering like sadness, fear, frustration, disappointment, and depression. Although there are different degrees of suffering and there are also positive experiences in life that we perceive as the opposite of suffering, such as ease, comfort and happiness, life in its totality is imperfect and incomplete, because our world is subject to impermanence. This means we are never able to keep permanently what we strive for, and just as happy moments pass by, we ourselves and our loved ones will pass away one day, too.

2. The origin of suffering is attachment.

• The origin of suffering is attachment to transient things and the ignorance thereof. Transient things do not only include the physical objects that surround us, but also ideas, and -in a greater sense- all objects of our perception. Ignorance is the lack of understanding of how our mind is attached to impermanent things. The reasons for suffering are desire, passion, ardour, pursuit of wealth and prestige, striving for fame and popularity, or in short: craving and clinging. Because the objects of our attachment are transient, their loss is inevitable, thus suffering will necessarily follow. Objects of attachment also include the idea of a “self” which is a delusion, because there is no abiding self. What we call “self” is just an imagined entity, and we are merely a part of the ceaseless becoming of the universe.

3. The cessation of suffering is attainable.

• The cessation of suffering can be attained through nirodha. Nirodha means the unmaking of sensual craving and conceptual attachment. The third noble truth expresses the idea that suffering can be ended by attaining dispassion. Nirodha extinguishes all forms of clinging and attachment. This means that suffering can be overcome through human activity, simply by removing the cause of suffering. Attaining and perfecting dispassion is a process of many levels that ultimately results in the state of Nirvana. Nirvana means freedom from all worries, troubles, complexes, fabrications and ideas. Nirvana is not comprehensible for those who have not attained it.

4. The path to the cessation of suffering.

• There is a path to the end of suffering - a gradual path of self-improvement, which is described more detailed in the Eightfold Path. It is the middle way between the two extremes of excessive self-indulgence (hedonism) and excessive self-mortification (asceticism); and it leads to the end of the cycle of rebirth. The latter quality discerns it from other paths which are merely “wandering on the wheel of becoming”, because these do not have a final object. The path to the end of suffering can extend over many lifetimes, throughout which every individual rebirth is subject to karmic conditioning. Craving, ignorance, delusions, and its effects will disappear gradually, as progress is made on the path.

Image: Tea (Housen-in temple, Kyoto) (by Marser)

Source: Flickr / marser
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Brandi Carlile