I (Robot) Thee Wed

[ed. Companion piece to the Sherry Turkle interview further down the page. While sex is the hook in this article, robots will definitely perform all kinds of social functions in the near future. Is that good or bad, or both?]

It’s hard to think of a more attention-grabbing title than “Robots, Men, and Sex Tourism”—especially in the academic world.

Written by researchers from New Zealand’s University of Wellington and published recently in the journal Futures, the paper predicts that in the decades to come, humans will patronize robot-staffed brothels, freeing them from the guilt associated with visiting a flesh-and-blood prostitute. Perhaps predictably, it sparked a lively conversation about whether the sex industry could be automated—and not a little squeamishness about the whole idea of robot-human relations.

That at least some of us will be having sexual intercourse with robots in the future should be obvious by now. Somebody out there will make love to just about any consumer good that enters the home (and if that’s not the first rule of product design, it should be).

But will our robot-human relations be relegated to the bedroom, or will love enter the equation, too? Is our society headed in a direction that will support this transition? Looking at current trends, I’d say that the answer is a resounding yes.  (...)

In 2007’s Love and Sex With Robots, Dr. David Levy claimed we humans—that’s men and women, so you’re not off the hook, ladies—will become smitten with new breeds of advanced humanoid robots due to arrive within the next half-century.

Many of our social interactions have been reduced to the barebones transfer of information via various online media: text messages, emails, shared videos and pictures, status updates, and, uh, pokes. We routinely create online profiles that distill our lives to a list of data points—much in the way that a role-playing game stat sheet boils down your complex and multi-faceted elvish archer to only his intelligence, dexterity, and charisma. For people who have been raised on text-based interactions, just speaking on the telephone can be high bandwidth to the point of anxiety.

The complicated, ambiguous milieu of human contact is being replaced with simple, scalable equations. We maintain thousands more friends than any human being in history, but at the cost of complexity and depth. Every minute spent online is a minute of face-to-face time lost. For better or worse, new modes of interaction are steadily eroding the more “traditional” forms of interaction familiar to older generations. New streamlined interactions between human beings may open the door for machines to join us as social peers and not just sex objects.

by Daniel H. Wilson, Slate |  Read more:
Photograph by Paul Sakuma/AP

Machine Turn Quickly by Francis Picabia, 1917
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Frappuccino Causes Vegan Backlash. Really?

About two months ago a Starbucks barista read the ingredients on a bag of a Strawberries & Crème Frappuccino mix, snapped a photo of the bag, and forwarded her discovery to a website that specializes in vegetarian and animal-rights issues. One ingredient, cochineal extract, wasn't something that should be found in a soy drink designed for vegetarians and vegans. Cochineal is a red dye extracted from crushed insects.

All hell broke loose. Starbucks immediately announced it would find another source for red dye, one more acceptable to the vegan community. Vegans recommended using plant dyes extracted from red beets, black carrots, purple sweet potatoes, or paprika. Some wondered why the strawberries weren’t pink enough to tint the drink.

Many vegans and vegetarians, swept up in a paroxysm of outrage, have failed to consider the unintended consequences of forcing Starbucks to pick another food coloring.

We weren’t always so fastidious

Humans have eaten insects since the dawn of mankind. In recent centuries, entomophagy has fallen out of favor in the Western world. People’s expectations and government oversight have reduced insect parts in our food, but it’s only been in the past century that Western culture could afford to be so picky.

We weren’t always so fastidious. In "The Fortune of War", one of a series of historically accurate novels on the naval wars of the Napoleonic era, Captain Aubrey posed a question to his good friend, the ship’s surgeon. Pointing to a couple of weevils crossing the table, abandoning one of the Royal Navy’s notoriously bug-infested ship’s biscuits, he asked the doctor which weevil he would choose, apropos of nothing. The doctor noted they were the same species, but if pressed he would pick the heftier one. Aubrey laughed and said, “Don’t you know that in the Navy you must always choose the lesser of two weevils?”

This universal rule of thumb is eschewed by vegans, who refuse to eat anything of animal origin. No meat, milk, cheese, eggs, honey. Not even bugs. On that last item, vegan and mainstream dietary preferences overlap. Unfortunately, the contemporary Western taboo against insect consumption can pose a serious dilemma when it comes to making an environmentally responsible decision.

These people are serious

But let’s duck back to the 19th century for a minute. Like Starbucks’ frappuccino faux pas, India’s First War of Independence was a backlash triggered, in part, by underestimating the public’s unwillingness to eat taboo animal products. In the mid-19th century, Great Britain reinforced its 50,000 troops in colonial India with about 200,000 sepoys, native soldiers of both Hindu and Muslim faiths. A new infantry rifle, a muzzleloader, was adopted by the army. Its cartridges consisted of a lead ball and gunpowder inside a paper tube. The paper was coated with tallow or lard for water-resistance and to facilitate ramming the ball down the barrel. To load, a soldier would bite off the end of the paper cartridge, pour the gunpowder down the barrel, then use the ramrod to push the ball and paper wad onto the powder.

But the lubricant was a problem. If it were beef tallow, putting it into the mouth or even touching the cartridge would humiliate and offend the Hindu sepoys. If pork lard, the Muslim sepoys would be offended. Soon many of the sepoys of both faiths were not only unwilling to load their weapons, they were in revolt. Tens of thousands of soldiers and civilians died in the subsequent turmoil.

If you aren’t a vegetarian or vegan, you might have missed the point I'm trying to make -- these people are serious.

by Rick Sinnott, Alaska Dispatch |  Read more:
Illustration: Stephen Nowers

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Amazon Leaps Into High End of the Fashion Pool

Amazon is so serious about its next big thing that it hired three women to do nothing but try on size 8 shoes for its Web reviews. Full time.

The online retailer is shooting 3,000 fashion images a day in a photo studio using patent-pending technology.

And it is happily losing hundreds of millions of dollars a year on free shipping — and, on apparel, even free returns — to keep its shoppers coming back.

Having wounded the publishing industry, slashed pricing in electronics and made the toy industry quiver, Amazon is taking on the high-end clothing business in its typical way: go big and spare no expense.

“It’s Day 1 in the category,” Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s chief executive, said in a recent interview. Though characteristically tight-lipped on bottom-line details, Mr. Bezos said the company was making a “significant” investment in fashion to convince top brands that it wanted to work with them, not against them.

The traditional retail world — and many major brands that want no part of Amazon — are gearing up to fight for their lives.

“It has the latitude to set prices and charge whatever it wants,” Sucharita Mulpuru, an analyst for Forrester Research, said of Amazon. “That is a huge threat for brands.”

Amazon has sold clothing for years. But recently it has focused on signing on hundreds of contemporary and high-end brands, including Michael Kors, Vivienne Westwood, Catherine Malandrino, Jack Spade and Tracy Reese, and it continues to prowl for more. On Monday, some of Amazon’s muscle was on display as the company sponsored, and live-streamed, the Costume Institute Benefit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the accompanying exhibit. Mr. Bezos, the event’s honorary chairman, said that he was advised by Anna Wintour, Vogue’s editor, to wear a pink pocket square with a Tom Ford tuxedo (which is not available on Amazon). He did so.

Amazon’s decision to go after high fashion is about plain economics. Because Amazon’s costs are about the same whether it is shipping a $10 book or a $1,000 skirt, “gross profit dollars per unit will be much higher on a fashion item,” Mr. Bezos said, and it already makes money on fashion. While its MyHabit site, started last year, uses a flash-sale model to compete with Gilt Groupe, Mr. Bezos says the company’s new effort is not about selling clothes at deep discounts but at prices that ensure that “the designer brands are happy.”

Amazon has not just size on its side but money. The company has about $5.7 billion in cash and marketable securities, and Mr. Bezos has long taken a stance that investing in the business is the best place to use it. The company can afford to do things that some competitors cannot, like hire a bevy of stylists for the Web site models or investigate replacing the plain brown shipping box with a fancier package for clothes.

by Stephanie Clifford, NY Times |  Read more:
Photo: Matthew Ryan Williams

Anatomy of Melancholy

[ed. A classic essay on the effects of depression. This article originally appeared in the January 1998 edition of The New Yorker.]

Depression afflicts millions of American each year, and many don't know where to turn when it strikes. The author recalls the greatest struggle of his life.

I did not experience depression until I had pretty much solved my problems. I had come to terms with my mother's death three years earlier, was publishing my first novel, was getting along with my family, had emerged intact from a powerful two-year relationship, had bought a beautiful new house, was writing well. It was when life was finally in order that depression came slinking in and spoiled everything. I'd felt acutely that there was no excuse for it under the circumstances, despite perennial existential crises, the forgotten sorrows of a distant childhood, slight wrongs done to people now dead, the truth that I am not Tolstoy, the absence in this world of perfect love, and those impulses of greed and uncharitableness which lie too close to the heart — that sort of thing. But now, as I ran through this inventory, I believed that my depression was not only a rational state but also an incurable one. I kept redating he beginning of the depression: since my breakup with my girlfriend the past October, since my mother's death; since the beginning of her two-year illness; since puberty; since birth. Soon I couldn't remember what pleasurable moods had been like.  (...)

In June, 1994, I began to be constantly bored. My first novel had recently been published in England, and yet its favorable reception did little for me. I read the reviews indifferently and felt tired all the time. In July, back home in downtown New York, I found myself burdened by phone calls, social events, conversation. The subway proved intolerable. In August, I started to feel numb. I didn't care about work, family, or friends. My writing slowed, the stopped. My usually headstrong libido evaporated.

All this made me feel that I was losing my self. Scared, I tried to schedule pleasures. I went to parties and failed to have fun, saw friends and failed to connect; I bought things I had previously wanted and gained no satisfaction from them. I was overwhelmed by messages on my answering machine and ceased to return calls. When I drove at night, I constantly thought I was going to swerve into another car. Suddenly feeling I'd forgotten how to use the steering wheel, I would pull over in a sweat.

In September, I had agonizing kidney stones. After a brief hospitalization, I spent a vagabond week migrating from friend to friend. I would stay in the house all day; avoiding the street, and was careful never to go far from the phone. When they came home, I would cry. Sleeping pills got me through the night, but morning began to seem increasingly difficult. From then on, the slippage was steady. I worked even less well, cancelled more plans. I began eating irregularly, seldom feeling hungry. A psychoanalyst I was seeing told me, as I sank lower, that avoiding medication was very courageous.

At about this time, night terrors began. My book was coming out in the United States, and a friend threw a party on October 11th. I was feeling too lacklustre to invite many people, was too tired to stand up much during the party, and sweated horribly all night. The event lives in my mind in ghostly outlines and washed-out colors. When I got home, terror seized me. I lay in bed, not sleeping and hugging my pillow for comfort. Two weeks later — the day before my thirty-first birthday — I left the house once, to buy groceries; petrified for no reason, I suddenly lost bowel control and soiled myself. I ran home, shaking, and went to bed, but I did not sleep, and could not get up the following day. I wanted to call people to cancel birthday plans, but I couldn't. I lay very still and thought about speaking, trying to figure out how. I moved my tongue, but there were no sounds. I had forgotten how to talk. Then I began to cry without tears. I was on my back. I wanted to turn over, but couldn't remember how to do that, either. I guessed that perhaps I'd had a stroke. At about three that afternoon, I managed to get up and go to the bathroom. I returned to bed shivering. Fortunately, my father, who lived uptown, called about then. "Cancel tonight," I said, struggling with the strange words. "What's wrong?" he kept asking, but I didn't know.   (...)

Once upon a time, depression was generally seen as a purely psychological disturbance. These days, people are likely to think of it as a tidy biological syndrome. In fact, it's hard to make sense of the distinction. Most depressive disorders are now though to involve a mixture of reactive (so-called neurotic) factors and internal ("endogenous") factors; depression is a seldom a simple genetic disease or a simple response to external troubles. Resolving the biological and the psychological understanding of depression is as difficult as reconciling predestination and free will. If you remember the beginning of this paragraph well enough to make sense of the end of it, that is a chemical process; love, faith, and despair all have chemical manifestations, and chemistry can make you feel things. Treatments have to accommodate this binary structure — the interplay between vulnerability and external events.

Vulnerability need not be genetic. Ellen Frank, of the University of Pittsburgh, says, "Experiences in childhood can scar the brain and leave one vulnerable to depression." As with asthma, predisposition and environment conspire. Syndrome and symptom cause each other: loneliness is depressing, but depression also causes loneliness. "When patients recover from depression by means of psychotherapy," Frank says, "we see the same changes in, for example, sleep EEG as when they receive medication. A socially generated depression does not necessarily need psychosocial treatment, nor a biologically generated one a biological treatment.

by Andrew Soloman via: The Noonday Demon, originally published in the New Yorker (January, 1998) |  Read more: 

The Climate Fixers

Late in the afternoon on April 2, 1991, Mt. Pinatubo, a volcano on the Philippine island of Luzon, began to rumble with a series of the powerful steam explosions that typically precede an eruption. Pinatubo had been dormant for more than four centuries, and in the volcanological world the mountain had become little more than a footnote. The tremors continued in a steady crescendo for the next two months, until June 15th, when the mountain exploded with enough force to expel molten lava at the speed of six hundred miles an hour. The lava flooded a two-hundred-and-fifty-square-mile area, requiring the evacuation of two hundred thousand people.

Within hours, the plume of gas and ash had penetrated the stratosphere, eventually reaching an altitude of twenty-one miles. Three weeks later, an aerosol cloud had encircled the earth, and it remained for nearly two years. Twenty million metric tons of sulfur dioxide mixed with droplets of water, creating a kind of gaseous mirror, which reflected solar rays back into the sky. Throughout 1992 and 1993, the amount of sunlight that reached the surface of the earth was reduced by more than ten per cent.

The heavy industrial activity of the previous hundred years had caused the earth’s climate to warm by roughly three-quarters of a degree Celsius, helping to make the twentieth century the hottest in at least a thousand years. The eruption of Mt. Pinatubo, however, reduced global temperatures by nearly that much in a single year. It also disrupted patterns of precipitation throughout the planet. It is believed to have influenced events as varied as floods along the Mississippi River in 1993 and, later that year, the drought that devastated the African Sahel. Most people considered the eruption a calamity.

For geophysical scientists, though, Mt. Pinatubo provided the best model in at least a century to help us understand what might happen if humans attempted to ameliorate global warming by deliberately altering the climate of the earth.

For years, even to entertain the possibility of human intervention on such a scale—geoengineering, as the practice is known—has been denounced as hubris. Predicting long-term climatic behavior by using computer models has proved difficult, and the notion of fiddling with the planet’s climate based on the results generated by those models worries even scientists who are fully engaged in the research. “There will be no easy victories, but at some point we are going to have to take the facts seriously,’’ David Keith, a professor of engineering and public policy at Harvard and one of geoengineering’s most thoughtful supporters, told me. “Nonetheless,’’ he added, “it is hyperbolic to say this, but no less true: when you start to reflect light away from the planet, you can easily imagine a chain of events that would extinguish life on earth.”

There is only one reason to consider deploying a scheme with even a tiny chance of causing such a catastrophe: if the risks of not deploying it were clearly higher. No one is yet prepared to make such a calculation, but researchers are moving in that direction. To offer guidance, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (I.P.C.C.) has developed a series of scenarios on global warming. The cheeriest assessment predicts that by the end of the century the earth’s average temperature will rise between 1.1 and 2.9 degrees Celsius. A more pessimistic projection envisages a rise of between 2.4 and 6.4 degrees—far higher than at any time in recorded history. (There are nearly two degrees Fahrenheit in one degree Celsius. A rise of 2.4 to 6.4 degrees Celsius would equal 4.3 to 11.5 degrees Fahrenheit.) Until recently, climate scientists believed that a six-degree rise, the effects of which would be an undeniable disaster, was unlikely. But new data have changed the minds of many. Late last year, Fatih Birol, the chief economist for the International Energy Agency, said that current levels of consumption “put the world perfectly on track for a six-degree Celsius rise in temperature. . . . Everybody, even schoolchildren, knows this will have catastrophic implications for all of us.”

by Michael Specter, The New Yorker |  Read more:
Illustration: Nishant Choksi

Nice.
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A Conversation with Sherry Turkle

You've spoken of your book, Alone Together, as a book of repentance. I'm wondering if you could reflect on that statement, in particular as it relates to your two previous books, Life on the Screen and The Second Self.

The artificial intelligence that I had researched for The Second Self and Life on the Screen was an AI where researchers were trying to make the computer smart. In sociable robotics the intent was less to make the computer smart than to make a “creature” that pushed people’s buttons, to do what was necessary to convince people that this machine was sentient and cared about them. It was playing on what the AI scientists knew about people’s make-up. The point is not so much that the machine is smart but that we are vulnerable. So, for example, I began to see sociable robots that looked you in the eye, kept eye contact, said your name, tracked your motion.

And there was something else. It turns out that if an artificial being, no matter how primitive, asks us for nurturance, we attach to it. Think of the little Tamagotchis, the little virtual creatures on tiny little screens that kids carried around in the late 1990s. These Tamagotchis asked you to feed them, amuse them, and clean up after them. When they did this, we attached. People nurture what they love, but they also love what they nurture. And that whole direction in sociable robotics, to create artificial creatures that might some day become substitutes for human companionship, and the realization of how vulnerable we are to such creatures, was something I really didn’t encounter until 1995, as I was finishing Life on the Screen.

Research on this new research tradition and our vulnerability to sociable robotics became a major preoccupation of mine. Every year a new sociable robot would come out, and every year I would embark on a new study of kids and this new robot. I studied Furbies, Aibos, My Real Babies. And finally robots were designed for the elderly in nursing homes, and I began to track that story as well.

So the growth of sociable robotics is one thing that changed my mind. People are so vulnerable and so willing to accept substitutes for human companionship in very intimate ways. I hadn’t seen that coming, and it really concerns me that we’re willing to give up something that I think defines our humanness: our ability to empathize and be with each other and talk to each other and understand each other. And I report to you with great sadness that the more I continued to interview people about this, the more I realized the extent to which people are willing to put machines in this role. People feel that they are not being heard, that no one is listening. They have a fantasy that finally, in a machine, they will have a nonjudgmental companion.

You tell the story of a graduate student who says she would prefer a robot over a human relationship.

Yes. And I studied people who are happy now to give these inanimate creatures to the elderly because, well, they say it’s better than nothing. They accept that there’s nobody else for these people. But how did we get to “there’s nobody else”? People have come to accept that we live in a society where there simply aren’t the resources to take care of our elderly. But this is a social decision that these resources are not available.

So Alone Together is a book of repentance in the sense that I did not see this coming, this moment of temptation that we will have machines that will care for us, listen to us, tend to us. That’s the first sense. A second thing that changed my mind has to do with where I see social networking and the internet going. My initial excitement about networked communication took place during a time when I saw the world of online play as an identity workshop: a place where people experimented with avatars, played out aspects of self that often were not fully expressed in their everyday lives. That still goes on, but now online life has become a life of continual performance. When I studied online life in the mid-1990s, I envisaged it as a place you went to experiment. But now, with our mobile devices “always on/always-on-us,” we are always “on camera.”

I didn’t see that coming, although it was right before me. And with it has come the culture of distraction, which isn’t even experienced as distraction because it’s just how we live. People feel they have the right to customize their lives, to put their attention where they want it to be. If they are at a meeting and want to text, they do. If they are at dinner and want to text, they do. Students in class tell me that that if they don’t check their texts, it makes them anxious. They can’t feel present if they are not also in some way absent. I didn’t see that coming. As in the case of sociable robotics, this new lack of attention to each other is something, again, where I feel that we are not doing our humanness justice.

The first part of your book is on robots, and the second is on social networking. A common theme in both is the way in which these new technologies both express and foster greater loneliness. Can you talk about this paradox, where you find people being more connected than ever, but also more lonely?

We’re moving from conversation to connection. In conversation we’re present to each other in very powerful ways. Conversation is a kind of communication in which we’re alive to each other, empathetic with each other, listening to each other. When we substitute Twitter or status updates on Facebook for this, we’re losing something important. Sometimes it’s not clear to me if it’s the volume, or velocity, or continualness of it. Some kids are up to 10,000, to 15,000 texts a month. That means they’re never not texting. In this cascade of communication, we move from conversation to mere connection. And so we’ve positioned ourselves in a way where we can end up feeling more alone, even as we’re taking actions that would suggest we’re more continually connected. In all of this there is another loss: I think we lose the capacity for solitude, the kind that refreshes and restores. The kind that allows us to reach out to another person.

by James Nolan, The Hedgehog Review |  Read more:

Inn at Langley. Whidbey Island.
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The Cab Ride I’ll Never Forget

There was a time in my life twenty years ago when I was driving a cab for a living.

It was a cowboy’s life, a gambler’s life, a life for someone who wanted no boss, constant movement and the thrill of a dice roll every time a new passenger got into the cab.

What I didn’t count on when I took the job was that it was also a ministry.

Because I drove the night shift, my cab became a rolling confessional. Passengers would climb in, sit behind me in total anonymity and tell me of their lives.

We were like strangers on a train, the passengers and I, hurtling through the night, revealing intimacies we would never have dreamed of sharing during the brighter light of day. I encountered people whose lives amazed me, ennobled me, made me laugh and made me weep.

And none of those lives touched me more than that of a woman I picked up late on a warm August night.

I was responding to a call from a small brick fourplex in a quiet part of town. I assumed I was being sent to pick up some partiers, or someone who had just had a fight with a lover, or someone going off to an early shift at some factory for the industrial part of town.

When I arrived at the address, the building was dark except for a single light in a ground-floor window.

Under these circumstances, many drivers would just honk once or twice, wait a short minute, then drive away. Too many bad possibilities awaited a driver who went up to a darkened building at 2:30 in the morning.

by Kent Nerburn, Zen Moments |  Read more: 
Photo: Taxi Union Square 2007 by Thomas Hawk

Honey, I Got a Year’s Worth of Tuna Fish

Forty-five minutes before midnight on a wintry Tuesday evening, Cathy Yoder and Monica Knight, a pair of 30-something Boise women who run a popular coupon blog called Fabulessly Frugal, strode with purpose through the parking lot of their local Albertsons supermarket. It was the third and final night of “doubles” at Albertsons. This biweekly happening, during which the store issues coupons that double the value of manufacturers’ coupons, is to dedicated coupon clippers what the full moon was to Druids. Yoder and Knight, who are Mormon and have nine children between them (Yoder: seven; Knight: two) had spent the day working on their blog and then taught a three-hour couponing class — all without a drop of forbidden caffeine. Yet with the supermarket in sight, they grew visibly jazzed, like Vegas high rollers entering a casino. “We’ll have it all to ourselves, and we’ll know all the cashiers,” Knight said.

Within minutes, Knight — a part-time dental hygienist with glossy, nearly waist-length blond hair and enviable white teeth — had discovered a sale on StarKist tuna fish. “Oh, Cathy, the tuna’s a dollar right now!” she said, as she stood before a shelf containing shiny blue plastic pouches of chunk-light tuna. A bulging nylon binder, which she had seated like a toddler in the front of her cart, held six StarKist coupons for 50 cents off; paired with Albertsons coupons, they were worth a dollar each, the same price as the tuna. “So it’s free right now,” she continued. “And we haven’t even blogged about it!”

For “couponers,” as they call themselves, free product is the holy grail. Freebies are obtained by combining various promotions in ways that can seem laborious and arcane to the civilian shopper: waiting for items to go on sale and then using coupons to buy them; “stacking” manufacturers’ coupons with store coupons; shopping during “double coupon” days; or receiving, post-purchase, a “catalina” — a coupon from a company called Catalina Marketing that can be redeemed on a future transaction. These little papers, which are spit out by a mini-printer that sits near the register and look like run-of-the-mill receipts, usually meet an unceremonious end in the graveyards of shoppers’ pockets and purses, but couponers regard them as cash. (...)

Yoder and Knight are part of a growing community of people for whom coupons are a significant part of making ends meet. After declining for nearly a decade, coupon use has increased almost 35 percent since 2008, according to Matthew Tilley, the director of marketing at Inmar, a coupon clearinghouse. Last year, more than 3.5 billion coupons for consumer packaged goods were redeemed, an increase of 6.1 percent over 2010. Coupon bloggers contributed to that increase, and though it’s hard to say how many of these blogs exist now, the numbers exploded during the recession. “When I started blogging in the summer of 2008,” says Jill Cataldo, a coupon-industry watchdog who writes a weekly syndicated column that runs in 154 newspapers, “there were not a lot of coupon blogs out there. In fact, I would be hard pressed to name more than a handful.” Fabulessly Frugal was also born in 2008. “I couldn’t even find anything local,” Yoder says. Now there are at least six other coupon blogs in the Boise area. A nasty review of a product or a complaint about a deal on one of these Web sites can have such a profound effect on customer perception — and thus on sales — that many companies have liaisons to correspond with them. Supervalu, whose major chain stores include Jewel-Osco, Cub Foods and numerous Albertsons, has created the position of “Social Media Coordinator” to communicate with bloggers and ply them with occasional giveaways.

by Amanda Fortini, NY Times |  Read more:
Photo: Danielle Levitt for The New York Times

Nanotechnology Shock Waves

“I sing the body electric,” Walt Whitman wrote in 1855, inspired by the novelty of useful electricity, which he would live to see power streetlights and telephones, locomotives and dynamos. In “Leaves of Grass,” his ecstatic epic poem of American life, he depicted himself as a live wire, a relay station for all the voices of the earth, natural or invented, human or mineral. “I have instant conductors all over me,” he wrote. “They seize every object and lead it harmlessly through me… My flesh and blood playing out lightning to strike what is hardly different from myself.”

Electricity equipped Whitman and other poets with a scintillation of metaphors. Like inspiration, it was a lightning flash. Like prophetic insight, it illuminated the darkness. Like sex, it tingled the flesh. Like life, it energized raw matter. Whitman didn’t know that our cells really do generate electricity, that the heart’s pacemaker relies on such signals and that billions of axons in the brain create their own electrical charge (equivalent to about a 60-watt bulb). A force of nature himself, he admired the range and raw power of electricity.

Deeply as he believed the vow “I sing the body electric” — a line sure to become a winning trademark — I suspect one of nanotechnology’s recent breakthroughs would have stunned him. A team at the University of Exeter in England has invented the lightest, supplest, most diaphanous material ever made for conducting electricity, a dream textile named GraphExeter, which could revolutionize electronics by making it fashionable to wear your computer, cellphone and MP3 player. Only one atom thick, it’s an ideal fabric for street clothes and couture lines alike. You could start your laptop by plugging it into your jeans, recharge your cellphone by plugging it into your T-shirt. Then, not only would your cells sizzle with electricity, but even your clothing would chime in.

I don’t know if a fully electric suit would upset flight electronics, pacemakers, airport security monitors or the brain’s cellular dispatches. If you wore an electric coat in a lightning storm, would the hairs on the back of your neck stand up? Would you be more likely to fall prey to a lightning strike? How long will it be before a jokester plays the sound of one-hand-clapping from a mitten? How long before late-night hosts riff about electric undies? Will people tethered to recharging poles haunt the airport waiting rooms? Will it become hip to wear flashing neon ads, quotes and designs — maybe a name in a luminous tattoo?

Another recent marvel of nanotechnology promises to alter daily life, too, but this one, despite its silver lining, strikes me as wickedly dangerous, though probably inevitable. As a result, it’s bound to inspire labyrinthine laws and a welter of patents and to ignite bioethical debates.

by Diane Ackerman, NY Times |  Read more:
Illustration: Agata Nowicka

You and I
You are
delicious
And I am
greedy.
You are
generous
And I am
needy.
You are
experienced
And I am
learning.
You are
flammable
And I am
burning.

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Non Cogito, Ergo Sum

[ed. In other words, being in the zone. Easier said than done.]

It was the fifth set of a semi-final at last year’s US Open. After four hours of epic tennis, Roger Federer needed one more point to see off his young challenger, Novak Djokovic. As Federer prepared to serve, the crowd roared in anticipation. At the other end, Djokovic nodded, as if in acceptance of his fate.

Federer served fast and deep to Djokovic’s right. Seconds later he found himself stranded, uncomprehending, in mid-court. Djokovic had returned his serve with a loose-limbed forehand of such lethal precision that Federer couldn’t get near it. The nonchalance of Djokovic's stroke thrilled the crowd. John McEnroe called it “one of the all-time great shots”.

Djokovic won the game, set, match and tournament. At his press conference, Federer was a study in quiet fury. It was tough, he said, to lose because of a “lucky shot”. Some players do that, he continued: “Down 5-2 in the third, they just start slapping shots …How can you play a shot like that on match point?”

Asked the same question, Djokovic smiled. “Yeah, I tend to do that on match points. It kinda works.”

Federer’s inability to win Grand Slams in the last two years hasn’t been due to physical decline so much as a new mental frailty that emerges at crucial moments. In the jargon of sport, he has been “choking”. This, say the experts, is caused by thinking too much. When a footballer misses a penalty or a golfer fluffs a putt, it is because they have become self-conscious. By thinking too hard, they lose the fluid physical grace required to succeed. Perhaps Federer was so upset because, deep down, he recognised that his opponent had tapped into a resource that he, an all-time great, is finding harder to reach: unthinking.

Unthinking is the ability to apply years of learning at the crucial moment by removing your thinking self from the equation. Its power is not confined to sport: actors and musicians know about it too, and are apt to say that their best work happens in a kind of trance. Thinking too much can kill not just physical performance but mental inspiration. Bob Dylan, wistfully recalling his youthful ability to write songs without even trying, described the making of “Like a Rolling Stone” as a “piece of vomit, 20 pages long”. It hasn’t stopped the song being voted the best of all time.

In less dramatic ways the same principle applies to all of us. A fundamental paradox of human psychology is that thinking can be bad for us. When we follow our own thoughts too closely, we can lose our bearings, as our inner chatter drowns out common sense. A study of shopping behaviour found that the less information people were given about a brand of jam, the better the choice they made. When offered details of ingredients, they got befuddled by their options and ended up choosing a jam they didn’t like.

by Ian Leslie, More Intelligent Life |  Read more:
Photo: Getty

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Santana

many useful tips i’m sure…
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