Nirvana

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Forever in debt to your priceless advice

Jeremy Norton Paintings, Untitled No.57

Lake Life

The photograph on the right was taken when I was six, on a boat speeding through Lake Ontario, in Henderson Harbor, New York. It was in the village of Henderson, a good six hours north of New York City, that an ancestor of mine (one more interested in fishing than fashion) built five houses in the early 1900’s; one for each of his children.

Four of the houses are on the water, and one looms on the hill across the road. A lakefront house right in the middle got sold before I was born, and the poor souls that live there now built a high fence around it to keep my family from swarming across their property. We no longer miss that house, but we do still call it by its old name.

Everything about the remaining four is somewhat irregular—they are all in different styles, of different sizes, and each is attached to a different-sized patch of property. The one that belongs to my branch has the least land, and is the biggest and most decrepit. It is best suited to being filled by at least two nuclear families. Probably its best asset is a cobwebby porch built directly over the water.

The lake itself is sea-weedy, green. Zebra mussels cut your feet. The labour of living by it —dragging the boat in, wresting bins of garbage up the stone hill in a wheelbarrow, washing a hundred plates three times a day—is more intense than you expected when you were child. There is always someone watering and pressing the clay court, or hanging up endless clumps of wet bathing suits and towels on lines. There is a mass production of tomato and chicken sandwiches, and by the time the last child has had their lunch, the first child is thinking of his dinner. In one area are bunches of children engaged in archery, over there are some more playing chess. Several grownups are off somewhere, sailing. All activities are tinged with competition, and a little danger. The tennis is downright ferocious.

Everywhere there is evidence of grandeur and decay.

My great-aunt, or great-cousin or something had her 90th birthday this summer, which brought all the branches flying lake-ward in droves. What one discovers in “my” house this summer is that the sofa has completely disintegrated; a pile of dead moths high as your ankle lines the perimeter of all windows. The children are bunched on cots on the porches; no one seemed to remember to shut the doors, so we lost the battle with the gnats and mosquitoes. The end of our dock—the most disgraceful one on the lake—has cracked off and slumps down into the water. Perhaps in sympathy, the sofa slumps at the same angle. When you come into the kitchen, which is plastered with notes to remind you that the appliances are whimsical, or don’t work at all--you find a spate of lake-wet relatives in towels nearly falling through the rattan seats of their chairs, speaking words you haven’t heard since last summer—like “mast”, “boom”, “main-line,” and “skipper.” The pot of coffee is always on. Then someone has to be taken to the hospital for stitches.

One topic that crops up periodically in the kitchen, is the old days. There used to be a pool in the property across the way; there used to be butterflies, which the children caught in nets and pinned to boards. They used to go to the farm and come back with a pile of kittens that someone had intended to drown. There used to be fish-gutting in the basement, which the women mostly did, and intense fishing trips across the lake, conducted uniquely by the men.

The oldest generation remembers this with mixed fondness, but not wistfulness. They share responsibility with my mother’s generation for the endless logistical minutia of managing the place. My generation is still young---I’m a over a decade older than the cousin closest to me in age, and many of the kids are perplexed about why they go on vacation in a house so far away, and so much less comfortable than the one they left. Nobody really fishes any more. The little ones say idly: “whichever of us strikes it rich should fix this place.”

It would be beautiful if it were fixed. But an interesting thing about lake life is the ethos of discomfort that is its essential spirit. Even in my great-grandmother’s day, when there had been money, there had also been spiders, and rotting fish washing up on the rocks, and the water was ice-cold, and the weather indifferent. They came because it was habit, because there is something about water that empties the mind, and they came to see each other; to mark their heights on a doorframe, to compete over trifles, and to remember who they were: a rather unmusical people interested in politics, Protestantism, poetry and psychology. But for a month or four, on the lake, they lost even that identity, and became interested in nature, and the strenuous use of the body. My great-aunt Eleanor, in her ‘90’s, still swam every day, and skinny-dipping is generally encouraged.

by Mara Jebsen, 3 Quarks Daily |  Read more:

Friends of a Certain Age

It was like one of those magical blind-date scenes out of a Hollywood rom-com, without the “rom.” I met Brian, a New York screenwriter, a few years ago through work, which led to dinner with our wives and friend chemistry that was instant and obvious.

We liked the same songs off Dylan’s “Blonde on Blonde,” the same lines from “Chinatown.” By the time the green curry shrimp had arrived, we were finishing each other’s sentences. Our wives were forced to cut in: “Hey, guys, want to come up for air?”

As Brian and his wife wandered off toward the No. 2 train afterward, it crossed my mind that he was the kind of guy who might have ended up a groomsman at my wedding if we had met in college.

That was four years ago. We’ve seen each other four times since. We are “friends,” but not quite friends. We keep trying to get over the hump, but life gets in the way.

Our story is not unusual. In your 30s and 40s, plenty of new people enter your life, through work, children’s play dates and, of course, Facebook. But actual close friends — the kind you make in college, the kind you call in a crisis — those are in shorter supply.

As people approach midlife, the days of youthful exploration, when life felt like one big blind date, are fading. Schedules compress, priorities change and people often become pickier in what they want in their friends.

No matter how many friends you make, a sense of fatalism can creep in: the period for making B.F.F.’s, the way you did in your teens or early 20s, is pretty much over. It’s time to resign yourself to situational friends: K.O.F.’s (kind of friends) — for now.

But often, people realize how much they have neglected to restock their pool of friends only when they encounter a big life event, like a move, say, or a divorce.

by Alex Williams, NY Times |  Read more:
Illustration: Roman Muradov

Can Tumblr’s David Karp Embrace Ads Without Selling Out?

It’s been said (by Steve Jobs, no less) that good design is not just about how a thing looks but rather about how a thing works. But maybe design is also about how a thing feels.

The design of Tumblr, the blogging tool and social network, is guided by feeling. In particular, the feelings of David Karp, the company’s 26-year-old founder, whose instincts tend to run counter to current Web conventions. Tumblr does not display “follower” counts, for example, or other numerical markers of popularity that are viewed as crucial social-media features, because Karp finds them “really gross.” The culture of public friend-and-follow reciprocity that theoretically expands a social networking service can, in his view, “really poison a whole community.”

Possibly such a view of Internet culture could be arrived at by way of deliberate study of online group behavior. But that’s not how Tumblr was made. “David built it for himself,” John Maloney, until recently the company’s president, told me. Marco Arment, Karp’s first employee, who participated directly in the service’s creation, put it even more succinctly: “Tumblr is David.”

I met Karp in Tumblr’s offices in the Flatiron district in New York. In his standard uniform of Jack Purcell sneakers, dark pants and a hoodie over a patterned shirt, Karp was polite, upbeat, inclusive and big on eye contact. Asked a question about competitors, he answered: “The last thing we want to do is compete with someone. That’s for bankers.” Karp likes to talk about Tumblr less as a business than as a “platform for creativity.” And indeed, it has been used to make more than 60 million blogs — among them a visual scrapbook kept by Michael Stipe; silly meme-blogs like Hey Girl, It’s Paul Ryan; and the clever graphic analysis that became the recent book “I Love Charts” — drawing a combined 17.5 billion page views a month.

The trick is making page views equal money. “Pretty much every large tech company today,” Karp said, is essentially “metrics driven.” Google, Twitter, Facebook: they’re obsessed with “optimizing” services, design, functionality and aesthetics through constant testing and tweaking. That ability to optimize and (not incidentally) monetize user experiences by reacting to microlevel data is the essence of Web-business magic, as it is generally understood.

Karp chose not to operate that way. Rather than monetizing clicks, he wants advertisers to view Tumblr as a place to promote particularly creative campaigns to an audience whose attention is worth paying for. It’s an approach that may or may not guide Tumblr into the black. But Karp isn’t worried. His nice-young-man aspect makes it easy to miss the brashness of what he is saying: he isn’t interested in competing, but not because he doesn’t like competition. He just feels that he sees something everyone else has missed.  (...)

Trying to blog at first made David Karp feel bad: that big, empty text box seemed to demand a lot of carefully constructed words, an intimidating sight for a nonwriter. The first iteration of Tumblr was a tool for “tumblelogging” (a short-form variation on blogging) designed to make it easier and less off-putting. It was released in 2007, and Tech Crunch promptly praised its simplicity: “There is absolutely no learning curve.”

Like any blogging tool, Tumblr allows users to design a site from a behind-the-scenes “dashboard,” where you type a post or upload a photo, and choose a visual “theme.” Tumblr’s dashboard incorporates some familiar elements of social Web services: in addition to making your own posts, you can “follow” or appreciate those of other Tumblr users. You can repost images and other content onto your own blog easily, and this helped Tumblr develop a reputation as a more visually oriented, multimedia version of Twitter.

In the beginning, most traffic came to Tumblr from without; but now more than 70 percent of the traffic on Tumblr occurs in the dashboard zone, where users read, react to and repurpose one another’s posts. The upshot is “the mullet theory of social software design,” summarizes Chris Muscarella, a tech-entrepreneur friend of Karp’s. “It’s all business in the front: you have your blog that looks like any other blog, although usually prettier. And then the real party is in the back, through the social interaction on the dashboard.”

The features Tumblr eliminates are as important to the way it feels as those it adopts. Bijan Sabet of Spark Capital, an early Tumblr investor who sits on its board, says that it is “normal behavior” for a founder to be excited about adding new bells and whistles, but Karp seems excited about doing the opposite: “He’ll tell us, ‘Hey, got a new version coming up — and I took four features out!’ ”

by Rob Walker, NY Times |  Read more:
Photo illustration by Clang. Set design: Cindy Sandmann

John Evans (1945 - ) The Exclamations Got Away, Oil on Canvas, 64” x 60”
via:

A Toast

 

{ President Obama has dinner in Woodside, Calif., in February 2011 with tech leaders including John Chambers (Cisco), Larry Ellison (Oracle), Reed Hastings (Netflix), Carol Bartz (Yahoo), Steve Jobs (Apple), and Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook). | One year ago tomorrow, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings took the first of a series of missteps that angered customers and nearly derailed his company. Current and former employees disclose what went wrong. }

via: The New Sheldon wet/dry

[ed. For some reason I've always liked this picture - the digital elite in a toast to their awesomeness. How quickly the fortunes of many in that room have changed over the last year and a half.]

Changing Cities: Ending Hawaii's Oil Addiction

When you think of the most innovative places around the world for clean-tech, Denmark, where 50 percent of the energy comes from wind, might come to mind. Or maybe you'd think of Iceland, which is almost nearly 100 percent powered off geothermal, or perhaps Germany, which recently set a new world record in power generated from solar, but Hawaii?

U.S. Pacific Command is working closely with Hawaii, the most oil addicted state in the nation, to ensure that the Hawaii Clean Energy Initiative, a plan launched in 2008 to reduce the state's consumption of fossil fuels by 70 percent by 2030 is a success.

"Pacific Command accounts for 20 percent of the island's energy demand, so Hawaii needed Pacific Command to sign on to make the Clean Energy Initiative work," Joelle Simonpietri senior analyst to U.S. Pacific Command Energy Office joint innovation and experimentation division told ABC News.

The military is using the Hawaiian islands as a test bed for new green tech innovation - everything from algae-based jet fuels and hydrogen fuel cell technology to smart-grids that can resist cyber terror. (...)

Since Hawaii's goals of a 70 percent reduction of fossil fuels was announced, dozens of renewable energy projects have been proposed and employment and jobs in the clean-tech sector have sharply increased.

"Twenty percent of construction jobs in Hawaii are now in the installation of solar photovoltaics," Glick said.

Several factors have allowed the state to forge ahead. A law that requires all new homes install solar hot water heating, and great tax rebates are helping Hawaii move toward a cleaner energy grid.

Hawaii has the second most solar photovoltaic systems, as well as the most EV's and charging spots per capita in the country, and it's also forging ahead on its efforts to increase the percentage of its electrical production with renewable power.

by Carrie Halperin, ABC News |  Read more:

Andrew Wyeth
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Tsuchiya Koitsu - Maizuru Harbor at Night (1936)
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A Word from Our Sponsors

In his novel “Infinite Jest,” published in 1996, David Foster Wallace imagined a near future in which the Organization of North American Nations—a single nation-state comprised of the former Mexico, United States, and Canada—had for various reasons adopted a policy known as “Revenue-Enhancing Subsidized Time.” In this scheme, calendar years are sponsored by corporations; as a result, they are no longer identified by sequential numerals but instead by product names. Subsidized time began with the “Year of the Whopper.” The action of the novel takes place several product sponsorships later, in the “Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment,” which came after the “Year of Dairy Products from the American Heartland” and before the “Year of Glad.”

Wallace’s novel was prophetic in all kinds of ways (one example is its prescience about the rise of personalized entertainment viewed in private)—but it was this outlandish satire about the calendar that came to mind recently, when the Times reported on the cash-strapped city of Brazil, Indiana (a name that sounds like one of Wallace’s post-national composites), which recently sold the naming rights of failing fire hydrants in need of repair. For the past month in Brazil, arson victims and overheated children alike have gotten their water delivered by hydrants brought to them by KFC Fiery Grilled Wings.

We’re surely a ways from a nationally recognized Year of the Fiery Grilled Wings, but maybe not as far as we might hope. The Times story notes other examples of local governments turning to advertising to help cover widening budget shortfalls: Baltimore is considering turning its fire engines into mobile billboards; Cleveland has renamed its entire bus system the HealthLine, after getting millions of dollars in sponsorship from the Cleveland Clinic; Chicago and Boston are selling naming rights to train stations; and even though the new Barclays Center isn’t scheduled to open until the fall, New Yorkers can already take the 2, 3, 4, 5, B, D, N, Q, or R trains to the renamed Atlantic Avenue-Barclays Center stop in Brooklyn. (New recorded message: “Stand clear of the closing doors, please—and sorry that we messed with those lending rates.”) And cities are thinking of moving beyond such examples of obvious synergy to selling the naming rights to parks and municipal buildings.

If this all seems inevitable—if we’re resigned to the fact that people of some subsequent generation will take their grandchildren to see the Southwest Airlines Grand Canyon or the Lincoln Financial Lincoln Memorial—it is partly due to the fact that these kinds of civic-corporate overlaps have long been a part of the culture. American sports fans, for example, long ago accepted that their favorite teams are doomed not only to play in such venues as Heinz Field, but in places with crushingly, almost provocatively absurd names, like PETCO Park (San Diego), O.co Coliseum (Oakland), or Jobing.com Arena (Glendale, Arizona). Such names are not just modern developments, however, as many of our public spaces bear names that point to their corporate pasts. Times Square was known as Longacre Square until Adolph Ochs moved his newspaper there at the beginning of the twentieth century and strong-armed city officials into changing its name. The persistence of marketers and mapmakers made it stick, and the creep of time de-commodified it, turning what was once a business deal into a civic landmark. (Times Square, of course, has always been a laboratory for the American capitalist experiment, host through the years of everything from horse stables to topless bars to the American Girl store.)

Reading about Indiana’s “fiery” hydrants elicited one of those slightly eerie moments when it feels as though we are living in the future. While the slow drift toward the corporate end times may have a long backstory, we are drawing closer to a cultural relationship with products and mass entertainment that once existed only in speculative fiction. (Of course, this is natural: as time progresses, the world rightly, and often unfortunately, begins to resemble what was predicted by the most brilliant and imaginative artists of the past.) In “Infinite Jest,” Wallace’s wry and, at times, cloying repetition (often in the form of acronyms) of all those goofy year titles is one of the many ways in which he uses a hyperbolic marketing-crazed future to satirize his marketing-crazed present. The book’s most memorable argument—that entertainment will eventually become so captivating as to be debilitating, and even deadly—is of a kind with many moments in fiction in which people of the future destroy themselves through their urges to consume. It is a key element in literature ranging from science fiction to literary theory that as the barriers of individual consciousness degrade we absorb a kind of shared cultural consciousness full of corporate junk. In this version of dystopia, advertising becomes more pervasive, consumer culture supplants traditional culture, and language itself, from place names to common nouns, is subsumed by the things we buy and sell.

by Ian Crouch, New Yorker |  Read more:
Photograph by Thomas Hoepker/Magnum

Children and Computers: State of Play

There are things in life that I don't understand. The rules of rugby. The continuing success of David Guetta. How to do an overhead kick on Fifa 12.

"You press Y and A really fast, like almost at the same time," says my son Patrick, who's six. I watch as his small thumbs flip between buttons. He could play computer games before he could read. Now he reaches for his Nintendo DS like I reach for my mobile; he fills in idle moments on Fifa, playing games or altering his team or practising shots. I don't mind, except when he gets so wound up by a vital match that he cries. My emails don't make me do that.

I go to grown-up events – weddings, anniversaries, all-day lunches – and each time, at some point, I see young children gathered around a device: a phone, an iPad, a hand-held console. They're absorbed, and quiet, not ruining anyone's day, which is a good thing. Isn't it? After all, when it comes to kids, there's not much point in pretending technology doesn't exist. It would be like pretending Lego didn't exist. When boys go round to each other's houses, they play football (in real life), or they play football (on X-Box 360 or PlayStation 3) – or they jump on top of each other in a big bundle and roll around and yell.

If I'm honest, my son – and even his sister, who's one and a half – have an ease around technology that I find scary sometimes. The baby scares me because she keeps deleting stuff off my iPad. Patrick scares me because he could use the Nintendo Wii controls, shift from game to game, choose players, set up teams by the time he was four. He still can't tie his shoelaces. There is research that says he is not alone: a survey of 2,200 mothers in 11 countries found that 70% of their two- to five-year-olds were comfortable playing computer games, but only 11% could pass the shoelace test.

Most kids' shoes have Velcro straps, of course. The shoelace thing is fine. But computer games still bother me. It's the knowledge gap. I have no idea what Patrick's up to when he plays Zelda, or cries over penalties in Classics XI, because, other than the odd game of Space Invaders, I've never got into computer games. Mostly, what my kids play with is a variation of something I had myself when I was young, so if they get stuck, I can help. But with computer games, I am as useful as an instruction manual for a Commodore Pet.

Michael Acton Smith is a genial man aged 37. He has big hair and wears black clothes, which means that business journalists describe him as rock 'n' roll. Actually, he's nerdier than that: more of a non-stop enthusiast, a man as dedicated to his weekly mates-together football game as he is to his business. That business? Oh, just Moshi Monsters.

Moshi Monsters is a UK-based website for young kids, where they pick their own monster, customise it and take it exploring: off meeting other Moshis, playing puzzles, earning points, decorating its home, acquiring cute pets called Moshlings by growing flowers… Sounds dreadful? You're clearly not aged between six and 12. Half of British children that age have, or used to have, a Moshi pet. Worldwide, there are 60m users and rising; one child every second signs up to the site. It only came online in 2008.

by Miranda Sawyer, The Guardian |  Read more:
Photograph: Donald Iain Smith/Getty Images/Flickr RF

Little Dragon

‘Manly’ Is a Lifestyle, Not a Look

I've seen more mustached lips on the street and more bacon-wrapped-fried anythings on menus than ever before. And the Internet tells me that facial hair and pig fat is manly, so it's possible we are. But, I don't think any of that stuff makes you manly. A mustache, on most of you, makes you look like the kind of guy who has a suspicious locked room in his basement, and bacon in every meal makes you a gluttonous fatso. Both of these things seem kinda dumb to me, along with all the other nonsense guys are taking part in because it helps them hark back to the days of manly men.

Macho archetypes haven't changed much, but these days it feels like we've pinpointed who we, as men, want to be more so than I can ever remember. Hey, check out this guy, he sexually harasses his employees in his office, while smoking a cigarette on his third liquid lunch date, while wearing a suit: he's the coolest. And check out this dude, what an incredible beard, and a blue ox and a huge axe: I'm totally going to dress like him. You can play dress up and imaginary playtime all you want, but that doesn't make you any more of a man, at least not to me.

In fact, I want to tell the modern man that he doesn't have to look like a gold rush-era carnival worker or brew his own micro whatever to be considered a man in my eyes. No, it's way easier than that. How about being a good guy, a good person. Just be honest, kind, tolerant, open, intrepid, self-aware, inquisitive, etc. — you know, all the things that have made our greatest men (and greatest anyone) great when we boil it down. Do these things and help others do them too, and you're a real man as far as I'm concerned. Next time you're out and about, walking tall, everyone might be focusing on the perfectly handrolled cigarette dangling effortlessly from your lips, but you and I will know the truth — you called your Mom just to tell her you love her, and you're happy you did.

Oh yeah, and get a bunch of tattoos.

by  Lawrence Schlossman, a writer and editor, blogs at How to Talk to Girls at Parties
via: NY Times

Fairfield Porter, Wheat, 1960
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The Second Brain In Our Stomachs

Our own stomachs may be something of a dark mystery to most of us, but new research is revealing the surprising ways in which our guts exert control over our mood and appetite.

Not many of us get the chance to watch our own stomach's digestion in action.

But along with an audience at London's Science Museum, I recently watched live pictures from my own stomach as the porridge I had eaten for breakfast was churned, broken up, exposed to acid and then pushed out into my small intestine as a creamy mush called chyme.

I had swallowed a miniature camera in the form of a pill that would spend the day travelling through my digestive system, projecting images onto a giant screen.

Its first stop was my stomach, whose complex work is under the control of what's sometimes called "the little brain", a network of neurons that line your stomach and your gut.

Surprisingly, there are over 100 million of these cells in your gut, as many as there are in the head of a cat.

The little brain does not do a lot of complex thinking but it does get on with the essential daily grind involved in digesting food - lots of mixing, contracting and absorbing, to help break down our food and begin extracting the nutrients and vitamins we need.

And all those neurons lining our digestive system allow it to keep in close contact with the brain in your skull, via the vagus nerves, which often influence our emotional state.

For instance when we experience "butterflies in the stomach", this really is the brain in the stomach talking to the brain in your head. As we get nervous or fearful, blood gets diverted from our gut to our muscles and this is the stomach's way of protesting.

Hunger hormones

To accommodate a big meal your stomach has to expand from the size of a fist to around 2 litres. That's a 40-fold increase.

We used to think that stretch receptors in the stomach told the brain when the stomach was full, time to stop eating. But it turns out that the hunger signals produced by your stomach are far more sophisticated than that.

by Michael Mosely, BBC |  Read more:

How to Abolish the Electoral College (Really!)

The electoral college is one of those things that few people understand all that well, yet almost everyone can tell you why we've been unable to get rid of it: the small states have blocked efforts to amend the Constitution to abolish it because they believe that it amplifies their voting power. As we all know, holding on to power trumps principles in the real world. However, as I will show using simple arithmetic, the small states are wrong about where their true voting strength lies. In fact, the electoral college more often than not dilutes the voting power of most small states. I hope by this article to stand conventional wisdom about the electoral college on its head and, thereby, change the national conversation about it so that we can move on.

Let there be no mistake about one thing: we will never be able to abolish the electoral college by constitutional amendment unless and until it is shown to the small states that it is in their selfish interests to do so. How could it be in their selfish interests when every expert on the subject says otherwise? Read on and you'll see. The numbers do not lie.


The U.S. Constitution as written in 1787 left to the state governments the selection of Senators and presidents. Since the Bill of Rights in 1791, nine of the 17 subsequent amendments have reformed election law or redefined eligibility to vote. The Seventeenth Amendment, for instance, provided for the popular election of U.S. Senators. Before it was ratified in 1913, U.S. Senators were never elected by the people; they were chosen by state governments. We are still waiting for a similar amendment to reform our presidential elections. (...)

From a purely self-interested point of view, were the small-state Senators right to defend the electoral college? The question we need to answer is a comparative one: Would the small states have more sway over the electoral-college vote or over a nationwide popular vote? It turns out that many of the small states are highly partisan, i.e. they vote overwhelmingly for one candidate over another. This fact will prove important in answering our question.

Most people who have thought about these questions readily see that the electoral college favors the swing states: those where the outcome is usually close. Florida and New Mexico in 2000, for instance, were won with margins of victory of less than 1000 votes each. Since all but two states use a winner-take-all formula in awarding their electoral votes, swing states attract the most political attention and can sway the electoral college disproportionately despite having small or negligible impact on the nationwide popular vote.

Here is my argument in a nutshell: The states whose voting power is diminished in the electoral college are the highly partisan states, i.e. those that vote overwhelmingly for one candidate over another, regardless of size. In other words, the small, highly partisan states should want to abolish the electoral college, yet they are the ones who have most resisted its abolition.

by Jeff Strabone, 3 Quarks Daily |  Read more:

20,000 Colleagues Under the Sea

[ed. Drones above, gliders below. The remote-sensing/surveillance industry is booming these days.]

Sailing the seven seas is old hat. The latest trick is to glide them. Sea gliders are small unmanned vessels which are now cruising the briny by the hundred. They use a minuscule amount of power, so they can stay out for months. And, being submarines, they are rarely troubled by the vicissitudes of weather at the surface. Their only known enemies are sharks (several have come back covered in tooth marks) and fishing nets.

Sea gliders are propelled by buoyancy engines. These are devices that pump oil in and out of an external bladder which, because it deflates when it is empty, means that the craft’s density changes as well. This causes the glider to ascend or sink accordingly, but because it has wings some of that vertical force is translated into horizontal movement. Such movement is slow (the top speed of most gliders is about half a knot), but the process is extremely efficient. That means gliders can be sent on long missions. In 2009, for example, a glider called Scarlet Knight, operated by Rutgers University, in New Jersey, crossed the Atlantic on a single battery charge, though it took seven months to do so. (...)

Skipping under the ocean

Ten years ago there were fewer than 30 gliders in the world, all built either by academic institutions or the armed forces. Now there are at least 400, and most are made by one of three firms: iRobot, whose product is called, simply, Seaglider; Teledyne Webb, which manufactures the Slocum Glider (named after Joshua Slocum, the first man to sail solo around the world); and Bluefin Robotics (the third member of the Massachusetts sea-glider cluster, based in Quincy), which sells the Spray Glider. Broadly speaking, these machines have three sorts of application: scientific, military and commercial.

At the moment, science rules the roost. For cash-strapped oceanographers, gliders are a blessing. Their running costs are negligible and, though buying one can cost as much as $150,000, that sum would purchase a mere three days of, say, a manned trip to the Southern Ocean.

Gliders, moreover, give a continuous view of what is going on, rather than the series of snapshots yielded by equipment lowered from a vessel at the surface. Besides tracking pollution, watching volcanoes and measuring icebergs, they are following fish around, monitoring changing temperatures in different layers of seawater and mapping the abundance of algae. The Ice Dragon, a modified Seaglider operated by the Virginia Institute of Marine Science, has explored under the Antarctic ice shelf, and another modified Seaglider, the Deepglider, can plumb the depths down to 6km (20,000 feet). Teledyne Webb’s Storm Glider, meanwhile, lurks in hurricane-prone areas, bobbing up to take readings during extreme weather.

Gliders are also quiet—so quiet that, as one researcher puts it, you can use them “to hear a fish fart”. This was demonstrated by a recent project run by the University of South Florida, in which a glider successfully mapped the locations of red grouper and toadfish populations on the West Florida Shelf from the noises the fish made.

by The Economist |  Read more:

Antoni Clave
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Five years after the iPhone, Carriers are the Biggest Threat to Innovation

Five years ago, the iPhone revolutionized the mobile business and kicked off a seismic shift in the technology industry that continues today. But the massive success of Apple's phone has overshadowed the grim reality of an American wireless marketplace that has become increasingly hostile to innovation — a market tightly controlled by carriers who capriciously pick winners and losers while raising prices and insisting that their use of valuable public spectrum remain free of any oversight. While the iPhone is a raging success, the wireless market is headed towards total failure.

The evidence is everywhere, starting with the iPhone itself: Verizon famously passed on the device at first, and if not for Steve Jobs personally convincing AT&T to sell his phone sight unseen, the iPhone may never have existed. Jobs was well aware that he couldn't reach the market of cellphone consumers without carrier support — at the D3 conference in 2005, he famously called the carriers "orifices" and offered this withering assessment of the industry as it then stood:

"It's even worse. The carriers now have gained the upper hand in terms of the power of the relationship with the handset manufacturers. And they're starting to tell the handset manufacturers what to build. And if Nokia and Motorola don't listen to them, well, Samsung and LG will. So the handset manufacturers are really getting these big thick books from the carriers, telling them "here's what your phone's gonna be."

"We're not good at that," Steve added. Two years later, he would ship the iPhone, turning the industry on its head. Apple had succeeded in building the phone customers wanted instead of the phone carriers wanted, and things would never be the same.

And indeed, things are different — they've gotten dramatically worse. Instead of seeing the benefits of free competition at the consumer level, the carriers are now exerting more control than ever before as demand for mobile devices skyrockets. Getting a device on a major carrier can take up to 15 months and cost millions of dollars; carriers are notorious for demanding custom devices in order to create customer lock-in. "Exclusivity is the bane of my existence," says one source at a major phone manufacturer. "But it's the only way business gets done."

by Nilay Patel, The Verge |  Read more: 
Photo: via Wikipedia