Shadow Catchers from the X series by Floris Neusüss, 1971

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‘I Don’t Want to See Him Go’

For years, Mel Stewart avoided swimming. Oh, at first he did some broadcasting, and he stayed around the sport, that seemed the natural transition. But that didn’t feel right to him. Swimming was part of his old life. He found the conversations he had with people about his Olympic experience were stilted and odd. He did not want to live in the past. Anyway, how could he explain why it meant so much to him? How could he explain it to himself? “Swimming,” he says, “is so painful. And it’s so lonely. It’s a very lonely sport. You spend all your time alone and muffled and inside your head.”

He went to Hollywood and wrote scripts. He got married, started a family. He involved himself in a few business deals here and there. For the most part, he left swimming behind. I ask him if he missed swimming, and he says that it did not really dawn on him much. His life was interesting. He felt no aching void. He was still an Olympic champion, and that led to some opportunities, and he kept an eye on swimming from a distance. But for the most part, he was on to the next thing.

Then in 2007, he decided to watch Phelps swim the 200-meter butterfly at the World Championships. Phelps swam it in 1:52.09 — more than three seconds faster than Stewart’s fastest time 16 years earlier — and something thoroughly unexpected happened.

“It was like a religious experience,” Mel says. “I don’t even have the words for it. It was like this guy had just painted the most beautiful 200 meters I had ever seen. It was just gorgeous. And I felt this intimate connection. It’s like he was doing something so amazing and beautiful, and I was maybe one of two or three guys on the planet who could really understand it and appreciate it. … I was unsettled for weeks.”

Mel says it was watching that swim — seeing Michael Phelps’ greatness not the way we as fans see it, but the way that the greatest butterfly swimmer of his time saw it — that made him realize what was missing. He went to his wife, Tiffany, and said, “I want to be involved in swimming again.” Seven months later, he was interviewing Phelps on a pool deck (“I was star-struck,” he says) and doing some swimming writing on the side.

Earlier this year, Mel and his wife started a swimming website — swimswam.com — that he says has received more than 3 million page views and more than 500,000 unique users. He says that unexpected success, like its inspiration, is due to Michael Phelps. But perhaps the greatest gift that Phelps has given Mel is that after all these years he has brought swimming back into his life.

“You know what’s a crazy feeling?” Mel says. “You get into the water and you realize that you’re better in the water than you are walking on land. It’s like you become a fish. You get in the water and it just feels right in your brain.”

by Joe Posnanski, Joe Blog |  Read more:

Photo: USA Today Sports

Raging Bulls: How Wall Street Got Addicted to Light-Speed Trading

One of the most interesting things about the catastrophe at Knight Capital Group—the trading firm that lost $440 million this week—is the speed of the collapse. News reports describe the bulk of the bad trades happening in less than an hour, a computer-driven descent that has the financial community once again asking if its pursuit of profits has led to software agents that are fast yet dumb and out of control. We’re posting this story in advance of its publication in Wired’s September issue because it examines how Wall Street has gotten to the point where flash failures come with increasing frequency, and how much further traders seem willing to go in pursuit of ever-greater speed.

The 2012 New York Battle of the Quants, a two-day conference of algorithmic asset traders, took place in New York City at the end of March, just a few days after a group of researchers admitted they had made a mistake in an experiment that purported to overturn modern physics. The scientists had claimed to observe subatomic particles called neutrinos traveling faster than the speed of light. But they were wrong; about six months later, they retracted their findings. And while “Special Relativity Upheld” is the world’s most predictable headline, the news that neutrinos actually obey the laws of physics as currently understood marked the end of a brief and tantalizing dream for quants—the physicists, engineers, and mathematicians-turned-financiers who generate as much as 55 percent of all US stock trading. In the pursuit of market-beating returns, sending a signal at faster than light speed could provide the ultimate edge: a way to make trades in the past, the financial equivalent of betting on a horse race after it has been run.

“Between the time the first paper came out in September and last week, a guy in my shop had written two papers explaining how it could be true,” a graying former physicist said ruefully, sipping coffee near an oversize Keith Haring canvas that dominated the room at Christie’s auction house where the conference was held. “Of course, you’d need a particle accelerator to make it work.”

If that were all it took, then by now someone would be building one. One of the major themes of this year’s conference was “the race to the bottom,” the cost-is-no-object competition for the absolute theoretical minimum trade time. This variable, called latency, is rapidly approaching the physical limits of the universe set by quantum mechanics and relativity. But perhaps not even Einstein fully appreciated the degree to which electromagnetic waves bend in the presence of money. Kevin McPartland of the Tabb Group, which compiles information on the financial industry, projected that companies would spend $2.2 billion in 2010 on trading infrastructure—the high-speed servers that process trades and the fiber-optic cables that link them in a globe-spanning network. And that was before projects were launched to connect New York and London by a new transatlantic cable and London and Tokyo by way of the Arctic Ocean, all just to cut a few hundredths of a second off the time it takes to receive data or send an order.

High-frequency traders are a subset of quants, investors who make money the newfangled way: a fraction of a cent at a time, multiplied by hundreds of shares, tens of thousands of times a day. These traders occupy an anomalous position on Wall Street, carrying themselves with a distinctive mixture of diffidence and arrogance that sets them apart from the pure, unmixed arrogance of investment bankers. A pioneering high-frequency trading firm, Tradeworx, has its relatively humble offices two flights up from an Urban Outfitters in a sleepy New Jersey suburb. Twenty people work there, about half of them on the trading floor, monitoring on triple screens the fractions of a penny as they mount up, second by second. Roughly 1.5 percent of the total volume of stocks traded on US exchanges on a given day will pass, however fleetingly, through the hushed, sunlit, brick-walled room.

On the first day of the New York conference, Aaron Brown, a legendary quant and former professional poker player, took the stage in rumpled chinos and a leather jacket to lecture the assembly on game theory. He began his talk by saying, “3.14159,” and then pausing expectantly. From the back of the room came the response: “265358.” Together they made up the first 12 digits of pi—a geek shibboleth. “You won’t see a lot of masters of the universe here,” said Charles Jones, a professor of finance and economics at Columbia Business School. “A lot of these guys, if they’re wearing a tie, it might be the only one they own.”

Faster and faster turn the wheels of finance, increasing the risk that they will spin out of control, that a perturbation somewhere in the system will scale up to a global crisis in a matter of seconds. “For the first time in financial history, machines can execute trades far faster than humans can intervene,” said Andrew Haldane, a regulatory official with the Bank of England, at another recent conference. “That gap is set to widen.”

by Jerry Adler, Wired |  Read more:

Photo: Tim Flach/Getty

An E-Mail Service With Lots of Smarts

“Coming soon, from the creator of the Macarena!”... “New, from the founders of Myspace!”... “He has the same agent as Steven Seagal!”

You don’t hear phrases like that much. Generally, once a hot property becomes a lame has-been, you don’t base your marketing on it.

But you might think that’s what Microsoft is doing with its new free Web-based e-mail service,Outlook.com. “From the company that brought you Hotmail!”

Hotmail is still the world’s largest e-mail service, with 324 million members. But Gmail, only six years old, already has 278 million, and Microsoft was getting nervous.

And there were other good reasons for Microsoft to start fresh: because times have changed and e-mail has changed; because e-mail isn’t the only thing you do online anymore (see also Facebook, Twitter); and, frankly, because lots of people still think of Hotmail as, you know, Hotmail.

That is, Hotmail still suffers from its early image as a cesspool of spam, fake addresses and blinking ads. Even today, a Hotmail address still says “unsophisticated loser” in some circles.

Outlook.com won’t have that problem. It’s clean, white and attractive, even on a cellphone. (It matches the look of the Mail program in the coming Windows 8 and the Outlook program in the coming Office 13.) Somebody put thought into the placement and typography of every element — and tried to get as far away from the Times Square clutter of Hotmail as possible. (...)

Outlook.com represents a rethink of what the basic features should be in an e-mail program. It acknowledges, for example, that a huge proportion of e-mail these days is auto-generated: spam, newsletters, social networking updates.

So Outlook.com has buttons that, with one click, sweep all e-mail from a particular sender into the trash (a feature inherited from Hotmail). It also has a one-click Unsubscribe button that removes you from the mailing lists of legitimate companies, much as Google does. It can even auto-delete all but the most recent message from a company — perfect for daily deals like Groupon.

Outlook.com uses other smarts to categorize your messages. It has auto-detectors that look for messages from social media networks, messages containing photos, messages with package-tracking details, and so on.

Actually, those tracking messages are particularly awesome. Outlook.com inserts, at the top of such a message, the actual location of your package in big type, so you don’t have to trundle off to a Web site to look it up.

by David Pogue, NY Times |  Read more:

Illustration: Stewart Goldenberg

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What Made 'Nasa Mohawk Guy' Such a Successful Meme?

Forty-eight hours ago, Bobak Ferdowsi had fewer than 200 Twitter followers. This morning, he has almost 40,000. Ferdowsi, also known as"Nasa Mohawk Guy", became an internet sensation after his unusual hairdo caught the eye of those watching the Mars Curiosity landing on Nasa TV. Within hours, he was a trending topic on Tumblr and became a trending hashtag on Twitter. He's been immortalised in image macros,comic fan art, and even T-shirts on Cafepress. While his meteoric rise to fame may not be as remarkable as the Mars landing itself, it prompts the question: what is it about Bobak Ferdowsi that turned him into a meme?

There is no magic formula when it comes to creating memes or making "viral" content. There are certainly ways to stack the deck: content that is humorous, incongruous, and/or part of the zeitgeist is likely to be spread through social networks more often than, say, a boring interview or advert. In looking at the top memes of the past several years, there are few discernible patterns that can be pulled out: some, like LOLCats, have become part of the meme canon; others, like Pepper Spray Cop, became instant phenomena and faded away just as quickly.

Ultimately, memes spread because on some level, they resonate with their audience: people share content that is meaningful to them in one way or another. When it comes to the most popular memes, that underlying meaning often differs across a variety of audiences. In his explanation of Susan Boyle's overnight success and transformation into a meme, Professor Henry Jenkins of USC Annenberg said: "There's no need to identify a single cause for why people spread this content. Different people spread this content for different reasons."

When it comes to Ferdowsi, the reasons why he has struck a chord seem to fall under one of three headings. One is that he is a "hot nerd". A majority of the tweets and coverage featuring Ferdowsi comment on his appearance, or women's reactions to his status as a "sexy scientist", including a plethora of marriage proposals.

Second, there has been a large response from the Persian community. Ferdowsi is of Persian descent, and many Persians and Persian-Americans have tweeted about him, saying how proud they are that he represents their community, providing a positive image of Iranian-Americans.

The third element of the Nasa Mohawk Guy meme that contributes to its popularity is that it provides a framework for cultural commentary and content creation. Ferdowsi's look has provided people with a distinctive and widely recognised image, and the various elements that have resonated with different groups – his attractiveness, his uniqueness – have come to represent certain values. By remixing existing images or creating new ones, Nasa Mohawk Guy provides an alternative medium for discussing societal issues, such as the importance of scientific research in American culture, or that an attractive scientist has gotten more media hype than the mission he was working on.

by Kate Miltner, The Guardian |  Read more:

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Rites of Passage

Eddie died. It didn’t bother me. Eddie was an old man the entire time I knew him, a relative I didn’t get to know until I was 12. “We’re going to visit your Great-Uncle Eddie and Aunt Emily in Falmouth,” my mother said one summer during a camping trip on Cape Cod, said it like we were just stopping at a gas station. The sentence served the double purpose, outlining our itinerary while also letting us know that some people named Eddie and Emily existed. And that, further, we were related. Apparently we’d visited them briefly when I was four. It didn’t ring a bell. So, on the car ride over, Mom turned to us every few minutes and offered facts without context, trying to build some hype around these people. “They lived in Okinawa for years.” “Eddie was a pilot.” It was like cramming before visiting some bizarre country: their main exports, I assumed, were hard candy, corduroy, and judgment. For my mother they were sweet relatives she hadn’t had time to visit. For me, at 12, the news registered just above neutral, as only slightly interesting. Mom may as well have been telling us about some lame, peripheral color in a box of crayons. These were burnt sienna relatives.

My parents, my two siblings, and I pulled up to Eddie and Emily’s house in our blue Caprice station wagon, a species of car that, like certain dinosaurs, had achieved absurd proportions and freakishly specialized features only then to become extinct. The car’s body, the length of a Camry tailgating a Prius, got wider at the end like an ant that had let itself go. The back space would flip up to form two more backward-facing seats, as if the designers at Chevrolet were both encouraging drivers to conceive more children and providing an actual location to do so. In this way-back area, miles from the reach of Dad’s palm, a Wild West,Lord of the Flies subculture would develop. Pinches went unpunished, thigh space was taken through eminent domain. Little things no one would miss, and sometimes socks, were slipped through the pop-out window slits as we drove. Cars behind us were given the thumbs up and then, as we got a little older, mocked for their enthusiastic replies.

We piled out of that airplane hangar of a car and crammed into the neatly decorated living room of Eddie and Emily’s Cape Cod–style house, a place full of doilies, dusted hardwood, and stiff, 1950s-looking couches. Everyone looked at everyone else pleasantly, blinking and occasionally saying words. My mother tried to kindle the conversation, poking at decades-old embers. For me, the slow conversation was nodes on a family tree morphing into real people, the way dots on a map, once visited, become real places where you can get a good burger or picture yourself living—or places you decide are only worth driving through, not worth stopping at again.

The exception to the general stillness was Emily, a slender, energetic woman flitting around the house with hospitality. The sister of a grandfather who had died years before I was born—a man I was always told I resembled—Emily kept singling me out with glances, wistfully saying her dead brother’s name out loud, and then feeding me elaborate meals. It was an arrangement we both accepted immediately. Long after everyone else got full, I kept taking her up on her offers of coffee cake and hot dogs. So we sat, me chewing and her staring, each of our hairstyles a variation on the bowl cut.

“Eddie likes fishing,” my mother said about the World War II bomber pilot staring at me. “Maybe he’ll take you fishing.”

And so, just like that, my father and I committed to waking up nauseatingly early the next morning. As an awkward, hate-filled preteen, I found fishing to be the one hobby timeless and genuine enough to keep me marginally tethered to the world, like when a felon comes out of his cell to do watercolors. I wore my best No Fear T-shirt and a bead necklace with enough black in it to still fit in with the Goth-lite look I was cultivating that summer. Eddie had flown more than 50 high-risk bombing missions over Europe and northern Africa, could play Chopin sonatas on the piano, and referred to staying in bed past 5 A.M. as sleeping in. The highlight of my year was the Vans Warped Tour. We kept our conversation to fishing.

As the outboard on the 17-foot Boston Whaler worked on the light chop, chugging us out to Vineyard Sound, the air was cool, smelling of mist and gasoline. Eddie wore mud boots, a frumpy baseball cap, and a sagging orange jacket. He looked like Walter Matthau doing an impression of Walter Matthau. As he drove, Eddie would periodically glance down at this new device called a GPS, into which he claimed to have fed coordinates. The patches of fog would clear to reveal behind them denser patches of fog. This happened several times until, finally, we came to a place that looked like all the other water we had crossed. Except now, in the distance, sat a single boat, the only object visible anywhere. Eddie looked at the boat, down at his GPS, and then back up at the boat.

“That son of a bitch is in my spot,” he said. My father and I paused, looked at each other, and laughed. Eddie, it turned out, was the man.

If that’s not what made me like him, it was his talent at fishing. “Now we’ll just drift across the top of them,” he would say, and every 10 minutes we pulled winter flounder and fluke up over the chrome guardrails and plopped them onto the boat’s gut-stained deck. Conceptually, I’d known that fluke and flounder were silly, sideways fish, perfect for supporting roles in underwater Disney movies. Up close, they looked like beastly hallucinations, angry pancakes come to life, unhappy they’d been forced to sleep on their side for the duration of their existence. Eddie clubbed one on the head, said, “He won’t be right after that” in the mock voice of a doctor breaking bad news to a family, and tossed it in the cooler. We had a great time that day, and because he was not a grandfather I was required to visit, or a friend I’d call to play street hockey with, I wouldn’t see him again for three years.

by Steve Macone, American Scholar |  Read more:

Photo: USFWS

How Apple and Amazon Security Flaws Led to My Epic Hacking

In the space of one hour, my entire digital life was destroyed. First my Google account was taken over, then deleted. Next my Twitter account was compromised, and used as a platform to broadcast racist and homophobic messages. And worst of all, my AppleID account was broken into, and my hackers used it to remotely erase all of the data on my iPhone, iPad, and MacBook.

In many ways, this was all my fault. My accounts were daisy-chained together. Getting into Amazon let my hackers get into my Apple ID account, which helped them get into Gmail, which gave them access to Twitter. Had I used two-factor authentication for my Google account, it’s possible that none of this would have happened, because their ultimate goal was always to take over my Twitter account and wreak havoc. Lulz.

Had I been regularly backing up the data on my MacBook, I wouldn’t have had to worry about losing more than a year’s worth of photos, covering the entire lifespan of my daughter, or documents and e-mails that I had stored in no other location.

Those security lapses are my fault, and I deeply, deeply regret them.

But what happened to me exposes vital security flaws in several customer service systems, most notably Apple’s and Amazon’s. Apple tech support gave the hackers access to my iCloud account. Amazon tech support gave them the ability to see a piece of information — a partial credit card number — that Apple used to release information. In short, the very four digits that Amazon considers unimportant enough to display in the clear on the web are precisely the same ones that Apple considers secure enough to perform identity verification. The disconnect exposes flaws in data management policies endemic to the entire technology industry, and points to a looming nightmare as we enter the era of cloud computing and connected devices.

This isn’t just my problem. Since Friday, Aug. 3, when hackers broke into my accounts, I’ve heard from other users who were compromised in the same way, at least one of whom was targeted by the same group.
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‬Moreover, if your computers aren’t already cloud-connected devices, they will be soon. Apple is working hard to get all of its customers to use iCloud. Google’s entire operating system is cloud-based. And Windows 8, the most cloud-centric operating system yet, will hit desktops by the tens of millions in the coming year. My experience leads me to believe that cloud-based systems need fundamentally different security measures. Password-based security mechanisms — which can be cracked, reset, and socially engineered — no longer suffice in the era of cloud computing.

I realized something was wrong at about 5 p.m. on Friday. I was playing with my daughter when my iPhone suddenly powered down. I was expecting a call, so I went to plug it back in.

It then rebooted to the setup screen. This was irritating, but I wasn’t concerned. I assumed it was a software glitch. And, my phone automatically backs up every night. I just assumed it would be a pain in the ass, and nothing more. I entered my iCloud login to restore, and it wasn’t accepted. Again, I was irritated, but not alarmed.

I went to connect the iPhone to my computer and restore from that backup — which I had just happened to do the other day. When I opened my laptop, an iCal message popped up telling me that my Gmail account information was wrong. Then the screen went gray, and asked for a four-digit PIN.

I didn’t have a four-digit PIN.

By now, I knew something was very, very wrong. For the first time it occurred to me that I was being hacked. Unsure of exactly what was happening, I unplugged router and cable modem, turned off the Mac Mini we use as an entertainment center, grabbed my wife’s phone, and called AppleCare, the company’s tech support service, and spoke with a rep for the next hour and a half.

It wasn’t the first call they had had that day about my account. In fact, I later found out that a call had been placed just a little more than a half an hour before my own. But the Apple rep didn’t bother to tell me about the first call concerning my account, despite the 90 minutes I spent on the phone with tech support. Nor would Apple tech support ever tell me about the first call voluntarily — it only shared this information after I asked about it. And I only knew about the first call because a hacker told me he had made the call himself.

by Mat Honan, Wired |  Read more:
Photo: Ariel Zambelich/Wired. Illustration: Ross Patton/Wired

The Leafy Sea Dragon

The incredibly beautiful, incredibly intricate Leafy Sea Dragon (Phycodurus eques) lives amongst the rocky reefs, seaweed beds and seagrass meadows of Australia’s southern waters. They are given a fragile appearance by their gossamer, leafy appendages, which actually evolved as camouflage to blend in with floating pieces of seaweed, and their movements mimic the swaying of seaweed and kelp—they’re one of the few species that actually hide from predators by moving. They also have long sharp spines along the side of their body, and can grow to a length of 35 centimetres. Curiously, males are the child bearers, incubating the eggs on a spongy brood patch on their tail. They’re currently listed as a threatened species because pollution threatens their habitat, and also because they’re frequently (and illegally) taken by divers to keep as pets.

(Image Credit: Caelum Mero)
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Songs in the Key of Death

I first learned about David Young from an ad in the quarterly trade magazine of the Dodge Company, the world’s largest supplier of mortuary chemicals. The Spring 2008 issue of Dodge Magazine included articles on “airbrushing cosmetics for funeral professionals” and how funeral directors should respond in the case of a mass murder in a small-town shopping mall (be “like French waiters…[who can] do the job and not be noticed”). In addition to embalming chemicals, Dodge also has a hand in the sale and distribution of miscellaneous funerary goods—including memorial collages of softly lit photos that “make women squeal with delight when they see the portraits for the first time.”

That there is a “funeral industry” in the first place can seem morbid and indecent. Anyone who remembers Six Feet Under may feel they know the ins and outs, but the reality is certainly more disturbing. Flipping through a trade magazine advertising “vibrant” urns and pink-hued arterial conditioners does nothing to contradict this impression, nor does Young’s ad. In the full-page color layout, Young’s musical oeuvre is described as “perfect background music for your funeral home.” Wearing dangerously tight pants and a puffy shirt coyly unbuttoned to reveal a shadow of chest hair, David Young hawks a new age of new-age music for funerals. “In emotional times such as these,” the ad claims, “it’s important to set the right tone.”

In 2004, Craig Caldwell of the Dodge Company met Young at a funeral directors’ trade show in Chicago. Impressed, Caldwell made a distribution arrangement with the musician and has since been selling Young’s recordings to his clients—funeral directors who rely on Dodge for everything from embalming fluid to a disinfectant called Lemocide. On the phone from his office, Caldwell explained that the music’s emotional restraint, being “lighter, airier, more enticing to sharing feelings and thoughts, than dirges,” made it seem like a good match for funeral homes. This preference for lightness mirrors other changes in modern funerals, a business that, though still traditional by many accounts, is becoming increasingly secular and informal. “People rarely wear black to funerals anymore,” Caldwell told me when I interviewed him in 2008. “Except for the older generation. But children today, they don’t even wear a coat and a tie anymore.”

Young is the theme song to your grandmother’s memorial, the pop radio of your cousin’s wake. That funeral homes now have a soundtrack, one that provides us with a subtle, uncomplicated sense of recognition—as minimalist guru Brian Eno would call it, an ambience—shouldn’t be a surprise. Rather than a nuisance or intrusion, this easy listening could be a way of mitigating disruptive grief.

by Nicole Pasulka, The Morning News |  Read more: 

Jacob Feige, Saiga Recorder, 2011. Courtesy the artist.

Will Wright Wants to Make a Game Out of Life Itself

For almost 30 years, Will Wright’s creations have attracted people who would never have played videogames. He’s also managed the trick of developing games that enthrall hardcore fans while making rabid players out of novices. The secret: In Wright’s worlds, there is no win or lose—there’s just the game.

He’s best known for creating the Sim franchise: SimCity, The Sims, and other titles. These unlikely blockbusters—more than 180 million sold so far—drew on the works of arcane architectural theorists, urban planners, and astrophysicists, yet they were consistently addictive. They thrived thanks to a concept Wright calls possibility space: the scope of actions or reactions a player can undertake. Most videogames give players a narrow possibility space: Do you want to kill the bad guys with bullets or grenades? Take the door on the right or the left?

Wright and his team at Maxis, the development studio he cofounded in 1987, blew past those constraints, creating an infinitely flexible gameworld limited only by the skill and imagination of the player. In Wright’s best work, players have so much leeway to determine their own objectives that the distinction between game player and game designer blurs.

In 2009, after more than 20 years at Maxis, Wright stepped down from day-to-day duties to form Stupid Fun Club, an entertainment development think tank. He sat down with Wired in Stupid Fun’s Berkeley studio to look back at his career, offer hints about upcoming projects, and speculate about what the future holds for us all—gamers or not. (...)

Baker: How did you start fiddling with computers?

Wright: I was very mechanical, very involved in building models, which evolved into building robots. I got my first computer when I was 20 years old and taught myself to program in order to connect to the robots I was building—to model the motion of a hydraulic robot arm, for example. That’s what first sucked me into writing software. When I learned to program, I realized that you could model the behavior of a system through time, not just a snapshot of it.

Baker: When did you go from playing around with this stuff to saying, “I’m going to be a commercial game designer”?

Wright: I was just fascinated with how the computer worked. Back then it was possible for one person to pretty much fully understand the system—every aspect, from the structure of the hardware to memory management. When I was 20 years old, around 1980, I was living in New York, and there was one computer store in the whole city that sold the Apple II. They had a few simple games in Ziploc bags on the wall and I started thinking, “Maybe I should try making a game, because then I can make all of my computer expenses tax-deductible.” [Laughs.] Then I bought a Commodore 64 when it first came out in 1982 and dedicated myself to learning everything I could about the machine.

Baker: Since then, has there been a common thread that runs through your career?

Wright: It’s really been about trying to construct games around the user, making them the center of the universe. How can you give players more creative leverage and let them show off that creativity to other people? (...)

Baker: How did Bungeling Bay lead to your next game, SimCity?

Wright: I wanted Bungeling Bay to have a world large enough to get lost in, so I wrote a program that would let me put down coastlines, roads, and buildings. I found that I was having much more fun building these little worlds than flying around and blowing them up. SimCity evolved from that—I got interested in building a game where players are in the role of creators.

Baker: And Bungeling Bay‘s “industrial food chain” morphed into a far more sophisticated system in SimCity.

Wright: I started researching urban planning and urban dynamics, and I came across the work of Jay Forrester, the father of modern system simulations. Back in the ’50s at MIT, he actually tried to simulate whole cities on a rudimentary computer. And then I moved into classic economic theory and urban theorists like Jane Jacobs and Kevin Lynch.

by Chris Baker, Wired |  Read more:

Photo: Nigel Parry

The Point of Exclamation

Anybody who has ever logged on knows that online writing begets exclamation points. A lot of exclamation points! Mocking this punctuational predilection is easy and fun. An amusing blog called “Excessive Exclamation!!” features photos of, for example, a Carl’s Jr. printed receipt with the words “PLEASE LET US KNOW HOW WE DID!!!” Another naysayer is Steve Martin, who recently wryly Tweeted:

Today, @SteepCanyon and I play with the Boston Pops! I must be excited, because I used one of my few remaining exclaimation marks.

David Shipley, the executive editor of Bloomberg View and a former Op-Ed editor at this newspaper, and Will Schwalbe, authors of “Send: Why People Email So Badly and How to Do It Better,” speculate that the trend stems in part from the nature of online media. “Because email is without affect, it has a dulling quality that almost necessitates kicking everything up a notch just to bring it to where it would normally be,” they write. But what if a particular point needs to be stressed beyond where it would normally be? Well, you need to kick it up an additional notch, with another exclamation point, or three. The unsurprising result has been Weimar-level exclamation inflation, where (it sometimes seems) you have to raise your voice to a scream merely to be heard, and a sentence without blingy punctuation comes across like a whisper.

My 21-year-old daughter once criticized my habit of ending text-message sentences with a period. For a piece of information delivered without prejudice, she said, you don’t need any punctuation at the end (“Movie starts at 6”). An exclamation point is minimally acceptable enthusiasm (“See you there!”). But a period just comes off as sarcastic (“Good job on the dishes.”). For similar reasons, the Obama campaign has encountered blowback over the punctuation in its slogan for the 2012 campaign, which is “Forward.” — period included. Austan Goolsbee, the former chairman of the National Economic Council, has been quoted as complaining that because of the period, the feel of the slogan is “like ‘forward, now stop.’”

Habitual e-mailers, texters and posters convey quite precise nuances through punctuation, which is after all one of the points of punctuation. A friend’s 12-year-old daughter once said that in her view, a single exclamation point is fine, as is three, but never two. My friend asked her where this rule came from and the girl said, “Nowhere. It’s just something you learn.”

by Ben Yagoda, NY Times |  Read more:

Illustration: Thomas Ng

Artists of the Floating World

In 1871 Claude Monet stumbled across a pile of Japanese prints in an Amsterdam shop and snapped them up. His discovery transformed Western perceptions of Japan (though Japanese art had first arrived in the West some decades earlier), inspiring artists such as Van Gogh and Whistler, as well as Monet himself, and sparking Japonisme, the enthusiasm for all things Japanese that swept across Europe.

Today Hokusai's Great Wave is one of the most recognisable images in the world. In fact Westerners tend to equate Japanese art with wood-block prints, which, as Timon Screech writes in Obtaining Images, 'would have chilled the blood of the shogunate and of most sober-minded people of the period'. To Japanese of the time, wood-block prints were akin to pin-up posters by and for the lower orders. Real art was very different.

Screech is Professor of the History of Art at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London and the author of memorably witty and insightful books such as Sex and the Floating World: Erotic Imagery in Japan, 1720-1810, a study of prints that to Western eyes look decidedly pornographic. Obtaining Images is his most ambitious work yet, a crisply written and copiously illustrated account of Japanese art throughout the Edo period (1603-1868). In it he explores not just the art but its context: why it was made, for whom, how much it cost, who would have seen it, and what it meant to the people of the day.

A detail from a handscroll shows a bridge over the River Sumida in Edo, present-day Tokyo, bustling with people. But who would have commissioned it, and why? Works painted on folding screens, room dividers or scrolls to hang in alcoves were for public display, but a small painting on a fan or a handscroll, like this one, was for private perusal. People who seldom went out, such as high-ranking ladies, had handscrolls to while away the long hours, enabling them to picture the lively world outside their walls, which they had very little chance of ever seeing themselves.

The higher a person's rank, the more secluded their life was. Dutch merchants stationed in Nagasaki had an audience with the shogun once a year. When one merchant tried to sneak a look at him, an official promptly shoved his face down on the floor. A Japanese who went to Russia brought back a portrait of Catherine the Great. The revelation that there were countries where commoners could actually depict and see their ruler was so subversive that the traveller was locked away for the rest of his life.

This affected portraiture. If the artist, a lower-class man, was not allowed to enter your presence, let alone look at you, how could he paint your portrait? The Kanō, the official painters of the shogun's court, had military rank and could mix more freely with the higher orders. But they still couldn't look on people of very superior rank. When the retired emperor Go-Mizunoo wanted his portrait painted, his son, who was a monk and thus allowed to meet lay people of any rank, posed for the artist wearing his father's clothes. Then he sketched his father's face and the artist copied the sketch onto the portrait.

The Kanō were part of the apparatus of government. They painted castle and temple interiors with images that bolstered and underlined the shogun's power: landscapes, auspicious beasts and heroic battles of the past, against lavish gold backgrounds. Nij_ Castle, the shogun's residence in Kyoto, is a fine example of the Kanō style. The gold-encrusted walls of the vast audience hall are painted with pine trees, with one spreading its branches above the shogun's seat. Pine trees are venerable and long-lived, just as the shogun intended his government to be.

Every element in a Japanese painting has symbolic value, chosen for its auspicious nature. Catalogue entries that describe a work merely as 'birds and flowers' entirely miss the point. Specific creatures have specific meanings and are associated with particular plants and seasons. Cranes go with pines, tortoises with bamboo, and all four signify long life. Screech quotes a humorous poem to the effect that the inept artist adds bamboo to an image so that the viewer will know that the animal in his picture is a tiger, not a cat. Tigers went with bamboos, cats with peonies.

by Leslie Downer, Literary Review |  Read more:

Image via: Wikipedia

Ani DiFranco

out of the impossible

out of the impossible i have no choice but to fabricate the future something said in me. then it laid me down and gave me shiatsu and when i got up from it said i looked different and indeed i felt different. i have walked to shed everything with which i had formerly been laden. then my heart got tired and tired. inside your head the skull says i don’t want to know what it feels like to be you anymore. puts the substance of grass into her fists. talks aloud. the snake upon the bursted fruit. i see a sand where i hold a purple stone up to my eye. ratchet the image up to the level of myself. many friends called but i wasn’t home. then i got home and i was like no actually, no. nobody’s home actually. nobody’s home. i closed the curtains and took off my clothes and laid down on the floor. then a god like a clod of earth descended to the level of my head and looked upon me. i don’t remember how to be in the world i said to it. i wanted to cry and be comforted but maintained my composure and grace, insofar as i could, being that i lay there, prostrate as one might say. i said, i don’t remember how to be in the world; even how to want to; i just project this voice out of the boiling pit at the base of my spine. that is correct it said. well i don’t really want to anymore. that is well understood by us said the little god. i asked it what it wanted from me now. i’m killed i added. i don’t want to write another book or a play. additionally i don’t want to go outside at all. or to eat or drink or know anything or say anything. everything beautiful doesn’t entice me anymore, what is wrong with me, i don’t even want anything. i don’t want anything little god, i said, what is wrong with me. he put away childhood things said the little god, quoting john ashbery. why won’t you just tell me what to do i said. you’re doing it he said. this? what i’m doing as i am doing it? like little jesus on the cross we like you like this said the little god. i don’t like it at all i said. what comes to me i often do not want. that feels like a sin i said. the fish leaps onto my hook. i unhook the hook from its bloodied cheek and throw it back. i do not eat the fish which nevertheless dies. why am i on this pier, whose buoys are those bouncing there, what do you want with me here little god. you are here to be sick and to convalesce it said. you are here for the vision we have prepared for you, toward whose purpose the sun will heat you. there will be a flood and there will be a world there said the small god, a world like a blade of grass. can you draw me back out of this death i asked. can you reverse my root i asked it. i can it said. will you i asked. yes it said. i will. but there is one thing said the little god. anything i said, tell me it, tell me it. this adventure with form that you’ve had, this adventure with form you’ve embarked upon by distrusting it so said the little god. yes i said wearily, my adventure with form, i remember it well, it tastes like puke in my mouth, fleeing everything willing to take shape. indeed said the little god, your abstraction has nearly killed you. do i not have form said the little god. you do i said. and so do you he said. barely anymore i said i am so catastrophized and i have seen too much sorrow. i think god has no shape because of how much misery he’s seen and i feel guilty like him in all his formlessness. you are a clever girl said the little god but of course you also know it is not so simple. i know little god i said. you are commanding that i remember how to wear clothes, how to have taste, how to be a woman, how to want things and care about things. you want me to take a shape as you have taken one. correct said the little god. i have taken this one for your sake, this shape. I can take others. i don’t want to think about what you do for others i said, in my delirium misapprehending his meaning a bit, i don’t want to think about you in other shapes. i want you to be only for me little god. as it happens said the little god, i am only for you. you will get sick said the little god and then you will not be sick anymore and then you will enter the world. if you say so i said. that means making a choice said the little god. uh huh i said. the choice of a voice is no longer my choice i added. correct said the little god. it is now required that you make of form, in form, a choice. a formal choice is what will be required of you said the little god. and that he said is what will become you.

by Ariana Reines

Suzanne Lalique-Haviland

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Big Med

It was Saturday night, and I was at the local Cheesecake Factory with my two teen-age daughters and three of their friends. You may know the chain: a hundred and sixty restaurants with a catalogue-like menu that, when I did a count, listed three hundred and eight dinner items (including the forty-nine on the “Skinnylicious” menu), plus a hundred and twenty-four choices of beverage. It’s a linen-napkin-and-tablecloth sort of place, but with something for everyone. There’s wine and wasabi-crusted ahi tuna, but there’s also buffalo wings and Bud Light. The kids ordered mostly comfort food—pot stickers, mini crab cakes, teriyaki chicken, Hawaiian pizza, pasta carbonara. I got a beet salad with goat cheese, white-bean hummus and warm flatbread, and the miso salmon.

The place is huge, but it’s invariably packed, and you can see why. The typical entrée is under fifteen dollars. The décor is fancy, in an accessible, Disney-cruise-ship sort of way: faux Egyptian columns, earth-tone murals, vaulted ceilings. The waiters are efficient and friendly. They wear all white (crisp white oxford shirt, pants, apron, sneakers) and try to make you feel as if it were a special night out. As for the food—can I say this without losing forever my chance of getting a reservation at Per Se?—it was delicious.

The chain serves more than eighty million people per year. I pictured semi-frozen bags of beet salad shipped from Mexico, buckets of precooked pasta and production-line hummus, fish from a box. And yet nothing smacked of mass production. My beets were crisp and fresh, the hummus creamy, the salmon like butter in my mouth. No doubt everything we ordered was sweeter, fattier, and bigger than it had to be. But the Cheesecake Factory knows its customers. The whole table was happy (with the possible exception of Ethan, aged sixteen, who picked the onions out of his Hawaiian pizza).

I wondered how they pulled it off. I asked one of the Cheesecake Factory line cooks how much of the food was premade. He told me that everything’s pretty much made from scratch—except the cheesecake, which actually is from a cheesecake factory, in Calabasas, California.

I’d come from the hospital that day. In medicine, too, we are trying to deliver a range of services to millions of people at a reasonable cost and with a consistent level of quality. Unlike the Cheesecake Factory, we haven’t figured out how. Our costs are soaring, the service is typically mediocre, and the quality is unreliable. Every clinician has his or her own way of doing things, and the rates of failure and complication (not to mention the costs) for a given service routinely vary by a factor of two or three, even within the same hospital.

It’s easy to mock places like the Cheesecake Factory—restaurants that have brought chain production to complicated sit-down meals. But the “casual dining sector,” as it is known, plays a central role in the ecosystem of eating, providing three-course, fork-and-knife restaurant meals that most people across the country couldn’t previously find or afford. The ideas start out in élite, upscale restaurants in major cities. You could think of them as research restaurants, akin to research hospitals. Some of their enthusiasms—miso salmon, Chianti-braised short ribs, flourless chocolate espresso cake—spread to other high-end restaurants. Then the casual-dining chains reëngineer them for affordable delivery to millions. Does health care need something like this?

Big chains thrive because they provide goods and services of greater variety, better quality, and lower cost than would otherwise be available. Size is the key. It gives them buying power, lets them centralize common functions, and allows them to adopt and diffuse innovations faster than they could if they were a bunch of small, independent operations. Such advantages have made Walmart the most successful retailer on earth. Pizza Hut alone runs one in eight pizza restaurants in the country. The Cheesecake Factory’s major competitor, Darden, owns Olive Garden, LongHorn Steakhouse, Red Lobster, and the Capital Grille; it has more than two thousand restaurants across the country and employs more than a hundred and eighty thousand people. We can bristle at the idea of chains and mass production, with their homogeneity, predictability, and constant genuflection to the value-for-money god. Then you spend a bad night in a “quaint” “one of a kind” bed-and-breakfast that turns out to have a manic, halitoxic innkeeper who can’t keep the hot water running, and it’s right back to the Hyatt.

Medicine, though, had held out against the trend. Physicians were always predominantly self-employed, working alone or in small private-practice groups. American hospitals tended to be community-based. But that’s changing. Hospitals and clinics have been forming into large conglomerates. And physicians—facing escalating demands to lower costs, adopt expensive information technology, and account for performance—have been flocking to join them. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, only a quarter of doctors are self-employed—an extraordinary turnabout from a decade ago, when a majority were independent. They’ve decided to become employees, and health systems have become chains. (...)

Historically, doctors have been paid for services, not results. In the eighteenth century B.C., Hammurabi’s code instructed that a surgeon be paid ten shekels of silver every time he performed a procedure for a patrician—opening an abscess or treating a cataract with his bronze lancet. It also instructed that if the patient should die or lose an eye, the surgeon’s hands be cut off. Apparently, the Mesopotamian surgeons’ lobby got this results clause dropped. Since then, we’ve generally been paid for what we do, whatever happens. The consequence is the system we have, with plenty of individual transactions—procedures, tests, specialist consultations—and uncertain attention to how the patient ultimately fares.

Health-care reforms—public and private—have sought to reshape that system. This year, my employer’s new contracts with Medicare, BlueCross BlueShield, and others link financial reward to clinical performance. The more the hospital exceeds its cost-reduction and quality-improvement targets, the more money it can keep. If it misses the targets, it will lose tens of millions of dollars. This is a radical shift. Until now, hospitals and medical groups have mainly had a landlord-tenant relationship with doctors. They offered us space and facilities, but what we tenants did behind closed doors was our business. Now it’s their business, too.

The theory the country is about to test is that chains will make us better and more efficient. The question is how. To most of us who work in health care, throwing a bunch of administrators and accountants into the mix seems unlikely to help. Good medicine can’t be reduced to a recipe.

Then again neither can good food: every dish involves attention to detail and individual adjustments that require human judgment. Yet, some chains manage to achieve good, consistent results thousands of times a day across the entire country. I decided to get inside one and find out how they did it.

by Atul Gawande, New Yorker |  Read more:

Illustration: Harry Campbell

by horitomo

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Raising Successful Children

Phrases like “tiger mom” and “helicopter parent” have made their way into everyday language. But does overparenting hurt, or help?

While parents who are clearly and embarrassingly inappropriate come in for ridicule, many of us find ourselves drawn to the idea that with just a bit more parental elbow grease, we might turn out children with great talents and assured futures. Is there really anything wrong with a kind of “overparenting lite”?

Parental involvement has a long and rich history of being studied. Decades of studies, many of them by Diana Baumrind, a clinical and developmental psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley, have found that the optimal parent is one who is involved and responsive, who sets high expectations but respects her child’s autonomy. These “authoritative parents” appear to hit the sweet spot of parental involvement and generally raise children who do better academically, psychologically and socially than children whose parents are either permissive and less involved, or controlling and more involved. Why is this particular parenting style so successful, and what does it tell us about overparenting?

For one thing, authoritative parents actually help cultivate motivation in their children. Carol Dweck, a social and developmental psychologist at Stanford University, has done research that indicates why authoritative parents raise more motivated, and thus more successful, children.

In a typical experiment, Dr. Dweck takes young children into a room and asks them to solve a simple puzzle. Most do so with little difficulty. But then Dr. Dweck tells some, but not all, of the kids how very bright and capable they are. As it turns out, the children who are not told they’re smart are more motivated to tackle increasingly difficult puzzles. They also exhibit higher levels of confidence and show greater overall progress in puzzle-solving.

This may seem counterintuitive, but praising children’s talents and abilities seems to rattle their confidence. Tackling more difficult puzzles carries the risk of losing one’s status as “smart” and deprives kids of the thrill of choosing to work simply for its own sake, regardless of outcomes. Dr. Dweck’s work aligns nicely with that of Dr. Baumrind, who also found that reasonably supporting a child’s autonomy and limiting interference results in better academic and emotional outcomes.

Their research confirms what I’ve seen in more than 25 years of clinical work, treating children in Marin County, an affluent suburb of San Francisco. The happiest, most successful children have parents who do not do for them what they are capable of doing, or almost capable of doing; and their parents do not do things for them that satisfy their own needs rather than the needs of the child.

The central task of growing up is to develop a sense of self that is autonomous, confident and generally in accord with reality. If you treat your walking toddler as if she can’t walk, you diminish her confidence and distort reality. Ditto nightly “reviews” of homework, repetitive phone calls to “just check if you’re O.K.” and “editing” (read: writing) your child’s college application essay.  (...)

So if children are able to live with mistakes and even failing, why does it drive us crazy? So many parents have said to me, “I can’t stand to see my child unhappy.” If you can’t stand to see your child unhappy, you are in the wrong business. The small challenges that start in infancy (the first whimper that doesn’t bring you running) present the opportunity for “successful failures,” that is, failures your child can live with and grow from. To rush in too quickly, to shield them, to deprive them of those challenges is to deprive them of the tools they will need to handle the inevitable, difficult, challenging and sometimes devastating demands of life.

While doing things for your child unnecessarily or prematurely can reduce motivation and increase dependency, it is the inability to maintain parental boundaries that most damages child development. When we do things for our children out of our own needs rather than theirs, it forces them to circumvent the most critical task of childhood: to develop a robust sense of self.

by Madeline Levine, NY Times | Read more:
Illustration: Lizzy Stewart