The Worst Retirement Investing Mistake

[ed. George Mannes interviews William Bernstein, investment adviseor and author.]

One thing that we point out to our readers is that if you don't have stocks in your portfolio, you expose yourself to inflation risk.

That's true. By owning stocks you do mitigate inflation risk, but of course, you're exposing yourself to equity risk to do it. It's sort of like all these people who are now buying dividend-yielding stocks because Treasury bonds don't have any yield; they're exchanging a riskless asset for a risky asset.

But there's another asset class that people really don't think about when they think about inflation protection, which is short, high-quality bonds with a maturity of less than three years. If we ever do get an inflationary shock, investors will demand a high real short-term rate of return. It's what happened during the late '70s and early '80s.

Even though interest rates are terrible right now, if inflation recurs -- as I think it probably will -- short-term bonds are a fine place to be, as are individual Treasuries or certificates of deposit. Since they mature soon, you can replace them quickly with newer, higher-interest bonds.

Interest rates usually more than keep up with inflation. It's true that real yields right now are historically low, but as a student of financial history I have to believe that's not going to last forever.

Okay, so stocks are risky at retirement. What about when I'm young?

For the average person, you'll want a very high stock allocation. Let's imagine you start working at age 25, and let's say for the sake of argument you have 35 years worth of human capital -- that is, 35 years of salary left in you. That's an asset that you own. What you've saved in one year for retirement is still minuscule compared to that 34 years of earning and saving that you have left.

So even if your investment capital when you're 26 years old falls by one-half, your total worth has fallen by only a couple of percent because you still have that 34 years of human capital left. Your ability to earn and save dwarfs the loss in your portfolio.

And what about when I'm in the middle of my career?

That's the key phase. You need to start bailing out of risky assets as you get closer to achieving that liability-matching portfolio—when you can "win the game" without taking so much risk.

Instead of cutting your stock allocation one percentage point a year -- the standard formula -- in a year with absolutely spectacular returns, you might want to take 4% or 5% off the table. In a series of years when stock returns have been poor, you don't take anything off the table. And over time you start laying down a floor of safe assets with the proceeds from the stocks you've sold.When exactly am I doing this?

Getting close to hitting your number is usually going to happen during a bull market, so the psychology of doing this right is tricky. It's hard to cut back on risk and accept lower returns when your neighbors are getting rich.

If you're very lucky and very frugal, hitting your number might happen when you're 45. In the worst-case scenario, you do everything right and still come up short at 65, so you wind up working longer or greatly paring back your expectations.

It sounds like retirement success depends on when you were born.

Yeah, that is certainly true. Young people should get down on their knees and pray for a brutal bear market at the beginning of their savings career, because that's going to enable them to buy a large number of shares cheaply. Having a sequence of bad returns first, followed by strong returns, is the best-case scenario.

I did a little thought experiment in which I calculated how many years it took people starting work in different years to make their number. I realized that the cohort that started working during the worst of economic times is the one that did the best.

by George Mannes., CNN Money |  Read more: 

Can Fandom Change Society?

Before the mass media, people actively engaged with culture through storytelling and expanding well-known tales. Modern fan culture connects to this historical tradition, and has become a force that challenges social norms and accepted behavior. Whether the issue is gender, sexuality, subversiveness, or even intellectual property law, fans participate in communities that allow them to think outside of what is possible in more mainstream scenarios. "Fannish" behavior has become its own grassroots way of altering our society and culture, and a means of actively experiencing one's own culture. In a sense, fans have changed from the faceless adoring masses, to people who are proud of their identity and are stretching the boundaries of what is considered "normal".

h/t: Boing Boing

“Mountain Road” by Robert LaDuke.
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Android, Apple, Starbucks & NASA: What Inspired These Four World-Famous Logos?

Imagine you’re a newbie fresh out of design school (and I don’t mean one of those faux-accredited hipster schools where all you have to do is turn up, swagger around with your fixed gear bike and strike pretend nonchalant-poses with your strategically positioned dirty-fake tatts showing). [ed. Be sure to click on this link for some pretty good (natured) laughs.]

You’ve studied hard, you’ve got the principles down, and you feel like you can easily navigate how to tactfully deal with clients and the intricacies of what to charge, so as not to be viewed as a slap-happy rip-off merchant. You’ve managed to blitz a first meeting with the perfect client, during which you’ve delicately pitched your ideas for a mind-bendingly awesome logo redesign.

During that meeting, you’ve even managed to trot out your gorgeous leather bound notebook with hand-sketched logo prototypes thrown in for that retro feel – all done with authentic 6B lead, obviously. You’re sure you’ve nailed it. Your revamp ideas are solid – complete with a bold new colour palette, a delicate twist on the original logo with just the right amount of zing to make sure the subtly is actually noticeable, and a font choice that would make mothers weep with joy , including your own (if, after paying your ridiculously high tuition fees she actually cares about anything other than you scoring an authentic job with dollar signs attached).

You’re absolutely, definitely positive the client is about to contact you with a sublime barrage of confirmation like “When can you start?“ or “You’re a designer queen who positively drips brilliance, you’re hired!” and “We want you to have our design babies, right now, on this couch!”. This uber-grateful praise (understandably, as the redesign is completely awesome) is to be accompanied by massive amounts of Square-swiped credits and a big-green-lit-go for the logo redesign to commence.

Right?

Wrong. If history (and actual working examples) proves correct, the process of designing logos – whether that’s through modifications to an existing design, or a brand-spanking-falling-off-the-newness-shelf type – is far more hairy and much more complex. Take, for instance, the stories of serendipity, underhandedness, and censorship that pepper the histories of world-famous logos. From ultra-recognisable tech icons to global coffee house branding, each logo comes with a distinct bubble of intrigue that makes designing logos look more like a train-wreck than a picnic.

by Mez Breeze | The Next Web | Read more:

Image via: TechCrunch

Mizue Hasegawa practices the ancient art of kyudo at Soto Mission of Hawaii in Nuuanu. Hasegawa, president and sensei of local archery club Hawaii Kyudo Kai, says it’s the oldest martial art in Japan, one with deep philosophical roots. “We focus on three main goals: shin, the truth, zen, the goodness, and bi, the beauty,” she explains. “If you have all three, the arrow should go through the target. But hitting the target is not our main objective.” Hawaii Kyudo Kai’s 15 members hone their skills every Sunday

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Nokia’s Visionary Wants to Out-Design Apple

Marko Ahtisaari spreads out several models of Nokia’s new smartphone with the self-assurance of a Tiffany diamond salesman. It is several weeks before the launch of Nokia’s Lumia 920 — the flagship phone for Microsoft’s Windows Phone 8 platform, a crucial product for both companies — and the head of Nokia design has come to New York City to reveal his wares in advance of today’s glitzy event.

There they are, shiny colored polymer bars fronted by bold 4.7-inch Gorilla Glass screens. Good looking, to be sure. Ahtisaari, who heads Nokia’s design studio, picks up a canary yellow one. Others are black, gloss red and matte gray. His face is all business, but his fingertips caress the surface like a lover’s.

“Our products are human,” he says. “They’re natural. They’re never cold. That’s partly driven by color, but also partly how they feel in the hand. This looks less like a product coming off a production line in a factory — though it does—than a product that might have grown on a tree. The grandest way I could put it, is post-industrial.”

Ahtisaari eventually ticks off some other features that he hopes will draw customers to the Nokia phone. Windows 8 software, of course, with the status and activity tiles that provide information at a glance. Well-integrated mapping and location applications, including an augmented-reality layer called City Lens. Wireless charging. Near Field Communications (NFC) technology, not used for yet another payment scheme, but quick and reliable connections for activities like streaming music to a speaker.

But all of these, he says, are part of a general overall vision where advanced function is blended into unforgettable form — post-industrial form. The dream, if not the exact language, is very familiar. Nokia is marketing its phone directly into the teeth of Apple’s strength: design.  (...)

His first order of business was energizing the culture of his team — it was apparently suffering from the same sort of drift as the rest of Nokia — and raising its importance in the company so that design became central to all product decision-making. While some observers thought that Nokia was left behind in the smartphone wars, and questioned Elop’s decision to cast Nokia’s fate with the unproven Microsoft Windows phone platform, Ahtisaari believed that there was still plenty of opportunity for a comeback.

“As a product area, smart phones are almost so over-covered that sometimes there’s a feeling that the core innovation in design is almost done,” he says. “Actually nothing can be further than the truth.”

The analogy he supplies is that of the auto industry. In the 1890s, he says, cars were steered by tillers, like rudders on small boats. Over the next couple of decades, ideas were exposed to the marketplace and ultimately a standard emerged, with steering wheels and gearshifts. “I think that we’re in the middle of that period,” he says.

Apple offers one path for design, he explains, with apps and folders, and Android is a variation of that, with multiple home screens. And now there’s this third option, involving live tiles that give real-time, at-a-glance information about the applications lurking beneath. “It’s another take on completely solving all the things that smartphones need to do,” he says.

Think about that auto analogy. Can he be saying that the iPhone approach will one day be as absurd as a rudder on a car? As they say in Finland, yikes.

by Steven Levy, Wired |  Read more:

Photo: nomadig/Flickr

Superman, Grab a Book

[ed. Some people are awesome (others, not so much).]

The best time to turn a pay phone into a lending library is early on a Sunday morning, said John H. Locke, an Upper West Side architectural designer who may be the world’s leading expert on the subject.

“There aren’t a lot of people out,” he said. “You can just go down, find a good booth, carry it out, latch it in. It takes seconds. And then just fill it up with books and let’s wait and see what happens.”

Last winter, Mr. Locke designed a lightweight set of bookshelves to fit inside the common Titan brand of New York City pay phone kiosks. A fabricator in Brooklyn cuts the shelves, which Mr. Locke paints and assembles in his apartment.

So far he has carried out four installations, most recently at Amsterdam Avenue and West 87th Street just before 8 a.m. on a Sunday last month.

As several sleepy-eyed patrons of a 24-hour deli looked on in confusion, Mr. Locke snapped a lime green bookcase into place, stocking it with children’s books and paperback novels.

Hooks on the unit allow Mr. Locke to install it without hardware, and the entire process took less than five minutes.

He had barely rounded the corner before a man who had been standing outside the deli began browsing through titles, choosing “The Shining” by Stephen King, tucking it under his arm and heading home.

What happens to the installations after the first few minutes is a bit of a mystery to Mr. Locke. He checks on them periodically, he said, until they disappear — after a few days or a few weeks. Which is fine with him.

“It’s a spontaneous thing that just erupts at certain locations,” he said. “People like it, people are inspired by it, but then it disappears again.”

The libraries have endured long enough to attract their share of fans. Publishing houses, bookstores and neighbors have approached Mr. Locke to donate books for future installations. The project is currently being featured in Spontaneous Interventions, the United States’ contribution to the International Venice Architecture Biennale, an architecture show.

If any disused fixture of city streets cried out for repurposing, it would seem to be the pay phone. The city’s Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications acknowledges as much. In July, the department began soliciting ideas about what to do with the city’s remaining 13,000 sidewalk pay phones once the current contracts expire in 2014. (...)

The city is also engaged in a pilot project to use pay phones as Wi-Fi hot spots. Eleven pay phones, including ones in every borough but the Bronx, have been providing free Wi-Fi since July. About 2,000 people logged on to the networks in August, according to the city. Users stayed connected for an average of 38 minutes.

Mr. Locke, who has an aversion to outdoor advertising, said he wanted nothing to do with the city’s initiative. He does post the plans for his shelves on his Web site, in the hope that people will install their own versions in their own neighborhoods.

by Joshua Brustein, NY Times |  Read more:

Sunny Seattle

Spent a wonderful sunny day at the Seattle Center last Saturday (accompanied by the world's most babe magnetic dog, Lucile.]

Photos: markk
More pictures after the break:

Internet Video's Robotic, Idiotic Copyright Cops

On Wired, Geeta Dayal looks at the state of automated copyright enforcement video-bots, the mindless systems that shut down the Hugo awards livestream, took down NASA's own footage of the Curiosity landing, and interrupted the video from the DNC. Dayal examines the legal status and necessity for these bots (dubious); their ability to model copyright's full suite, including fair use (nonexistent); and the business reasons for deploying them (cowardly). She also looks at what's at stake when our ability to communicate with one another is suborned to the profit-maximization strategies of giant copyright holders.

“The companies that are selling these automated takedown systems are really going above and beyond the requirements set for them in the DMCA, and as a result are favoring the interests of a handful of legacy media operators over the free-speech interest of the public,” says Parker Higgins, an activist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. 

The notice-and-takedown regime created by the DMCA allows copyright holders to send a written notice to an online hosting service when they find their copyright being violated. The online service can then escape legal liability by taking down the content fairly promptly, and the original poster has the opportunity to dispute the notice and have the content reinstated after two weeks. 

But that regime breaks down for livestreaming. For one, if a valid copyright dispute notice is filed by a human, it’s unlikely that a livestream site would take it down before the event ends, nor, under the law, is it actually required to. On the flipside, if a stream is taken down, the user who posted it has no immediate recourse, and the viewership disappears.

The Algorithmic Copyright Cops: Streaming Video’s Robotic Overlords

by Cory Doctorow, Boing Boing |  Read more:

How My Mother Disappeared

The meatloaf fooled me.

I should have known it would. That’s what a meatloaf is meant to do: make you believe the world is so forgiving a place that even an array of bits and pieces, all smashed up, can still find meaning as an eloquent whole. The duplicity is integral to the dish, if you make it well. And when I made my mother’s meatloaf, it was perfect.

In 2005, as my mother began the torturous process of disappearing in plain sight, I retreated to my kitchen, trying to reclaim her at the stove. Picking up a pot was not the instant panacea for illness and isolation and despair that I wanted it to be. But it helped. When I turned to my mother’s recipes, I felt grounded in her rules, and they worked every time. I could overcook or undercook the meatloaf, and it still tasted the same. I could eat it hot and eat it cold, and I ended up doing both, because my stepsons, Nat and Simon, and my husband, Frank, like meatloaf fine, but they don’t love it. The writer Peg Bracken summed it up perfectly in “The I Hate to Cook Book”: men prefer steaks and chops to casseroles and meatloaf, she wrote, because they “like a tune they can whistle.” But it was those inexact elements, murky and mystical, that drew me to my mother’s meatloaf again and again. It was my remnant of home and I conjured it, reaching back, always back. Each time I made it, it was absolutely perfect. And each time I made it, I felt more and more afraid. (...)

As Thanksgiving neared, Mom grew calmer. I did not. I spoke with Roberta Epstein, the social worker, filling her in on Mom, how she was there, but not there.

“It’s called ambiguous loss,” she said. “Gone, but not gone. She is your mother, but not the mother you knew. If she had died, it would be easier to grieve the loss. It’s hard to do that when she’s sitting in front of you.”
Would I prefer to have lost my mother completely, without warning? I used to think the answer was no. Still, as hard as that would have been on me, maybe it would have been better for her. To die as herself. Because the worst part was watching her know that she wasn’t in there anymore — watching her face as she heard herself speak and saw how other people reacted. No awards for bravery for keeping going while realizing how diminished you are, watching flashes of yourself crackle then disappear, like lightning.

So at that point, who was my mother? A 77-year-old woman who could no longer remember how many years she had been married or any of her children’s birthdays. She did not recognize her grandchildren. She stood in my apartment, where she had visited me for 19 years, and asked me who lived there. But the fierce, loving, prickly person she had always been was still in there, fleetingly for sure, and I didn’t want to let her go. I wanted to track her down and keep her there.

But she didn’t want to be tracked down. She didn’t want to be kept, anywhere. “Is someone here for me?” she had gone down to the lobby in her nightgown to ask the doorman one morning. “Am I moving?” she asked my aunt. She was sensing it was time to go. Even halfway out of her mind, she seemed to recognize the truth of that. When I still couldn’t.

I never wanted her to think I’d abandoned her. I wanted her to know I was fighting for her. I kept asking what I could do to help her, what I could do to make her happier. She looked at me pityingly every time. “There’s nothing you can do, because it’s not up to you,” she would say. “You’re here with me now. That’s enough.”

by Alex Witchel, NY Times |  Read more:

Photo: Alex Witchel

How Google Builds Its Maps—and What It Means for the Future of Everything

Behind every Google Map, there is a much more complex map that's the key to your queries but hidden from your view. The deep map contains the logic of places: their no-left-turns and freeway on-ramps, speed limits and traffic conditions. This is the data that you're drawing from when you ask Google to navigate you from point A to point B -- and last week, Google showed me the internal map and demonstrated how it was built. It's the first time the company has let anyone watch how the project it calls GT, or "Ground Truth," actually works.

The company opened up at a key moment in its evolution. The company began as an online search company that made money almost exclusively from selling ads based on what you were querying for. But then the mobile world exploded. Where you're searching has become almost important aswhat you're searching. Google responded by creating an operating system, brand, and ecosystem in Android that has become the only significant rival to Apple's iOS.

And for good reason. If Google's mission is to organize all the world's information, the most important challenge -- far larger than indexing the web -- is to take the world's physical information and make it accessible and useful.

"If you look at the offline world, the real world in which we live, that information is not entirely online," Manik Gupta, the senior product manager for Google Maps, told me. "Increasingly as we go about our lives, we are trying to bridge that gap between what we see in the real world and [the online world], and Maps really plays that part."

This is not just a theoretical concern. Mapping systems matter on phones precisely because they are the interface between the offline and online worlds. If you're at all like me, you use mapping more than any other application except for the communications suite (phone, email, social networks, and text messaging).

Google is locked in a battle with the world's largest company, Apple, about who will control the future of mobile phones. Whereas Apple's strengths are in product design, supply chain management, and retail marketing, Google's most obvious realm of competitive advantage is in information. Geo data -- and the apps built to use it -- are where Google can win just by being Google. That didn't matter on previous generations of iPhones because they used Google Maps, but now Apple's created its own service. How the two operating systems incorporate geo data and present it to users could become a key battleground in the phone wars.

But that would entail actually building a better map.

by Alex Madrigal, The Atlantic |  Read more:

Japanese Woodblock Botanicals Shodo Kawarazaki 1939-1970’s
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Janet Lowry
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Find the Song Name Without Knowing the Lyrics

It happens all the time. You are sitting in a restaurant with friends or driving to work and there’s some beautiful music playing on the FM radio station. You would love to buy a copy of that music album for yourself but the problem is that you didn’t get the lyrics so how do you find out the name of that song.

Search engines like Google or Bing won’t be of much help unless you know a couple of words from the song lyrics or have some clue about the name of the artist or the band. How do you then identify the name of that lovely song?

Well, here are some of the best music recognition services that can help you discover song names without having to know the lyrics. You may use them to identify music playing from the radio, TV, Internet or that CD playing in the bar.

1. Find Music with your Mobile Phone

1a. Shazam – Shazam is a mobile application that you may use to find song names from your iPhone, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, Android or your Nokia S60 phone. You may also use Shazam on an iPod Touch provided you have an external microphone.

Simply install the Shazam application, hold your phone towards the audio source and hit the Tag button to let Shazam identify the playing music. Shazam works only with pre-recorded music and not with live performances.

The free version of Shazam will help you identify up to 5 different track per month while Shazam Encore, the paid version, offers unlimited tracking for $4.99. If the tune cannot be recognized, there’s no charge. If you are in the UK, you can use just about any mobile phone to recognize music with Shazam – just dial 2580 and hold your phone to the music.

1b. MusicID – Hold your iPhone up to some music and MusicID will tell you what song is playing. It’s a $3 iPhone App available worldwide but if you are on AT&T, you may also use your Blackberry, Windows Mobile or any Java phone to identify music with MusicID.

Like Shazam, MusicID works only with pre-recorded music and they also have an SMS based service for people in the US that doesn’t require any downloads – just dial a short code, hold your phone up to some music and you’ll get a text message with the result.

2. Find song names using your own voice

2a. Midomi – If you have a tune that’s stuck in your head, just grab a microphone, hum that tune yourself and Midomi will be able tell you what that song is. Alternatively, you may play a short recording of that “unknown” track for Midomi to identify its name.

Unlike Shazam which is a mobile app, Midomi offers a web interface where you can can hum or sing for about 10 seconds and the service will then show you a list of matching songs. For best results, keep the volume bar in the green and avoid background noise.

Midomi is free to use online, but it also offers mobile apps for iPhone, Android, Nokia Ovi and Windows Mobile phones. You can identify songs by holding your phone up to a speaker or by singing / humming the melody into the phone itself.

by Amit Agarwal, Digital Inspiration |  Read more:

How Dangerous Is Your Couch?

In September 1976, a mail runner from Katmandu arrived at Base Camp on Mount Everest with a package for Dr. Arlene Blum, a member of the American Bicentennial Everest Expedition. The package had nothing to do with the climb, or Blum’s status as the first American woman to attempt the world’s highest peak. It concerned pajamas. Inside were the proofs of an article she co-wrote for the journal Science about a chemical then widely used in children’s sleepwear. The subtitle was unusually blunt for a scientific paper: “The main flame retardant in children’s pajamas is a mutagen and should not be used.”

The article ran the following January. By April, the Consumer Product Safety Commission banned the flame retardant from children’s sleepwear. Manufacturers quickly switched to a related compound, chlorinated Tris. Blum and her co-author, a biochemist named Bruce Ames, tested it and found that it, too, was a mutagen and thus likely to be carcinogenic. Chlorinated Tris was then removed from pajamas as well.

Blum went on to a storied career as a mountaineer, leaving biochemistry behind. But while she was adventuring all over the world, Tris was staging a quiet comeback in other products.

Blum discovered this fact six years ago, when, at age 61, she decided to return to science. Looking for a way to put her academic training to use, she attended a symposium on chemical policy in California. There she struck up a conversation with Bob Luedeka, who happens to be the executive director of the Polyurethane Foam Association. He was there, he said, because of worries about chemical flame retardants, which are found in almost all upholstered furniture. One of the most commonly used flame retardants is chlorinated Tris. Blum says she felt like Rip Van Winkle waking up after a 30-year nap.

Since 1975, an obscure California agency called the Bureau of Home Furnishings and Thermal Insulation has mandated that the foam inside upholstered furniture be able to withstand exposure to a small flame, like a candle or cigarette lighter, for 12 seconds without igniting. Because foam is highly flammable, the bureau’s regulation, Technical Bulletin 117, can be met only by adding large quantities of chemical flame retardants — usually about 5 to 10 percent of the weight of the foam — at the point of manufacture. The state’s size makes it impractical for furniture makers to keep separate inventories for different markets, so about 80 percent of the home furniture and most of the upholstered office furniture sold in the United States complies with California’s regulation. “We live in a foam-filled world, and a lot of the foam is filled with these chemicals,” Blum says.

The problem is that flame retardants don’t seem to stay in foam. High concentrations have been found in the bodies of creatures as geographically diverse as salmon, peregrine falcons, cats, whales, polar bears and Tasmanian devils. Most disturbingly, a recent study of toddlers in the United States conducted by researchers at Duke University found flame retardants in the blood of every child they tested. The chemicals are associated with an assortment of health concerns, including antisocial behavior, impaired fertility, decreased birth weight, diabetes, memory loss, undescended testicles, lowered levels of male hormones and hyperthyroidism.

Blum decided she would get the Bureau of Home Furnishings to change its rules so that flame retardants would no longer be used. She had the science. She had the support of the foam industry. And she had already done this once, with children’s pajamas. How hard could it be?

“I thought we’d have one meeting,” she says. “You know, Himalayan mountain climbers are acute optimists because there’s such a high fatality rate. If you do things like that, you have to be optimistic to the point of slight insanity.” (...)

Heather Stapleton, a Duke University chemist who conducted many of the best-known studies of flame retardants, notes that foam is full of air. “So every time somebody sits on it,” she says, “all the air that’s in the foam gets expelled into the environment.” Studies have found that young children, who often play on the floor and put toys in their mouths, can have three times the levels of flame retardants in their blood as their parents. Flame retardants can also pass from mother to child through the placenta and through breast milk.

The effects of that exposure may be hard to detect in individual children, but scientists can see them when they look across the population. Researchers from the Center for Children’s Environmental Health, at Columbia University, measured a class of flame retardants known as polybrominated diphenyl ethers, or PBDEs, in the umbilical-cord blood of 210 New York women and then followed their children’s neurological development over time. They found that those with the highest levels of prenatal exposure to flame retardants scored an average of five points lower on I.Q. tests than the children with lower exposures, an impact similar to the effect of lead exposure in early life. “If you’re a kid who is at the low end of the I.Q. spectrum, five points can make the difference between being in a special-ed class or being able to graduate from high school,” says Julie Herbstman, the study’s author.

There are many flame retardants in use, the components of which are often closely held trade secrets. Some of the older ones, like the PBDEs, have been the subject of thousands of studies and have since been taken off the market (although many of us still have them in our furniture). Newer ones like Chemtura’s Firemaster 550 are just starting to be analyzed, even though it is now one of the most commonly used flame retardants in furniture.

Logic would suggest that any new chemical used in consumer products be demonstrably safer than a compound it replaces, particularly one taken off the market for reasons related to human health. But of the 84,000 industrial chemicals registered for use in the United States, only about 200 have been evaluated for human safety by the Environmental Protection Agency. That’s because industrial chemicals are presumed safe unless proved otherwise, under the 1976 federal Toxic Substances Control Act.

by Dashika Slater, NY Times |  Read more:

Photo: Jens Mortensen

Miu Miu

Miu Miu f/w 2012

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Curtis Mayfield

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Stuffed

My grandparents’ move to the nursing home had offered a hard lesson in the value of things. It occurred in the spring of my freshman year of college, after my grandfather had suffered a severe stroke. I was only a few months removed from my time at a Jesuit high school, where we often spent theology class critiquing American consumerism, exposing the malign influence of advertising and understanding the vanity of worshipping things. St. Ignatius of Loyola, the Jesuits’ founder, had instructed his followers not to prefer wealth to poverty, an attitude I found superhumanly ennobling and heroic. Consequently—and because I suddenly felt very guilty about my affection for clothing—I became an enthusiastic haranguer of modern capitalism. I spoke of solidarity with the poor; of radical, systematic change; of Reagan’s disastrous presidency (this, I should say, was in 2007), all while continuing to patronize Urban Outfitters, expensively cultivating a personal style best described as “unemployed 1970s music critic.” Like many of my high-school cause célèbres (the Great Society, pacifism, Jack Kerouac), my enthusiasm for anticonsumerism cooled during the first months of college from a gatecrasher’s zeal into a liberal’s conscience-assuaging principle. I was no longer refusing to buy any clothing made in Bangladesh, but I still harbored a smug disdain for the things of this world—except, of course, for books.

During the move, I had a long phone conversation with my grandmother. A frail woman for as long as I’d known her, she’d grown even weaker since I’d left for Chicago. Her voice now dragged and slurred, as if she’d always just awoken. I stood in Hutchinson Courtyard, the sort of sheltered campus grove that keeps you from considering the scene of crisis towards which the distant siren wail is heading, listening to my grandmother recount the dispersal of her things. My grandparents had a single room in the nursing home, forcing my dad and uncle to pass what remained of their life’s possessions through an unforgivingly narrow sieve. As she had throughout her life—through the Dust Bowl and World War II and the stillbirth of her first child—she set her jaw against hardship. But my grandmother was a tough lady, not an unfeeling one, and her sadness emanated from my phone’s earpiece, each strained pause suggesting truths about time, aspiration, and mortality that I could only begin to understand. But what I did recall at that moment was how much meaning, for better or for worse, we deposit in our things. “I can’t live without it” is an expression of attachment to an object, but it had become painfully literal for my grandmother. The gradual dissipation of her possessions must have looked like the very walls of her allotted time meeting in their vanishing point, which suddenly drew very near. (...)

True enough. A little more than a year after moving to the nursing home, my grandmother died. I was sitting in Hutchinson Courtyard—the same place where I’d listened to her pained account of the move a year earlier—reading Moby-Dick. My dad called to tell me the news, and the first thing I did after hanging up was circle the number of the page I’d been reading. My dad had been playing golf after visiting her at the nursing home when he learned of her death, and he kept his scorecard from that afternoon. After the funeral, he gave me one of Grandma’s Hummels, a doe-faced boy reading a newspaper, a nod to my interest in journalism. I placed it on my desk, where my hand seems to knock against it every time I reach for a pen or rearrange papers. But it was Grandma’s, so I keep it. My children will be bound to the Hummel by no such contract of memory. It is like an isotope with a short half-life, sitting on my desk while it leaks meaning.

We so often claim to be owners when we are in fact stewards. Indeed, with a sufficiently macroscopic lens, one that encompasses mortality, ownership gives way to stewardship entirely. And stewardship, with its connotations of preserving for later generations, may not be the right word, for there is no guarantee that the objects that mean a lot to us will be anything other than clutter to our descendants. The exigencies of time and the vagaries of individual experience ensure that most of what we own will speak only to us. A copy of Moby-Dick with a circle around the page number 38, a scorecard from an afternoon of golf, a postcard bearing a photo of a smiling father and his son: all of these things will someday become clutter, their stories silenced.

by James Santel, Paris Review |  Read more:

ENCODE: The Rough Guide to the Human Genome

[ed. Pretty extensive overview, be sure to continue scrolling for the entire article.]

Back in 2001, the Human Genome Project gave us a nigh-complete readout of our DNA. Somehow, those As, Gs, Cs, and Ts contained the full instructions for making one of us, but they were hardly a simple blueprint or recipe book. The genome was there, but we had little idea about how it was used, controlled or organised, much less how it led to a living, breathing human.

That gap has just got a little smaller. A massive international project called ENCODE – the Encyclopedia Of DNA Elements – has moved us from “Here’s the genome” towards “Here’s what the genome does”. Over the last 10 years, an international team of 442 scientists have assailed 147 different types of cells with 24 types of experiments. Their goal: catalogue every letter (nucleotide) within the genome that does something. The results are published today in 30 papers across three different journals, and more.

For years, we’ve known that only 1.5 percent of the genome actually contains instructions for making proteins, the molecular workhorses of our cells. But ENCODE has shown that the rest of the genome – the non-coding majority – is still rife with “functional elements”. That is, it’s doing something.

It contains docking sites where proteins can stick and switch genes on or off. Or it is read and ‘transcribed’ into molecules of RNA. Or it controls whether nearby genes are transcribed (promoters; more than 70,000 of these). Or it influences the activity of other genes, sometimes across great distances (enhancers; more than 400,000 of these). Or it affects how DNA is folded and packaged. Something. (...)

Think of the human genome as a city. The basic layout, tallest buildings and most famous sights are visible from a distance. That’s where we got to in 2001. Now, we’ve zoomed in. We can see the players that make the city tick: the cleaners and security guards who maintain the buildings, the sewers and power lines connecting distant parts, the police and politicians who oversee the rest. That’s where we are now: a comprehensive 3-D portrait of a dynamic, changing entity, rather than a static, 2-D map.

And just as London is not New York, different types of cells rely on different DNA elements. For example, of the roughly 3 million locations where proteins stick to DNA, just 3,700 are commonly used in every cell examined. Liver cells, skin cells, neurons, embryonic stem cells… all of them use different suites of switches to control their lives. Again, we knew this would be so. Again, it’s the scale and the comprehensiveness that matter.

by Ed Yong, Discover |  Read more: