Oyster Run 2012

History of the Oyster Run (largest motorcycle gathering in the Pacific Northwest)

[ed. Wow, what a great day. So much energy, so many happy, friendly people jamming together having a great time. I'd never experienced a rally close up before and wondered: what do people do? Race? Get tattoos? Party? (Maybe, but I didn't get invited to any of those events). It seems you mainly check out everyone else's bike, promenade up and down main street, rev your engine, and mingle with other people who love your passion as much as you do. It's a carnival atmosphere with lots of leather, food, music, motorcycle paraphernalia, and all kinds of other attractions. The most enjoyable part was just wandering among the thousands of bikes, taking pictures and feeling the rumble as a constant stream of riders motored past. I'd love to learn to do this.]

More pictures after the break

Photos: markk

Margarita Georgiadis

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May Doctors Help You to Die?

On November 6, Massachusetts voters will decide whether a physician may provide a dying patient with medication to bring about a faster, easier death if the patient chooses. On the ballot will be a Death with Dignity Act that reads:

It is hereby declared that the public welfare requires a defined and safeguarded process by which an adult Massachusetts resident who has the capacity to make health care decisions and who has been determined by his or her attending and consulting physicians to be suffering from a terminal disease that will cause death within six months may obtain medication that the patient may self administer to end his or her life in a humane and dignified manner. It is further declared that the public welfare requires that such a process be entirely voluntary on the part of all participants, including the patient, his or her physicians, and any other health care provider or facility providing services or care to the patient.

If this ballot initiative passes, it will be binding, and Massachusetts will join Oregon, which implemented a virtually identical statute in 1998, and Washington, which did the same in 2009, as the only states where voters approved this form of physician-assisted dying, sometimes called aid-in-dying. (These terms are favored by proponents over the older term, physician-assisted suicide, because they distinguish it from the typical suicide in which someone with a normal life expectancy chooses death over life. Here the patient is near death from natural causes anyway, and chooses the timing and manner of an inevitable death.) Montana, through a 2009 decision by its Supreme Court, not a voter referendum, also permits physician-assisted dying.

Euthanasia—the act of directly injecting medication to cause death rather than providing medication for the patient to take if he or she chooses—is also a form of assisted dying, but it is banned everywhere in the United States. It is also banned in Switzerland, where assisted dying is otherwise allowed. However, euthanasia is legal in the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg, where they make no moral distinction between the two forms of assisted dying, and euthanasia is favored because it’s easier and faster. In June, the British Columbia Supreme Court overturned the Canadian law against assisted dying.1 If that decision stands on appeal, Canada will likely join the Benelux countries in allowing both forms of assisted dying.

The growing number of jurisdictions permitting physician-assisted dying, and particularly its possible acceptance in heavily Catholic Massachusetts, might suggest a new movement, but in fact what we are seeing is an outgrowth of a decades-long evolution in public attitudes toward how we die, which began with the 1976 case of Karen Ann Quinlan. (...)

Before Quinlan, there wasn’t much explicit attention given to whether and how to bring about an earlier death in permanently unconscious patients, or in patients who, although conscious, were suffering unbearably at the end of life. In fact, in the 1960s, when I trained in medicine, dying was hardly mentioned in medical school or training programs, except as a failure of treatment. It was rarely spoken of to families, let alone patients, who were never to be denied hope for a recovery, no matter how dire the prognosis. Sometimes when patients were in obvious misery at the end of life, doctors would increase the dose of morphine, with the expectation that it would hasten death, but they usually didn’t consult with anyone about it (an order for a large dose of morphine could lead to trouble even in those days), and it was more a reflection of doctors’ compassion and courage than patients’ needs and desires.

There were a few, isolated concessions to the inevitability of death during this period. In 1957, Pope Pius XII held that there is no moral requirement for doctors or families to provide “extraordinary” medical treatment, by which he seemed to mean futile or extremely burdensome treatment. In 1968, a group of prominent physicians recommended that death be redefined to include brain death even while respiration and heartbeat continued, and that treatment could be withdrawn from such patients. Also in the 1960s, Dame Cicely Saunders introduced the British hospice movement to the United States, and Elisabeth Kübler-Ross published her book, On Death and Dying, which argued for greater acceptance of death. Nevertheless, until the case of Karen Ann Quinlan, removing life-sustaining treatment, particularly artificial feeding, would generally have been considered tantamount to euthanasia, and simply was not done.

Nor was it nearly as urgent a question as it later became. Before the time of Quinlan, we simply didn’t have the technology to sustain life artificially for very long. In addition, there was another reason the right-to-die movement began about the time of Quinlan. As medicine became more specialized, of necessity it became a team endeavor, not a purely private matter between one physician and one patient. So a physician could not quietly increase the dose of morphine, as before. Instead, these sorts of decisions were removed from the bedside, discussed among team members, and became subject to ethical and legal oversight.

by Marcia Angell, NY Review of Books |  Read more:

Illustration:Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York/Art Resource

Fiona Apple

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, 2004

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700BC-650 BCE
Assembled from fragments; the tridacna shell served as a container for cosmetics.
E  Mediterranean-Phoenician
British Museum

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Gabriel Mayers

Shrink to Fit

In July, when Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg announced his competition to create a building of residential “micro-units” inManhattan, each ranging from 275 to 300 square feet, the plan ignited the imagination of countless architects and developers.

It also gave many New Yorkers a joltingly fresh perspective. For those who already consider themselves space-starved, quarters that are even more cramped seemed inconceivable. Yet to others, an apartment of that size sounded crazy-huge.

Consider Gab Stolarski, who happily renewed the lease for her West Village studio apartment— all 170 square feet of it.

As she welcomes a visitor to her fourth-floor walk-up, Ms. Stolarski, a manager in the digital sales group at Condé Nast, recites the stock reaction to her pinkie toehold in Manhattan: “ ‘Oh! Ohhh. It’s ... cute! And you have a bathroom, too!’ ”

Plus 35 pairs of shoes.

Although her charming aerie has a working fireplace and a courtyard view, here is what Ms. Stolarski’s apartment does not have: a couch; tchotchkes; specks of dirt; paperwork (“I’m 25,” she shrugs. “I’m a digital girl.”); food.

Yet the studio, which was represented by Prudential Douglas Elliman, perfectly matches her priorities. A clotheshorse who doesn’t cook, she stores sweaters, not soy sauce, in her kitchen cabinets. She covers her stove burners with a cutting board — not for serving cheese and crackers, but as a counter area to dump sunglasses and her purse du jour. More important, she lives in her favorite neighborhood, near transportation, and for a rent that is almost bearable: $1,745 a month (Manhattan one-bedroom rents have inched over $3,300). As for entertaining guests? Like many others with no space to spare, she usually meets friends at bars and restaurants.

“The city as living room is key,” said Susanne Schindler, an architect with Team R8, a design group that contributed to Making Room, an initiative of the Citizens Housing and Planning Council, which explores designs for diverse housing options, including micro-units.

by Jan Hoffman, NY Times |  Read more:

Photo: Marilynn K. Yee

~Fionabus / Fiona Meng. Tea Time.
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How Much Tech Can One City Take?

Last year, when Mayor Ed Lee heard that Twitter was planning to move its headquarters out of San Francisco and down to the peninsula, he quickly consulted with his digital experts—his two daughters, Brianna, 27, and Tania, 30. Was the company important enough to make a top priority? “Of course it’s important, Daddy!” they told him. “We tweet all the time. You have to keep them in town.”

Lee quickly made an appointment with Twitter CEO Dick Costolo to see how San Francisco could hold on to the social media giant. Costolo told the mayor that Twitter was planning to double the size of its local workforce over the next year, from about 450 employees to 1,000. But the city’s policies penalized job growth by taxing a company’s payroll, the Twitter chief said. If San Francisco wanted to attract fast-growing digital companies like his, city hall would have to reform its business-tax structure.

For Lee, the Costolo meeting would prove to be a wake-up call. Little in the mayor’s biography (he’s the son of a Chinese restaurant cook, and a former tenants’ rights agitator) suggested that he would become a close friend of the city’s dominant business interests. But ever since his Twitter awakening, Lee has been moving quickly to align his administration with the booming technology industry, shrugging off complaints from the city’s powerful progressives that he’s gotten too cozy with tech moguls, such as investor Ron Conway. The mayor’s proposal to shift business taxes from a payroll-based plan to one based on gross receipts will be on the November ballot, with wide backing from the Board of Supervisors, labor unions, and, of course, Conway. Progressive gadfly Aaron Peskin tapped a deep well of distrust on the left last month when he told the San Francisco Chronicle, “The Koch brothers are trying to buy the president of the United States, and Ron Conway has bought himself a mayor.”

Lee, unperturbed by the flak on his left, now devotes one afternoon each week to a gathering he calls "Tech Tuesday"—visiting one of the many technology companies that are flocking to the city and discussing with the executives and engineers their wishlists for San Francisco. He has sat down with the geek elite at more than 20 companies so far, including Yelp, Yammer, Autodesk, and Zendesk. The firms’ representatives tell Lee what they like about the city—the bike lanes, the arts, the cultural diversity, the different languages you hear on the streets. And then they tell him what they don’t like—the homelessness, the poor public schools, the crime.

In spite of the obvious urban warts, the word is out: San Francisco is the world’s leading tech paradise. At a rate eclipsing the dot-com boom of the 1990s, tech companies are setting up shop in the city by the hundreds, drawn by its beauty and livability, as well as the deep pool of engineering talent here and, yes, city hall’s increasingly tech-oriented policies.

Young entrepreneurs from as far away as Denmark, Singapore, and France can be seen with real estate agents in tow, roaming through converted South of Market lofts still vacant from when the previous bubble burst more than a decade ago. The city is currently home to more than 1,700 tech firms, which employ 44,000 workers, up a whopping 30 percent from just two years ago. And San Francisco has been the nation’s top magnet for venture capital funding for three years in a row. Consequently, the distinction between Silicon Valley and San Francisco has all but disappeared. It is us, and we are it.

The city is clearly benefiting from this new mind meld. San Francisco’s 7.6 percent unemployment rate handily beats the state’s 10.9 percent rate, and it’s one of the few counties in California that has experienced significant property-tax growth during the economic crisis, driven largely by the hot real estate market in the tech-heavy SoMa area. The new tech boom has helped add $6 billion to the city’s tax rolls over the past year—an increase of more than 4 percent over the previous fiscal year. There’s a sense of pride and excitement in the air, a feeling that—once again—we’re the ones creating the technologies that are driving the digital era. San Francisco is quite literally changing the world.

But despite all this, there is trouble in paradise. The unique urban features that have made San Francisco so appealing to a new generation of digital workers—its artistic ferment, its social diversity, its trailblazing progressive consciousness—are deteriorating, driven out of the city by the tech boom itself, and the rising real estate prices that go with it. Rents are soaring: Units in one Mission district condominium complex recently sold for a record $900 per square foot. And single-family homes in Noe Valley, Bernal Heights, and other attractive city neighborhoods are selling for as much as 40 percent above the asking price. Again and again, you hear of teachers, nurses, firefighters, police officers, artists, hotel and restaurant workers, and others with no stake in the new digital gold rush being squeezed out of the city.

And it’s not just about housing. Many San Franciscans don’t feel as if they’re benefiting from the boom in any way. While 23-year-olds are becoming instant millionaires and the rest of the digital technocracy seek out gourmet restaurants and artisanal bars, a good portion of the city watches from the sidelines, feeling left out and irrelevant. Dot-com decadence is once again creeping into the city of St. Francis, and the tensions between those who own a piece of its future and those who don’t are growing by the day.

In light of this, the time has come for a serious reckoning—for Mayor Lee, for the tech cognoscenti, and for the rest of the populace. In short, do we wish to be a city of enlightenment, or a city of apps? Many of those who have lived in San Francisco the longest and care for it the most are worried that their charmed oasis is becoming a dangerously one-dimensional company town—a techie’s Los Angeles, a VC’s D.C. If San Francisco is swallowed whole by the digital elite, many city lovers fear, the once-lush urban landscape will become as flat as a computer screen.

by David Talbot, San Francisco Magazine |  Read more:

Photography by Peter Belange

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Still Too Pricey

Facebook has a business model in need of a radical change and a still-rich $61 billion market value. What's not to "like"? Plenty.

Facebook's 40% plunge from its initial-public-offering price of $38 in May has millions of investors asking a single question: Is the stock a buy? The short answer is "No." After a recent rally, to $23 from a low of $17.55, the stock trades at high multiples of both sales and earnings, even as uncertainty about the outlook for its business grows.

The rapid shift in Facebook's user base to mobile platforms—more than half of users now access the site on smartphones and tablets—appears to have caught the company by surprise. Facebook (ticker: FB) founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg must find a way to monetize its mobile traffic because usage on traditional PCs, where the company makes virtually all of its money, is declining in its large and established markets. That trend isn't likely to change. (...)

The bull case for Facebook is that Zuckerberg & Co. will find creative ways to generate huge revenue from its 955 million monthly active users, be it from mobile and desktop advertising, e-commerce, search, online-game payments, or sources that have yet to emerge. Pay no attention to depressed current earnings, the argument goes. Facebook is just getting started.

Facebook now gets $5 annually in revenue per user. That could easily double or triple in the next five years, bulls say. In a recent interview at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference, Zuckerberg said, "It's easy to underestimate how fundamentally good mobile is for us." His argument, coming after Facebook's brand-damaging IPO fiasco and a halving of the stock, was something only a mother, or a true believer, could love. This year Facebook is expected to get 5% of its revenue from mobile. "Literally six months ago we didn't run a single ad on mobile," Zuckerberg said. Facebook executives declined to speak with Barron's.

"Anyone who owns Facebook should be exceptionally troubled that they're still trying to 'figure out' mobile monetization and had to lay out $1 billion for Instagram because some start-up had figured out mobile pictures better than Facebook," says one institutional investor, referring to Facebook's April deal for two-year-old Instagram, whose smartphone app for mobile photo-sharing became a big hit (and at the time had yet to generate a nickel in revenue). 

by Andrew Bary, Barrons |  Read more:

Anthropology of Tailgating

Think football, and odds are you think tailgate party. And with good reason — the tailgate party is among the most time-honored and revered American sporting traditions, what with the festivities, the food and the fans. And the beer. Don’t forget the beer.

To the untrained eye, these game-day rituals appear to be little more than a wild party, a hedonistic excuse to get loaded and eat barbecue. Not at all. They are, according to Notre Dame anthropologist John Sherry, bustling microcosms of society where self-regulatory neighborhoods foster inter-generational community, nurture tradition and build the team’s brand.

Sherry didn’t always feel this way. There was a time when he considered tailgating a boisterous nuisance, little more than a gauntlet of unrelated and unruly celebrations to be run if he were to reach his seat in Notre Dame Stadium. But then he had an epiphany: What if there was meaning to the madness?

“One day I slowed down and paid attention to things that were going on that weren’t individual celebrations,” he said of research presented in A Cultural Analysis of Tailgating. “It was much more nuanced that I had thought before.”

Sherry consulted the existing literature on the subject and found bupkis. Most studies on tailgating come to Onion-esque conclusions like “tailgating leads to drunkenness” or examine the environmental impact(.pdf) of all that trash. Sherry looked deeper into tailgating and saw a whole lot of consumption akin to that of, say, ancient harvest festivals. He recruited colleague Tonya Bradford, trained a few research assistants and started attending tailgate parties and interviewing fans to learn more.

Notre Dame was a convenient place to start, given its rich football tradition. But Sherry and Co. hit the road too, attending Irish away games and checking the scene at Big Ten Conference schools. They talked to fans of every stripe, from alumni with six-figure RVs to students. And they discovered what every true football fan eventually discovers.

“What we really found was a real active and orchestrated effort in community building,” said Sherry. “People have tailgated in the same place for years, they have tailgated through generations, they have encountered strangers who have passed through and adopted them to their families and became fast friends. They have created neighborhoods.”

This much was obvious Saturday at the University of Utah-Brigham Young University game I attended. The parking lot around Eccles Stadium was thick with trucks and trailers and RVs, the air was thick with the smell of cooking meat. The lot was divided into “streets” and “neighborhoods” populated by fans who have in many cases known each other for years.

by Beth Carter, Wired |  Read more:

Photo: Mike Roemer/Associated Press

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John Tavener

Hysteria

Such was the media excitement inspired by the appearance of a vibrator in a late 1990s episode of Sex And The City, one might have thought the device had only just been invented. Any misapprehension is about to be corrected by a new film, Hysteria, which tells the true story of the vibrator's inception. Described by its producers as a Merchant Ivory film with comedy, Hysteria's humour derives chiefly from the surprise of its subject's origins, which are as little known as they are improbable.

The vibrator was, in fact, invented by respectable Victorian doctors, who grew tired of bringing female patients to orgasm using their fingers alone, and so dreamt up a device to do the job for them. Their invention was regarded as a reputable medical instrument – no more improper than a stethoscope – but became wildly popular among Victorian and Edwardian gentlewomen, who soon began buying vibrators for themselves. For its early customers, a vibrator was nothing to be embarrassed about – unlike, it's probably safe to assume, many members of the film's contemporary audience, not to mention some of its stars.

"I've done a lot of 'out there' sexual movies," Maggie Gyllenhaal readily acknowledges, "but this one pushed even my boundaries." Gyllenhaal plays a spirited young Victorian lady, and the love interest of the doctor who invents the vibrator, but admits, "I just think there is something inherently embarrassing about a vibrator. It's not something most people say they've got; nobody talks about that, it's still a secret kind of thing. So it's very difficult," she adds, breaking into a laugh, "to imagine that 100 years ago women didn't have the vote, yet they were going to a doctor's office to get masturbated."

In 19th-century Britain, the condition known as hysteria – which the vibrator was invented to treat – was not a source of embarrassment at all. Hysteria's symptoms included chronic anxiety, irritability and abdominal heaviness, and early medical explanations were inclined to blame some or other fault in the uterus. But in fact these women were suffering from straightforward sexual frustration – and by the mid-19th century the problem had reached epidemic proportions, said to afflict up to 75% of the female population. Yet because the very idea of female sexual arousal was proscribed in Victorian times, the condition was classed as non-sexual. It followed, therefore, that its cure would likewise be regarded as medical rather than sexual.

The only consistently effective remedy was a treatment that had been practised by physicians for centuries, consisting of a "pelvic massage" – performed manually, until the patient reached a "hysterical paroxysm", after which she appeared miraculously restored. The pelvic massage was a highly lucrative staple of many medical practices in 19th-century London, with repeat business all but guaranteed. There is no evidence of any doctor taking pleasure from its provision; on the contrary, according to medical journals, most complained that it was tedious, time-consuming and physically tiring. This being the Victorian age of invention, the solution was obvious: devise a labour-saving device that would get the job done quicker.

by Decca Aitkenhead, The Guardian | Read more:
Photo: Good Vibrations

Google News at 10: How the Algorithm Won Over the News Industry

In April of 2010, Eric Schmidt delivered the keynote address at the conference of the American Society of News Editors in Washington, D.C. During the talk, the then-CEO of Google went out of his way to articulate -- and then reiterate -- his conviction that "the survival of high-quality journalism" was "essential to the functioning of modern democracy."

This was a strange thing. This was the leader of the most powerful company in the world, informing a roomful of professionals how earnestly he would prefer that their profession not die. And yet the speech itself -- I attended it -- felt oddly appropriate in its strangeness. Particularly in light of surrounding events, which would find Bob Woodward accusing Google of killing newspapers. And Les Hinton, then the publisher of the Wall Street Journal, referring to Google's news aggregation service as a "digital vampire." Which would mesh well, of course, with the similarly vampiric accusations that would come from Hinton's boss, Rupert Murdoch -- accusations addressed not just toward Google News, but toward Google as a media platform. A platform that was, Murdoch declared in January 2012, the "piracy leader."

What a difference nine months make. Earlier this week, Murdoch's 20th Century Fox got into business, officially, with Captain Google, cutting a deal to sell and rent the studio's movies and TV shows through YouTube and Google Play. It's hard not to see Murdoch's grudging acceptance of Google as symbolic of a broader transition: producers' own grudging acceptance of a media environment in which they are no longer the primary distributors of their own work. This week's Pax Murdochiana suggests an ecosystem that will find producers and amplifiers working collaboratively, rather than competitively. And working, intentionally or not, toward the earnest end that Schmidt expressed two years ago: "the survival of high-quality journalism."

"100,000 Business Opportunities"

There is, on the one hand, an incredibly simple explanation for the shift in news organizations' attitude toward Google: clicks. Google News was founded 10 years ago -- September 22, 2002 -- and has since functioned not merely as an aggregator of news, but also as a source of traffic to news sites. Google News, its executives tell me, now "algorithmically harvests" articles from more than 50,000 news sources across 72 editions and 30 languages. And Google News-powered results, Google says, are viewed by about 1 billion unique users a week. (Yep, that's billion with a b.) Which translates, for news outlets overall, to more than 4 billion clicks each month: 1 billion from Google News itself and an additional 3 billion from web search.

As a Google representative put it, "That's about 100,000 business opportunities we provide publishers every minute."

Google emphasizes numbers like these not just because they are fairly staggering in the context of a numbers-challenged news industry, but also because they help the company to make its case to that industry. (For more on this, see James Fallows's masterful piece from the June 2010 issue of The Atlantic.) Talking to Google News executives and team members myself in 2010 -- the height of the industry's aggregatory backlash -- I often got a sense of veiled frustration. And of just a bit of bafflement. When you believe that you're working to amplify the impact of good journalism, it can be strange to find yourself publicly resented by journalists. It can be even stranger to find yourself referred to as a vampire. Or a pirate. Or whatever.

by Megan Garber, The Atlantic |  Read more:

Why I Eloped

When I recently called my mother to tell her that I was getting married, she was ecstatic. After all, my boyfriend, Chris, and I had been together for nearly 10 years, so he had long been part of the family. “When’s the big day?” she asked me.

“In about 20 minutes!” I said, trying to sound perky instead of scared. Though we had decided to get married a few weeks prior, we told almost no one beforehand—not even our parents. And now, we were standing just outside the office of the man who would perform the ceremony.

“You’re getting married today?” she said, shocked. I braced myself for the worst—for her to say that I was robbing her of a precious time in a mother’s life. But she instead declared her unmitigated delight. And with that blessing on hand, I was wed. Chris, the officiant, and I were the only three people in the room.

Now a mere month into my marriage, perhaps it is dangerous to declare, “We did it the right way.” But as I look back at my humble little wedding, I feel pride—and the more I think about it, the more it seems that everyone should elope.

I love a good wedding just as I love any party with an open bar and “The Electric Slide.” But unless you are wealthy, come from a family that has never known strife, enjoy giving up an entire year of your life to planning, and can smile in the face of any possible wedding disaster (and mean it, not just for pictures), you should elope. That’s because weddings—even small-scale ones—are more pageant than sincerity.

True, I was never the fairy tale wedding type. As a child, I didn’t play bride unless peer-pressured. I can’t recall ever fantasizing about my wedding dress, let alone the flowers, the color scheme, or the cake. (Well, maybe the taste of the cake.) My father died when I was 11, and though I could foresee regretting many moments we would never share, walking down the aisle wasn’t among them. Because despite the popular idea that “every little girl dreams of her wedding”—an idea that keeps TLC churning out wedding reality shows—this is not so. I always dreamed of a lifelong partnership but never thought much of the froufrou affair.

The obvious reason to elope is the money. Over the summer, Brides magazine reported that, even in these tough economic times, the average couple spends nearly $27,000 on their nuptials. I have some doubts about that figure—the respondents were readers of Brides magazine and its website, a group already inclined to go veils-to-the-wall for a wedding. But there is no question that weddings, even those done on the cheap, cost far more than many couples can afford. While I have no qualms with the well-off (and their parents) shelling out for a classy affair, I did not want to go into debt or decimate my hard-earned savings for a party.

My primary objections to a “real” wedding go beyond the financial, however.

by Torie Bosch, Slate |  Read more:

Photo: Gerald Williams

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