Friday, October 5, 2012
The Things They Carried: At The National Wife-Carrying Championships
The basics on the most difficult nuptial sport around: fifty couples run in the Championships, two in each heat, and the two best times overall make the finals. The husband dangles his wife upside-down over his head and tries to traverse a hilly, sloppy, divot-filled, 278-yard obstacle course as fast as he can while gradually coming to realize, once and for all, that his hamstrings are useless. He thinks, Oh God, I'm about to tumble in the most emasculating fashion possible. That was my experience, at least.
But Dave Castro did much better than that. He came up only three feet short, and he hasn't stopped thinking about it since.
***
Well before these Wife-Carrying Championships came to Newry, Maine's Sunday River Ski Resort a decade ago, and well before Dave and Lacey Castro were a world-class pair, Wife-Carrying already had a long, half-nefarious history. While Wife-Carrying sounds like something an enterprising Jack might have invented in 1956 to amuse the local Rotarians, it's actually a centuries-old Scandinavian tradition.
Story goes that a Finnish robber named Herkko Rosvo-Ronkainen used women as training weights to prepare his marauding bands for their raids on nearby villages. That's the sanitized tale, at least; it's also possible that modern-day Wife-Carrying has its origins in Rosvo-Ronkainen's knack for women-napping. This is part of why I'd been a bit reluctant to haul my progressive wife on my back like she was some sort of nifty plunder.
“Some people say, 'Oh, Wife-Carrying is such a sexist sport,'" Lacey Castro says. "But I feel like I've been training just as long as my husband has. The women are forcing the husbands to do it just as much as the other way.”
The Castros have forced themselves into phenomenal shape for the one-minute a year when they have a chance to be the absolute best at something. Silly as that something may seem to an outsider, they take the Championships seriously, and they're made for them. Lacey, a body-builder with about a thimble's-worth of body fat, weighs in at around 108 pounds, which is the minimum for wives; Dave, compact and slim, has the bulging calves of a UPS driver. Which is because he is a UPS driver.
“He's basically training all the time,” Lacey told me. “Five days a week he's running around with 50-pound boxes from door to door.” (...)
Wife-Carrying is, honestly, mostly Estonian. If only because The Estonian Carry is the sport's answer to the Fosbury Flop: both stylistic signature and agreed-upon best practice. There is no official technique in wife-carrying—Piggybacks, Fireman's Carries, and Honeymoon Threshold Lifts are all legal. But every champion has used the Estonian Carry, most notably the Estonian Uusorg brothers, the most decorated spouse-hauling athletes, and rivals of Miettenen's for international supremacy. At the farthest opposite end of the prestige spectrum, I also would need to master this Baltic carry for my own turn on the Wife-Carrying Championship course.
Since the North American Championship was my first attempt at extreme sports with my wife—they'd given us a wild card entry—I wasn't sure I could convince her to dangle near my rear as I traversed a slippery ski hill. She'd agreed to participate because I'd made some claim about Immersion Journalism, but we'd yet to get to the touchy subject of head-ass-ground proximity. I turned to the Castros for advice.
“Tell her, 'Look, you might be a little dizzy, but just hold on',” Lacey said. “Go right into the Estonian.”
Dave added: “You'll put her on your back. She might not like it at first. But it'll be good.”
I was convinced, but I was not really the one who needed convincing. Megan and I needed to practice, so before the competition, we took to the field between our apartment and the public library. It was dark. I popped her up on my shoulders and chugged up a hill. Right then, the local book club let out and we were bathed in the accusing glare of a dozen pairs of headlights. Undaunted, I took 17 laps around an oak tree and put her down. She was flushed beneath her helmet, either from embarrassment or because half her blood supply had rushed straight to her cheeks, or both.
by David Wancyzk, The Classical | Read more:
What Will Ice-Free Arctic Summers Bring?
"There is much more open ocean than there used to be," says NSIDC research scientist Walt Meier. "The volume is decreasing even faster than the extent [of surface area] as best as we can tell," based on new satellite measurements and thickness estimates provided by submarines. Once sea ice becomes thin enough, most or all of it may melt in a single summer.
Some ice scientists have begun to think that the Arctic might be ice-free in summer as soon as the end of this decade—leaving darker, heat-absorbing ocean waters to replace the bright white heat-reflecting sea ice. The question is: Then what happens? Although the nature and extent of these rapid changes are not yet fully understood by researchers, the impacts could range from regional weather-pattern changes to global climate feedbacks that exacerbate overall warming. As Meier says: "We expect there will be some effect…but we can't say exactly what the impacts have been or will be in future."
On thin ice
Arctic ice influences atmospheric circulation and, hence, weather and climate. Take away the ice and impacts seem sure to follow. There's more warming to come, as well, particularly in the Arctic, which is warming faster than the rest of the globe. Given cumulative greenhouse gas emissions, there's likely at least as much warming to come as has occurred to date—a rise of 0.8 degree Celsius in global average temperatures, most of that in the past 30 years.
The warmer Arctic waters and land have also begun to release methane, a short-lived but potent greenhouse gas that is also the primary hydrocarbon in natural gas fuel. The Arctic Ocean alone contains more methane than the rest of the world's oceans combined—though when and even if such a thawing would contribute a massive methane release remains a "known unknown" in the words of former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and oceanographer Wieslaw Maslowski of the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey. "If we release that methane, we will amplify global warming by an unknown amount," Maslowski says. "We have no idea."
The warmer Arctic waters and land have also begun to release methane, a short-lived but potent greenhouse gas that is also the primary hydrocarbon in natural gas fuel. The Arctic Ocean alone contains more methane than the rest of the world's oceans combined—though when and even if such a thawing would contribute a massive methane release remains a "known unknown" in the words of former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and oceanographer Wieslaw Maslowski of the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey. "If we release that methane, we will amplify global warming by an unknown amount," Maslowski says. "We have no idea."
by David Biello, Scientific American | Read more:
Image: Courtesy of NASA
The Cup Holders Runneth Over
"There will be cup holders," he sighs. "The world wants cup holders. Designers are crying, 'oh shit, another cup holder'." But Jacob is smiling. He knows that cup holders matter. The outside of a car gets all the attention—at first. Yet it is inside that we sit, often for long stretches, and nowadays most of us want to do more than just listen to the radio. (...)
Car design began on June 23rd 1927, when the executive committee of General Motors (GM) met in Detroit and approved the creation of a new department to "study the question of art and colour combinations". Harley Earl, who made customised car bodies for Hollywood stars, was hired as its leader. Over the coming decades, Earl developed the idea of making concept cars, both to get a better idea of what production vehicles would look like and to drum up interest in new models. He also came up with the annual model change and, brilliantly, put tail fins on Cadillacs. Earl was also the first to hire female designers, thus beginning the process of feminising the automobile.
Today GM has 1,900 designers in ten design centres in seven countries. Many are specialists in safety, aerodynamics, materials, colours or ergonomics: there is even a specialist looking after cup holders. Cup holders got going in the 1980s, although some were available well before. The idea came from the spread of drive-in restaurants and cinemas in America, as people parked up and wanted somewhere to put their drink. Now they take the drink for a drive.
Many European carmakers at first resisted fitting cup holders, only to capitulate in time. Some regional differences remain: an American car could have a dozen cup holders, a European one only half that. And the American cup holders are generally bigger (to hold those supersized Cokes). In Asia, the cup holders have to take drinks that come in square containers. (...)
by Paul Markillie, Intelligent Life | Read more:
Illustration: Nick Hardcastle
Meet the High Priest of Runaway College Inflation (He Regrets Nothing)
The valedictory beverage felt well earned. Since Trachtenberg took over in 1988, he had boosted the school's endowment from $250 million to $1 billion and built many state-of-the-art facilities, such as computer and research labs. The profusion of comforts didn't just stimulate students' minds; it also fulfilled their every whim--a change that drew a more selective, more intelligent group of applicants and sent the admission rate plummeting from 75 percent to 37 percent. "It was a very soothing, very beautiful experience and gave me a great sense of satisfaction about my tenure as president," Trachtenberg wrote in his memoir, Big Man on Campus.
Trachtenberg's students funded this triumph. When he became president, they paid $25,000 (in today's dollars) in tuition, room, and board to attend; by the time he retired, they paid $51,000. Trachtenberg made George Washington the most expensive school in the nation. The burst of cash powered his agenda, but the freshmen who borrowed to enroll--46 percent of the class--during his final year graduated with an average of $28,000 of debt.
Trachtenberg also set a trend that other colleges--first his private competitors, then universities across the country--felt compelled to follow. Today, George Washington is only the 21st most expensive school, and the average American student accumulates $24,300 of debt earning her diploma. Collectively, Americans hold more student-loan debt than credit-card debt, and graduates enter a world where more than half of them are jobless or underemployed. (...)
The way Trachtenberg saw it, selling George Washington over the other schools was like selling one brand of vodka over another. Vodka, he points out, is a colorless, odorless liquid that varies little by maker. He realized the same was true among national private universities: It was as simple as raising the price and upgrading the packaging to create the illusion of quality. Trachtenberg gambled that prospective students would see costly tuition as a sign of quality, and he was right. "People equate price with the value of their education," he says.
Trachtenberg was hardly the first to reach this conclusion, but under his leadership, George Washington was peerless in following its logic. He didn't spend the tuition windfall to shift the professor-to-student ratio or overhaul the curriculum. Instead, he covered the campus in cafés, beautiful study spaces, and nicer dorms. Trachtenberg thought that construction on campus gave the appearance that the school was financially sound and was progressing toward a goal, so his policy was, "Never stop building." If he wanted to erect or renovate two buildings, he would stagger the projects so that jackhammers could be heard constantly around campus. He also introduced a three-day orientation, known as Colonial Inauguration, that featured ice-cream socials, casino nights, and a laser show that cost $2,500 per minute.
by Julia Edwards, The Atlantic | Read more:
Photo: Richard A. Bloom
Thursday, October 4, 2012
A Great Pair of Bookshelf Speakers
These budget-minded speakers are some serious giant killers according to a number of well respected reviewers and people who own them. And if you want a fantastic pair of two-ways that perform as well as speakers costing 3-4 times as much, our research says these are the ones to get.Designed by legendary audio engineer Andrew Jones–the same guy who came up with the TAD Reference One loudspeaker ($70,000/pair)–these more modestly priced $150 speakers still have many of the high-end details. These includes things like radio frequency bonded, curved cabinets, improved multi-component crossovers, and gold-plated five-way binding posts.
Stereophile's Robert Reina was floored by their performance, saying that both the quantity and the quality of the Pioneer's bass reproduction was excellent. "One would expect the sound of a $149.99/pair bookshelf model to include some serious compromises and tradeoffs," he says, "but within its size limitations, the Pioneer SP-BS41-LR has none."
In his review, Reina compared the BS41s to a number of other well known entry-level benchmark bookshelves, including the Paradigm Atom v.6 ($250/pair) and the Wharfedale Diamond 10.1 ($350/pair). According to Reina, the Pioneer bested the more expensive Paradigm in nearly all ways (with a richer, more detailed midrange and cleaner, more extended highs). In fact, the BS41s came very close to matching Wharfedale Diamond 10.1, generally considered to be the reigning king of affordable loudspeakers.
by Brian Lam, Wirecutter | Read more:
Michelin, Get Out of the Kitchen!
A little more than a hundred years ago, a pair of brothers invented the food guide. It was an inadvertent invention. What they thought they’d done was compile a directory of places in France where you could grab a baguette and a bed for the night while some rural blacksmith or farrier tried to mend your broken-down Boitel, Motobloc, Otto, or Lacoste & Battmann. The brothers, Édouard and André Michelin, made pneumatic tires and were staring down the road at the biggest blue-sky start-up industry of the new century.The Michelin guide turned out to be prescient and inspired. This motoring thing wasn’t going to be about what you went in but where you went to. The guide quickly became not an emergency manual but a destination invitation. They added a star system—one, two, or three stars—and a hieroglyphic lexicon to show you where you could eat on a terrace, take your dog, or make a phone call.
The Michelin guide made kitchens as competitive as football teams, becoming the most successful and prestigious guidebook in the world, and along the way it killed the very thing it had set out to commend. It wasn’t the only assassin of the greatest national food ever conceived, but it’s not hyperbole to say Michelin was French haute cuisine’s Brutus. (...)
You think three-star food is expensive, but it’s nothing compared with compiling the world’s most famous guide. Michelin doesn’t say how many inspectors it has, what it pays them, how often they visit each establishment—they claim at least once a year—or what their expenses are like, but you do the math. Consider how many more restaurants there are now than there were 30 years ago. It’s a very, very expensive production. When the occasional ex-inspector goes public, there are stories of exhausting and unsustainable lives on the road, covering vast areas where the pleasure of food is made a relentless and lonely craft. There are admissions that many dining rooms are not revisited year after year.
But still, Michelin has launched in a number of foreign countries. And though it claims its standards are universal and unimpeachable, it proves how Francophile and bloated and snobbish the whole business really is and that, far from being a lingua franca, the food on our plate is as varied as any other aspect of a national culture. For instance, Italy has absurdly few three-star restaurants, apparently because the criteria of complexity and presentation aren’t up to Michelin—French—standards, and the marvelously rich and varied curries of India plainly seem to baffle the guide. The city with the most stars is Tokyo, but then, many of its restaurants have barely a handful of chairs, and most benefit from the Gallic reverence for O.C.D. saucing and solitary boy’s knife skills. In both London and New York, the guide appears to be wholly out of touch with the way people actually eat, still being most comfortable rewarding fat, conservative, fussy rooms that use expensive ingredients with ingratiating pomp to serve glossy plutocrats and their speechless rental dates.
The New York guide has also swapped the dry information of the original for short, purple reviews. Food writing is already the recidivist culprit of multiple sins against both language and digestion, but the little encomiums of the Michelin guide effortlessly lick the bottom of the descriptive swill bucket. Take this, for instance, but only if you have a paper bag close at hand: “Can something be too perfect? Can its focus be so singular, pleasure so complete, and technique so flawless that creativity suffers? Per Se proves that this fear is unfounded.” That was written in chocolate saliva. Or this: “Devout foodies are quieting their delirium of joy at having scored a reservation—everyone and everything here is living up to the honor of adoring this extraordinary restaurant … Uni with truffle-oil gelée and brioche expresses the regret that we have but three stars to give.” That’s not a review of Chef’s Table at Brooklyn Fare—it’s a handjob.
The New York guide has also swapped the dry information of the original for short, purple reviews. Food writing is already the recidivist culprit of multiple sins against both language and digestion, but the little encomiums of the Michelin guide effortlessly lick the bottom of the descriptive swill bucket. Take this, for instance, but only if you have a paper bag close at hand: “Can something be too perfect? Can its focus be so singular, pleasure so complete, and technique so flawless that creativity suffers? Per Se proves that this fear is unfounded.” That was written in chocolate saliva. Or this: “Devout foodies are quieting their delirium of joy at having scored a reservation—everyone and everything here is living up to the honor of adoring this extraordinary restaurant … Uni with truffle-oil gelée and brioche expresses the regret that we have but three stars to give.” That’s not a review of Chef’s Table at Brooklyn Fare—it’s a handjob.
by A.A. Gill, Vanity Fair | Read more:
Illustration: Chris Crisman
The Dementia Plague
"You look gorgeous!" the doctor exclaimed when she greeted her patient, a 99-year-old woman with white hair and a wry smile, in the dining room of her apartment. In an hourlong conversation, Mrs. K (as we'll call her) recalled, in moving and sometimes mischievous detail, growing up in Poland, where soldiers on horseback took her brother away; coming to America on a ship and working in her parents' grocery story in Queens; and dealing with male colleagues in the real-estate business when they got "fresh." But when Granieri asked how old Mrs. K was when she got married, she looked puzzled.
"I can't remember," she said after a pause. A cloud passed over her face. "Was I married? To whom?" A framed photograph on a nearby table memorialized her 50th wedding anniversary.
Spirited and funny, her personality intact even as her memory deteriorates, Mrs. K is one of more than five million Americans with dementia. Far from the gleaming research centers where scientists parse the subtle biochemical changes associated with Alzheimer's disease and other forms of the condition, clinicians like Granieri, chief of the Division of Geriatric Medicine and Aging at Columbia University Medical Center, confront its devastating reality every day. And, often, they talk to relatives of patients. As Granieri and two interns probed Mrs. K's memory with small talk and measured her blood pressure, a niece called from Manhattan to see how her aunt was doing.
Almost every dementia patient has worried family members huddled in the background, and almost every story about dementia includes a moment when loved ones plead with the doctor for something—any medicine, any intervention, anything—to forestall a relentless process that strips away identity, personality, and ultimately the basic ability to think. Unfortunately, Evelyn Granieri is the wrong person to ask. In 2010 she served on a high-level panel of experts that assessed every possible dementia intervention, from expensive cholinesterase-inhibiting drugs to cognitive exercises like crossword puzzles, for the National Institutes of Health; it found no evidence that any of the interventions could prevent the onslaught of Alzheimer's. She can—with immense compassion, but equally immense conviction—explain the reality for now and the immediate future: "There really is nothing." Dementia is a chronic, progressive, terminal disease, she says. "You don't get better, ever."
These conversations have always been difficult for doctors and families alike, but perhaps never more so than in the past year, when public reports about dementia research have bounced between optimism and gloom. In the fall of 2011, financial analysts were giddily projecting a global Alzheimer's market of $14 billion a year by 2020 and touting a new generation of drugs known as monoclonal antibodies that were in advanced human trials. A year later, the prospect for the drugs no longer looked so positive. This past August, the giant drug makers Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson suspended advanced clinical trials of one of the monoclonals because it showed no effect in patients with mild to moderate Alzheimer's. A few weeks later, another leading pharmaceutical manufacturer, Eli Lilly, announced inconclusive results for a monoclonal drug it too was testing against the protein deposits called amyloid plaques that are characteristically found in the brains of Alzheimer's patients. The disheartening results prompted some critics to start writing epitaphs for the prevailing hypothesis about the disease—that these amyloid deposits are causing the cognitive impairment.
"The field is in a precarious place right now," says Barry D. Greenberg, director of strategy for the Toronto Dementia Research Alliance, "because tens of billions of dollars have been invested in the development of new treatments, and nothing—not a single disease-modifying agent—has been identified." Granieri often sets off on her house calls from her second-floor office at Allen Hospital—literally the last building in Manhattan, on the northernmost tip of Broadway. That may sound like an out-of-the-way outpost in medicine's battle against dementia, but in reality it sits at ground zero for the looming medical and societal catastrophe. The hospital's catchment area includes upper Manhattan and parts of the Bronx, one of the three densest concentrations of nursing home facilities in the entire United States, according to Granieri. "Here we sit, right in an epicenter," she says.
The epicenter is a contentious place these days. Frontline clinicians like Granieri are increasingly frustrated with the narrowness of dementia research. In the patients they treat every day, they see a disease that is complicated and insidious, often with multiple causes and murky diagnostic distinctions. In contrast, they see a research enterprise focused on several favorite hypotheses, and they see a drug industry that has profited handsomely from expensive, marginally effective treatments sought by desperate families.
Academic and pharmaceutical researchers, meanwhile, continue to throw money at the dementia problem—but finally, they insist, with better aim and much shrewder treatment strategies. They have begun to assemble a list of diagnostic markers that they believe may reliably indicate the first signs of Alzheimer's disease 10 or 15 years before symptoms appear, and they are gearing up to test new drugs that can be given to healthy patients, in an attempt to block the buildup of amyloid long before dementia's onset. Indeed, to hear researchers tell it, this summer's highly publicized clinical-trial failures are already ancient history. They are finally doing the right kind of science and hope to get the right kinds of answers, the first glimpses of which may appear in the next several years.
As Granieri and other physicians who treat dementia patients know, the stakes could scarcely be higher.
by Steven S. Hall, MIT Technology Review | Read more:
Illustration: William Utermohlen—Blue Skies (detail), 1995
The Death of the Golden Dream of Higher Education
Then California bled that system dry. Over three decades, voters starved their state -- and so their colleges and universities -- of cash. Politicians siphoned away what money remained and spent it more on imprisoning people, not educating them. College administrators grappled with shriveling state support by jacking up tuitions, tacking on new fees, and so asking more each year from increasingly pinched students and families. Today, many of those students stagger under a heap of debtas they linger on waiting lists to get into the over-subscribed classes they need to graduate.
California's public higher education system is, in other words, dying a slow death. The promise of a cheap, quality education is slipping away for the working and middle classes, for immigrants, for the very people whom the University of California's creators held in mind when they began their grand experiment 144 years ago. And don't think the slow rot of public education is unique to California: that state's woes are the nation's. (...)
This is something new in what was once known as “the golden state.” For nearly as long as colleges and universities operated in California, there was a place for every student with the grades to get in. Classes were cheap, professors accessible, and enrollments grew at a rapid clip. When my own father started at Mt. San Antonio College in southern California in August 1976, anyone 18 or older could enroll, and a semester's worth of classes cost at most $24. Then, like so many Californians, he transferred to a four-year college, the University of California-Davis, and paid a similarly paltry $220 a quarter. Davis's 2012 per-quarter tuition price: $4,620.
Today, public education in California is ever less public. It is cheaper for a middle-class student to attend Harvard (about $17,000 for tuition, room, and board with the typical financial-help program included) than Cal State East Bay, a mid-tier school that'll run that same middle-class student $24,000 a year. That speaks to Harvard's largesse when it comes to financial aid, but also the relentless rise of tuition costs in California. For the first time in generations, California's community colleges and state universities are turning away qualified new students and shrinking their enrollments as state funding continues its long, slow decline. Many students who do gain admission struggle to enroll in the classes they need -- which, by the way, cost more than they ever have. "We're in a new era," says John Aubrey Douglass, an expert on the history of higher education in California. He’s not exaggerating. Not a bit.
by Andy Kroll, TomDispatch | Read more:
Image: via:
For Suzuki, Respect for Bats Is Key to Hitting
Today, after a decade in the major leagues, Suzuki still displays that same reverence on a daily basis, caring for his bats like Stradivarius violins. While most players dump their bats in cylindrical canvas bags when they are not using them, Suzuki neatly stacks his best eight bats inside a shockproof, moisture-free black case that he keeps close by his locker at home and on the road.
“He dresses like a rock star and he carries his bats around in a case like a rock musician with a guitar,” Yankees pitcher Boone Logan said. “It fits his style perfectly.”
The case, which looks like a mini trunk, not only protects the bats from jostling and banging during transports, it also serves as a dehumidifier, drawing moisture out of the bats during the hot, humid American summers.
“In New York, Texas, Baltimore, you take your bat from the clubhouse to the dugout and it’s like it’s sweating from all the moisture,” he said through his interpreter. “It’s really shocking to see it.”
For Suzuki, a preeminent scientist in the field of hitting, regulating the amount of moisture in his bat is critical to the touch and feel of it. A hard, dry bat with just the right amount of water content has helped Suzuki become one of the best hitters in the game. Since he came to the United States in 2001 to play for the Seattle Mariners, he has led all of baseball in regular-season hits on seven occasions and recorded 200 hits in each of his first 10 seasons.
Apparently, that cannot be done with spongy, sweaty bats.
“The moment when the ball leaves the bat, that feeling of a moist bat, it doesn’t feel as good,” he said. “That feel of the ball coming off the bat is different.”
by David Waldstein, NY Times | Read more:
Photo: Messerschmidt/Getty Images
Wednesday, October 3, 2012
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