Sunday, October 7, 2012
BB King at 87: The Last of the Great Bluesmen
And on he comes, to applause from people who know him well and claim him as their own – the last of the blues masters a few weeks short of his 87th birthday. "Nice evening, isn't it?" he says, and introduces his nephew on sax. Some of his 15 children (all by different mothers) and innumerable grandchildren are in the audience, though one of his daughters died recently of diabetes, as had BB's mother – a poignant riptide beneath the occasion. "I guess you can look at me," he says from the stage, "and tell I'm the old man. My name is BB King."
Backed now by a lilac glow in the western sky – and looking east towards the village of Itta Bena, where he was born – BB sits down and starts up the show. He reaches "Key to the Highway", and there it is: that one long and trembling note, hanging there in the wafts of barbecue smoke, like only BB King can play it. He rolls his eyes, raises his eyebrows, then stares out into the crowd – and there's a collective gasp, a ripple of applause, and a mutual bond of affection.
This is a huddle, not a crowd, really. The town has come to hear its famous son: mostly black people – in families, many with a picnic – plus a few whites with ponytails, ZZ Top beards or other gestures of nonconformity. There are people here like Alfred Knox – one of 11 children with eight of his own (and 21 grandchildren) – who left Mississippi for Milwaukee when he was 19, the sound of Honeyboy Edwards playing juke joints ringing in his ears, and has now come back with his nephew Gervis to hear BB, to hear and talk blues, talk politics. The usual jocks and suits who wave bottles of Bud and shout at tourist clubs like BB King's own franchise in Memphis are not here for this annual homecoming concert – oddly, but thank God.
Nor, indeed, are some of Indianola's good citizens. Latunya and her friend were in the post office earlier, and said how "We're real excited BB's coming back. Gee, I'd lo-o-ove to go see him play. But I go out Fridays. I don't go out Wednesdays, I only go out Fridays". This is also the town in which the White Citizens Council was formed, political wing of the Ku Klux Klan; and the founders' heirs are probably elsewhere tonight.
The maestro's sonority on guitar is as inimitably perfect as ever. After one long, searing note during "The Thrill is Gone", BB King darts the stare of a clown right into the front rows, as though to say: "How about that!?" But it is BB's voice on the warm breeze that stops a heartbeat – that feeling behind and between the words that is the quintessence of the blues.
This is the 35th Homecoming concert, an event initially staged in memory of Medgar Evers, the civil rights activist and friend of BB's assassinated by a member of the White Citizens' Council. There is something important about BB King's appearance, for the simple reason that even if he is still touring as a 90-something, there will not be that many more of these; nor will there be occasions upon which this great man will reflect on his extraordinary life, which began when he was working out there on the cotton plantations, living alone in a shack, having outlived his mother and then his grandmother.
All the more reason for that remarkable life to be recounted on film. Jon Brewer's The Life of Riley, released next month, was made after hours talking with BB King, with those who grew up around him, and those – including many British musicians – who followed his example. This is the definitive filmed testimony of the last great bluesman.
Even more important than the tributes from stars – Eric Clapton, Keith Richards, Bono et al – are the recollections of people like John Fair and Clemmie Trevellaine, who sit on the porch of their home remembering the day that nine-year-old Riley B King cycled home to live among the cotton fields, working behind a plough, holding the reins of a mule. "I knew none of this," says Brewer. "I had no idea this had been BB King's life. That he lived alone, in a shack out there, at nine years of age, working for four years to pay off his dead mother's and grandmother's debts. I never knew he was so alone, talking to rabbits, his only friends. And by the time he's telling me this, I'm in tears."
by Ed Vulliamy. The Guardian | Read more:
Photo: Wikipedia
Why Craigslist Is Such a Mess
Odd perhaps, but no odder than what you see at the most popular job-search site: another wasteland of hypertext links, one line after another, without recommendations or networking features or even protection against duplicate postings. Subject to a highly unpredictable filtering system that produces daily outrage among people whose help-wanted ads have been removed without explanation, this site not only beats its competitors—Monster, CareerBuilder, Yahoo's HotJobs—but garners more traffic than all of them combined. Are our standards really so low?
But if you really want to see a mess, go visit the nation's greatest apartment-hunting site, the first likely choice of anybody searching for a rental or a roommate. On this site, contrary to every principle of usability and common sense, you can't easily browse pictures of the apartments for rent. Customer support? Visit the help desk if you enjoy being insulted. How much market share does this housing site have? In many cities, a huge percentage. It isn't worth trying to compare its traffic to competitors', because at this scale there are no competitors.
Each of these sites, of course, is merely one of the many sections of craigslist, which dominates the market in facilitating face-to-face transactions, whether people are connecting to buy and sell, give something away, rent an apartment, or have some sex. With more than 47 million unique users every month in the US alone—nearly a fifth of the nation's adult population—it is the most important community site going and yet the most underdeveloped. Think of any Web feature that has become popular in the past 10 years: Chances are craigslist has considered it and rejected it. If you try to build a third-party application designed to make craigslist work better, the management will almost certainly throw up technical roadblocks to shut you down.
Craigslist is not only gigantic in scale and totally resistant to business cooperation, it is also mostly free. The only things that cost money to post on the site are job ads in some cities ($25 to $75), apartment listings by brokers in New York ($10), and—in a special case born of recent legal trouble—advertisements in categories commonly used by prostitutes, because authorities encourage vendors to maintain a record that would aid investigators. There is no banner advertising. They won't let you join them, and at this price you can't beat them either.
At times it has occurred to people that the problems with craigslist could be solved by appealing to its eponym, Craig Newmark. Newmark is under lots of pressure these days. His company is being sued by eBay, a competitor and minority shareholder angry at being excluded from the company's deliberations. The attorney general of South Carolina has blustered about prosecuting his CEO for facilitating prostitution, and there have been strong challenges from law enforcement agencies in other states, too. The tabloids have relentlessly played up stories about two so-called craigslist killers, one who allegedly used the site's erotic-services section to lure victims and another who used the help-wanted ads. Newmark responds to such criticism with extreme serenity. Inquire about his finances and he talks about his hummingbird feeder. When his Twitter page asks him, "What are you doing?" he retweets in the voice of a squirrel.
"Run, run, run," he says. "Dig, dig." (...)
Newmark's claim of almost total disinterest in wealth dovetails with the way craigslist does business. Besides offering nearly all of its features for free, it scorns advertising, refuses investment, ignores design, and does not innovate. Ordinarily, a company that showed such complete disdain for the normal rules of business would be vulnerable to competition, but craigslist has no serious rivals. The glory of the site is its size and its price. But seen from another angle, craigslist is one of the strangest monopolies in history, where customers are locked in by fees set at zero and where the ambiance of neglect is not a way to extract more profit but the expression of a worldview.
The axioms of this worldview are easy to state. "People are good and trustworthy and generally just concerned with getting through the day," Newmark says. If most people are good and their needs are simple, all you have to do to serve them well is build a minimal infrastructure allowing them to get together and work things out for themselves. Any additional features are almost certainly superfluous and could even be damaging.
Newmark has been working hard to extend the influence of his worldview. His public pronouncements have the delighted yet apologetic tone of a man who has stumbled on a secret hiding in plain sight and who finds it embarrassingly necessary to point out something that should long have been obvious. He seems to have discovered a new way to run a business. He suspects that it may be the right way to run the world.
Newmark's claim of almost total disinterest in wealth dovetails with the way craigslist does business. Besides offering nearly all of its features for free, it scorns advertising, refuses investment, ignores design, and does not innovate. Ordinarily, a company that showed such complete disdain for the normal rules of business would be vulnerable to competition, but craigslist has no serious rivals. The glory of the site is its size and its price. But seen from another angle, craigslist is one of the strangest monopolies in history, where customers are locked in by fees set at zero and where the ambiance of neglect is not a way to extract more profit but the expression of a worldview.
The axioms of this worldview are easy to state. "People are good and trustworthy and generally just concerned with getting through the day," Newmark says. If most people are good and their needs are simple, all you have to do to serve them well is build a minimal infrastructure allowing them to get together and work things out for themselves. Any additional features are almost certainly superfluous and could even be damaging.
Newmark has been working hard to extend the influence of his worldview. His public pronouncements have the delighted yet apologetic tone of a man who has stumbled on a secret hiding in plain sight and who finds it embarrassingly necessary to point out something that should long have been obvious. He seems to have discovered a new way to run a business. He suspects that it may be the right way to run the world.
by Gary Wolf, Wired | Read more:
Photo: Platon
Pot Dispensaries Clouding Medical Marijuana's Image
A legal panel debated public policy and a doctor discussed the state of health care as girls in bikinis posed near tables of bongs and a guy in a green bear suit offered free hits off a 5-foot pipe.
And the smell of marijuana wafted over the Ship Canal.
Seattle's first-ever Medical Cannabis Cup — part gourmet weed contest, part trade show, part smoke-in — showcased the entrepreneurial drive and explosive growth of the local medical-marijuana industry.
From dispensaries offering dozens of marijuana varieties to new potency-testing labs to makers of cannabis-infused capsules and candy corn, storefronts displaying the trademark green cross dot nearly every Seattle neighborhood. The city estimates there are at least 150 marijuana-related businesses here, more ubiquitous than Starbucks. Elsewhere in Washington, business may not be as out in the open, but it's still chugging along.
"We're at the infancy of a new industry," said Dan Skye, editorial director at High Times magazine, which put on the Cannabis Cup. "Everybody's trying to get their foundations.
But just as quickly as this quasi-legal industry has grown, it is at a crossroads.
With virtually no state regulation, hustlers threaten to stain what began as a grass-roots patient-care movement. Federal authorities continue to enforce the prohibition against marijuana, with recent warnings to dispensaries and a handful of prosecutions.
And, as voters consider a ballot measure to legalize recreational marijuana use, it's clear that, under the guise of medicine, the party has already started, particularly in Seattle.
Leaders in the medical-marijuana industry are pushing for more regulation from Olympia. In the interim, they're working to police themselves, including writing their own ethics guidelines. Some even pay taxes.
"I would like our industry to appear more grown up," said John Davis, owner of a West Seattle dispensary. "But I understand that's not the way it is right now."
Now, some say it's more like the Wild West.
Photo: Steve Ringman
Saturday, October 6, 2012
Who Destroyed the Economy? The Case Against the Baby Boomers
His name is Tom. He is 63, tall and lean, a contracts lawyer in a small Oregon town. A few wisps of hair still reach across his scalp. The moustache I have never seen him without has faded from deep brown to silver. The puns he tormented my younger brother and me with throughout our childhood have evolved, improbably, into the funniest jokes my 6-year-old son has ever heard. I love my dad fiercely, even though he's beaten me in every argument we've ever had except two, and even though he is, statistically and generationally speaking, a parasite.
This is the charge I've leveled against him on a summer day in our Pacific Northwest vision of paradise. I have asked my favorite attorney to represent a very troublesome client, the entire baby-boom generation, in what should be a slam-dunk trial--for me. On behalf of future generations, I am accusing him and all the other parasites his age of breaking the sacred bargain that every American generation will pass a better country on to its children than the one it inherited.
We are sitting on a beach in late afternoon on a sun-drizzled lake in the Cascade Mountains, two college-educated, upper-middle-class white men settling in for a week of generational warfare. My son, Max, splashes in the waves with his grandmother; sunbathers lounge in inner tubes around us; snow-capped peaks loom above the tree line. The breeze smells of Coppertone and wet dog. My father thinks back on the country that awaited him when he finished law school. "There seemed to be a lot of potential," he says, setting up the first of many evasions, "but there weren't a lot of jobs."
I'm mildly impressed that he's even bothering to mount a defense. The facts as I see them are clear and damning: Baby boomers took the economic equivalent of a king salmon from their parents and, before they passed it on, gobbled up everything but the bones.
by Jim Tankersley, The Atlantic | Read more:
Photo: Rob Finch Visuals
War Between the Sexes
Darwinian sexual selection has not, in general, selected for particularly cosy relations between the sexes. The praying mantis female often cannibalizes her mate; she bites his head just as he is delivering his sperm and then completes her meal when he’s done. Aside from a hard-to-interpret wiggle, he seems not to protest the terms of the sexual bargain because he is solitary and unlikely to score again. By contrast, the male bedbug is a brutal bully; he has evolved a dagger-like projection with which to slash the female’s abdomen. The more graceful water strider has two precision antennae that serve no other purpose than to hold females down. As for the toxin-loaded scorpion, he has evolved a special toxin-lite to subdue the female of his species.
And so it goes. Sex on six legs, or eight, can be a decidedly sordid affair. As Darwin himself observed, one should not look for moral uplift in nature. For the economist and Darwinist Paul Seabright, insect sex nonetheless neatly illustrates the dialectical nature of sexual evolution. Male strategies for “scoring” escalate over time. In dialectic tandem, so do female counterstrategies for evading undesirables and exerting some choice – overt or covert – in their affairs. This is the “war” of his title.
Game theory enables evolutionary biologists and economists such as Seabright to think of the so-called war of the sexes as a strategic game. In general, the male evolves to “want” to score at all costs – whether that means being a bully, a martyr or something else entirely. The female, however, “knows” the real stakes are viable offspring. Of course, neither sex “knows” or “wants”, which would imply sentience or introspection; rather, they are unconscious vehicles for such behaviours. Insects and humans alike, we are the descendants of those who happened to play the game exceptionally well.
Cars, sports, human plumage and a great deal else, according to Seabright, all exploit the same basic principle. The wastefulness of the billion-dollar cosmetics industry clearly dismays him even while it enables him to point out the connection between vanity, fertility cues and marketability. Much of the first half of his book cleverly relates the essence of life to cocktail party dynamics. Seabright puts it this way: “Like a conversation at a party with someone who cannot restrain himself from looking over your shoulder to see who else there might be to talk to, sexual relations in almost all species are clouded by the possibility that either partner might be better off with someone else now or in the future”. (...)
Regarding romance, Seabright argues that we have evolved to be “a socially monogamous species but surreptitiously promiscuous”. Sexual conflicts of interest need not compromise our long-term unions. “We are the species for whom life is about partnerships” – even if every partnership harbours sublimated conflicts of interest. For Seabright as for Freud, the sexual partnership is the template for all others. We can’t create, any more than we can procreate, without others. We exist only in the cocktail party-distracted gaze of the other. Charm is about monopolizing that gaze. Adolescent schoolgirls know this better than anyone. (Seabright reminds his reader that female “cunning” can be charming, even glamorous.) So do business tycoons. Being in the dumpster where no one wants to partner up or collaborate with us makes us physically ill. Fearing the dumpster makes us neurotic. Winning the Oscar or its equivalent gives us extra years of life (compared to also-rans), according to a now-famous study, because everyone wants to partner or cooperate with us. In other words, our emotions and health are intimately tied up with where we stand in the cooperative or partnering hierarchy – with our bargaining power in effect.
by Michele Pridmore-Brown, The Times Literary Supplement | Read more:
And so it goes. Sex on six legs, or eight, can be a decidedly sordid affair. As Darwin himself observed, one should not look for moral uplift in nature. For the economist and Darwinist Paul Seabright, insect sex nonetheless neatly illustrates the dialectical nature of sexual evolution. Male strategies for “scoring” escalate over time. In dialectic tandem, so do female counterstrategies for evading undesirables and exerting some choice – overt or covert – in their affairs. This is the “war” of his title.Game theory enables evolutionary biologists and economists such as Seabright to think of the so-called war of the sexes as a strategic game. In general, the male evolves to “want” to score at all costs – whether that means being a bully, a martyr or something else entirely. The female, however, “knows” the real stakes are viable offspring. Of course, neither sex “knows” or “wants”, which would imply sentience or introspection; rather, they are unconscious vehicles for such behaviours. Insects and humans alike, we are the descendants of those who happened to play the game exceptionally well.
Cars, sports, human plumage and a great deal else, according to Seabright, all exploit the same basic principle. The wastefulness of the billion-dollar cosmetics industry clearly dismays him even while it enables him to point out the connection between vanity, fertility cues and marketability. Much of the first half of his book cleverly relates the essence of life to cocktail party dynamics. Seabright puts it this way: “Like a conversation at a party with someone who cannot restrain himself from looking over your shoulder to see who else there might be to talk to, sexual relations in almost all species are clouded by the possibility that either partner might be better off with someone else now or in the future”. (...)
Regarding romance, Seabright argues that we have evolved to be “a socially monogamous species but surreptitiously promiscuous”. Sexual conflicts of interest need not compromise our long-term unions. “We are the species for whom life is about partnerships” – even if every partnership harbours sublimated conflicts of interest. For Seabright as for Freud, the sexual partnership is the template for all others. We can’t create, any more than we can procreate, without others. We exist only in the cocktail party-distracted gaze of the other. Charm is about monopolizing that gaze. Adolescent schoolgirls know this better than anyone. (Seabright reminds his reader that female “cunning” can be charming, even glamorous.) So do business tycoons. Being in the dumpster where no one wants to partner up or collaborate with us makes us physically ill. Fearing the dumpster makes us neurotic. Winning the Oscar or its equivalent gives us extra years of life (compared to also-rans), according to a now-famous study, because everyone wants to partner or cooperate with us. In other words, our emotions and health are intimately tied up with where we stand in the cooperative or partnering hierarchy – with our bargaining power in effect.
by Michele Pridmore-Brown, The Times Literary Supplement | Read more:
Unfriending Someone, Before Facebook
Let me give you an example of how the people in my family unfriended someone when I was growing up in the Catskills: It is summer and my favorite city cousin, whom we shall call Ravishing Rachel because of the delicacy of the situation, is in the mountains with a boyfriend. My mother gets a call that one of her brothers, Rachel’s father, has had a fatal heart attack. She is naturally distraught and, after calling a few motels, finally tracks down her niece and breaks it to her.
“Ravishing, you tramp!” I hear her holler. “Your father is dead and you killed him.”
See how much better that was than Facebook? No confusion, no wondering why or when it happened. Yes, yes, I know what you are thinking: My mother was obviously the Emily Post of the Catskills, how many of us could hope to attain her command of language, her diplomacy and tact? It is amazing, you are thinking, that Jackie Kennedy didn’t ditch Letitia Baldrige and hire my mother to be her social secretary at the White House. And I would have to give you that. In my mother, one found a moral clarity that I think can only be compared to John Wayne, who unfriended people by shooting them dead.
Consider the grace with which my mother unfriended Cousin Marvin when he appeared on a summer day at our house:
“Marvin, I plain can’t stand you and nobody in the family can stand you. Stay at a motel.”
But why stop with my mother’s generation?
My grandmother Gussie, who conversed primarily in Yiddish and was so hazy about American customs that she understood Halloween to be a national holiday in which you give the children money, was a genius at terminating relationships. When someone, say Cousin Marvin, who just seemed to have one problem after another, got a divorce, a scandalous event at the time, my grandmother took out a pair of nail scissors and removed the face of Marvin’s ex-wife from the family photos, leaving for some reason the hair – well, Marvin’s wife did have very nice hair. She did the same thing with someone’s prom photos, after he had broken up with the girl. I kept expecting to see it in The National Enquirer: “Upstate Boy Takes Faceless Girl to Prom.”
by Joyce Wadler, NY Times | Read more:
Illustration: NY Times
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
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