Why Do We Hate Facebook?

It started with a media report in France and in a few days the story had gone around the world. Our private Facebook messages from 2007 and 2008 were being made public on our walls. The story was picked up on U.S. blogs and was rapidly spread through Facebook status updates and on Twitter.

Facebook quickly issued a strong denial, tech journalists drilled deep, and the story was quickly debunked. Yet the message -- the cautionary status updates -- still spread, translated across Facebook's global communities. Even when faced with evidence to the contrary, people still insisted the story was true: They didn't care what Facebook said, they knew they didn't write that on their Wall, they never would have written that in public.

Our susceptibility to believe reports that Facebook is playing fast and loose with our data comes as no surprise. Facebook has let us down many times before, changing privacy settings without telling us and exposing our information. But in the social-media-powered hysteria, something else was on display. It was almost as if many of us wanted to believe it, as if we wanted to feel let down by Facebook. What the messaging saga showed us was the sheer depths of distrust and unease held by many of Facebook's heaviest users.

I confess: I love Facebook. It is my social network of choice. I am not a basement dweller, living my life online. I live a normal life with friends and family and Facebook is an enhancement of that. I use Twitter, but for journalism and networking rather than for communicating with friends. The Twitter me is the corporate me, truncated and reined in. On Facebook, I can be more myself. Over the years, Facebook has brought me closer with many people I am happy to be closer to. If I didn't use Facebook, I wouldn't have made those connections. The technology did that.

But sometimes, in praising Facebook, I feel like I am a rarity. Being too enthusiastic about Facebook is just not done in polite, techno-literate society. Among the general public, Facebook is the lowest-scoring "e-business company" on the American Customer Satisfaction Indexes with 61 on a 100-point scale. While Facebook has just reached a milestone of 1 billion users worldwide, there are some worrying signs for the company, for example the shrinking number of web-based users in the United States.

The sense of unease about Facebook appears in many different guises. There are those who criticize Facebook -- and social media in general -- for being inauthentic, superficial, and at odds with the "real world." There are those who take umbrage at Facebook's business model, its behavior as a virtual monopoly. There are those -- hipsters, fashionistas -- who wouldn't be seen dead anywhere other than Tumblr. There are those from the church of high-tech who ideologically oppose Facebook's closed platform, its capture of the open web, and long for a distributed open-source alternative. There are those who worry about what they see as Facebook's cavalier attitude to users' privacy, especially when those users are based in odious regimes. There are those who see Facebook as just the latest incarnation of mass consumer society, where our desires and behavior are being manipulated by The Man. And then there are those who just see Facebook, and social networking in general, as trivial and quit after getting too many Farmville requests.

While all of these viewpoints are very vocal, among the great mass of Facebook users they are likely edge cases, a long tail of elite unease. Right in the heart of Facebook's user base, though, the concern about the service is far more complex, revealing, and interesting. The low-level hum of discontent, revealed in the recent hysteria over messages is due to our evolving relationship with data. It is a relationship most of us don't really understand, but it gives us a general sense of foreboding.

by Luke Allnutt, Tangled Web |  Read more:

robert bechtle
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Diary: Online Dating

The man generally held responsible for internet dating as we know it today is a native of Illinois called Gary Kremen, but Kremen was out of the internet dating business altogether by 1997, just around the time people were signing up for the internet en masse. Today he runs a solar energy financing company, is an elected official in Los Altos Hills, California and is better known for his protracted legal battle over the ownership of the pornography website sex.com than he is for inventing internet dating. Like many visionary entrepreneurs, Kremen doesn’t have very good management skills. His life has passed through periods of grave disarray. When I met him, at a conference on the internet dating industry in Miami last January, he asked where I was from. ‘Ah, Minnesota,’ he said: ‘Have you ever been to the Zumbro River?’ The Zumbro flows south of Minneapolis past Rochester, home of the Mayo Clinic. It turned out that Kremen had once driven, or been driven, into the river. He used to be addicted to speed.

In Miami Kremen recounted the genesis of his ideas about internet dating to a room full of matchmakers. In 1992, he was a 29-year-old computer scientist and one of the many graduates of Stanford Business School running software companies in the Bay Area. One afternoon a routine email with a purchase order attached to it arrived in his inbox. But it wasn’t routine: the email was from a woman. At the time, emails from women in his line of work were exceedingly rare. He stared at it. He showed the email to his colleagues. He tried to imagine the woman behind it. ‘I wonder if she would date me?’ Then he had another idea: what if he had a database of all the single women in the world? If he could create such a database and charge a fee to access it, he would most probably turn a profit.

In 1992, that couldn’t be done – modems transmitted information too slowly. Then there was the scarcity of women with online access. Because in its early days the internet was prevalent in worlds that had historically excluded women – the military, finance, mathematics and engineering – women were not online in big numbers. As late as 1996 America Online estimated that of its five million users, 79 per cent were men. In more administrative fields, however, a growing number of women had email.

So Kremen started with email. He left his job, hired some programmers with his credit card, and created an email-based dating service. Subscribers were given anonymous addresses from which to send out their profiles with a photo attached. The photos arrived as hard copy, and Kremen and his employees scanned them in by hand. Interested single people who did not yet have email could participate by fax. By 1994 modems had got faster, so Kremen moved to take his company online. He and four male partners formed Electric Classifieds Inc, a business premised on the idea of re-creating online the classifieds section of newspapers, beginning with the personals. They rented an office in a basement in San Francisco and registered the domain match.com.  (...)

I joined OK Cupid at the age of 30, in late November 2011, with the pseudonym ‘viewfromspace’. When the time came to write the ‘About’ section of my profile, I quoted Didion’s passage, then added: ‘But now we have internet dating. New faces!’ The Didion bit sounded unpleasant, so I replaced it with a more optimistic statement, about internet dating restoring the city’s possibilities to a life that had become stagnant between work, subway and apartment. Then that sounded depressing, so I finally wrote: ‘I like watching nature documentaries and eating pastries.’ From then on I was flooded with suggestions of YouTube videos of endangered species and recommendations for pain au chocolat.

OK Cupid was founded in 2004 by four maths majors from Harvard who were good at giving away things people were used to paying for (study guides, music). In 2011 they sold the company for $50 million to IAC, the corporation that now owns Match. Like Match, OK Cupid has its users fill out a questionnaire. The service then calculates a user’s ‘match percentage’ in relation to other users by collecting three values: the user’s answer to a question, how she would like someone else to answer the same question, and the importance of the question to her. These questions ranged from ‘Does smoking disgust you?’ to ‘How often do you masturbate?’ Many questions are specifically intended to gauge one’s interest in casual sex: ‘Regardless of future plans, what’s more interesting to you right now, sex or true love?’ ‘Would you consider sleeping with someone on the first date?’ ‘Say you’ve started seeing someone you really like. As far as you’re concerned, how long will it take before you have sex?’ I found these algorithms put me in the same area – social class and level of education – as the people I went on dates with, but otherwise did very little to predict whom I would like. One occurrence in both online and real-life dating was an inexplicable talent on my part for attracting vegetarians. I am not a vegetarian.

by Emily Witt, LRB |  Read more:

Illustration: Winston Churchill

[ed. Google in all it's estimable wisdom has decided to put various posts (apparently anything sex-related) behind a warning screen because...well, who knows? "This post was put behind a warning for readers because it contains sensitive content as outlined in Blogger’s Community Guidelines." Even something from the London Review of Books, by the great writer Emily Witt. God help us.]

The Great Unreal — Taiyo Onorato & Nico Krebs
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Kate Peters “plane”
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Enjoyment Day

It’s 11:30 a.m. on Sunday, August 26, and I’m sitting with friends in the middle of the central plaza in Bad Durkheim, Germany, trying to take it all in. It looks like rain, but the plaza is full of people. They eat bratwurst and crepes. They laugh. There’s a band somewhere out of sight playing flawless, note-for-note covers of Pink Floyd classics, Eagles tunes, and songs from The Muppets. People dance. A grey-haired man with a sculpted, imperial-style mustache serves wine from an open-air bar. We sit and stare. His customers stand up, raise glasses, offer one another flowery salutations, and clank cups. It’s not even noon, but everyone here is drinking.

My friend Tom sits down across from me and says he thinks he just saw a baby take a sip, although he’s not sure. Moments later, we watch a Mr. Bean-sized car drive past, carrying a blond woman who waves at the crowd like a pageant queen. Bad Durkheim’s Wine Princess is on parade. Throughout the day, she will make her way down Germany’s Weinstraße—and so will we.

The German Weinstraße (literally “Wine Street”) is an 85-kilometer road that winds through the Pfalz (Palatinate), Southwest Germany. The decision to name a road Weinstraße dates to 1935, when it was conceived of as a way to connect the wine growers in the region and increase tourism. The last Sunday in August is the Weinstraße’s big day, known as Erlebnistag Deutsche Weinstraße, which translates to “Enjoyment Day on the German Wine Street.” On Enjoyment Day, Police close the street to motorized traffic and people ride bikes, rollerblades, and sometimes scooters down the Weinstraße to 15 different wine festivals in the Pfalz. In recent years, as many as 400,000 people have come to ride and drink on Enjoyment Day.

When we’re about half way through our first round of wine, my brother Mike, who arrived in Germany less than a week ago and seems overwhelmed, turns to me and says, “Geez. This is a lot different than a wine tasting in California.”

Like everyone here, Mike sips on a glass of Riesling, but he might be the only person in Bad Durkheim drinking from a 0.25-liter wine glass, which is the same size as the glasses you have in your kitchen cabinets. The rest of us drink from something called a Dubbeglas, which looks like a dimpled pint glass, holds a half-liter of wine, and is traditional to the Pfalz region. If a half-liter serving sounds like a lot of wine, it’s because it is. Drink two Dubeglases and you’ve already consumed more than a standard bottle of wine on your own. For those who wish to pace themselves, the Germans drink something called weinschorle, which is a 50/50 mix of wine and sparkling water.

In other words, this is a wine drinking festival; there’s not a lot of tasting going on.

by Brian Blickenstaff, Outside | Read more:
Photo: Mike Blickenstaff

I Heart Emoji

Over the past few years, the definition of texting has further evolved with the introduction of something that has both loosened the medium’s restrictions and presented new ones. Down at the bottom of the list of new features promised by iOS5, the iPhone operating system that débuted last year, was something at which only a true text-artist would rejoice: the iPhone keyboard would now come automatically equipped with Emoji, a line of tiny Japanese pictographs that can be deployed like letters. Anyone using an older model iPhone or Android already had the option of texting with Emojis, but to do so required downloading an app, and then manually adding the “language” to the keyboard. Now access was effortless. Last month, with the introduction of the iPhone 5 and iOS6, texters got another treat: a set of brand new Emojis, hundreds of them. As one aficionado recently put it, via text: “It’s like you’re a speaker of some primitive Japanese picture language with only three hundred some odd words and your vocabulary just DOUBLED.”

It’s hard to explain the appeal of this primitive language, but perhaps just as hard not to succumb to it. Emoji (the word is an anglicization of Japanese characters that translate literally to “picture letter”) takes the idea of the emoticon—the smiley face :), the sad face :(, the winking face ;), the heart <3—and brings it to its logical conclusion: full color, detail, a world of options. For starters, the classic emoticon faces are turned right-side up, now rendered as bright yellow orbs, and their expressions, no longer subjected to the limits of standard punctuation marks, run the gamut of cartoonish emotion: grin with eyes closed; grin with eyes open; wide-eyed, red-cheeked embarrassment; eyes-lowered, red-cheeked embarrassment; gritted teeth; hearts for eyes; puckered lips; wink with a smile; wink with tongue out; features crumpled in misery; eyebrows furrowed in anger. There are eleven Emoji hearts, including one that appears to be pulsating and one with an arrow shot through it. (...)

Most Emojis are universally understood—even the ones you can’t imagine finding use for. (My personal favorites in that category comprise what I like to think of as the Lost Toys: nearly obsolete technological equipment it seems hilarious to reference at all, let alone in a text, including a fax machine, a floppy disk, a VHS tape, a pager, a CD, and a camcorder.) Others, however, are distinctly Japanese. There is an array of actual Japanese characters, a line of Japanese foods (a plate of curry with rice, a bowl of ramen, a bento box, tuna sushi, onigri, shrimp tempura, a dish of shaved ice, a bottle of sake), a handful of Japanese trinkets, and a yellow face wearing a surgical mask, with sad eyes. And then there are the Emojis that seem to just be lost in translation: a pyramid of excrement with eyes and a grin; a stack of dollar bills with wings; the tip of a fountain pen in front of a padlock; a pair of hands held up, palms open, beneath a line of blue triangles; a building with the letters BK on it (not signifying, presumably, Brooklyn); the number 18 circled and crossed with a diagonal line. (...)

According to Business Wire, more than seventy per cent of young women in Japan use “Emoji-enabled services” (Emoji is also available for some e-mail platforms, including Gmail) and the Emoji market there exceeds three hundred million U.S. dollars. So what does one do with Emojis? Although just scrolling through them provides a little thrill, figuring out how to use them is the exciting part. Personally, I like to pepper them throughout my texts, using them to complement a word, feeling, or concept when appropriate: “Had you already left when the undercover cops broke up the party?! [policeman]” “[airplane] fly safe [pill] [sleeping Zs]”.

Sometimes I send them on their own. I recently texted a friend mired in grad school a tiny green turtle, just to let her know I was thinking of her; she responded with a poodle, and then a yellow face blowing a kiss. Even Vladimir Nabokov, arguably unparallelled in his mastery of the English language, acknowledged that sometimes nothing but an emoticon will quite do: when, in 1969, the New YorkTimes asked him how he ranked himself among other writers, he replied, “I often think there should exist a special typographical sign for a smile—some sort of concave mark, a supine round bracket, which I would now like to trace in reply to your question.”

by Hanah Goldfield, New Yorker |  Read more:
Illustration: Maximilian Bode

The Life of Riley: BB King at 87

The fat red sun settles itself against the horizon, throwing a last, honey-sweet light through humid evening and over a small crowd on the lawn beside a railroad track that cuts through the cotton fields beyond. A quarter-moon rises and a chorus of cicadas serenades imminent twilight, now conjoined by the sound of the band; the drummer catches the backbeat and the compere announces: "How about an Indianola hometown welcome for the one-and-only King of the Blues: BB KING!"

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.

by Ed Vuillamy, The Guardian | Read more:

Photograph: Kevin Nixon/Guitarist

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What Happens in Brooklyn Moves to Vegas

The Downtown Project got its unofficial start several years ago when Hsieh realized that Zappos, the online shoe-and-apparel company that he built to $1 billion in annual sales in less than a decade, would soon outgrow its offices in nearby Henderson, Nev. Though Amazon bought Zappos in 2009 for $1.2 billion, Hsieh still runs the company, and he has endeavored to keep alive its zany corporate culture. This includes a workplace where everyone sits in the same open space and employees switch desks every few months in order to get to know one another better. “I first thought I would buy a piece of land and build our own Disneyland,” he told the group. But he worried that the company would be too cut off from the outside world and ultimately decided “it was better to interact with the community.”

Around the same time, the Las Vegas city government was also about to move, and Hsieh saw his opportunity. He leased the former City Hall — smack in the middle of downtown Vegas — for 15 years. Then he got to thinking: If he was going to move at least 1,200 employees, why not make it possible for them to live nearby? And if they could live nearby, why not create an urban community aligned with the culture of Zappos, which encourages the kind of “serendipitous interactions” that happen in offices without walls? As Zach Ware, Hsieh’s right-hand man in the move, put it, “We wanted the new campus to benefit from interaction with downtown, and downtown to benefit from interaction with Zappos.” The only hitch was that it would require transforming the derelict core of a major city.

For Hsieh, though, this was part of the appeal. Transforming downtown Vegas would “ultimately help us attract and retain more employees for Zappos.” For the city itself, it would “help revitalize the economy.” More important, it would “inspire,” a word Hsieh uses often. Hsieh closed his presentation at the faux log cabin high above the desert with the sort of fact he seems to always have on hand: up to 75 percent of the world’s population will call cities home in our lifetime. “So,” he concluded, “if you fix cities, you kind of fix the world.”

Most tourists never see downtown Las Vegas. There are a few blocks of mostly run-down casinos, cavernous gift stores and the enormous, glittering LED display overhead called, with hopefulness, the Fremont Street Experience. Less than two miles to the north, there’s the so-called homeless corridor, a patchwork of soup kitchens and air-conditioned shelters that protect the area’s thousands of homeless from life-threatening 115-degree afternoons during the summer. And this is within a greater metro area that has dominated the nation’s unemployment, foreclosure and bankruptcy lists for much of the last four years. Everyone knows at least one person who has left town for Houston, Dallas or Atlanta.

Nevertheless, the Downtown Project is hoping to draw 10,000 “upwardly mobile, innovative professionals” to the area in the next five years. And according to Hsieh, he and his team receive requests for seed money from dozens of people every week. In return, the Downtown Project asks not just for a stake in the companies but also for these entrepreneurs to live and work in downtown Las Vegas. (They’re also expected to give back to the community and hand over contacts for future recruits.) In expectation of all these newcomers, the project has already set up at least 30 real estate companies, bought more than 15 buildings and broken ground on 16 construction projects.

For those entrepreneurs who live in other parts of the country, and most do, the question often comes down to how eager they are to relocate to a downtown area filled with liquor stores and weekly hotels. Less than a year after the project was officially established, about 15 tech start-ups have signed on. The first tech investment went to Romotive, a company developing smart-phone-controlled personal robots. Money has also gone to Local Motion, a start-up that designs networks for sharing vehicles, and Digital Royalty, a social-media company.

by Timothy Pratt, NY Times |  Read more:

Photo: Brian Finke

The Story of Amanda Todd

We’ll never know, when the fifteen-year-old Amanda Todd, of Port Coquitlam, British Columbia, decided to make last Wednesday the last day of her life, whether she expected that that act would turn her into a household name. If she imagined her fame at all, she must have felt ambivalent at the prospect. In her short life, Todd had already learned that notoriety had a dark side. A certain kind of fame had already found her, and with it came a certain kind of life she plainly convinced herself that she couldn’t escape.

In a YouTube video she left behind, Todd told the tale by flash card, set to a maudlin song called “Hear You Me.” Her story is this: A few years ago, she was chatting with someone she met online, a man who flattered her. At his request, she flashed him. The man took a picture of her breasts. He then proceeded to follow Todd around the Internet for years. He asked her to put on another show for him, but she refused. So he’d find her classmates on Facebook and send them the photograph. To cope with the anxiety, Todd descended into drugs and alcohol and ill-advised flirtations and sex. Her classmates ostracized her. She attempted suicide a few times before finally succeeding, last week.

Todd’s suicide is easily analogized to Tyler Clementi’s, mostly because the public has diagnosed both cases as the result of “cyber-bullying.” Yet, as a descriptive term, “cyber-bullying” feels deliberately vague. Somewhere in the midst of the “mob” there is usually at least one person whose cruelty exceeds the tossing off of a stray insult. In Clementi’s case, the magazine’s Ian Parker chalked the harasser’s motives up to “shiftiness and bad faith,” the kinds of things that criminal statutes can’t easily be invoked to cover. But with Todd’s harasser, the malice is unquestionable. Anyone who has ever been to high school knows what they are provoking by distributing photographs like that.

It is a cultural myth—one particular to the Internet—that the methods of a harasser are fundamentally “legal,” and that the state is helpless to intervene in all cases like this. The systematic way the harasser allegedly followed Todd to new schools, repeatedly posting the images and threatening to do it again, makes it textbook harassment regardless of the medium. Indeed, in Todd’s native Canada, cyber-harassment is prosecuted under the general harassment provision of the Canadian criminal code. And in the United States, most states have added specific laws against cyber-harassment and bullying to their general legislation of harassment. At the federal level, there is the Federal Interstate Stalking Punishment and Prevention Act, which covers harassment that crosses state and national lines. While all of these laws are subject to the limitations of the First Amendment, the First Amendment generally doesn’t protect threats and harassment. If people are not being prosecuted for these acts, the fault lies in the social alchemy of law enforcement, the way the human prejudices of judges, juries, and prosecutors inflect the black letter. Put otherwise, the power is there—the cultural mores are what is preventing the laws from being successfully invoked.

by Michelle Dean, New Yorker |  Read more:

John Register, Pacific Rim Restaurant, 1989
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Pablo Picasso - Reading the Letter (1921)
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Standing Next to Greatness

In my parents’ living room in Boca Raton, Fla., there’s a collection of University of Florida Gators football paraphernalia they like to call “The Shrine.” They have the shrine because my brother Alex played on the team. Well, sort of.

 Inside the shrine are framed photographs of my brother’s hand clad in championship rings and the back of his head meeting President George W. Bush. There’s a Plexiglas-encased 2007 BCS national championship pigskin, a game helmet and several laminated game tickets. There’s also a painting entitled “A Meeting of Champions,” that displays two alligators dressed in Gators football and basketball jerseys, shaking hands in a swamp. It commemorates the greatest year in Gator history, when the school secured national championships in both sports.

As a 5’9, 179-pound walk-on, my brother was all but ignored by the coaching staff, even though he was required to work out until he collapsed, attend all practices and take hits from huge guys on a regular basis. Alex rarely got to wear a uniform or travel, and he never did get out on that field during a game. Not for one minute. Not for one play. Not ever. For me, though, the most telling aspect of the shrine is a photograph of my brother and Tim Tebow standing next to each other in identical blue and orange football uniforms. If you look closely at the picture, though, you’ll notice that my brother isn’t even standing next to Tebow; there’s another player in between them. My dad snapped the photograph off our television screen at the exact moment the camera’s angle obscured the gap between my brother and the superstar.

Few people ever notice that. My brother’s tentative spot on the team elevated our family from relative nobodies into relatives of somebody who sometimes stood next to Tim Tebow.  (...)

At the time, I was living in my parents’ house, having boomeranged back home for the second time since college. I saw first-hand what it meant to my parents that my brother had become a Gator.

One time I was shopping with my mom at Nordstrom, looking through racks of shirts, when a woman near us found a blouse she liked. “Oh, I’m so excited,” the shopper said to her friend. “This is exactly what I’ve been looking for.”

My mother smiled and scooted closer. “No, I’m so excited,” she informed the strangers. Then she paused expectantly.

“Why is that?” one woman finally asked.

“My son’s football team is going to the national championship,” my mother said. "He plays for U.F. – the Gators.”

Although I got caught up in an interior debate on how to subvert my own genetics, I did catch snippets of the unfolding conversation. “That’s wonderful news,” the women were saying, and they seemed genuinely impressed. Apparently having a son that was a Gator – any Gator – permitted my mother to break the rules of social etiquette. What the hell was going on?

I had friends who attended U.F., and when they heard my brother made the team, they too went ballistic. They insisted that I attend the games to see what it was like to be among the 90,000 people packed into Ben Hill Griffin Stadium, which I was told to call “The Swamp.” Everybody would be wearing orange and blue (two colors I thought looked hideous together) and rocking together to "We Are the Boys of Ol' Florida" when the third quarter ended.

by Ashley Harrell, SB Nation | Read more:

Iron-Dumping Experiment in Pacific Alarms Marine Experts

[ed. See also: The First Geo-Vigilante.]

An environmental entrepreneur whose plan to dump iron in a patch of the Pacific Ocean was shelved four years ago after a scientific outcry has gone ahead with a similar experiment without any academic or government oversight, startling and unnerving marine researchers.

The incident has prompted an investigation by Canadian environmental officials, and in the United States, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said it was misled into providing ocean-monitoring buoys for the project.

The entrepreneur, Russ George, said his team scattered 100 tons of iron dust in mid-July in the Pacific several hundred miles west of the islands of Haida Gwaii, in northern British Columbia, in a $2.5 million project financed by a native Canadian group.

The substance acted as a fertilizer, Mr. George said, fostering the growth of enormous amounts of plankton that were monitored by the team for several months. He said the result could help the project meet what it casts as its top goal: aiding the recovery of the salmon fishery for the native Haida people.

But marine scientists and other experts said the experiment, which they learned about only in news reports this week, was shoddy science, irresponsible and probably in violation of international agreements intended to prevent tampering with ocean ecosystems under the guise of trying to fight the effects of climate change.

While the environmental impact of Mr. George’s foray could well prove minimal, they said, it raises the specter of what they have long feared: rogue field experiments that could upend ecosystems one day put the planet at risk. Mark L. Wells, a marine scientist at the University of Maine, said that what Mr. George’s team did “could be described as ocean dumping.”

Noting that blooms like those that the team observed occur regularly in the region, Dr. Wells said it would be difficult for Mr. George to demonstrate what impact the iron had on the plankton. And Dr. Wells said it was “extraordinarily unlikely” that Mr. George could prove that the experiment met another crucial goal of the project: the permanent removal of some carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

Plankton absorbs carbon dioxide and settles deep in the ocean when it dies, sequestering carbon. The Haida had hoped that by permanently burying carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas, they could sell so-called carbon offset credits to companies and make money.

Iron fertilization is contentious because it is associated with geoengineering, a set of proposed strategies for counteracting global warming through the deliberate manipulation of the environment. Many experts have argued that scientists should be researching such geoengineering techniques — like spewing compounds into the atmosphere to reflect more sunlight or using sophisticated machines to remove carbon dioxide to combat rising temperatures.

by Henry Fountain, NY Times |  Read more:

Grace reading at Howth Bay ( circa 1900) by William Orpen (27 November 1878 – 29 September 1931).
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How Can We Think About Evil?

"Evil" is a strong word, and a provocative one. Nowadays it tends to be reserved for acts of exceptional cruelty: the Moors murders, organised child abuse, genocide. It is not just the extreme nastiness of such acts – and their perpetrators – that makes people describe them as evil. There is something unfathomable about evil: it appears to be a deep, impenetrable darkness that resists the light of reason. To say that a murderer has killed because she or he is evil is really to point to an absence of motive. Far from the usual muddle of human motivation, evil has a cold, horrifying purity. Phrases like "unthinkable evil" or "unspeakable evil" highlight the way the word is used to say the unsayable, to explain the inexplicable.

So how can we think about evil? Perhaps we can't, or shouldn't. Ludwig Wittgenstein famously wrote that we should remain silent about "that whereof we cannot speak" – a quotation beloved of lesser philosophers seeking a convenient way to end an academic paper. On a more practical level, most victims of evil will find that simply coping takes all their energy – and in the midst of their suffering, it may be difficult to disentangle the questions "why?" and "why me?" But the very familiarity of these questions suggests that there is something about evil that calls for thinking. And Wittgenstein's remark about remaining silent can be countered by Martin Heidegger's suggestion that the proper subject matter for philosophical thinking is precisely what is "unthought" and even unthinkable.

The Christian tradition offers huge resources for our thinking about the nature, origin and meaning of evil. This is partly because the history of western philosophy is intimately bound up with Christianity, so that supposedly secular debates on morality and human nature usually involve theological ideas even if these remain implicit. But more specifically, the Christian doctrine of creation makes the question of evil particularly pressing. If the world was designed and brought into being by a perfectly good, just and all-powerful creator, why does it contain evil at all? If God did not create evil, where did it come from? And why would God make human beings capable of extreme cruelty?

In this religious context, the concept of evil becomes elastic, encompassing much more than pure wickedness. The Christian believer comes under pressure to explain the existence of various kinds and degrees of suffering, unpleasantness, deviation and disorder. In their discussions of the "problem of evil", theologians have distinguished between the "moral evil" of human wrongdoing and the "natural evil" wrought by destructive events like earthquakes and tsunamis. They have also had to worry about the apparently imperfect conditions of life itself – our mortality, our finite knowledge, and our limited power – which are sometimes described as "metaphysical evil". Why didn't God just make everything better?

by Claire Carlisle, The Guardian |  Read more:

Photograph: Bettmann/Corbis

Local Hero and Donald Trump

I make things up for a living. I don't get out much and I haven't allowed a newspaper in the house for thirty years, so I truly live in a world of fiction. I've got by with Louis B Mayer's definition of a documentary being a film without girls in it, while a semi documentary has one girl. Recently however, I've been obliged to confront reality head-on in the form of the film You've Been Trumped.

It turns out that an old piece of fiction of mine, Local Hero, bears unavoidable comparison with real life events in Aberdeenshire where the property developer Donald Trump is building his "world class" golf resort, captured in Anthony Baxter's compelling work of factual observation. I watched the film recently at the Shetland Film Festival. So here's my report from the front, the border between fiction and fact.

Page one of the writer's handbook tells you that it's characters that make a story and not the other way about. This is certainly true of the local heroines and heroes in You've Been Trumped. Although they share a truly awful predicament, it's the special nature of each individual's developing reactions, revealed in measured intimate sequences, that delivers the true human dimension to the events.

In a manifestly bleak scenario these human qualities start to show through. This isn't feel-good Hollywood stuff though; we're watching real lives and livelihoods mercilessly put to hazard by a malign concoction of egotistical bullying, corporate muscle flexing, craven averting of gaze by national politicians right to the very top and crass misreading of events by local authorities including police.

With the rest of the audience that day I came out into the daylight dazed and shocked, with a numb feeling of individual impotence. Our usually unchallenged feeling of smug security as citizens of a mature democracy had been rocked. (...)

This takes me to my very own villain, Happer, in my film Local Hero. Even 30 years ago as a young tyro writer (I wasn't even drawing arcs in those days) I had the nous to flesh out my baddie, to endow with him with enough personal facets to keep an audience interested, and to create for them at least the facsimile of a human being with which to engage.

For a start, there was his name; Felix Happer, Mister Happy Happy. In reality he was the man with everything but happiness. But I gave him interests and foibles; a fascination with astronomy, a love of the night sky, that, granted, became sadly a clinical obsession.

But crucially he had some personal insight. His instincts told him that his untrammelled ego needed a measure of outside control. So he had regular sessions with an expensive abuse therapist who on demand verbally assaulted him, but who by the end of the film was happily quoting for more physical sessions at an enhanced hourly rate.

by Bill Forsyth, The Guardian |  Read more:
Photograph: David Moir/Reuters

Neighbors

[ed. See also:  The Long Shot.]

Bringing the search for another Earth about as close as it will ever get, a team of European astronomers was scheduled to announce on Wednesday that it had found a planet the same mass as Earth’s in Alpha Centauri, a triple star system that is the Sun’s closest neighbor, only 4.4 light-years away.

The planet is the lightest one ever found orbiting another star and — in the words of its discoverer, Xavier Dumusque, a graduate student at the Geneva Observatory — “it will surely be the closest one ever.”

It is presumably a rocky ball like our own, but it is not habitable. It circles Alpha Centauri B, a reddish orb about half as luminous as the Sun, every three days at a distance of only about four million miles, resulting in hellish surface temperatures of 1,200 degrees.

So this is not “Earth 2.0.” Yet.

Astronomers said the discovery raised the possibility that there were habitable Earthlike planets right next door and that methods and instruments were now precise enough to detect them.

“Very small planets are not rare,” said Mr. Dumusque, who is the lead author of a paper being published on Wednesday in Nature. “When you find one small planet, you find others.” He and his colleagues discussed the results on Tuesday in a news conference hosted by the European Southern Observatory in Garching, Germany.

Astronomers were electrified by the news of the planet, but also cautioned that it needed confirmation by other astronomers, not an easy task.

by Dennis Overbye, NY Times |  Read more:

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Alex Rodriguez, All American

Beyond the superhuman prerequisites—talent oozing out of pores, a decade or so of dominance, preferably a full head of hair—it's not quite clear what fans actually want in their all-time great baseball players. But it is clear that whatever that is, Alex Rodriguez isn't providing it. Which is weird at first glance, but less so when we look at who we're talking about here. For all the things that are permitted of baseball's generation-defining stars—and it's a lot, from transcendently prickly and prickish vanity, to being a colorful but nihilistic and doomed drunk—the one thing they are not allowed, it turns out, is being the way A-Rod is.

Rodriguez has had the tough part of immortality locked down for years—if he hadn't moved, without complaint, from shortstop to third base after joining the New York Yankees in 2004, he'd be regarded as the best shortstop ever to play the game; he probably is anyway. He has won three Most Valuable Player awards, five home run titles, and has a decent chance—he'd only need to hit 23 per season over the next five years—to hit more homers than any player ever to play baseball. Per Baseball Reference's formula, Rodriguez has been worth 111.4 Wins Above Replacement over his career; Albert Pujols, his nearest active competitor, has been worth 22.9 fewer. Rodriguez is not only one of the best prospects ever, he's one of the greatest baseball players in the history of baseball players. Everyone knows this, and it still doesn't matter.

It doesn't matter because whatever the other, ineffable things we seek in our all-timers are, Rodriguez not only lacks, but exemplifies their opposite. All-timers are allowed to be virtuous ciphers whose robo-hearts pump whole milk, but A-Rod, a buff android coated in marzipan and inauthenticity, can't even clear that low bar of dull verisimilitude—it's easy to imagine RoboCop (he works in private security now), John Tesh, and Mitt Romney chuckling together on Skype about how deeply inauthentic and distant and weird A-Rod seems when he's asked to answer even basic baseball player questions.

All-timers are also, under certain circumstances and within different generations' parameters for colorful-ness, allowed to be total weeping whiskey-filled garbage bags—from Babe Ruth to Mickey Mantle, the Yankees have had a special fondness for these sloshing four-finger pours of virtuosity. But, for all his travails—which include ill-advised dabblings in performance-enhancing drugs, a frosted-tip hairdo, and actual physical sex with Madonna—A-Rod can't quite pull that off, either. In all circumstances and in every way he comes off alien and affluence-perverted and so perversely and simultaneously self-regarding and oblivious that only the word "Miami" seems capable of summing it all up. His soul is upholstered in teal leather; his whole life is an overly air-conditioned and excessively security-guarded VIP section. This, for better or worse, is the best baseball player most fans presently alive have ever had the opportunity to watch play baseball.

In some ways, this is the fault of all those old, silly baseball biases—A-Rod has been simply too good at this sport, his mastery of it too transparently and transcendently fluent, for the necessary struggle to scan. He hits home runs, and the natural response, upon watching the swing that launched the bomb, is "of course." It was once this way with all those graceful gliding plays at shortstop; it was this way as recently as his outlandishly great 2007 MVP season, during which he was 31 years old. The first sin that Alex Rodriguez committed was an original one—he was born effortless, and fans have never quite forgiven him for that. This is almost a poignant thing, until Alex Rodriguez himself comes into play.

by David Roth, Vice |  Read more: