Wednesday, October 24, 2012
I Like Rabbits
[ed. I like rabbits. I was out back today when I spied a little guy just near the edge of the yard. We eyed each for a minute then all of a sudden he started zipping around, in and out of the bushes, across the yard, around the side of the house, zipping back and forth just in front of me. You know how cats sometimes rip it up just to dissipate a little energy? It was like that. He knew I was standing there but spent three or four minutes just boinging around, showing off his speed. I feel for rabbits. They don't have much going for them -- they're cute but pretty much defenseless and look like filet mignon to predators. So they have to breed like...um, rabbits, just to stay in the game. And, I guess, get speedy. This little guy can come back and visit any time.]
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Netroots Bloggers Struggling for Survival
“It was infuriating,” Madrak recalled of the political moment that spurred her to start throwing her own commentary online. “I could see that they were fabricating the reasons for war. Blogging was what I did instead of throwing a brick through the window.”
She started her own site, called Suburban Guerilla, and it soon became one of the boldface blogs of the “Netroots,” a new network of engaged political progressives giving a voice they thought was missing in the mainstream press. In time, millions like her took to their own keyboards, and thousands of similar sites bloomed. The Netroots became the world’s first online grassroots political organizing effort, and the goal was nothing less than to remake the American political system by pushing Democrats leftward.
“We didn’t trust the traditional progressive movement—labor, the issue orgs, the party—because of a record of failure and futility,” writes Markos Moulitsas, founder of Daily Kos, in an email. “In turn, they didn’t like us petulant upstarts. A popular sentiment was, ‘What are those bloggers going to do, hit George Bush in the head with a laptop?’”
Now, however, the Netroots, which were once thought to do to the political left what evangelical Christianity was supposed to do to the professional right, are 10 years old. In that time they vaulted Howard Dean to within a scream of the presidency, helped Democrats take both houses of Congress and several statehouses across the country, and gave the party what many in the movement believed to be some much-needed spine.
But with another critical election two weeks away, politicians, political operatives, and even the bloggers themselves say the Netroots are a whisper of what they were only four years ago, a dial-up modem in a high-speed world, and that the brigade of laptop-wielding revolutionaries who stormed the convention castle four years ago have all but disappeared as a force within the Democratic Party.
Madrak’s example is typical. She blogs, she says, more than ever, up to 20 times per day. But traffic is a third of what it was at its peak, and instead of being able to make a living through ad dollars, she is forced to seek donations intermittently on her site.
“The days when people could be very influential in the blogosphere aren’t here anymore,” she said.
The beginning of the end, many of the current and former bloggers say, came during the great Democratic primary Civil War of 2007–08. Until then, the Netroots had been remarkably cohesive, lining up behind promising congressional and Senate candidates en masse to raise money and boost name recognition. Since Democrats had been rendered to minor-party status, disagreements were papered over.
But then came the wave election of 2006, and suddenly the presidency was in sight. But the Netroots, like most Democrats, were divided among Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and John Edwards. During that campaign, the political blogosphere on the left became less known for sparking offline activism and more known for epic fights among those with divided loyalties.
“I supported John Edwards,” Madrak said. “And the Obama people were very vehement about what they thought about it. And they up and left the site if they thought you were being irrational about Obama. I still don’t know where they went. They just up and disappeared.”
Although the Obama campaign raised a record amount of money online, they never quite made common cause with online activists.
“It has been a very testy relationship,” said Peter Daou, a blogger in the early days of the movement and now a political consultant. “He didn’t reach out. That was complained about in 2008, and during his presidency there has been a very bad relationship. They have been dismissive, and you want to look for a reason why the progressive blogosphere has fractured, that is it.” (...)
Part of the Netroots decline had to do with the inevitable maturing of the movement and the simple evolution of the Internet. Ten years ago the blogs were one of the few places on the Internet where it was possible to find out what was happening in real time, as even many establishment news organizations hadn’t figured out how to move their offline print and broadcast products to the Web.
That has long since been sorted out, and in the meantime, dozens of online-only news outlets have been likewise competing for clicks and crowding out some of the proud amateurs. The political conversation, like the rest of the online conversation, has moved to Facebook and Twitter, and the bloggers steeped in an earlier Internet culture have not been able to keep up.
“Some bloggers have learned how to play well with a very dynamic Facebook community, with a very dynamic Twitter community, but a lot just don’t have the mental bandwidth,” said Henry Copeland, CEO of Blogads, which sells advertising on the Internet. “You need a density of folks who are excited about doing it. All of this stuff requires a community, and as a blogger you want to be responding to other bloggers and be in the thick of it, and the thick of things has just moved in another direction.”
by David Freedlander, The Daily Beast | Read more:
CBS Announces Smells Like Teen Spirit – The Sitcom
[ed. Just kill me now.]
CBS has bought the rights to the sitcom, which was created by the writer behind The Big Bang Theory, Dave Goetsch. According to the Hollywood Reporter, the sitcom tells the story of a teenager who "forgoes Harvard and instead opts to launch a multibillion-dollar Internet company from his garage with the assistance of his sister, best friend and his 1990s indie-rock parents".
The title of the sitcom is, of course, the name of Nirvana's iconic 1991 hit single and is clearly designed to neatly wrap up the teenage protagonist's ambitions and his parents' past. It is not yet clear if Courtney Love has given her permission for the title to be used.
by NME | Read more:
Photo: via
Killer Stuff and Tons of Money
He finally pulls into his spot and immediately a man materializes, nosing around the back of the truck, but Avery has come mainly to buy, so once he unloads sawhorses and plywood, he locks his truck and we cruise the aisles. The gates don’t open for another three hours, but the “show” starts the minute Avery passes through the chain-link fence. By the time the unwitting public arrives, it will be over, the good stuff gone. There will likely be no great finds left. This is the show before the show, when dealers trade with one another out of their still unemptied trucks. Coffee cup in hand, Avery hunkers down the lanes. I follow. “Fresh blood,” he says, spotting a Ryder truck. A rental truck can mean that somebody has inherited an estate, or some other one-time circumstance. Amateurs. People who don’t do this for a living, who haven’t taken the time to research their stuff, who want to turn a quick buck. The objects are new to the market; they haven’t been floating around from show to show, the ink on the price tags faded or blurred illegible by rain. “Fresh tags can be good,” Avery says.
As we approach the Ryder truck, Avery scans the objects, like the Six Million Dollar Man with telescopic vision. Twenty feet away from the table, he sings a ditty into my ear: “I just made a hundred doll-ars.” He picks up a butter churn, a small glass canister with a wooden paddle wheel inside, pays the asking price of $40. “They made very few one-quart butter churns,” he says out of the dealer’s earshot, “because for all the work you did, you only got a little butter. You do the same amount of work in a two-quart churn and double the butter. Once they figured that out, they didn’t make too many of the one-quarts. They’re rare.” This bit of esoterica—and Avery has hundreds of such factoids—will earn him a clean C-note when he resells the one-quart churn for close to $200. This is my first five minutes in Avery’s world, and he makes finding treasure look easy. But the easy money is deceptive. Avery’s apparently effortless profit is the result of years of being on the scene, gleaning tips from other dealers, working at an auction house for minimum wage, studying obscure reference books. “It’s a long education,” he says. “You really don’t start until you spend $100. I can remember the first time I broke the $100 mark. It was traumatizing.”
Now the Ryder truck woman is unloading a variety of two-inch-tall, delicately shaped perfume bottles. Avery picks one up, asks how much. “Five bucks,” she says. It’s an anomaly to see Avery gingerly handling the fragile bottle. He was a wrestler in high school, and still has the wrestler’s form, a low center of gravity, with beefy arms and legs and a barrel chest. He has tattooed biceps, a wild mop of carbon-black curls, and a five o’clock shadow by noon. With his dark, deep-set eyes and heavy eyelashes, he’s handsome in a rugged, Bruce Springsteen way.
As the woman unloads more bottles, Avery picks up each one, asks the price. Same as before, five bucks. Finally he says, “How much for all of them?” He walks away with a shoe box of thirty antique perfume bottles for $100. Probably some woman who collected perfumes died and her collection, her lifelong passion, ended up in the hands of these people, who didn’t know its value, and—it would appear—didn’t care. Avery will later sell the bottles on eBay, most for $20 to $50 each, and one for $150. This is capitalism down and dirty, no guarantees, no regrets. There is a rebellious, outré air to the flea market, “suburban subversive,” one researcher called it, “libidinous,” said another.
“Flea markets,” Avery says, “are the carnal part of this business.”
by Maureen Stanton, Utne Reader | Read more:
Photo: Penguin Books
Bigger, Better Google Ngrams
The appeal of the Ngram Viewer was immediately obvious to scholars in the digital humanities, linguistics, and lexicography, but it wasn't just specialists who got pleasure out of generating graphs showing how key words and phrases have waxed and waned over the past few centuries. Here at The Atlantic, Alexis Madrigal collected a raft of great examples submitted by readers, some of whom pitted "vampire" against "zombie," "liberty" against "freedom," and "apocalypse" against "utopia." A Tumblr feed brought together dozens more telling graphs. If nothing else, playing with Ngrams became a time suck of epic proportions.
As of today, the Ngram Viewer just got a whole lot better. For starters, the text corpus, already mind-bogglingly big, has become much bigger: The new edition extracts data from more than eight million out of the 20 million books that Google has scanned. That represents about six percent of all books ever published, according to Google's estimate. The English portion alone contains about half a trillion words, and seven other languages are represented: Spanish, French, German, Russian, Italian, Chinese, and Hebrew.
The Google team, led by engineering manager Jon Orwant, has also fixed a great deal of the faulty metadata that marred the original release. For instance, searching for modern-day brand names -- like Microsoft or, well, Google -- previously revealed weird, spurious bumps of usage around the turn of the 20th century, but those bumps have now been smoothed over thanks to more reliable dating of books. (...)
Orwant, in introducing the new version on the Google blog, reckoned that these new advanced features will be of primary interest to lexicographers. "But then again," Orwant writes, "that's what we thought about Ngram Viewer 1.0," which he says has been used more than 45 million times since it was launched nearly two years ago. I was given early access to the new version, and after playing with it for a few days I can see how the part-of-speech tags and mathematical operators could appeal to dabblers as well as hard-core researchers (who can download the raw data to pursue even more sophisticated analyses beyond the pretty graphs).
by Ben Zimmer, The Atlantic | Read more:
How Patsy Grimaldi Is Getting His Good Name Back
If neither Patsy nor Grimaldi could be on the sign, Patsy Grimaldi was determined to put his stamp on the food. One morning earlier this month, he stood at the marble counter in front of Juliana’s refurbished coal-fired oven, auditioning two pizzaioli. Both were clearly nervous. And Patsy wasn’t making it easy. He didn’t like the way Jose Martinez, a 35-year-old with ten years of experience, threw flour on the board—Patsy showed him how to flick his wrist so it settled like a delicate layer of snow. He didn’t like the way 23-year-old Vinny Amato patted the dough—use your fingertips, not your palms—or the way he lifted it off the counter to stretch it with his fists; any true pizza man knows that will make the center too thin. “You get it?” Patsy asked as his fingers flew, nimbly caressing (“like a woman,” he used to say) a lump of dough into a perfect round. Then, perhaps realizing that he had to hire someone if Juliana’s were to open by the end of the month as planned, he added, “I know you are both professionals. But you have to do it my way.”
The prospect of pies done Patsy’s way—blister-edged discs topped with ingredients like fragrant tomatoes and his wife Carol’s homemade mozzarella—has had pizza geeks salivating since word first leaked last winter that the maestro was returning after nearly fifteen years in retirement. That Patsy would be serving his pies at 19 Old Fulton Street, the very spot on the Brooklyn waterfront where he and Carol had opened more than twenty years ago, would make them taste even better. But Patsy’s big comeback has been fraught. Ciolli, who continued to operate Grimaldi’s at 19 Old Fulton until this past December, when he was forced to move a few doors down after a bitter dispute with the landlord, has taken Patsy and Carol to court. Juliana’s, he claims in an affidavit filed last month, could slash his business by 30 percent or more. Patsy and Carol, he alleges, are trying to “steal back the very business they earlier sold to me.”
For Patsy, Juliana’s is more than just a swan song. “It’s a classic, almost Sicilian thing,” says Ed Levine, the editor-in-chief of the food blog Serious Eats and the author of Pizza: A Slice of Heaven. “This is about one thing: getting his good name back.” Even if the name he has to use to restore his legacy isn’t his own.
Never before has the city been the pizza wonderland it is today. You find great pies in Bushwick, the Village, Hell’s Kitchen—even midtown! And you can indulge in a kaleidoscope of styles. There are Sicilian slices at Di Fara; wood-fired Neapolitan pies with soupy centers at Franny’s and Motorino; Roman pies with their crackerlike crusts at Campo De’ Fiori; fried, lumpy, but delicious blobs called montanaras at Forcella and PizzArte. Sometimes it’s hard to remember that less than ten years ago—what the New York Times’ Frank Bruni once called “less self-conscious pizza times”—good pizza in New York meant only one thing: a coal-fired pie.
According to lore, pizza made its debut in New York in 1905, when the Neapolitan immigrant Gennaro Lombardi began using leftover bread dough to make pizza at his grocery store in Little Italy. The pies were cooked in coal-fired ovens, not out of any culinary pretension but because that was the technology of the day. The result was a pizza with a crust that was neither too thick nor too thin, a slightly charred bottom that lent a subtle smokiness, and distinct islands of sauce and fresh-pulled mozzarella.
The original Lombardi’s closed in the early eighties (a spinoff still operates in Noho), but not before giving root to New York’s three other great pizza families. Anthony Pero, who opened Totonno’s in Coney Island in 1924, worked there. So did John Sasso, who started John’s in 1929, and Patsy Lancieri, who opened Patsy’s in East Harlem in 1933. To a casual observer, their pies might have seemed interchangeable. But the four families have long defended their turf with the same ferocity of those other famous New York families (minus the violence and illegal sidelines). Louise “Cookie” Ciminieri, Anthony Pero’s granddaughter, still runs Totonno’s in Coney Island. She refuses to tell customers what goes into her sauce or whether there’s a touch of Romano cheese sprinkled on her pies. (Survey says? There is!) And she certainly would never deign to taste someone else’s pie. “I don’t eat anyone’s pizza,” she says brusquely. “Because then they turn around and say Totonno’s eats my pizza!”
by Jane Black, New York Magazine | Read more:
Photo: David Leventi
The Island Where People Forget to Die
One day in 1976, Moraitis felt short of breath. Climbing stairs was a chore; he had to quit working midday. After X-rays, his doctor concluded that Moraitis had lung cancer. As he recalls, nine other doctors confirmed the diagnosis. They gave him nine months to live. He was in his mid-60s.
Moraitis considered staying in America and seeking aggressive cancer treatment at a local hospital. That way, he could also be close to his adult children. But he decided instead to return to Ikaria, where he could be buried with his ancestors in a cemetery shaded by oak trees that overlooked the Aegean Sea. He figured a funeral in the United States would cost thousands, a traditional Ikarian one only $200, leaving more of his retirement savings for his wife, Elpiniki. Moraitis and Elpiniki moved in with his elderly parents, into a tiny, whitewashed house on two acres of stepped vineyards near Evdilos, on the north side of Ikaria. At first, he spent his days in bed, as his mother and wife tended to him. He reconnected with his faith. On Sunday mornings, he hobbled up the hill to a tiny Greek Orthodox chapel where his grandfather once served as a priest. When his childhood friends discovered that he had moved back, they started showing up every afternoon. They’d talk for hours, an activity that invariably involved a bottle or two of locally produced wine. I might as well die happy, he thought.
In the ensuing months, something strange happened. He says he started to feel stronger. One day, feeling ambitious, he planted some vegetables in the garden. He didn’t expect to live to harvest them, but he enjoyed being in the sunshine, breathing the ocean air. Elpiniki could enjoy the fresh vegetables after he was gone.
Six months came and went. Moraitis didn’t die. Instead, he reaped his garden and, feeling emboldened, cleaned up the family vineyard as well. Easing himself into the island routine, he woke up when he felt like it, worked in the vineyards until midafternoon, made himself lunch and then took a long nap. In the evenings, he often walked to the local tavern, where he played dominoes past midnight. The years passed. His health continued to improve. He added a couple of rooms to his parents’ home so his children could visit. He built up the vineyard until it produced 400 gallons of wine a year. Today, three and a half decades later, he’s 97 years old — according to an official document he disputes; he says he’s 102 — and cancer-free. He never went through chemotherapy, took drugs or sought therapy of any sort. All he did was move home to Ikaria.
Tuesday, October 23, 2012
Why Can't We Be Friends?
New research suggests that there may be some truth to this possibility—that we may think we’re capable of being “just friends” with members of the opposite sex, but the opportunity (or perceived opportunity) for “romance” is often lurking just around the corner, waiting to pounce at the most inopportune moment.
In order to investigate the viability of truly platonic opposite-sex friendships—a topic that has been explored more on the silver screen than in the science lab—researchers brought 88 pairs of undergraduate opposite-sex friends into…a science lab. Privacy was paramount—for example, imagine the fallout if two friends learned that one—and only one—had unspoken romantic feelings for the other throughout their relationship. In order to ensure honest responses, the researchers not only followed standard protocols regarding anonymity and confidentiality, but also required both friends to agree—verbally, and in front of each other—to refrain from discussing the study, even after they had left the testing facility. These friendship pairs were then separated, and each member of each pair was asked a series of questions related to his or her romantic feelings (or lack thereof) toward the friend with whom they were taking the study.
The results suggest large gender differences in how men and women experience opposite-sex friendships. Men were much more attracted to their female friends than vice versa. Men were also more likely than women to think that their opposite-sex friends were attracted to them—a clearly misguided belief. In fact, men’s estimates of how attractive they were to their female friends had virtually nothing to do with how these women actually felt, and almost everything to do with how the men themselves felt—basically, males assumed that any romantic attraction they experienced was mutual, and were blind to the actual level of romantic interest felt by their female friends. Women, too, were blind to the mindset of their opposite-sex friends; because females generally were not attracted to their male friends, they assumed that this lack of attraction was mutual. As a result, men consistently overestimated the level of attraction felt by their female friends and women consistently underestimated the level of attraction felt by their male friends.
by Adrian S Ward, Scientific American | Read more:
Illustration Kyle Staver-Adam and Eve with Goats, 2011 via:
No Respect
During sex my wife always wants to talk to me. Just the other night she called me from a hotel.
I drink too much. Last time I gave a urine sample there was an olive in it.
I haven’t spoken to my wife in years. I didn’t want to interrupt her.
I tell ya, my wife and I, we don’t think alike. She donates money to the homeless, and I donate money to the topless.
I was making love to this girl and she started crying. I said, “Are you going to hate yourself in the morning?” She said, “No, I hate myself now.”
I was such an ugly baby. My mother never breast fed me. She told me that she only liked me as a friend.
It's tough to stay married. My wife kisses the dog on the lips, yet she won't drink from my glass!
Last night my wife met me at the front door. She was wearing a sexy negligee. The only trouble was, she was coming home.
My family was so poor that if I hadn't been born a boy, I wouldn't of had anything to play with.
My wife and I were happy for twenty years… then we met.
My wife made me join a bridge club. I jump off next Tuesday.
My wife only has sex with me for a purpose. Last night she used me to time an egg.
Rodney Dangerfield (A True Original)
Kanji City - Kyoto (by COGLabTokyo)
“Kanji City” is a movie that portraits the landscape with Kanji, an ideogram whose shape of the letter embodies its meanings.
The City of Kyoto is shown with 16 kanji animations, each of which symbolizing a tree, river, temple, gate and so on.
via:
Redefining Sex Work
"It's been great, honestly," she told me a couple weeks ago at an Oakland Chinatown lunch spot, steam rising from the vermicelli bowl in front of her and fogging her lenses. She genuinely likes her clients, or at least as much as anyone can be expected to like the people they work with, and she appreciates the freedom of being able to set her own hours: "I don't have an alarm clock," she said. "I make breakfast every morning, I get to hang out with my friends whenever I want. This job affords me a lifestyle most people don't get."
Sex is one of those commodities that tends to be popular no matter how bad the economy is, and Parton said the Bay Area's booming tech industry — and its attendant cadre of young, lonely men who want an escort they're compatible with both sexually and intellectually — has been great for business. All told, with a rate in the several hundreds of dollars an hour, she can work between five and ten hours a week and still make far more than the vast majority of other 24-year-olds out there. Parton has met many of her friends through sex work, and it's via her involvement with the Bay Area chapter of the Sex Workers Outreach Project — a national advocacy group and decriminalization effort founded by and for sex workers in 2003 that's better known by its acronym, SWOP — that she's found her footing as an activist. "Honestly," she said, "my job is one of the most stable and rewarding things in my life
Parton is exceptionally well-adjusted by any measure — especially for someone working in a trade that's illegal and often maligned — but as it turns out, she's far from alone. In fact, she's but one example of what's beginning to look like an emerging breed of sex workers: educated, empowered, tech-savvy, and activism-oriented, honest about who they are and proud of what they do. They have iPhones and nose piercings and college degrees; they chronicle their experiences on Tumblr and are out to their families. They're primarily what are known in the industry as "indoor" sex workers — meaning they find clients mostly via the web, at online marketplaces like Eros and Redbook, rather than working on the street, and they tend to charge rates in the hundreds of dollars an hour. (...)
"The relationships between customers, managers, sex workers ... are incredibly varied and very nuanced," said Max Besbris, who conducted a sociological study of Oakland's sex trade as part of his honors thesis at UC Berkeley and is now a Ph.D candidate at NYU. "What we've seen is that there's a great deal of agency exercised by a lot of women and men who do sex work. But the laws basically reduce all relationships to exploitative ones."
The latest and highest-profile such proposed law is Prop 35, which appears on California's November ballot. It's a complicated measure, rife with legalese and referential to several different parts of the penal code, but essentially, Prop 35 would expand the definition of, and increase penalties for, human trafficking. On the surface, it sounds like one of those unequivocally positive ballot measures anyone can feel good about voting for — and, in fact, it's been endorsed by both of California's major political parties.
Advocates of Prop 35 — mostly law enforcement and those who work with victims of childhood sex abuse — argue that human trafficking is an epidemic in California and the laws as they currently exist don't adequately address the problem. But the ballot measure is also getting vehement criticism, much of it from within the sex industry itself: A number of victims' rights organizations have come out against it, arguing, for the most part, that a problem as complicated as trafficking deserves a more comprehensive solution, and many sex workers have raised fears about unintended consequences, specifically with regards to the fact that the proposed law would expand the definition of trafficking to anyone who benefits financially from prostitution, regardless of intent. "Prop 35 implicates a lot of adult consensual behavior," said Monet. "In my opinion, it's an erosion of sexual rights" — not a protection of human ones.
In Parton's eyes, it's not just that Prop 35 would further criminalize the kind of work she does. It's that it's predicated on the idea that that kind of work — the kind where all parties are participating by choice and no one feels exploited — is fundamentally impossible, that all sex workers are victims. And in that sense, Prop 35 isn't just an inconvenience — it's an affront to a political and social movement that's taken years to build.
by Ellen Cushing, East Bay Express | Read more:
Photo: Blair Hopkin
Everything Breaks Eventually
In the corner of Building 4, a massive complex at Ford headquarters in Dearborn, Michigan, the ghostly skeleton of a pickup truck endures a constant torment. The truck has no wheels, no bed, no seats, and no steering column—it’s just a vacant shell and a set of pedals. Inside, a pneumatic piston is positioned to press on the gas pedal over and over again, night and day. It’s a test of the whole accelerator assembly, but engineers are focused on one simple part—the hinge that connects the gas pedal to the frame.
Building 4 is Ford’s Tough Testing Center, where the company evaluates nearly all of its nonengine parts, from seat belts to axle assemblies. The facility is a monument to a dark truth of manufacturing: Even the best-engineered products fail. Some percentage of all mechanical devices will break before they’re expected to. “Companies come to me and say they want to be 100 percent failure-free after three years,” says Fred Schenkelberg, whose firm, FMS Reliability, estimates the lifespan of products. “But that’s impossible. You can’t do it.”Consider a few recent examples. In 2009, Mohawk Industries—one of the largest makers of carpeting in the country—was forced to discontinue an entire line of carpet tiles when the tiles failed unexpectedly, costing the company millions. In 2010, Johnson & Johnson had to recall 93,000 artificial hips after their metal joints started failing—inside patients. In 2011, Southwest Airlines grounded 79 planes after one of its Boeing 737s tore open in midflight. And just this past summer, GE issued a recall of 1.3 million dishwashers due to a defective heating element that could cause fires. Unexpected failure happens to everything, and so every manufacturer lives with some amount of risk: the risk of recalls, the risk of outsize warranty claims, the risk that a misbehaving product could hurt or kill a customer.
This is why the sprawling hangar-size rooms of Ford’s Building 4 are full of machines. Machines that open and close doors, robots that rub padded appendages on seats, treadmills that spin tires until they erupt in a cloud of white smoke. There’s even a giant bay where an entire Ford pickup is held up in the air by pistons that violently shake the vehicle by its suspension. Officially, Building 4 is about reliability, but it’s actually more about inevitability. Ford isn’t trying to ensure the gas-pedal hinge will never break. The company knows it will break; its engineers are trying to understand when—and how and why—this will happen.
Product failure is deceptively difficult to understand. It depends not just on how customers use a product but on the intrinsic properties of each part—what it’s made of and how those materials respond to wildly varying conditions. Estimating a product’s lifespan is an art that even the most sophisticated manufacturers still struggle with. And it’s getting harder. In our Moore’s law-driven age, we expect devices to continuously be getting smaller, lighter, more powerful, and more efficient. This thinking has seeped into our expectations about lots of product categories: Cars must get better gas mileage. Bicycles must get lighter. Washing machines need to get clothes cleaner with less water. Almost every industry is expected to make major advances every year. To do this they are constantly reaching for new materials and design techniques. All this is great for innovation, but it’s terrible for reliability.
by Joseph Flaherty, Wired | Read more:
Photo: Christopher Griffith
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