Tuesday, January 22, 2013
12 Rude Revelations About Sex
Sex, we have been led to believe, is as natural as breathing. But in fact, contends British philosopher Alain de Botton, it is "close to rocket science in complexity." It's not only a powerful force, it's often contrary to many other things we care about. Sex inherently sets up conflicts within us. We crave sex with people we don't know or love. It makes us want to do things that seem immoral or degrading, like slapping someone or being tied up. We feel awkward asking the people we love for the sex acts we really want.
There's no denying that sex has its sweaty charms, and in its most exquisite moments dissolves the isolation that embodied life imposes on us. But those moments are rare, the exception rather than the rule, says de Botton, founder of London's School of Life. "Sex is always going to cause us headaches; it's not something we can miraculously grow relaxed about." We suffer privately, feeling "painfully strange about the sex we are either longing to have or struggling to avoid."
If we turn to sex books to help us work out this central experience of our lives, we are typically assured that most problems are mechanical, a matter of method. In his own new book, How to Think More About Sex, de Botton makes the case that our difficulties stem more from the multiplicity of things we want out of life, or the accrual of everyday resentments, or the weirdness of the sex drive itself. Here are some of the most basic questions it answers. —The Editors
Why is sex more difficult to talk about in this era, not less?
Whatever discomfort we feel around sex is commonly aggravated by the idea that we belong to a liberated age—and ought by now to be finding sex a straightforward and untroubling matter, a little like tennis, something that everyone should have as often as possible to relieve the stresses of modern life.
The narrative of enlightenment and progress skirts an unbudging fact: Sex is not something we can ever expect to feel easily liberated from. It is a fundamentally disruptive and overwhelming force, at odds with the majority of our ambitions and all but incapable of being discreetly integrated within civilized society. Sex is not fundamentally democratic or kind. It refuses to sit neatly on top of love. Tame it though we might try, it tends to wreak havoc across our lives; it leads us to destroy our relationships, threatens our productivity, and compels us to stay up too late in nightclubs talking to people whom we don't like but whose exposed midriffs we wish to touch. Our best hope should be for a respectful accommodation with an anarchic and reckless power.
by Alain de Botton, Psychology Today | Read more:
Image via:
There's no denying that sex has its sweaty charms, and in its most exquisite moments dissolves the isolation that embodied life imposes on us. But those moments are rare, the exception rather than the rule, says de Botton, founder of London's School of Life. "Sex is always going to cause us headaches; it's not something we can miraculously grow relaxed about." We suffer privately, feeling "painfully strange about the sex we are either longing to have or struggling to avoid."If we turn to sex books to help us work out this central experience of our lives, we are typically assured that most problems are mechanical, a matter of method. In his own new book, How to Think More About Sex, de Botton makes the case that our difficulties stem more from the multiplicity of things we want out of life, or the accrual of everyday resentments, or the weirdness of the sex drive itself. Here are some of the most basic questions it answers. —The Editors
Why do most people lie about their true desires?
It is rare to go through life without feeling that we are somehow a bit odd about sex. It is an area in which most of us have a painful impression, in our heart of hearts, that we are quite unusual. Despite being one of the most private activities, sex is nevertheless surrounded by a range of powerfully socially sanctioned ideas that codify how normal people are meant to feel about and deal with the matter. In truth, however, few of us are remotely normal sexually. We are almost all haunted by guilt and neuroses, by phobias and disruptive desires, by indifference and disgust. We are universally deviant—but only in relation to some highly distorted ideals of normality.
Most of what we are sexually remains impossible to communicate with anyone whom we would want to think well of us. Men and women in love instinctively hold back from sharing more than a fraction of their desires out of a fear, usually accurate, of generating intolerable disgust in their partners.
Nothing is erotic that isn't also, with the wrong person, revolting, which is precisely what makes erotic moments so intense: At the precise juncture where disgust could be at its height, we find only welcome and permission. Think of two tongues exploring the deeply private realm of the mouth—that dark, moist cavity that no one but our dentist usually enters. The privileged nature of the union between two people is sealed by an act that, with someone else, would horrify them both.
What unfolds between a couple in the bedroom is an act of mutual reconciliation between two secret sexual selves emerging at last from sinful solitude. Their behavior is starkly at odds with the behavior expected of them by the civilized world. At last, in the semi-darkness a couple can confess to the many wondrous and demented things that having a body drives them to want.
It is rare to go through life without feeling that we are somehow a bit odd about sex. It is an area in which most of us have a painful impression, in our heart of hearts, that we are quite unusual. Despite being one of the most private activities, sex is nevertheless surrounded by a range of powerfully socially sanctioned ideas that codify how normal people are meant to feel about and deal with the matter. In truth, however, few of us are remotely normal sexually. We are almost all haunted by guilt and neuroses, by phobias and disruptive desires, by indifference and disgust. We are universally deviant—but only in relation to some highly distorted ideals of normality.
Most of what we are sexually remains impossible to communicate with anyone whom we would want to think well of us. Men and women in love instinctively hold back from sharing more than a fraction of their desires out of a fear, usually accurate, of generating intolerable disgust in their partners.
Nothing is erotic that isn't also, with the wrong person, revolting, which is precisely what makes erotic moments so intense: At the precise juncture where disgust could be at its height, we find only welcome and permission. Think of two tongues exploring the deeply private realm of the mouth—that dark, moist cavity that no one but our dentist usually enters. The privileged nature of the union between two people is sealed by an act that, with someone else, would horrify them both.
What unfolds between a couple in the bedroom is an act of mutual reconciliation between two secret sexual selves emerging at last from sinful solitude. Their behavior is starkly at odds with the behavior expected of them by the civilized world. At last, in the semi-darkness a couple can confess to the many wondrous and demented things that having a body drives them to want.
Why is sex more difficult to talk about in this era, not less?
Whatever discomfort we feel around sex is commonly aggravated by the idea that we belong to a liberated age—and ought by now to be finding sex a straightforward and untroubling matter, a little like tennis, something that everyone should have as often as possible to relieve the stresses of modern life.
The narrative of enlightenment and progress skirts an unbudging fact: Sex is not something we can ever expect to feel easily liberated from. It is a fundamentally disruptive and overwhelming force, at odds with the majority of our ambitions and all but incapable of being discreetly integrated within civilized society. Sex is not fundamentally democratic or kind. It refuses to sit neatly on top of love. Tame it though we might try, it tends to wreak havoc across our lives; it leads us to destroy our relationships, threatens our productivity, and compels us to stay up too late in nightclubs talking to people whom we don't like but whose exposed midriffs we wish to touch. Our best hope should be for a respectful accommodation with an anarchic and reckless power.
Image via:
The Vegans Have Landed
According to animal rights theory, respecting the interests of animals in this way would mean abolishing the use of them as resources. So we’d all have to become vegans who neither eat animals nor use any other animal products. Vegan advocates face a daunting challenge, though, since most of us have a strong prejudice in favour of humans. This makes it relatively difficult for us to empathise with non-humans, so we are reluctant to give up the spoils of animal domination — meat, eggs, cheese, wool, fur and leather — and exchange them for tofu, pleather (plastic leather) and animal liberation.
In the face of this inertia, some have asked us to imagine ourselves in the position of the animals that we exploit and kill. Jonathan Safran Foer puts this in the form of an alien invasion in his anti-factory farming treatise, Eating Animals (2009):
If we were to one day encounter a form of life more powerful and intelligent than our own, and it regarded us as we regard fish, what would be our argument against being eaten?Suppose that we are doing our usual thing of exploiting animals because they aren’t smart or powerful enough to fight back. An alien species that is smarter and more powerful than us lands on Earth and decides to follow our example by exploiting and killing us. Why shouldn’t aliens use their technological and cerebral edge to turn us into food, clothes, entertainment and research subjects, just as we do to animals now?
This is, of course, a sci-fi repackaging of the ‘Golden Rule’ — that is, one should treat others as one would like to be treated oneself. This argument resonates because most of us have picked up a version of ‘do as you would be done by’ somewhere along the way, no matter how secular our upbringings. Could it be, then, that if we want to be consistent with our own values, the animal activists are right that we need to go vegan?
We might object that there is something misleading about the alien scenario. It wants to make us see things from the animals’ point of view, yet fudges it by putting us in the animals’ place while maintaining our human cultural beliefs and cognitive abilities. There are certainly similarities between human and non-human experiences, especially when it comes to pain, but as with the Epsilons in Aldous Huxley’s novel Brave New World (1932) who are genetically designed to tolerate a subservient existence, we assume that cows, pigs, lambs and chickens who are raised on farms and killed in slaughterhouses do not suffer the horror and existential anguish that humans would in the same circumstances. This is why the alien hypothetical is something of a cheat, and equally why comparing factory farms to the Holocaust and human slavery rings false.
Even so, if animals want to avoid suffering and want to live, as surely they do, using them as resources violates those interests. Given that humans cause animals so much suffering and death while offering them so little in return, there’s no denying that for most other animals on this planet, we might as well be a malevolent invasion.
So, my objection to the alien invasion scenario is more sweeping. If we want to take the interests of animals seriously, then the biggest failure of the analogy is that it underestimates just how malign we are. Sure, if we were replaced as the dominant animals on the planet, we’d probably prefer the new ruling species to be vegan. But if aliens with superior technology and minds came here and were determined to treat us the way that vegan humans treat animals on this planet, we’d still be in serious trouble. Veganism would hardly figure as a safeguard of our wellbeing.
Universal veganism wouldn’t stop the road-building, logging, urban and suburban development, pollution, resource consumption, and other forms of land transformation that kills animals by the billions. So what does veganism do exactly? Theoretically, it ends the raising, capture and exploitation of living animals, and it stops a particular kind of killing that many vegans claim is the worst and least excusable: the intentional killing of animals in order to use their bodies as material goods.
Veganism, as a whole, requires us to stop using animals for entertainment, food, pharmaceutical testing, and clothing. If it were to become universal, factory farming and animal testing would end, which would be excellent news for all the animals that we capture or raise for these purposes. But it would accomplish next to nothing for free-roaming wild animals except to stop hunting, which is the least of their problems.
by Rhys Southan, Aeon | Read more:
Illustration: Salad by Till Nowak
Monday, January 21, 2013
Why You Truly Never Leave High School
Throughout high school, my friend Kenji had never once spoken to the Glassmans. They were a popular, football-playing, preposterously handsome set of identical twins (every high school must have its Winklevii). Kenji was a closeted, half-Japanese orchestra nerd who kept mainly to himself and graduated first in our class. Yet last fall, as our 25th high-school reunion was winding down, Kenji grabbed Josh Glassman by his triceps—still Popeye spinach cans, and the subject of much Facebook discussion afterward—and asked where the after-party was. He was only half-joking.
Psychologically speaking, Kenji carries a passport to pretty much anywhere now. He’s handsome, charming, a software engineer at an Amazon subsidiary; he radiates the kind of self-possession that earns instant respect. Josh seemed to intuit this. He said there was an after-party a few blocks away, at the home of another former football player. And when Kenji wavered, Josh wouldn’t take no for an answer. “I could see there was no going back,” Kenji explained the next morning, over brunch. “It was sort of like the dog who catches the car and doesn’t know what to do with it.”
The party was fine. For a while, Kenji wondered if he’d been brought along as a stunt guest—a suspicion hardly allayed by Josh’s announcement “I brought the valedictorian!” as they were descending the stairs to their host’s living room—though Kenji’s attendance was in the same spirit, really, just in reverse. (“This is the party I never got invited to in high school,” he told Josh at one point, who didn’t disagree.) At any rate, Kenji didn’t care. His curiosities were anthropological: He had no idea what it was like “to be a football player or a cheerleader, get out of high school, marry someone from your local area, and settle in the same area.” And his conclusion, by the end of the night, was: Nothing special. “It was just an ordinary party, one that might have been a little uncomfortable if we all hadn’t been a little drunk.”
You’d think Kenji’s underwhelmed reaction would have been reassuring. But another classmate of ours, also at that brunch, didn’t take it that way. Like Kenji, Larry was brilliant, musically gifted, and hidden behind awkward glasses during most of his adolescence; like Kenji, he too is attractive and successful today. He received a Tony nomination for the score of Legally Blonde, he has a new baby, he married a great woman who just happens to be his collaborator. Yet his reaction was visceral and instantaneous. “Literally?” he said. “Your saying this makes me feel I wish I’d been invited to that.”
“Well, right,” said Kenji. “Because that’s the way high school is.”
“And maybe the way life is, still, sometimes,” said Larry. “About wanting to be invited to things.” He’s now working on a musical adaptation of Heathers, the eighties classic that culminates, famously, in Christian Slater nearly blowing up a high school.
Not everyone feels the sustained, melancholic presence of a high-school shadow self. There are some people who simply put in their four years, graduate, and that’s that. But for most of us adults, the adolescent years occupy a privileged place in our memories, which to some degree is even quantifiable: Give a grown adult a series of random prompts and cues, and odds are he or she will recall a disproportionate number of memories from adolescence. This phenomenon even has a name—the “reminiscence bump”—and it’s been found over and over in large population samples, with most studies suggesting that memories from the ages of 15 to 25 are most vividly retained. (Which perhaps explains Ralph Keyes’s observation in his 1976 classic, Is There Life After High School?: “Somehow those three or four years can in retrospect feel like 30.”)
Psychologically speaking, Kenji carries a passport to pretty much anywhere now. He’s handsome, charming, a software engineer at an Amazon subsidiary; he radiates the kind of self-possession that earns instant respect. Josh seemed to intuit this. He said there was an after-party a few blocks away, at the home of another former football player. And when Kenji wavered, Josh wouldn’t take no for an answer. “I could see there was no going back,” Kenji explained the next morning, over brunch. “It was sort of like the dog who catches the car and doesn’t know what to do with it.”The party was fine. For a while, Kenji wondered if he’d been brought along as a stunt guest—a suspicion hardly allayed by Josh’s announcement “I brought the valedictorian!” as they were descending the stairs to their host’s living room—though Kenji’s attendance was in the same spirit, really, just in reverse. (“This is the party I never got invited to in high school,” he told Josh at one point, who didn’t disagree.) At any rate, Kenji didn’t care. His curiosities were anthropological: He had no idea what it was like “to be a football player or a cheerleader, get out of high school, marry someone from your local area, and settle in the same area.” And his conclusion, by the end of the night, was: Nothing special. “It was just an ordinary party, one that might have been a little uncomfortable if we all hadn’t been a little drunk.”
You’d think Kenji’s underwhelmed reaction would have been reassuring. But another classmate of ours, also at that brunch, didn’t take it that way. Like Kenji, Larry was brilliant, musically gifted, and hidden behind awkward glasses during most of his adolescence; like Kenji, he too is attractive and successful today. He received a Tony nomination for the score of Legally Blonde, he has a new baby, he married a great woman who just happens to be his collaborator. Yet his reaction was visceral and instantaneous. “Literally?” he said. “Your saying this makes me feel I wish I’d been invited to that.”
“Well, right,” said Kenji. “Because that’s the way high school is.”
“And maybe the way life is, still, sometimes,” said Larry. “About wanting to be invited to things.” He’s now working on a musical adaptation of Heathers, the eighties classic that culminates, famously, in Christian Slater nearly blowing up a high school.
Not everyone feels the sustained, melancholic presence of a high-school shadow self. There are some people who simply put in their four years, graduate, and that’s that. But for most of us adults, the adolescent years occupy a privileged place in our memories, which to some degree is even quantifiable: Give a grown adult a series of random prompts and cues, and odds are he or she will recall a disproportionate number of memories from adolescence. This phenomenon even has a name—the “reminiscence bump”—and it’s been found over and over in large population samples, with most studies suggesting that memories from the ages of 15 to 25 are most vividly retained. (Which perhaps explains Ralph Keyes’s observation in his 1976 classic, Is There Life After High School?: “Somehow those three or four years can in retrospect feel like 30.”)
The Jailhouse Now
[ed. Lanai City is looking pretty good these days (courtesy of Mr. Larry Ellison). They've even spruced up the old jailhouse.]
Photo: markk
Sunday, January 20, 2013
Sitting Is the Smoking of Our Generation
[ed. This is one of the best ideas I've heard in a long time, and so simple.]
As we work, we sit more than we do anything else. We're averaging 9.3 hours a day, compared to 7.7 hours of sleeping. Sitting is so prevalent and so pervasive that we don't even question how much we're doing it. And, everyone else is doing it also, so it doesn't even occur to us that it's not okay. In that way, I've come to see that sitting is the smoking of our generation.
Of course, health studies conclude that people should sit less, and get up and move around. After 1 hour of sitting, the production of enzymes that burn fat declines by as much as 90%. Extended sitting slows the body's metabolism affecting things like (good cholesterol) HDL levels in our bodies. Research shows that this lack of physical activity is directly tied to 6% of the impact for heart diseases, 7% for type 2 diabetes, and 10% for breast cancer, or colon cancer. You might already know that the death rate associated with obesity in the US is now 35 million. But do you know what it is in relationship to Tobacco? Just 3.5 million. The New York Times reported on another study, published last year in the journal Circulation that looked at nearly 9,000 Australians and found that for each additional hour of television a person sat and watched per day, the risk of dying rose by 11%. In that article, a doctor is quoted as saying that excessive sitting, which he defines as nine hours a day, is a lethal activity.
And so, over the last couple of years, we saw the mainstreaming of the standing desk. Which, certainly, is a step forward. But even that, while it gets you off your duff, won't help you get real exercise.
So four years ago, I made a simple change when I switched one meeting from a coffee meeting to a walking-meeting. I liked it so much it became a regular addition to my calendar; I now average four such meetings, and 20 to 30 miles each week. Today it's life-changing, but it happened almost by accident.
My fundamental problem with exercise has always been this: it took time away from other more "productive things." Going to the gym to take care of me (vs. companies, colleagues, family) seemed selfish. My American-bred Puritan work ethic nearly always won out. Only when I realized I could do both at the same time, by making exercise part of the meeting, did I finally start to get more exercise. This is one of those 2-for-1 deals. I'm not sacrificing my health for work, nor work for fitness. And maybe that's why making fitness a priority finally doesn't feel like a conflict. It's as easy as stepping out the door and might require as much as a change of shoes.
And, yet, it's true that some people will turn you down. Probably 30% of the people I ask to do these kinds of meetings say that they are not fit enough to do a walking meeting. I had one person tell me afterwards that they got more active for an entire month before our meeting, so as to not embarrass themselves on their hike with me. I don't judge the people who won't do a hiking meeting, and in most cases will choose to do another type of meeting with them (lunch or whatever) but I am also reminded of James Fowler and Nicholas Christakis's research from their related book, Connected. They observed that obesity spreads according to network effects; if your friend's friend's friend who lives a thousand miles away gains weight, you're likely to gain weight, too. And if that extended friend also loses weight, even if you're not in the same city, you're likely to lose weight, too. My goal is to be someone who socializes the idea that physical activity matters, and that we each matter enough to take care of our health.
And after a few hundred of these meetings, I've started noticing some unanticipated side benefits. First, I can actually listen better when I am walking next to someone than when I'm across from them in some coffee shop. There's something about being side-by-side that puts the problem or ideas before us, and us working on it together.
Second, the simple act of moving also means the mobile device mostly stays put away. Undivided attention is perhaps today's scarcest resource, and hiking meetings allow me to invest that resource very differently.
And, finally we almost always end the hike joyful. The number one thing I've heard people say (especially if they've resisted this kind of meeting in the past) is "That was the most creative time I've had in a long time" And that could be because we're outside, or a result of walking. Research certainly says that walking is good for the brain.
by Nilofer Merchant, Harvard Business Review | Read more:
Photo: uncredited
Hello Laptop, My Old Friend
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the evocative power of cast-off material, because the day that twentysomething piece appeared, my laptop died. It was a galling loss: it left me wandering around the house all morning, eating stale crackers and feeling like an unyoked mule before I figured out how to move forward again. I had a second laptop, I realized—an old one, stuffed into a bookshelf by my desk. It would be perfect. Yet I kept demurring. I’d retired that computer, with complicated feelings, years before. Put plainly, the machine—which I called Laptop, capital L: the genus particularized, like “God”—stands, even now, as one of the great, haunting loves of my young-adult life.
It was an affection born of shared interests and mutual experience. I bought Laptop when I was twenty, and for years after we were inseparable. We lived together in school, in the city, abroad, and back home—some ten towns on two continents in total, with short trips to several more in between. Laptop followed me to countless cafés, bounced through hostels, patiently waited at research libraries, and offered no complaint about the odd hours or the basic loneliness of his endeavors. I wrote college papers on him, then a thesis. Hundreds of pages later, he helped me compose my first magazine work. Laptop is an IBM T42: a stripped-down, strangely square model that was the standard issue at my university tech store. But he has a rare, marvellous keyboard—deep, well-defined, solid—and has proved indestructible. The only T42 I ever saw give up the ghost belonged to a friend who treated it badly—flinging it onto tables, hammering cruelly at its keys, and dropping it repeatedly—until, one day (I think there might have been spillage involved), she broke the unbreakable. That was around the time I started to suspect that people’s rapports with their laptops reveal more about them than we might want to know.
Here’s what I’ll tell you about mine, then, with the cool objectivity of sudden reacquaintance. Laptop is dusty these days. His shell is slightly scratched. But he’s still bright on the inside—even polished—thanks to the years of oiling by fingertips and palms. He bears the marks of his experience. The A, S, E, D, C, O, L, N, and M keys are worn down to a point of near-illegibility. There’s evidence of lots of activity on the BACKSPACE key—though, having just sifted through a bunch of writing from those years, I think maybe not quite enough. Crumbs were, and continue to be, a problem.
Still, he looks basically great. I turned him on. His hourglass spun. Half an hour later, after a long, groggy, somewhat painful-to-watch reveille, I found myself facing the desktop I’d worked on all those years. This is a little like trying on those weird pants that you wore in high school: memories, not all salutary, rush back; habits return; a mind-set reasserts itself, mocking the progress that you thought you’d made. For instance, e-mail. I’d nearly forgotten what a prolific, voluble, and capricious e-mailer I was for most of my early twenties; seeing Laptop’s home screen brought back an old feeling, and I found myself tempted to fire off a string of prolix missives. Other, obscurely related anxieties followed. Not long after I began to use Laptop again, I started to have strange dreams about failing to find gainful employment after school.
by Nathan Heller, New Yorker | Read more:
Illustration by Tim Lahan
Tupac Lane Welcomes You
Of course it’s not as if Vegas city council and Humpty Hump got together to decide that Tupac’s name should be immortalized on some grand boulevard. Like most streets in Las Vegas, virtually no one who lives outside of this particular subdivision needs to know it exists. Vegas, which has doubled in size since Tupac's death, has developed in the strange way that we build cities these days: as a collection of subdivisions with winding, lot-size-maximizing streets, that connect to collector roads, which connect subdivisions to strip malls and, of course, other subdivisions. This is the uniquely American exurban form that creates large gulfs between your as-the-crow-flies distances and the actual vehicle-miles-traveled between points A and B, putting strain on the Kelley Blue Book value of Trailblazers across the nation, gas budgets, the environment, public health… the list goes on.
"The area grew fairly slowly for a lot of years, and it was a very small community, and then it just exploded," says Mark Hall-Patton, an historian and administrator of Clark Countys museums. His expertise as an historian (and his incredible beard) are frequently put to use on the History Channel's "Pawn Stars." Also, he wrote an entire book about Las Vegas' street names, Asphalt Memories, "So we've got a number of street names that we probably wouldn't have had had we grown a lot slower." Like, to name a few: Pillow Talk Court, Simple Life Avenue, Magic Lamp Street and Fast Lane. There's also Internet Avenue, Purple Haze Street, Anchorman Way (incidentally, near Ferrell Street), and Elvis Alive Drive. There's Hole in 1 Street, Peaceful Dreams Street, Nature Scene Drive, Exotic Plum Ave, Edifice Avenue, Music Avenue, Backslash Avenue, and Coffee Grinder Court. There's even a street named for Grand Moff Tarkin. (You know, Grand Moff Tarkin? The guy who built the Death Star and blew up Alderaan with it?)
These are people's addresses, and while they might be used as mere labels, the apparent carelessness with which the city's streets have been named reveals the deep lack of civic spirit engendered by the housing boom. The unfortunate fact is that, if you build enough houses, you start to build cities. As anyone who has walked by Canal or Wall Street with his father can tell you, street names offer a connection to a city's past, a sobering reminder that even the grandest city in the nation was never an inevitability. Well, does Las Vegas' strange assortment of street names offer any similar lessons? (...)
The story of Bugsy Siegal [sic] Circle, at the fringes of Vegas, in a subdivision surrounded on three sides by desert, encapsulates the strangeness of the city's growth nicely. Here, I will paraphrase heavily from a 1997Las Vegas Review journal article, written by columnist Jane Ann Morrison, headlined, "Siegal Circle Misspelling a Serious Crime." A husband-and-wife team of developers, Raymond and Barbara Shapiro had wanted to name the street "Bree's Way," for their daughter, but realized that the city would take issue because it sounds too much like "Breeze Way"—a problem for 911 dispatchers (more on this later). They happened to be watching "Bugsy," at some point in this process—if only it had been named "Siegel"!—and it occurred to them: why not honor one of Las Vegas' true fathers, Bugsy Siegel? It didn't occur to them that before you put a name on a street sign, public records, and a handful of home addresses, you might want to double-check its spelling. One neighbor took issue with the street's name—"I'd rather live on Whispering Pines," he told theReview-Journal—but Mrs. Shapiro was quite pleased with it. "Shapiro thought it might be fun in the future to have a development with a slew of gangster street names like Big Al Capone Circle and Lucky Luciano Lane," the article continues. "'I think people would get a kick out of it—they like the gangster era,' she said."
If the Shapiros are at all typical, developers in Vegas seemed to recognize on some level that there was a glut of the product they were peddling. How does one differentiate between dozens of similar options in a city that is being built before your eyes, with little neighborhood history to draw upon as a reference? Well, what does Ms. Shapiro mean when she says that people will get a "kick" out of living on Lucky Luciano Lane? Perhaps that a cheekily named street would offer some way of piquing a potential buyer's interest when they're looking at vaguely-Spanish stucco home after vaguely-Spanish stucco home?2
Saturday, January 19, 2013
The Hoax of Digital Life
I once tried to talk somebody out of pursuing a mail-order bride, a young Filipino who for a relatively modest fee would agree to move to Spokane, Wash., and start a new life with a complete stranger. Among the many questions raised by this half-baked plan was: How could you marry someone you had never met?
The case of Manti Te’o, the Notre Dame linebacker and finalist for college football’s highest honor, and his fake dead girlfriend takes this question to a whole new level. How can someone claim to have fallen in love with a woman he never met?
The answer, in part, is what’s wrong with love and courtship for a generation that values digital encounters over the more complicated messiness of real human interaction. As my colleague Alex Williams reported in a widely discussed piece a few days ago, screen time may be more important than face time for many 20- and 30-somethings. “Dating culture has evolved to a cycle of text messages, each one requiring the code-breaking skills of a cold war spy to interpret,” said Shani Silver, 30, in the story.
Technology, with its promise of both faux-intimacy and a protective sense of removal, does not alone explain the bizarre and still unfolding story of Te’o, who claimed that the love of his life died of leukemia last September after also suffering from a serious car crash. […] Te’o never actually met his phantom lover. Never. No face time. The entire relationship was electronic. And yet she was likely to become his wife, according to Te’o’s father. […]
The woman either existed, and then died, or didn’t exist, and therefore couldn’t have died at such a young and tender age. […] The digital girlfriend, Te’o said in an interview last October, two months before he found out the fraud, “was the most beautiful girl I ever met. Not because of her physical beauty, but the beauty of her character and who she is.” […] There was a picture, from their online encounters, of a lovely woman, a Stanford student, supposedly. There was a voice, from telephone conversations, of someone as well. And that someone finally called him up in early December and said the whole thing was a hoax perpetuated by an acquaintance in California, according to Deadspin, which broke the story.
“The pain was real,” said Swarbrick. “The grief was real. The affection was real. That’s the nature of this sad, cruel game.” No, that’s the nature of people who develop relationships through a screen. […]
To fall in love requires a bit of unpredictable human interaction. You have to laugh with a person, test their limits, go back and forth, touch them, reveal something true about yourself. You have to show some vulnerability, some give and take. At the very least, you have to make eye contact. It’s easier to substitute texting, tweeting or Facebook posting for these basic rituals of love and friendship because the digital route offers protection. How can you get dumped when you were never really involved?
The case of Manti Te’o, the Notre Dame linebacker and finalist for college football’s highest honor, and his fake dead girlfriend takes this question to a whole new level. How can someone claim to have fallen in love with a woman he never met?The answer, in part, is what’s wrong with love and courtship for a generation that values digital encounters over the more complicated messiness of real human interaction. As my colleague Alex Williams reported in a widely discussed piece a few days ago, screen time may be more important than face time for many 20- and 30-somethings. “Dating culture has evolved to a cycle of text messages, each one requiring the code-breaking skills of a cold war spy to interpret,” said Shani Silver, 30, in the story.
Technology, with its promise of both faux-intimacy and a protective sense of removal, does not alone explain the bizarre and still unfolding story of Te’o, who claimed that the love of his life died of leukemia last September after also suffering from a serious car crash. […] Te’o never actually met his phantom lover. Never. No face time. The entire relationship was electronic. And yet she was likely to become his wife, according to Te’o’s father. […]
The woman either existed, and then died, or didn’t exist, and therefore couldn’t have died at such a young and tender age. […] The digital girlfriend, Te’o said in an interview last October, two months before he found out the fraud, “was the most beautiful girl I ever met. Not because of her physical beauty, but the beauty of her character and who she is.” […] There was a picture, from their online encounters, of a lovely woman, a Stanford student, supposedly. There was a voice, from telephone conversations, of someone as well. And that someone finally called him up in early December and said the whole thing was a hoax perpetuated by an acquaintance in California, according to Deadspin, which broke the story.
“The pain was real,” said Swarbrick. “The grief was real. The affection was real. That’s the nature of this sad, cruel game.” No, that’s the nature of people who develop relationships through a screen. […]
To fall in love requires a bit of unpredictable human interaction. You have to laugh with a person, test their limits, go back and forth, touch them, reveal something true about yourself. You have to show some vulnerability, some give and take. At the very least, you have to make eye contact. It’s easier to substitute texting, tweeting or Facebook posting for these basic rituals of love and friendship because the digital route offers protection. How can you get dumped when you were never really involved?
by Timothy Egan, NY Times | Read more:
Photo: Michael Conroy/Associated Press
Google and the Future of Search
[ed. I know, another article about search. I'm just beginning to get the implications of this technological battleground.]
Thinking about Google over the last week, I have fallen into the typically procrastinatory habit of every so often typing the words "what is" or "what" or "wha" into the Google search box at the top right of my computer screen. Those prompts are all the omnipotent engine needs to inform me of the current instant top 10 of the virtual world's most urgent desires. At the time of typing, this list reads, in descending order:
What is the fiscal cliff
What is my ip
What is obamacare
What is love
What is gluten
What is instagram
What does yolo mean
What is the illuminati
What is a good credit score
What is lupus
It is a list that indicates anxieties, not least the ways in which we are restlessly fixated with our money, our bodies and our technology – and paranoid and confused in just about equal measure. A Prince Charles-like desire for the definition of love, in my repetitive experience of the last few days, always seems to come in at No 4 on this list of priorities, though the preoccupations above it and below it tend to shift slightly with the news.
The list also supports another truism: that we – the billion components of the collective questioning mind – have got used to asking Google pretty much anything and expecting it to point us to some kind of satisfactory answer. It's long since become the place most of us go for knowledge, possibly even, desperately, for wisdom. And it is already almost inconceivable to imagine how we might have gone about finding the answer to some of these questions only 15 years ago without it – a visit to the library? To a doctor? To Citizens Advice? To a shrink?
That was the time, in the prehistory of about 1995, when our ideas of "search" still carried the sense of the word's Latin roots – a search was a kind of "arduous quest" that invariably involved "wandering" and "seeking" and "traversing". Not any longer. For those who are growing up to search in this millennium, it implies nothing more taxing than typing two words into a box – or, increasingly, mumbling them into a phone – and waiting less than an instant for a comprehensive answer, generally involving texts and images and films and books and maps. Search's sense of questing purpose has already gone the way of other pre-Google concepts, such as "getting lost".
That rate of change – of how we gather information, how we make connections and think – has been so rapid that it invites a further urgent Google question. Where will search go next? One answer to that question was provided by the billionaire double act of Sergey Brin and Larry Page, Google's founders, in 2004, when pressed about their vision of the future by the former Newsweek journalist Steven Levy.
"Search will be included in people's brains," said Page of their ambition. "When you think about something and don't really know much about it, you will automatically get information."
"That's true," Brin concurred. "Ultimately I view Google as a way to augment your brain with the knowledge of the world. Right now, you go into your computer and type a phrase, but you can imagine that it could be easier in the future, that you can have just devices you talk into or you can have computers that pay attention to what's going on around them…"
Page, generally the wilder thinker, was adamant, though. "Eventually, you'll have the implant, where if you think about a fact, it will just tell you the answer."
Nine years on, Brin's vision at least is already reality. In the past couple of years, a great advance in voice-recognition technology has allowed you to talk to search apps – notably on iPhone's Siri as well as Google's Jelly Bean – while Google Now, awarded 2012 innovation of the year, will tell you what you want to know – traffic conditions, your team's football scores, the weather – before you ask it, based on your location and search history. Page's brain implants remain some way further off, though both Google founders have lately been wearing "Google Glass" prototypes, headbands that project a permanent screen on the edge of your field of vision, with apps – cameras, search, whatever – answerable to voice-activated command. Searching is ever more intimately related to thinking.Outside Google HQ in Mountain View, California.
In this sense, the man who is, these days, in charge of the vast majority of the world's questing and wandering and seeking and traversing is called Amit Singhal. Aged 44, head of Google Search, he is a boyishly enthusiastic presence, who inhabits a much-mythologised office in Mountain View, California, somewhat in the way that the Wizard of Oz lived at one end of the Yellow Brick Road. Singhal is the man who pulls the levers that might just help you find a heart, or a brain, or the way back to Kansas. For a dozen years, he has taken over responsibility from Brin for writing and refining the closely guarded algorithm – more than 200 separate coded equations – that powers Google's endless trawl for answers through pretty much all of history's recorded knowledge. So far, he has never stopped finding ways to make it ever smarter and quicker.
by Tim Adams, The Guardian | Read more:
Photograph: Google/Rex Features
Deception Is Futile
Despite their fixation on the problem of deceit, government agencies aren’t interested in funding anything so abstract as basic research. “They want to buy hardware,” Honts says. But without an understanding of the mechanics of lying, it seems that any attempt to build a lie-detecting device is doomed to fail. “It’s like trying to build an atomic bomb without knowing the theory of the atom,” Honts says.
Take the polygraph. It functions today on the same principles as when it was conceived in 1921: providing a continuous recording of vital signs, including blood pressure, heart rate, and perspiration. But the validity of the polygraph approach has been questioned almost since its inception. It records the signs of arousal, and while these may be indications that a subject is lying—dissembling can be stressful—they might also be signs of anger, fear, even sexual excitement. “It’s not deception, per se,” says Judee Burgoon, Nunamaker’s research partner at the University of Arizona. “But that little caveat gets lost in the shuffle.”
The US Army founded a polygraph school in 1951, and the government later introduced the machine as an employee-screening tool. Indeed, according to some experts, the polygraph can detect deception more than 90 percent of the time—albeit under very strictly defined criteria. “If you’ve got a single issue, and the person knows whether or not they’ve shot John Doe,” Honts says, “the polygraph is pretty good.” Experienced polygraph examiners like Phil Houston, legendary within the CIA for his successful interrogations, are careful to point out that the device relies on the skill of the examiner to produce accurate results—the right kind of questions, the experience to know when to press harder and when the mere presence of the device can intimidate a suspect into telling the truth. Without that, a polygraph machine is no more of a lie-detector than a rubber truncheon or a pair of pliers.
As a result, although some state courts allow them, polygraph examinations have rarely been admitted as evidence in federal court; they’ve been dogged by high false-positive rates, and notorious spies, including CIA mole Aldrich Ames, have beaten the tests. In 2003 the National Academy of Sciences reported that the evidence of polygraph accuracy was “scanty and scientifically weak” and that, while the device might be used effectively in criminal investigations, as a screening tool it was practically useless. By then, other devices and techniques that had been touted as reliable lie detectors—voice stress analysis, pupillometry, brain scanning—had also either been dismissed as junk science or not fully tested.
But spooks and cops remain desperate for technology that could boost their rate of success even a couple of points above chance. That’s why, in 2006, project managers from the Army’s polygraph school—by then renamed the Defense Academy for Credibility Assessment—approached Nunamaker and Burgoon. The government wanted them to build a new machine, a device that could sniff out liars without touching them and that wouldn’t need a trained human examiner: a polygraph for the 21st century.
by Wired Staff, Wired | Read more:
Illustration Joyce P. Chan/The University of Arizona
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