The Mourning Forest, Naomi Kawase (2007)
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Gait 101: Learning to Run More Naturally

Many beginning runners remark about how much they enjoy the new experience. They care little about the nuances regarding form, technique, or proper gait. As long as they are moving, accumulating mileage over a sustained period of time, they feel content and satisfied. But at the advanced and elite level of running, the concept of gait takes on an entirely new dimension of complexity, constant questioning, and evaluation by a coach or oneself.

But what is exactly meant by the term “gait?” In running, gait is typically defined as moving posture– the whole body’s forward progress, including the foot strike and pelvic position, to arm swing, head and knee movement. It’s not unusual for coaches, kinesiologists and other biomechanics experts, and elite runners to dissect each component of one’s gait. From this assessment, each element of the gait that’s viewed as “flawed” is “corrected”—the runner is told to lift the knee to this position, swing the arms that way, or hold the elbows this way.

Yet nothing is more natural than the biomechanics of human running. Or should be. With every step a runner takes, the limbs, trunk, head and spine participate in various combinations of movement, ranging from flexion, extension, and rotation, to abduction and adduction, along with the feet, which pronate, supinate, invert and evert. Only by understanding the normal ranges of motion can one detect “abnormal” movements so as to help assess an injury or observe for the potential of future injury.

More importantly, there’s no ideal running form. While all humans have the same basic running pattern—just like other animals—your gait is yours alone. In fact, it’s easy to recognize your training partner from a distance, even before the face comes into focus, because you know his or her unique running fingerprint. Even looking at the best athletes in professional sports, there’s one common feature—everyone’s movements are slightly different. Each golfer follows the basic swing, while at the same time each has a swing all his or her own; the same for every high-jumper, baseball pitcher, tennis player, or marathoner.

That is, unless something interferes with movement.

When something causes the gait to go astray, two things happen. First, there is the risk of getting injured because it meant something went wrong, and it will be reflected in running form in a subtle—or sometimes more obvious—way. There might be irregular movement in the hip joint causing the pelvis to tilt more to one side than the other, more flexion of one knee than the other stressing the hamstring muscles, too much rotation of the leg causing the foot to flair outward excessively, and erratic arm movements. The most common reason for this is muscle imbalance, and it forces the body to compensate by contracting certain muscles to keep the imbalance from worsening.

The second problem is that the body’s energy is being used inefficiently. A flawed running form will raise the heart rate more than usual, making one fatigue quicker, and resulting in a slower pace. Stretching can disturb the gait too—by making a muscle longer with a loss of power. By stretching muscles before running, it’s very possible to cause muscle imbalance.

Physical interference is most often the result of bad shoes or muscle imbalance, sometimes both. Stretching can disturb the gait too—by making a muscle longer with a loss of power. By stretching muscles before running, it’s very possible to cause muscle imbalance.

Another factor affecting is gait is poor postural habit. We sit in chairs too long or slump at our desks. We stand with poor posture and even walk with an irregular gait—all because somewhere along the way we allowed our bodies to get lazy. For many, these bad habits carry over to running.

by Dr.Phil Maffetone, Natural Running Center |  Read more:

Image: Uncredited

Why Etsy's Brave New Economy is Crumbling

One of the biggest consumer markets in the world resides in a river valley about 200 miles southwest of Shanghai. You can find almost anything you want in Commodity City's half-million stalls: baby bibs, knitting supplies, sundry types of underwear, T-shirts, glitzy jewelry.

The market is the literal and figurative heart of Yiwu, a metropolis of 1.3 million people that bustles under the sticky, industrial haze of Zhejiang province. Journalist Tim Phillips has called Yiwu the "Wall Street" of China's counterfeit goods industry—an accurate, if somewhat narrow, label. The city's factories flood the shelves of Commodity City and the rest of the world with a lot more than just knock-off iPhones and pirated Hollywood DVDs. They relentlessly pump out the type of cheap consumer goods you're used to seeing at shopping mall kiosks and street-side trinket stands.

It's in part because of factory cities like Yiwu that Etsy, an online marketplace that specializes in handcrafted goods, has become so successful. Since launching in 2005, Etsy has ridden an Internet-powered counter-industrial revolution, adding a personal and DIY touch to goods—everything from sweaters to Christmas ornaments. Craftsmakers have fled to Etsy to escape the price-cutting effects of big-box stores and their walls of factory-made products.The crafts marketplace has formed an alternate commercial universe with 30 million members and nearly 1 million stores, all ostensibly running on human labor and handmade goods.

It goes without saying that If Yiwu-type products began infiltrating Etsy, they'd upend the market—the same way Walmart destroyed your local department store or Barnes & Noble ended the era of the corner book shop.

Take a look at the "Infinity Ring," a delicate brass loop coated with a silver sheen and topped with rhinestones and crystal. In pictures of the factory where it's made, you can see rows of workers in surgical masks bent over dusty tables, not far from bulky industrial machines. From ports in Ningbo and Shanghai, the Yiwu Daihe Jewelry Corp. exports the ring to anywhere in the world at 50 cents a piece.

You can buy it on Etsy's most popular jewelry store for $15.

How? To most Etsy users, the obvious answer is that Laonato, the store, is buying the rings wholesale from the factory, then pawning them off as handmade goods, reaping a monstrous 2,900 percent profit. That practice is known as "reselling," and it's a subject of intense controversy on the site. But like with a lot of things on Etsy—where the entire economy operates behind the shroud of the Internet—easily drawn assumptions and reality rarely align as neatly as you'd expect.

As its leaders struggle to redefine the company's corporate identity, the blurry, ungraspable truth about the Infinity Ring hints of a chronic ailment at Etsy's core—one that could undermine the company’s ambitious plans and the marketplace as a whole.

by Kevin Morris, Daily Dot |  Read more:

Image: Jason Reed

Yume32ki, Summer School
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R. Crumb, Can't You See I'm Reading? 1984.
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Junku Nishimura
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Brain to Brain Interface

University of Washington researchers have performed what they believe is the first noninvasive human-to-human brain interface, with one researcher able to send a brain signal via the Internet to control the hand motions of a fellow researcher.

Using electrical brain recordings and a form of magnetic stimulation, Rajesh Rao sent a brain signal to Andrea Stocco on the other side of the UW campus, causing Stocco’s finger to move on a keyboard.

While researchers at Duke University have demonstrated brain-to-brain communication between two rats, and Harvard researchers have demonstrated it between a human and a rat, Rao and Stocco believe this is the first demonstration of human-to-human brain interfacing.

“The Internet was a way to connect computers, and now it can be a way to connect brains,” Stocco said. “We want to take the knowledge of a brain and transmit it directly from brain to brain.” (...)

Rao, a UW professor of computer science and engineering, has been working on brain-computer interfacing in his lab for more than 10 years and just published a textbook on the subject. In 2011, spurred by the rapid advances in technology, he believed he could demonstrate the concept of human brain-to-brain interfacing. So he partnered with Stocco, a UW research assistant professor in psychology at the UW’s Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences.

On Aug. 12, Rao sat in his lab wearing a cap with electrodes hooked up to an electroencephalography machine, which reads electrical activity in the brain. Stocco was in his lab across campus wearing a purple swim cap marked with the stimulation site for the transcranial magnetic stimulation coil that was placed directly over his left motor cortex, which controls hand movement.

The team had a Skype connection set up so the two labs could coordinate, though neither Rao nor Stocco could see the Skype screens.

Rao looked at a computer screen and played a simple video game with his mind. When he was supposed to fire a cannon at a target, he imagined moving his right hand (being careful not to actually move his hand), causing a cursor to hit the “fire” button. Almost instantaneously, Stocco, who wore noise-canceling earbuds and wasn’t looking at a computer screen, involuntarily moved his right index finger to push the space bar on the keyboard in front of him, as if firing the cannon. Stocco compared the feeling of his hand moving involuntarily to that of a nervous tic.

by Doree Armstrong and Michelle Ma, University of Washington | Read more:
Image: University of Washington

The Bee Hummingbird is the smallest bird on Earth.
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“Teuthology of the Deep” by Clara Jauquet

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The Failed Grand Strategy in the Middle East

In the beginning, the Hebrew Bible tells us, the universe was all "tohu wabohu," chaos and tumult. This month the Middle East seems to be reverting to that primeval state: Iraq continues to unravel, the Syrian War grinds on with violence spreading to Lebanon and allegations of chemical attacks this week, and Egypt stands on the brink of civil war with the generals crushing the Muslim Brotherhood and street mobs torching churches. Turkey's prime minister, once widely hailed as President Obama's best friend in the region, blames Egypt's violence on the Jews; pretty much everyone else blames it on the U.S.

The Obama administration had a grand strategy in the Middle East. It was well intentioned, carefully crafted and consistently pursued.

Unfortunately, it failed.

The plan was simple but elegant: The U.S. would work with moderate Islamist groups like Turkey's AK Party and Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood to make the Middle East more democratic. This would kill three birds with one stone. First, by aligning itself with these parties, the Obama administration would narrow the gap between the 'moderate middle' of the Muslim world and the U.S. Second, by showing Muslims that peaceful, moderate parties could achieve beneficial results, it would isolate the terrorists and radicals, further marginalizing them in the Islamic world. Finally, these groups with American support could bring democracy to more Middle Eastern countries, leading to improved economic and social conditions, gradually eradicating the ills and grievances that drove some people to fanatical and terroristic groups.

President Obama (whom I voted for in 2008) and his team hoped that the success of the new grand strategy would demonstrate once and for all that liberal Democrats were capable stewards of American foreign policy. The bad memories of the Lyndon Johnson and Jimmy Carter presidencies would at last be laid to rest; with the public still unhappy with George W. Bush's foreign policy troubles, Democrats would enjoy a long-term advantage as the party most trusted by voters to steer the country through stormy times.

It is much too early to anticipate history's verdict on the Obama administration's foreign policy; the president has 41 months left in his term, and that is more than enough for the picture in the Middle East to change drastically once again. Nevertheless, to get a better outcome, the president will have to change his approach.

With the advantages of hindsight, it appears that the White House made five big miscalculations about the Middle East. It misread the political maturity and capability of the Islamist groups it supported; it misread the political situation in Egypt; it misread the impact of its strategy on relations with America's two most important regional allies (Israel and Saudi Arabia); it failed to grasp the new dynamics of terrorist movements in the region; and it underestimated the costs of inaction in Syria. (...)

This is dangerous. Just as Nikita Khrushchev concluded that President Kennedy was weak and incompetent after the Bay of Pigs failure and the botched Vienna summit, and then proceeded to test the American president from Cuba to Berlin, so President Vladimir Putin and Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei now believe they are dealing with a dithering and indecisive American leader, and are calibrating their policies accordingly. Khrushchev was wrong about Kennedy, and President Obama's enemies are also underestimating him, but those underestimates can create dangerous crises before they are corrected.

by Walter Russell Mead, WSJ |  Read more:

Image: AP

Feel Free to Help Yourself

Several years ago, I was living in Washington with one of my brothers, who had come to stay with me while he pulled himself out of a rough patch. Eventually, he got a gig selling memberships at a gym, part of a well-known national franchise. No one in our family is a natural salesperson, but it was a job, and at least the gym is one place where my brother is in his element.

He had the closing shift, and he’d get home in his regulation polo shirt and raid the fridge just as I was going to bed. Pulling in a paycheck straightened his shoulders, as it does for anyone. Some of his wry humor returned, and so it was that one night he came in and, standing at the kitchen counter, recited “The Affirmation,” the creed that new gym employees had to learn by heart:

I will win. Why? I’ll tell you why—because I have faith, courage, and enthusiasm!
Today, I’ll meet the right people in the right place at the right time for the betterment of all.
I see opportunity in every challenge.
I am terrific at remembering names.
When I fail, I look at what I did right, not what I did wrong.
I have clearly defined goals.
I never take advice from anyone more messed up than I am.
I never let a negative thought enter my head.
I am a winner, a contributor, an achiever. I believe in me.

We laughed until there were tears on our cheeks, in part because of the mock enthusiasm with which my brother belted out that last line, but mostly at the idea that such earnest propaganda could ever be received—much less adopted—with a straight face. What kind of chump did these corporate types think he was?

But really, what was so ludicrous about a company that makes its money burnishing the temple of the body applying that same approach to the mind? Sure, it isn’t exactly a tune you can dance to. Still, “The Affirmation,” crude as it is, echoes some of the time-tested ideas of the self-improvement canon, old and new. Back in 1936, in How to Win Friends and Influence People, a folksy businessman’s bible that is really just a useful guide to not being a jerk, Dale Carnegie admonished his readers to “remember that a man’s name is to him the sweetest and most important sound in any language.” And in the 2006 blockbuster The Secret, various “experts” unrelentingly advocate using positive thinking to mobilize the “law of attraction” in your favor. “Your life is a mirror of the dominant thoughts you think,” but the law of attraction doesn’t register “words of negation,” says one of these authorities. (In other words, if you’re thinking “I don’t want the restaurant to give away our table,” what the universe hears is “I want restaurants to give away our tables.”) The Secretreminds me of another megaseller, The Da Vinci Code, with its pseudo-historical references and simplistic explanations peddled as deep insights. The law of attraction is bunk. But there really are some benefits to thinking positively.

The truth is, my brother could have done worse than take “The Affirmation” to heart. And at that point in my life, dating a string of men whom Dale Carnegie would have kicked to the curb, I could have, too. The main trouble with “The Affirmation” was the source—a company that wanted its workers to bristle with enthusiasm so they’d sell more memberships. That didn’t invalidate the message.

There’s a fundamental contradiction in our attitudes about self-help—a term that describes the broad category of products and ideas that are supposed to make us thinner, happier, smarter, and more efficient. We Americans accept protein powders, extreme diets, personal trainers, expensive gym memberships, and the Rube Goldberg exercise contraptions that litter our basements and garages as the necessary paraphernalia for the pursuit of physical perfection. We openly admire gym rats and envy their fit bodies. But anyone who dabbles in the improvement of the mind—even taking yoga that hasn’t had its spiritual roots bleached out completely—invites a raised eyebrow among those of us who consider ourselves serious people. We are above such lockstep platitudes, empty positivity, and pop psychology. (...)

With each mention of the current self-help book I was reading, I’d include a “research” disclaimer, afraid to risk the judgment or, worse, pity of those who’d now lump me with weak-minded housewives who fall prey to TV pitches for kitchen gadgets that can Do All This and More! for $29.95. That fear is another reason self-help provokes such profound unease in us. We assume it’s the opiate of the intellectual underclasses—the people who don’t know any better than to go in for that sort of thing. And that’s where we’re wrong.

The ethos of self-help is woven into American culture. It’s the literature of aspiration. The pursuit of happiness is embedded right there in the document that launched the American experiment. For centuries, religion has offered a strong tonic for those in need of backbone, upper-lip stiffening, moral guidance, or practical advice. The cultivation of good human relationships and moderation in both food and drink—two central preoccupations of the self-help industry—are touchstones of the Christian faith.

It’s hardly a coincidence that self-help is booming at a time when America is less religious than ever before.

by Sarah L. Courteau, Wilson Quarterly | Read more:

Image: Sheryl Sandberg by Nadine Rupp/Getty

Georgia Gerber bronzes
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Annie Oakley’s heart target by Annie Leibovitz
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P.M. Dawn

No, Thanks: I Won't “Support the Troops”

In addition to donating change to the troops, we are repeatedly impelled to “support our troops” or to “thank our troops.” God constantly blesses them. Politicians exalt them. We are warned, “If you can’t stand behind our troops, feel free to stand in front of them.” One wonders if our troops are the ass-kicking force of P.R. lore or an agglomeration of oversensitive duds and beggars.

Such troop worship is trite and tiresome, but that’s not its primary danger. A nation that continuously publicizes appeals to “support our troops” is explicitly asking its citizens not to think. It is the ideal slogan for suppressing the practice of democracy, presented to us in the guise of democratic preservation. (...)

The troops are now everywhere. They occupy bases and war zones throughout the Arab world and Central Asia and have permanent presence in dozens of countries. They also occupy every tract of discursive territory in the United States. The troops are our omnipresent, if amorphous, symbols of moral and intellectual austerity.

No televised sporting event escapes celebration of the troops. Networks treat viewers to stars and stripes covering entire football fields, complementing the small-but-always-visible flags the studio hosts sport on their lapels. The national anthem is often accompanied by fighter jets and cannon blasts. Displays of hypermasculine prowess frame the reciprocal virtues of courage and devotion embedded in American war mythology.

Corporate entities are the worst offenders. On flights, troops are offered early boarding and then treated to rounds of applause during the otherwise forgettable safety announcements. Anheuser-Busch recently won the Secretary of Defense Public Service Award and in 2011 “Budweiser paid tribute to America’s heroes with a patriotic float in the Rose Parade®.” The Army’s website has a page dedicated to “Army Friendly Companies”; it is filled with an all-star lineup of the Forbes 500 as well as dozens of regional businesses.

I do not begrudge the troops for availing themselves of any benefits companies choose to offer, nor do I begrudge the companies for offering those benefits. Of greater interest is what the phenomenon of corporate charity for the troops tells us about commercial conduct in an era of compulsory patriotism.

by Steven Salaita, Salon |  Read more:

Image: AP/Mark J. Terrill

Reducing Time Wasted in Law Schools

I don’t know it is going to make headlines, but the president came up with a suggestion during his “college affordability” bus tour that I and many other law school graduates would heartily endorse (per BuzzFeed’s Evan McMorris-Santoro):

As part of his bus tour focused on tough talk for school administrators and pushing the education establishment to help make schooling affordable, the president said it’s time for law schools to drop a year of classroom instruction. 

“This is probably controversial to say, but, what the heck, I’m in my second term, so I can say it,” Obama said. “Law schools would probably be wise to think about being two years instead of three years.” 

Obama said the third year of law school could be replaced with a paid job like an apprenticeship, which would create a dramatic reduction in costs for students. “The third year, they’d be better off clerking or practicing in a firm even if they weren’t getting paid that much, but that step alone would reduce the costs for the student,” he said.

It’s been a long time since I was in law school, and I gather schools have gotten better at offering practical experience both in-class and in out-of-class placements. But it’s long been a byword among young lawyers that an extraordinarily high percentage of instruction has been irrelevant to the actual practice of law, unless you take very seriously such chestnuts as the critical importance of learning to “think like a lawyer.” For one thing, an awful lot of law students, in my experience, have been “thinking like a lawyer” since about the third grade, which made them very unpopular children. More importantly, the cult of legal education seems to depend on the perpetuation of what amounts to an intellectual hazing system, where the student’s tolerance for tedious content, arbitrary testing, and self-imposed pressure is presumably preparation for the agonies of being on the low end of the professional totem pole for years.

by Ed Kilgore, Washington Monthly |  Read more:

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Jonas Löfgren, Nest, 2012. Mixed media.
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Learning How to Live

Stop what you’re doing. I don’t mean stop reading this, or whatever you’re doing while you’re reading (brushing your teeth, eating, waiting for the water to boil). I mean consider the possibility of stopping whatever your answer is to the conversational gambit, “And what do you do?” Try putting the appropriate response in the past tense: “I used to be [. . .]” It’s very likely, unless your interlocutor gives up on you at that point (as an academic sitting at a Cambridge “feast” once did, turning to her other neighbour for the rest of the meal when I told her I was a novelist), that the follow-up question will be: “So what do you do now?” You might attempt to circumvent this with “I used to be [. . .] but now I’m retired”, if you look old enough, or if you’re younger you could try, “I used to be [. . .] but now I’m vastly wealthy”, but the chances are that the next question will still be in the conceptual area of “What do you do now?”, such as: “How do you spend your time? What do you do with yourself? What are your hobbies?” If you wanted to avoid the whole party chatter thing (but what are you doing at this vacuous party, anyway?), you could say: “Unemployed, thanks to the government’s economic policy, and lacking the financial resources for hobbies to pass the time until I die.” Or in a more passive-aggressive mode just answer, “Oh, these days I skive and scrounge.” (...)

My father often used to tell me how my immigrant grandfather declined in health and spirit once he gave up the café he ran from dawn to late into the night in Petticoat Lane to retire to a leafy suburb. It was only a matter of time, my father said of the man I never met and knew almost nothing else about, before he died of having stopped work. I think this story is the equivalent of an urban myth of that generation. The decent man who worked all the hours that God sent and more, provided what he could (which was never lavish) for his family, toiled unceasingly in order to make sure his son went to a good school and got a profession, collapsed and died once he stepped off the treadmill.

I never doubted that retirement killed my grandfather. I did wonder sometimes why his devotion to work unto death was considered a virtue.

by Jenny Diski, New Statesman |  Read more:

Image: Magnet Reps

As Amazon Stretches, Seattle’s Downtown Is Reshaped

Often a corporation with a grand dream to reshape a city wants tax breaks in return. Not Amazon.

When Amazon executives showed up last year for the first meetings about their proposal to build a new headquarters here — three towers that would draw thousands of workers downtown — city officials were taken aback. Not by the scope of the plan, but by the simplicity of the discussion. The executives said they were ready to break ground immediately on what would be one of the biggest development projects in city history.

“It was not a hard-boiled negotiation,” said Marshall Foster, the director of city planning. “They basically walked in and said, ‘We think this is the site.’ ” A shovel-ready company that clear and confident, and with the cash to back it up, “doesn’t happen very often,” Mr. Foster added.

Jeffrey P. Bezos, Amazon’s founder and chief executive, has a reputation for the grand gesture, a knack for seizing an opportunity that can remake a landscape. His purchase of The Washington Post this month for $250 million cash, a bet that others might have shied away from, is a case in point.

Here, in his company’s hometown, Mr. Bezos has put his chips on the idea of Seattle and urban America itself. The first headquarters tower is already under construction, and the company currently occupies 14 smaller buildings nearby.

The result in South Lake Union, previously a low-rise, low-rent warehouse district with ties to the city’s gritty maritime past, is a flood of cash, construction detours and dust. Increases to the city’s tax base aside, some people are apprehensive about whether the growth could outstrip the city’s ability to keep up.

“South Lake Union was a place that people drove through, not to,” John Schoettler, Amazon’s director of global real estate and facilities, said in an interview. “Once we started development there, everything started to spring up around us.”

The once-empty streets are flooded at lunchtime with Amazon workers, easily identified by their blue employee badges. Fleets of food trucks have arrived, offering Thai, tacos and other fare. On a nice day, workers take their lunches to a park next to the Museum of History and Industry, which was recently renovated with a $10 million contribution from Mr. Bezos.

The company already has about 15,000 employees in Seattle, mostly highly paid engineers, managers and programmers, out of a global work force of about 97,000, according to people familiar with its head count who were not authorized to discuss a figure that the company does not share publicly. The new towers have a capacity for 12,000, giving the company room for nearly 30,000 workers in Seattle, which has a population of 635,000. (...)

“I think they’ve single-handedly defined a whole region,” said Bryan Trussel, the chief executive of Glympse, an Internet start-up with offices next to Amazon. “Now everyone wants to be there.”

by Kirk Johnson and Nick Wingfield, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: NBBJ

Road Trip

[ed. I've always thought a good road trip should have elements of transcendence and disaster (or, potential disaster) if it was ever to become a really great trip. Well, this one presented none of the latter (thankfully), and much of former, and it turned out great anyway. So now I've been wrong at least once in my life...

Down the coasts of Washington and Oregon, over to Portland, up the towering slopes of Mt. Hood and across the high deserts of Madras and Bend, over the rolling wheat fields of northern Oregon to the sparkling waters of the Deschutes River, on to The Dalles and the Columbia River Gorge, then Yakima and its abundant fruit orchards, and finally crossing the Cascades, homeward bound.

I'll spare you the travelogue and just say this is some truly magnificent country. And to think the most beautiful segment of the trip started in a town called Boring. (sorry about the blurry picture, my camera was malfunctioning and I had to bang it around a little before I could get it to work.)]