The Big Year

[ed. See also: Audubon Christmas Bird Count.]

Homer, Alaska - A wayward Siberian bird seen last month not only caught the attention of local and Alaska birders, it brought another visitor thousands of miles just to tag it.

That sighting of a rustic bunting by Massachusetts birder Neil Hayward helped him tie the record of 748 bird species seen in one year set in 1998 by Sandy Komito.

Last Saturday, Hayward broke Komito’s record — if three provisional species sightings stand — when he spotted a great skua in the Atlantic Ocean off Cape Hatteras, N.C.

The rustic bunting came as a 40th birthday present for Hayward, who flew all the way from Fort Lauderdale, Fla., to spot the rare bird. With the help of Homer bird guide Aaron Lang of Wilderness Birding, Hayward easily saw the rustic bunting flying with a group of juncos at a bird feeder on Hohe Street.

“That was a nice way to spend my birthday,” Hayward said last week in a phone interview from his home in Cambridge, Mass., near Boston. “It was kind of fitting that happened in Alaska. Alaska has been such a big part of my Big Year.”

Non-birders might be familiar with the idea of a Big Year from the book, “The Big Year: A Tale of Man, Nature, and Fowl Obsession” by Mark Obmascik, or the movie based on it, “The Big Year,” starring Jack Black, Owen Wilson and Steve Martin. Wilson played Kenny Bostick, the character based on Sandy Komito.

In a Big Year, birders attempt to see as many species of birds as possible in North America in one year. Sometimes birders are in ruthless competition, as shown in the movie, but in 2013, Hayward was way ahead of any other birder.

by Michael Armstrong, Homer News |  Read more:

Image: Neil Hayward

[ed. Nice hat. I've never understood why hipsters went for a porkpie when a fedora is so much classier]
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Civilian Photography, Now Rising to New Level

Five years ago, the DJI Phantom 2 Vision would have seemed like a science fiction film prop or a piece of surveillance hardware flown only by the sexiest of superspies. But it is the first camera-carrying drone you may want to own — and you could do that without spending thousands of dollars.

This drone is an intelligent, remote-controlled air vehicle that can fly far out of direct line of sight of its operator. It can record great video and photo stills from a thousand feet in the air over whatever “target” you can imagine. If it loses the connection to its remote control, it can even use GPS to fly automatically back to its launching point and land by itself. It is just like what you see on the news, only smaller, with about 20 to 25 minutes of flying time and less aggressive missions.

I’m not exaggerating here: From the moment I opened the (huge) box containing this four-bladed flying machine and its remote control, I felt a degree of wariness that I imagine you’d feel if a bit of a stealth bomber fell off and landed in your backyard.

But once that wariness wore off, and I’d gotten over the complexity of the hardware, the one word to sum up the Phantom 2 Vision is fun. Oh, my goodness, this thing is fun.

The Vision is the latest quadrocopter from DJI, which has been in the business for a relatively short while. It’s not a toy by any means — and at $1,200, it is certainly not cheap. But it’s a world away from those tiny $20 remote-control helicopters that probably filled many a stocking this Christmas. The Vision is serious hardware.

by Kit Eaton, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Kit Eaton

A Speck in the Sea

Looking back, John Aldridge knew it was a stupid move. When you’re alone on the deck of a lobster boat in the middle of the night, 40 miles off the tip of Long Island, you don’t take chances. But he had work to do: He needed to start pumping water into the Anna Mary’s holding tanks to chill, so that when he and his partner, Anthony Sosinski, reached their first string of traps a few miles farther south, the water would be cold enough to keep the lobsters alive for the return trip. In order to get to the tanks, he had to open a metal hatch on the deck. And the hatch was covered by two 35-gallon Coleman coolers, giant plastic insulated ice chests that he and Sosinski filled before leaving the dock in Montauk harbor seven hours earlier. The coolers, full, weighed about 200 pounds, and the only way for Aldridge to move them alone was to snag a box hook onto the plastic handle of the bottom one, brace his legs, lean back and pull with all his might.

And then the handle snapped.

Suddenly Aldridge was flying backward, tumbling across the deck toward the back of the boat, which was wide open, just a flat, slick ramp leading straight into the black ocean a few inches below. Aldridge grabbed for the side of the boat as it went past, his fingertips missing it by inches. The water hit him like a slap. He went under, took in a mouthful of Atlantic Ocean and then surfaced, sputtering. He yelled as loud as he could, hoping to wake Sosinski, who was asleep on a bunk below the front deck. But the diesel engine was too loud, and the Anna Mary, on autopilot, moving due south at six and a half knots, was already out of reach, its navigation lights receding into the night. Aldridge shouted once more, panic rising in his throat, and then silence descended. He was alone in the darkness. A single thought gripped his mind: This is how I’m going to die. (...)

The first thing you’re supposed to do, if you’re a fisherman and you fall in the ocean, is to kick off your boots. They’re dead weight that will pull you down. But as Aldridge treaded water, he realized that his boots were not pulling him down; in fact, they were lifting him up, weirdly elevating his feet and tipping him backward. Aldridge’s boots were an oddity among the members of Montauk’s commercial fishing fleet: thick green rubber monstrosities that were guaranteed to keep your feet warm down to minus 58 degrees Fahrenheit, a temperature Montauk had not experienced since the ice age. Sosinski made fun of the boots, but Aldridge liked them: they were comfortable and sturdy and easy to slip on and off. And now, as he bobbed in the Atlantic, he had an idea of how they might save his life.

Treading water awkwardly, Aldridge reached down and pulled off his left boot. Straining, he turned it upside down, raised it up until it cleared the waves, then plunged it back into the water, trapping a boot-size bubble of air inside. He tucked the inverted boot under his left armpit. Then he did the same thing with the right boot. It worked; they were like twin pontoons, and treading water with his feet alone was now enough to keep him stable and afloat.

The boots gave Aldridge a chance to think. He wasn’t going to sink — not right away, anyway. But he was still in a very bad situation. He tried to take stock: It was about 3:30 a.m. on July 24, a clear, starry night lit by a full moon. The wind was calm, but there was a five-foot swell, a remnant of a storm that blew through a couple of days earlier. The North Atlantic water was chilly — 72 degrees — but bearable, for now. Dawn was still two hours away. Aldridge set a goal, the first of many he would assign himself that day: Just stay afloat till sunrise.

by Paul Tough, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Daniel Shea

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Fiona Apple

Silver Ball Revival

For $13, you can play pinball until your arms fall off at Seattle's working pinball museum.

The two-story storefront in Seattle's International District is filled with games from every era from the 1960s to today.

The museum, which houses about 50 or so machines, started in 2010 as one couple's obsession and grew to be something they wanted to share with others, or as Cindy Martin puts it: a good solution when they ran out of space in their garage.

"Any serious collector will tell you collecting these machines is an incurable disease," said Charlie Martin, her husband and business partner.

They keep the equipment fixed up — with some help from other collectors — offer brief historical information and "fun" ratings on small cards above the games and sell snacks, beer and soda to visitors from around the world.

The Seattle museum is one of a handful around the country celebrating a pastime that seems to be in the midst of revival.

by Donna Gordon Blankenship, AP |  Read more:

Image: Jim Young, Reuters

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Why Didn't the Creator of Hashtag Patent the Concept?

[ed. See also: How did the idea for hashtags originate on Twitter?]

For two reasons, primarily:

1. claiming a government-granted monopoly on the use of hashtags would have likely inhibited their adoption, which was the antithesis of what I was hoping for, which was broad-based adoption and support — across networks and mediums.
2. I had no interest in making money (directly) off hashtags. They are born of the Internet, and should be owned by no one. The value and satisfaction I derive from seeing my funny little hack used as widely as it is today is valuable enough for me to be relieved that I had the foresight not to try to lock down this stupidly simple but effective idea.

Chris Messina, Creator of the hastag via: Quora

Image via The Guardian

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Thinking Outside the (Big) Box

When my wife and I first visited the supersize Ikea in Red Hook, Brooklyn, in 2008, we didn’t take time to stop for the lingonberry jam or meatballs. Soon after we walked in, we just wanted to leave. We realized that the place was a crowded, labyrinthine mess lacking the adequate amount of staff to help us chose between the Ekby Hensvik and the Ekby Bjarnum. We left angry and exhausted, and we swore — for the sake of our marriage — never to return. Ikea, I thought, was just like Walmart or countless other big-box retailers that seemed to have embraced a Faustian bargain with their customers. The chains would sell absurdly inexpensive stuff — like a Lovbacken coffee table for $60 — but as a consequence, customers would have to put up with huge stores manned by small, often unhappy and unhelpful staffs.

One recent Sunday, however, my wife and I caved. We needed to buy four separate closets and all the interior trimmings, and Ikea was the only place we could find them for less than $600. Coincidentally, it was the same weekend in which I was reading “The Good Jobs Strategy,” by Zeynep Ton, a business professor at M.I.T.’s Sloan School of Management. Ton, 39, grew up in Turkey and spent several summers working at her father’s apparel factory, often sewing pockets for bathrobes. The job was, like many menial low-wage tasks, both pressure-filled and boring, and Ton wished she could find a way to make such workers happier. After a volleyball scholarship brought her to the United States as a young adult, she eventually dedicated her academic career to figuring out how to make low-paid work more rewarding for employees and employers alike.

In the last few years, Ton has become a revolutionary force in a field that would seem unlikely to generate many — the Kafkaesque-titled Operations Management. Her central thesis is that many of those big-box retailers have been making a strategic error: Even the most coldhearted, money-hungry capitalists ought to realize that increasing their work force, and paying them and treating them better, will often yield happier customers, more engaged workers and — surprisingly — larger corporate profits. This sounds Pollyannaish, sure, but a study co-authored by Marshall Fisher, a Wharton professor who specializes in retail-management studies, backs it up. For every dollar of increased wages, one retailer that was studied by Fisher brought in $10 more in revenue. For more-understaffed stores in the study, the boost was as high as $28.

The problem results from the way many companies consider their workers. Ikea, for instance, has more than 130,000 global workers. In order to manage all these people, it uses something called work-force-management software, which ensures that there are enough workers — but not too many — to handle the forecasted in-store shopping traffic. (Walmart, which has 16 times as many workers, does, too, as do most larger retailers.) The software typically codes workers as a cost — one of the biggest — and aims to find the most efficient number of employees that can handle expected traffic. A trip to a big-box store reveals this algorithm’s logic in practice. There always seem to be endless aisles of merchandise but no one to answer your questions.

Ton, however, argues that workers are not merely a cost; they can be a source of profit — a major one. A better-paid, better-trained worker, she argues, will be more eager to help customers; they’ll also be more eager to help their store sell to them. The success of Costco, Trader Joe’s, QuikTrip and Mercadona, Spain’s biggest supermarket chain, indicate, she argues, that well-paid, knowledgeable workers are not an indulgence often found in luxury boutiques with their high markups. At each of the aforementioned companies, workers are paid more than at their competitors; they are also amply staffed per shift. More employees can ask customers questions about what they want to see more of and what they don’t like, and then they are empowered to change displays or order different stock to appeal to local tastes. (In big chains, these sorts of decisions are typically made in headquarters with little or no line-staff input.) Costco pays its workers about $21 an hour; Walmart is just about $13. Yet Costco’s stock performance has thoroughly walloped Walmart’s for a decade.

by Adam Davidson, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Kelsey Dake

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Memory Recollection - Jim Campbell
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Colorado Stores Throw Open Their Doors to Marijuana Buyers

[ed. See also: Holding Our Breath and Colorado's recreational marijuana stores make history.]

Customers began lining up before dawn on Wednesday to take part in what they called a historic departure from drug laws focused on punishment and prohibition. Many had flown in or driven hours specifically to buy a bag of marijuana.

At the Medicine Man dispensary in Denver, which claims it is the closest marijuana retailer to the airport, as many as half the customers were from out of state, here for the first day that marijuana could be sold legally in Colorado.

The store’s owner, Andy Williams, said he had redesignated about 60 percent of his medical marijuana to be sold retail but worried that it would not be enough to meet the demands of the lines snaking out the door.

Despite the long lines, Mr. Williams said, people seemed thrilled to be able to walk into a shop, lay down $50 or $60 and openly buy the drug.

“This is Independence Day for the marijuana community,” he said. “People don’t like breaking the law. The burden has been taken off them. “

With security guards posted outside many stores and police and state officials watching closely, the day’s first sales appeared to go smoothly, officials said. “So far so good,” said Ron Kammerzell, director of enforcement for Colorado’s Department of Revenue.

Mr. Kammerzell said the state had eight investigators checking retailers’ licenses, inspecting packaging and labeling, and ensuring that stores checked each customer’s identification to see if they were 21 or older.

To supporters, Wednesday was a watershed moment in the country’s tangled relationship with the ubiquitous recreational drug. They celebrated with speeches, hailing it as akin to the end of Prohibition, albeit with joints being passed instead of champagne being uncorked.

To skeptics, it marked a grand folly, one they said would lead to higher drug use among teenagers and more impaired drivers on the roads, and would tarnish the image of a state whose official song is John Denver’s “Rocky Mountain High.” The governor of Colorado and the mayor of Denver both opposed legalization, and stayed away from the smoky celebrations on Wednesday.

While some 20 states allow medical marijuana, voters in Colorado and Washington State decided last year to go one step further, becoming the first in the nation to legalize small amounts of the drug for recreational use and regulate it like alcohol. Ever since, the states have been racing to devise rules detailing how to grow it, sell it, tax it and track it.

by Jack Healy, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Brennan Linsley/Associated Press

Vogue Italia Oct 2008 ‘The New Vision’ - Iris Strubegger by Mert & Marcus
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Slaves to the Algorithm

There are many reasons to believe that film stars earn too much. Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie once hired an entire train to travel from London to Glasgow. Tom Cruise’s daughter Suri is reputed to have a wardrobe worth $400,000. Nicolas Cage once paid $276,000 for a dinosaur head. He would have got it for less, but he was bidding against Leonardo DiCaprio.

Nick Meaney has a better reason for believing that the stars are overpaid: his algorithm tells him so. In fact, he says, with all but one of the above actors, the studios are almost certainly wasting their money. Because, according to his movie-analysis software, there are only three actors who make money for a film. And there is at least one A-list actress who is worth paying not to star in your next picture.

The headquarters of Epagogix, Meaney’s company, do not look like the sort of headquarters from which one would confidently launch an attack on Hollywood royalty. A few attic rooms in a shared south London office, they don’t even look as if they would trouble Dollywood. But my meeting with Meaney will be cut short because of another he has, with two film executives. And at the end, he will ask me not to print the full names of his analysts, or his full address. He is worried that they could be poached.

Worse though, far worse, would be if someone in Hollywood filched his computer. It is here that the iconoclasm happens. When Meaney is given a job by a studio, the first thing he does is quantify thousands of factors, drawn from the script. Are there clear bad guys? How much empathy is there with the protagonist? Is there a sidekick? The complex interplay of these factors is then compared by the computer to their interplay in previous films, with known box-office takings. The last calculation is what it expects the film to make. In 83% of cases, this guess turns out to be within $10m of the total. Meaney, to all intents and purposes, has an algorithm that judges the value—or at least the earning power—of art.

To explain how, he shows me a two-dimensional representation: a grid in which each column is an input, each row a film. "Curiously," Meaney says, "if we block this column…" With one hand, he obliterates the input labelled "star", casually rendering everyone from Clooney to Cruise, Damon to De Niro, an irrelevancy. "In almost every case, it makes no difference to the money column."

"For me that’s interesting. The first time I saw that I said to the mathematician, ‘You’ve got to change your program—this is wrong.’ He said, ‘I couldn’t care less—it’s the numbers.’" There are four exceptions to his rules. If you hire Will Smith, Brad Pitt or Johnny Depp, you seem to make a return. The fourth? As far as Epagogix can tell, there is an actress, one of the biggest names in the business, who is actually a negative influence on a film. "It’s very sad for her," he says. But hers is a name he cannot reveal.

by Tom Whipple, Intelligent Life |  Read more:

Image: Brett Ryder

At 407: My Grandfather's House and a Lost Era

We called it 407 after its address, 407 Highland Avenue—an early Victorian, a big house on a street of big houses. It had high ceilings, airy and claustrophobic at the same time, like a church. It had a cured smell, the comfortable pungence of a can of pipe tobacco or mink coats in closets. There were huge Oriental rugs, wingback chairs, and standup ashtrays. On tables were objects of crystal, bronze, and sterling silver with monograms—cigarette boxes, porringers, picture frames, and a tea set of architectural splendor. To me, at the age of ten or so, it all had the air of furnishings for a ritual, however outworn.

My grandfather, Henry Southworth Allen, Jr., was called Harry. (My father is the third with that name, and I am the fourth.) He was a managing partner at Spencer Trask, a Wall Street investment bank. It was a station in life that gave him much satisfaction. He bought 407 after the First World War. An artist had owned it once, and had added a studio that went up two stories, enclosing an exterior wall whose bedroom windows overlooked what became the living room. After bedtime, we children could peer down on the mysteries of grownups, the men backhanding logs into the fireplace and lighting the women’s cigarettes.

When the three Allen sons, my father and his two younger brothers, got together there on holidays, they had wary smiles, as if life at 407 were an inside joke. They had grace, too, gliding around in pleated trousers that hung from high nineteen-forties waists. They lightly hitched them up by the creases before they sat down; they held cigarettes at the last knuckle of their fingers and smoked only half of them. They had spent their youths on the right lists, for coming-out parties at the Ritz-Carlton or the Plaza. That was before the war. (...)

I was born in 1941; my grandmother died soon after, of asthma and heart disease, at the age of fifty-six. She and her death seemed to occupy 407, at the edge of our peripheral vision. My grandfather took refuge in a small, dark, ground-floor bedroom. He would lead me and my younger sister, Julie, in there, lift us up, and let us put one hand in his penny jar. We could keep all the pennies we could hold—a lesson in the fundamentals of capitalism.

He had a little potbelly, quick eyes, and a busy precision about him. In middle age he had learned to figure skate in the old style, gliding backward to draw figure eights. He believed in homeopathy. He was superstitious. If he saw a man on crutches during his morning ferry ride to Wall Street and then the market went down, he’d come home grumbling about the “goddam cripple.” After very bad days, he would throw away the necktie he’d worn.

Into the nineteen-forties, he still went to New York on Saturdays to work a half day in the old style. He would not return until evening. My father asked him once what he did with the other half of the day.

He said: “I have lunch with Kerensky and then we go antique shopping.”

Kerensky! Alexander Kerensky, who lived in New York then, had been the Prime Minister of Russia, the last chance for democracy before the Bolsheviks overthrew him. I love the bravado of this lie. The truth was, my grandfather spent Saturdays with his secretary and their son: he had another family.

I wrote a poem about this:

Grandpa had a mistress.
The mistress had a son.
When Grandpa died the cancelled checks
Would show what he had done.

My grandfather was everything to my father. My mother despised him. “He was such a phony,” she would say.

She resented him for allowing one and only one martini to be served before dinner. He kept a close eye on the drinking, a family disease. I suspect she also didn’t like having to fight him for my father’s loyalty. He insisted that my father—though not his younger brother, David—follow him to Wall Street, as if it were a family legacy. My grandmother thought that he should be an Episcopal priest, but she was overruled. I think he would have found the clergy tedious, but he found working as a bond broker tedious, too—and he lacked the knack for making money. As for my father’s own youthful ambitions, he mooned over two impossible romances: Broadway songwriting and going to sea, as he had read about it in Joseph Conrad. (...)

Near the end of his junior year, he quit Princeton to attempt a transatlantic sail in a thirty-six-foot Friendship sloop with two friends—a feat that was covered in at least one New York newspaper. The boat sprung a board five hundred miles out, and they had to pump their way back to Nova Scotia. While repairs were being made, my father got a job harpooning swordfish. He hated the cruelty of it.

He told me about his boyhood failures, perhaps to comfort me for mine. Once, at St. George’s, he was running down a football field with the winning pass arcing toward him, and dropped the ball. I was sorry he told me.

In Southport, before the Depression, my father crewed on a Star boat that tied for first in the Eastern championships. The skipper had already rented a flatcar to haul the boat to San Francisco for the Nationals. In the sail-off, the other Star went out looking for wind on a reach and found it, and that was that. So many almosts, so many not quites.

by  Henry Allen, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: courtesy Henry Allen

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Image: Harris Graber

Tara Keefe. Tequila!
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