Fore!

[ed. Ehh...  not much worth posting today, so here's a classic. Makes me think of a hilarious Curb Your Enthusiasm episode when Larry decides to swipe a beloved 5-wood from the casket of his dead buddy at a funeral home and gets caught.]

On the par-3, 175-yard fourteenth hole at Riviera, I hit my tee shot a mere ninety yards and a physics-defying thirty degrees to the right—almost sideways. It’s a miracle I got my right leg out of the way, or I could have shattered it with the club. As I walked to the ball, I remarked to my friend that after seventeen years of playing this course I’d never seen someone hit a ball anywhere near where mine ended up. He had never seen it, either. “What’s more,” I said, “I couldn’t care less.” My friend was taken aback. But I meant it. I didn’t care, and I didn’t particularly care about the next shot, either. I felt liberated, not unlike the way I felt when my wife left me, except this time I didn’t take up skipping.

Finally, after years of pain and struggle, I had accepted the fact that I would never be a good golfer. No matter how many hours I practiced, no matter how many instructors I saw, how many books and magazines I read, or how many teaching aids I tried. Then it hit me. According to Dr. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s book “On Death and Dying,” Acceptance was the final stage of grief that terminal patients experience before dying, the others being Anger, Denial, Bargaining, and Depression. I was in the final stage! When I started thinking about it, I realized that I’d gone through every one of those stages, but not as a terminal patient . . . as a golfer.

My first stage: Anger. There was a time when I was always angry on the course. Driving fast in the cart. Throwing clubs. Constantly berating myself. “You stink, four-eyes! You stink at everything. You can’t even open a bottle of wine! You can’t swipe a credit card at the drugstore! You can’t swipe. And you’ve never even been to the Guggenheim. The Guggenheim! And call your parents, you selfish bastard!” Then I’d walk off the course and vow never to play again, only to return the following week for more of the same. I hardly ever finished a round. Once, I bought a brand-new set of clubs, and then, after a particularly terrible day, I gave them to the caddy at the sixteenth hole and left.

The Anger phase lasted for years, and then I entered the next phase, Denial. “All I need are some lessons,” I told myself. “Why should everyone else be able to do it and not me? Why are they good? I’m coördinated. I have a jump shot! I can go to my left. Obviously I have it in me. I have it in me! Next year, I’ll go to Orlando and spend a week taking lessons with Leadbetter. I don’t care what it costs. How can you spend a week with Leadbetter and not get better? It’s impossible.” But I did, and I didn’t.

by Larry David, New Yorker |  Read more:
Image:Vector_Golf by DaPino Webdesign

What's on Your Reading List?

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[ed. See also: The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Reader.]

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[ed. Reminds me of somebody I used to know. Oh no... It's that song!]

Sears Roebuck Catalogue Assembly Line 1942.
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Papinta (Caroline Hipple Holpin)

Book Art by Jonathan Callan.
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[ed. I read somewhere that every book is a Mystery if you never finish reading it.]

Smokey and the Bandit

[ed. This sounds pretty much like every federal agency I've ever encountered (and reminiscent of my own beloved state agency). Political manipulation, personnel transfers, budget cuts, administration lackeys, et al. Standard operating procedure for undermining objective regulatory oversight. In the end, government inefficiency just becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.]

There are sports franchise owners who, through civic-mindedness and steely pursuit of victory, win the admiration of their fans. Then there is Dan Snyder, owner of the Washington Redskins. Since the self-made advertising mogul bought the storied football franchise fourteen years ago, the team has had only two winning seasons, a sorry record widely attributed to Snyder’s penchant for micromanaging coaches and throwing money at expensive past-their-prime veterans rather than finding new talent. Yet that losing record hasn’t kept the billionaire Snyder from reaping record profits by exploiting every conceivable revenue stream—from jacked-up ticket prices to luxury skyboxes for lobbyists to charging fans to watch hitherto free team workouts. He sued a seventy-three-year-old grandmother who, after losing most of her assets in the housing crash, couldn’t afford to keep up payment on her season tickets. And when a Washington City Paper writer protested, Snyder sued him, too.

Two recent events further highlight Snyder’s imperiousness. The first is a renewed chorus of demands by everyone from Native American activists to the D.C. city council that the team change its inherently offensive name—to which Snyder last year responded, “NEVER—you can use caps.”

The second is the settling last fall by the National Park Service (NPS) of a whistleblower complaint over a secret sweetheart deal Snyder extracted nine years ago to give his Maryland home an unobstructed view of the Potomac River. It was a small concession in the grand scheme of things, the kind that the rich and powerful frequently wheedle out of government, especially back then, during the presidency of George W. Bush, when such favors were flowing like booze in a skybox. But its discovery set off a decade-long campaign of bureaucratic retribution over two administrations that nearly sent an innocent man to prison. The story of that little favor wonderfully (if depressingly) encapsulates the essential character of our times, in which average people who play by the rules are made to suffer by the blithe manipulation of those rules by the people at the top.

by Tim Murphy, Washington Monthly |  Read more:

Image: Dan Snyder, uncredited

Louis
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Wikipedia Vandalism

Snoop Dogg's Gin and Juice:

New Shelton wet/dry: Wikipedia Vandalism

Always be Squinching and Other Tricks from a Portrait Photographer

People pose for more pictures than ever these days, at their own and others' hands. And since we basically live our entire lives online, those pictures are more important than ever--now, any old romantic prospect or potential empoyer who knows your name can find a photo of you to go with it.

With that in mind, we asked portrait photographer Peter Hurley, whose recent video on “squinching" (squinching: narrowing your eyes slightly to create a confident look. No, not too much--that's squinting. Watch the video for more), went viral recently, to share with us tricks for how to look your very best when posing in front of the camera--even if you’re also the photographer.

Consider the Whole Face

I've got a slew of tips, but squinching and emphasizing the jawline are the first two I start with. The jawline is number one. The squinching is cool, believe me--if people can get people to squinch in front of their cameras, or if they're doing selfies, they're going to look way more confident and cooler--but if their jawline's not out, then it doesn't give them any definition around their face, so it doesn't really help them out anyway. So you have to get the jawline first, then throw in the squinch.

You can only move your mouth, eyes, and eyebrows. Those are the three things you can move on your face. I like to engage eyebrows. That's another thing that I'll work on down the road. But you don't necessarily have to. I've had clients say, "I can move my nostrils." I don't think it's really going to help your picture-taking ability--you're not going to get any more photogenic by flaring your left nostril slightly. Other than that it's really subtleties. It's really the subtle things that make the difference.

by Dan Solomon, Fast Company |  Read more:

Image: Peter Hurley

Synthetic Biology: Engineering Life To Examine It

Synthetic biology is an area of science devoted to engineering novel biological circuits, devices, systems, genomes or even whole organisms. This rather broad description of what "synthetic biology" encompasses reflects the multidisciplinary nature of this field which integrates ideas derived from biology, engineering, chemistry and mathematical modeling as well as a vast arsenal of experimental tools developed in each of these disciplines. Specific examples of "synthetic biology" include the engineering of microbial organisms that are able to mass produce fuels or other valuable raw materials, synthesizing large chunks of DNA to replace whole chromosomes or even the complete genome in certain cells, assembling synthetic cells or introducing groups of genes into cells so that these genes can form functional circuits by interacting with each other. Synthesis in the context of synthetic biology can signify the engineering of artificial genes or biological systems that do not exist in nature (i.e. synthetic = artificial or unnatural), but synthesis can also stand for integration and composition, a meaning which is closer to the Greek origin of the word. It is this latter aspect of synthetic biology which makes it an attractive area for basic scientists who are trying to understand the complexity of biological organisms. Instead of the traditional molecular biology focus on studying just one single gene and its function, synthetic biology is engineering biological composites that consist of multiple genes and regulatory elements of each gene. This enables scientists to interrogate the interactions of these genes, their regulatory elements and the proteins encoded by the genes with each other. Synthesis serves as a path to analysis.

One goal of synthetic biologists is to create complex circuits in cells to facilitate biocomputing, building biological computers that are as powerful or even more powerful that traditional computers. While such gene circuits and cells that have been engineered have some degree of memory and computing power, they are no match for the comparatively gigantic computing power of even small digital computers. Nevertheless, we have to keep in mind that the field is very young and advances are progressing at a rapid pace.

One of the major recent advances in synthetic biology occurred in 2013 when an MIT research team led by Rahul Sarpeshkar and Timothy Lu at MIT created analog computing circuits in cells. Most synthetic biology groups that engineer gene circuits in cells to create biological computers have taken their cues from contemporary computer technology. Nearly all of the computers we use are digital computers, which process data using discrete values such as 0's and 1's. Analog data processing on the other hand uses a continuous range of values instead of 0's and 1's. Digital computers have supplanted analog computing in nearly all areas of life because they are easy to program, highly efficient and process analog signals by converting them into digital data. Nature, on the other hand, processes data and information using both analog and digital approaches. Some biological states are indeed discrete, such as heart cells which are electrically depolarized and then repolarized in periodical intervals in order to keep the heart beating. Such discrete states of cells (polarized / depolarized) can be modeled using the ON and OFF states in the biological circuit described earlier. However, many biological processes, such as inflammation, occur on a continuous scale. Cells do not just exist in uninflamed and inflamed states; instead there is a continuum of inflammation from minimal inflammatory activation of cells to massive inflammation. Environmental signals that are critical for cell behavior such as temperature, tension or shear stress occur on a continuous scale and there is little evidence to indicate that cells convert these analog signals into digital data.

Most of the attempts to create synthetic gene circuits and study information processing in cells have been based on a digital computing paradigm. Sarpeshkar and Lu instead wondered whether one could construct analog computation circuits and take advantage of the analog information processing systems that may be intrinsic to cells.

by Jalees Rehman, 3Quarks Daily | Read more:

Image: uncredited

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Lykke Li

A Lonely Quest for Facts on Genetically Modified Crops

[ed. See also: The GMO Apple the Industry Hates.]

Kona, Hawaii - From the moment the bill to ban genetically engineered crops on the island of Hawaii was introduced in May 2013, it garnered more vocal support than any the County Council here had ever considered, even the perennially popular bids to decriminalize marijuana.

Public hearings were dominated by recitations of the ills often attributed to genetically modified organisms, or G.M.O.s: cancer in rats, a rise in childhood allergies, out-of-control superweeds, genetic contamination, overuse of pesticides, the disappearance of butterflies and bees.

Like some others on the nine-member Council, Greggor Ilagan was not even sure at the outset of the debate exactly what genetically modified organisms were: living things whose DNA has been altered, often with the addition of a gene from a distant species, to produce a desired trait. But he could see why almost all of his colleagues had been persuaded of the virtue of turning the island into what the bill’s proponents called a “G.M.O.-free oasis.”

“You just type ‘G.M.O.’ and everything you see is negative,” he told his staff. Opposing the ban also seemed likely to ruin anyone’s re-election prospects.

Yet doubts nagged at the councilman, who was serving his first two-year term. The island’s papaya farmers said that an engineered variety had saved their fruit from a devastating disease. A study reporting that a diet of G.M.O. corn caused tumors in rats, mentioned often by the ban’s supporters, turned out to have been thoroughly debunked.

And University of Hawaii biologists urged the Council to consider the global scientific consensus, which holds that existing genetically engineered crops are no riskier than others, and have provided some tangible benefits.

“Are we going to just ignore them?” Mr. Ilagan wondered.

Urged on by Margaret Wille, the ban’s sponsor, who spoke passionately of the need to “act before it’s too late,” the Council declined to form a task force to look into such questions before its November vote. But Mr. Ilagan, 27, sought answers on his own. In the process, he found himself, like so many public and business leaders worldwide, wrestling with a subject in which popular beliefs often do not reflect scientific evidence.

At stake is how to grow healthful food most efficiently, at a time when a warming world and a growing population make that goal all the more urgent.

Scientists, who have come to rely on liberals in political battles over stem-cell research, climate change and the teaching of evolution, have been dismayed to find themselves at odds with their traditional allies on this issue. Some compare the hostility to G.M.O.s to the rejection of climate-change science, except with liberal opponents instead of conservative ones. (...)

Like three-quarters of the voters on Hawaii Island, known as the Big Island, Mr. Ilagan supported President Obama in the 2012 election. When he took office himself a month later, after six years in the Air National Guard, he planned to focus on squatters, crime prevention and the inauguration of a bus line in his district on the island’s eastern rim.

He had also promised himself that he would take a stance on all topics, never registering a “kanalua” vote — the Hawaiian term for “with reservation.”

But with the G.M.O. bill, he often despaired of assembling the information he needed to definitively decide. Every time he answered one question, it seemed, new ones arose. Popular opinion masqueraded convincingly as science, and the science itself was hard to grasp. People who spoke as experts lacked credentials, and G.M.O. critics discounted those with credentials as being pawns of biotechnology companies.

“It takes so much time to find out what’s true,” he complained.

So many emails arrived in support of the ban that, as a matter of environmental responsibility, the Council clerks suspended the custom of printing them out for each Council member. But Mr. Ilagan had only to consult his inbox to be reminded of the prevailing opinion.

“Do the right thing,” one Chicago woman wrote, “or no one will want to take a toxic tour of your poisoned paradise.”

by Amy Harmon, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Jim Wilson 

How to Stay Dry Forever

I hate being rained on. I especially hate it when it's cold. You'd have thought that with all our 21st-century Google-Glass exploring-Mars engineering marvellousness, we would have made more progress on the problem of rain. But no. The umbrella is a few thousand years old and is nowhere near an optimal solution, especially in blustery windy weather. Wet-weather clothing works if you wear it, but most people don't because it looks so awful.

From a materials-science perspective, the best solution for the British weather would be an invisible waterproof coating that you can spray on the clothes you actually do want to wear. Excitingly such materials have now been invented; they borrow tricks from nature, and they may yet get us singing in the rain.

Traditional waterproofing involves materials that are hydrophobic – in other words molecules that repel water. Waxes and other oily materials fall into this category because of the way they share their electrons at an atomic scale. Water molecules are polar, which means they have plus and minus charged ends. Waxes and oils prefer their electrons more equally distributed and so find it hard to conform to the polarity of water, and in the stand-off they repel each other. Hence oil and water don't mix. This hydrophobic behaviour is bad for vinaigrettes but good for waterproofing.

Nature uses this trick too but is much better at it. Go into a garden during a rain shower and have a look at how many leaves repel water so effectively that water droplets sit like jewels glistening on their surface. Lotus leaves have long been known to have this superhydrophobic property, but no one knew why until electron microscopes revealed something very odd about the surface of the lotus leaf. There is a waxy material there, yes, but it is arranged on the surface in the form of billions of tiny microscopic bumps. When a drop of water sits on a hydrophobic surface it tries to minimise its area of contact, because it wants to minimise its interaction with the non-polar waxy material.

The bumps on the lotus leaf drastically increase this area of waxiness, forcing the droplet to sit up precariously on the tips of the bumps. In this, the Cassie-Baxter state, the droplet becomes very mobile and quickly slides off the leaf. So by manipulating just the bumpiness of its surface, lotus leaves are far better at repelling water.

The mobility of the droplets has another effect. By zooming around the surface of the leaf rather than sticking, the droplets of water collect small particles of dust, hoovering them up. This cleaning mechanism of these superhydrophobic surfaces is called the lotus effect.

by Mark Miodownik, Guardian | Read more:
Image: Alarmy

Ice Bowl II

[ed. The '67 Championship was one of the best NFL games in history (and I watched it on tv in Honolulu. Yea!). Here's a short six-minute video.]

The Green Bay Packers' playoff game Sunday against the San Francisco 49ers could be one of the coldest in NFL history, rivaling the subzero temperatures of the 1967 Ice Bowl.

Temperatures at Lambeau Field are expected to be -2F (-19C) at kick off, and by the fourth quarter may reach -7F (-21C), with wind chills approaching -30F (-34 C), according to the National Weather Service. The so-called Ice Bowl, the 1967 NFL championship game in which the Packers beat the Dallas Cowboys to advance to Super Bowl II, saw cold as severe as -13F (-25C), with a wind chill of -46F (-43C).

In these temperatures, exposed skin can become frostbitten in minutes and hypothermia can equally quickly. Players can huddle around giant heaters on the sidelines, but fans will have to take extra safety measures, such as dressing in layers and sipping warm drinks. The Packers plan to pass free coffee, hot chocolate, and 70,000 hand warmers, which fans can slip into gloves and jackets to provide warmth for up to 10 hours. (...)

Lambeau Field has a heating system buried beneath the turf to keep the field from freezing, but it failed during the Ice Bowl, leaving the sod feeling as though "someone had taken a stucco wall and laid it on the ground", according to journalist David Maraniss. The system was upgraded in 1997 to include 30 miles of heating pipes, so players on Sunday can expect softer landings.

The field should be relatively clear Sunday, with no snow in the forecast. The stands had been filled with snow during the week, but the team, continuing a popular tradition, invited members of the public to help shovel it for $10 per hour. Though Packers' tickets sell notoriously quickly, the severe forecast scared off many from buying seats to the playoff game, and the NFL threatened not to air the game on local TV if the team failed to sell out. Corporate partners of the Packers stepped in to assist, however, and helped the team avert disaster for Wisconsin. (...)

The 1967 game took a major toll on players, said Ed Gruver, the author of a book called The Ice Bowl: The Cold Truth. Packers coach Vince Lombardi didn't let most of his players wear gloves, so several, including Hall of Fame quarterback Bart Starr, suffered varying degrees of frostbite, Gruver said. One Cowboys player had respiratory problems due to breathing in so much frigid air, he added, and Dallas quarterback Don Meredith's calls were inarticulate because his lips were frozen.

by Alan Yuhas, Guardian |  Read more:

Image: Wesley Hitt/Getty Images

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Duane Michals, Madame Schroedinger’s Cat, 1998
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The Hard-Won Lessons of the Solitary Years

When my then-boyfriend Mark lost the lease on his Brooklyn apartment, moving in together made good sense. We were in our 40s, both battle-scarred from decades of romantic unhappiness, and had finally found the relationship we had longed for our entire lives. So even though the timing was bad (we had been dating for only six months), we knew where this was headed. Why wait?

“I’m ready to take it to the next level,” said Mark, while cooking chicken paprikash in his soon-to-expire apartment.

I watched this sweet, handsome man sauté onions, and my heart turned upside down. After two decades of dating guys who could barely commit to next week, here was a wonderful man who wanted to be with me, plain and simple.

I was thrilled — and terrified. Sure, Mark and I were having a glorious time: weekends picking apples in the Pennsylvania countryside, brunches at his favorite Mexican diner. But living together was different. Or at least I thought it would be. I couldn’t know for sure. Because, to my deep embarrassment, I was nearly 40 and had never shared a home with a boyfriend.

For most of my adult life, I was unattached. I spent my 30s with a slowly escalating fear that I would never find a partner. My anxiety wasn’t merely about getting older and supposedly less desirable in our youth-obsessed culture. I also worried that my single years were shaping me, hardening me into a woman too finicky and insular for a lifetime partnership.

I had noticed that friends going through breakups often took solace in the fact that they had learned from those failed romances. They had acquired important skills such as how to be vulnerable, how to set boundaries, how to listen and how to speak up. They had learned the art of compromise and forgiveness and how to love someone even when you don’t always like them. Through practice and repetition, they were mastering this exquisite, complicated dance, cultivating wisdom and muscle memory that could be successfully applied to future relationships.

I was glad my friends had found an upside to their heartache, but statements like those also made me nervous. If one learned how to have a happy partnership by trial and error, then I was missing crucial on-the-job training.

Even so, when it came to the particular question of whether Mark and I should move in together, I knew my concerns were valid. “It’s too soon, and for the wrong reason,” I told my friend Paul at a bar one night.

He shook his head, looked at the ceiling and said, “No wonder you’re single.”

by Sara Eckel, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Brian Rea

h/t YMFY