Fellow Vegans, Please Stop Making Me Hate You

When I was young and self-hating, I used to not-really-jokingly tell people that I was a "queer writer vegan who hates other queer writer vegans." We can unpack the sadness of that statement at a later date; suffice it to say that I am a competitive attention-seeker, and when competitive attention-seekers are uncertain and immature, sometimes they blame others for their own insecurities rather than examining their own behaviors.

But I digress. Obviously, I no longer hate other queers or other writers. Duh. I do, however, still sometimes hate other vegans. At least, I hate the way some other vegans behave about the whole shebang.

Here's the thing. I've been a vegan for five years now, and I can say that there are a lot of facets of the lifestyle that I appreciate. For example, I like the fact that I eat a hell of a lot more fruits and vegetables than I did in my Dorito-and-Diet-Coke-reliant teenage years. I like that I am occasionally driven by sheer necessity to create new, exciting combinations of breakfast foods (such as peanut-butter-and-frozen-pea tacos, or peanut-butter-and-broccoli stir fry, or peanut-butter-and-one's-own-hand despair-pops). I like that a lot of the vegans I have met are chill folks willing to swap nutritional yeast recipes or let me steal a bite of their tofu breakfast burrito.

And, on the real, I like that I'm not creating any personal demand for factory-farmed milk and eggs. That's what drove me to becoming vegan in the first place, and while I don't talk about it much -- because, frankly, I wrestle with the ethics of avoiding chick-maceration while gorging on strawberries picked by exploited farmworkers -- it's still a pretty big part of why I avoid everything pushed on me by the Cheese Lobby.

However, these positives are far from universal. Veganism is, by nature, not for everyone. And the sooner everyone realizes that, the less inclined I will be to automatically make an Aggressively Placid Face at the next person to espouse the evils of honey at me.

Take what just happened in Detroit, for example. On Thursday, PETA, never known for being a font of rationality when it comes to animal rights, offered to pay the water bill for 10 city families who "pledged to go vegan for a month." Despite the fact that half of Detroit's residents are struggling to, say, flush their toilets or cook on the stove, PETA apparently took it upon itself to use a basic human necessity as leverage for "pledging" to forgo animal products.

Clearly, this is a moronic, unsustainable venture. I am not a resident of Detroit, but if a stranger approached me in my hour of desperation and told me to kill a man just to watch him die, I would 100 percent promise her that her target would be at the bottom of Lake Michigan within the hour. I wouldn't do it, of course, but so long as she was willing to fork over the moolah for utilities, I'd tell her whatever she wanted to hear.

Similarly, there's no indication that PETA will check in with these folks after supposedly ponying up cash for their needs. As of now, they seem content to throw a few pro-vegan pamphlets at families before jetting back to wherever animal rights executives go when they're not trying to raise a stink. In other words, this smells like a publicity stunt, and a half-assed one at best.

From an outside perspective, it appeared as if PETA wanted to cast itself as the wise savior who just needed to offer a tiny incentive -- i.e., water in your own home -- to spark the wonder of veganism within the hearts of Detroiters. In fact, it even graciously pointed out to its would-be beneficiaries that "by accepting our offer to go vegan, not only will families be getting an immediate financial boost and helping animals, if they stick with it, they’ll also lower their risk of obesity, heart disease, cancer, diabetes and strokes." Shut up, PETA. (...)

Again, most vegans I know do not behave this poorly to such a large degree. Many, in fact, understand that food is a personal experience, and that it's unacceptable to shame others for listening to their own bodies, putting their needs ahead of what they perceive to be important, or just frankly not really caring what they place in their face. But I think we've all known vegans who refuse to empathize with other humans in favor of empathizing with farm animals -- and that is no way to create social or environmental change in the long run. For one thing, that's a dickish way to behave, period. For another, it's not going to shift anyone's eating habits, except maybe in the opposite direction out of spite.

by Kate Conway, XOJane |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

Ryan Adams

Al Di Meola

The Map

via: The Map: A Palestinian Nation Thwarted and Speaking Truth to Power

Nasturtium ‘Aloha Red'
via:

Guy Walks Into a Bar

So a guy walks into a bar one day and he can’t believe his eyes. There, in the corner, there’s this one-foot-tall man, in a little tuxedo, playing a tiny grand piano.

So the guy asks the bartender, “Where’d he come from?”

And the bartender’s, like, “There’s a genie in the men’s room who grants wishes.”

So the guy runs into the men’s room and, sure enough, there’s this genie. And the genie’s, like, “Your wish is my command.” So the guy’s, like, “O.K., I wish for world peace.” And there’s this big cloud of smoke—and then the room fills up with geese.

So the guy walks out of the men’s room and he’s, like, “Hey, bartender, I think your genie might be hard of hearing.”

And the bartender’s, like, “No kidding. You think I wished for a twelve-inch pianist?”

So the guy processes this. And he’s, like, “Does that mean you wished for a twelve-inch penis?”

And the bartender’s, like, “Yeah. Why, what did you wish for?”

And the guy’s, like, “World peace.”

So the bartender is understandably ashamed.

And the guy orders a beer, like everything is normal, but it’s obvious that something has changed between him and the bartender.

And the bartender’s, like, “I feel like I should explain myself further.”

And the guy’s, like, “You don’t have to.”

But the bartender continues, in a hushed tone. And he’s, like, “I have what’s known as penile dysmorphic disorder. Basically, what that means is I fixate on my size. It’s not that I’m small down there. I’m actually within the normal range. Whenever I see it, though, I feel inadequate.”

And the guy feels sorry for him. So he’s, like, “Where do you think that comes from?”

And the bartender’s, like, “I don’t know. My dad and I had a tense relationship. He used to cheat on my mom, and I knew it was going on, but I didn’t tell her. I think it’s wrapped up in that somehow.”

And the guy’s, like, “Have you ever seen anyone about this?”

And the bartender’s, like, “Oh, yeah, I started seeing a therapist four years ago. But she says we’ve barely scratched the surface.”

by Simon Rich, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: Yann Kebbi

Inside Sun Noodle, the Secret Weapon of America's Best Ramen Shops

There were only about three or four ramen shops on Oahu when Hidehito Uki founded Sun Noodle in 1981. Ramen in America was pretty much just a cup of noodles you cook in the microwave. Uki — who had come to Hawaii from Japan to make and sell fresh ramen noodles — wondered how he could ever be successful.
Now, ramen shops have proliferated in cities from Los Angeles and New York to DC, Chicago, and even Milwaukee. People stand in line for ramen. Chefs create mash-ups of ramen and hamburgers, and people stand in line for those, too.

Behind the scenes of the so-called ramen boom of recent years is Sun Noodle. Over the last 33 years, the Hawaiian company has built three factories which pump out a combined 90,000 servings of ramen noodles per day. It sells these noodles to notable ramenya across America, including nine of New York Times critic Pete Wells' picks for the top 10 ramen destinations in New York. Ivan Orkin, one of Japan's most respected ramen chefs, says that Sun Noodle was the clear choice when he recently opened two restaurants in New York City. And Momofuku's David Chang, who is often credited with the rise of ramen in America, believes that Sun Noodle facilitated that boom. "It's an entire micro-industry they've created," he says. (...)

Sun Noodle Begins

A trip to Hawaii was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to an 19-year-old Hidehito Uki. He was working for a noodle factory in the Japanese countryside when he got the call from his father, who operated another noodle company named Unoki in Japan. His father's business partner had pulled out of their project in Hawaii just before it opened. The project was dead, but a noodle-making machine remained on-site. Did Hidehito want it?

Hidehito arrived in Honolulu in 1981. He didn't speak any English, and he didn't know anything about the Hawaiian noodle market. All he knew was that people in Hawaii were interested in noodles, particularly the local variety called saimin, a native Hawaiian noodle soup that is similar to ramen but made with egg noodles and topped with things like Spam. Saimin dates back the islands' plantation history, and was such a locally beloved comfort food that McDonald's already offered saimin on its menus in Hawaii by the time Hidehito arrived.

There were about 20 noodle manufacturers on the island of Oahu at the time, mostly churning out saimin noodles. There were a few ramen shops and plenty of instant ramen available, but Hidehito didn't find much in the way of fresh ramen as he launched Sun Noodle. The quality of the flour wasn't very good either. "I was so surprised, and I wondered if I could have a successful business in Hawaii," Hidehito says.

Getting that first customer did turn out to be a challenge. Hidehito's strategy was to bring samples to potential clients who didn't really understand what he was offering after years of working with instant noodles. They didn't want to eat Hidehito's noodles with their unfamiliarly firm texture, a result of the alkalinity that is key to fresh ramen noodles. He would listen to their feedback, return to his factory, and make the noodles again. Hidehito went back and forth about 15 times with Ezogiku, a small Japanese ramen shop that had opened its first international location in Hawaii seven years earlier. The owners were impressed, and Ezogiku became Sun Noodle's first customer. More customers came. (...)

Sun Noodle has a reputation for working with chefs to create a noodle that best complements their broth recipe. At the New Jersey factory, there are 40 recipes for dough on the master sheet. Each of these can be cut differently — wavy, straight, thick, thin — meaning that there are altogether about 120 types of ramen noodle produced on just one assembly line in the 10,000-square-foot factory. "Can you imagine a bakery that makes 75 kinds of bread, 80 kinds of bread?" Orkin asks.

And Sun Noodle is obsessive about the quality of each of these 120 types of ramen noodles. Every detail matters, starting with the flour. Sun Noodle uses eight different types of flour from suppliers in Canada, Australia, and America, in various combinations. The flour is tempered for at least eight hours at a temperature between 62 and 67 degrees. The factory filters water on a reverse osmosis machine, and constantly measures the humidity of the factory to adjust the water levels correspondingly. Sun Noodle also adds kansui, a mix of sodium carbonate and potassium carbonate, to the water in order to reproduce the alkalinity of Japanese water that makes ramen noodles firm and springy.

by Amy McKeever, Eater |  Read more:

Image: Daniel Krieger

Failing the Third Machine Age

[ed. See also: And So It Begins.]

A cheerily written op-ed in the New York Times proclaims: “It’s time for robot caregivers”.

Why? We have many elderly people who need care, and children—especially those with disabilities—the piece argues, and not enough caregivers.

Call in the machines, she says:

“We do not have anywhere near enough human caregivers for the growing number of older Americans.”

This how to fail the third machine age.

This is not just an inhuman policy perspective, it’s economically destructive and rests on accepting current economic policies and realities as if they were immutable.

Let me explain. When people confidently announce that once robots come for our jobs, we’ll find something else to do like we always did, they are drawing from a very short history. The truth is, there’s only been one-and-a-three-quarters of a machine age—we are close to concluding the second one—we are moving into the third one.

And there is probably no fourth one.

Humans have only so many “irreplaceable” skills, and the idea that we’ll just keep outrunning the machines, skill-wise, is a folly. (...)

But wait, you say, there’s a next set of skills, surely?

That has been the historical argument: sure, robots may replace us, but humans have always found a place to go.

As I recounted, there are really only one and a maybe two thirds examples of such shifts, so far, so forgive me if I find such induction unconvincing. Manual labor (one), mental labor (still happening) and now mental skills are getting replaced, we are retreating, partially into emotional labor—i.e. care-giving.

And now machines, we are told, are coming for care-giving.

We are told that this is because there aren't enough humans?

Let’s just start with the obvious: Nonsense.

Of course we have enough human caregivers for the elderly. The country –and the world— is awash in underemployment and unemployment, and many people find caregiving to be a fulfilling and desirable profession. The only problem is that we –as a society— don’t want to pay caregivers well and don’t value their labor. Slightly redistributive policies that would slightly decrease the existing concentration of wealth to provide subsidies for childcare or elder care are, unfortunately, deemed untouchable goals by political parties beholden to a narrow slice of society.

Remember: whenever you hear there’s a shortage of humans (or food), it is almost always a code for shortage of money. (Modern famines are also almost always a shortage of money, not food). Modern shortages of “labor” are almost always a shortage of willingness to pay well, or a desire to avoid hiring the “wrong” kind of people. (...)

Next, consider that emotional labor is all that’s left to escape to as humans workers after manual and mental labor have been already been mostly taken over by machines.

(Creative labor is sometimes cited as another alternative but I am discounting this since it is already discounted—it is very difficult, already, to make a living through creative labor, and it’s getting harder and not easier. But that’s another post).

US Bureau of Labor Statistics projects the following jobs as the ones with the largest growth in the next decade: Personal care aides, registered nurses, retail salespersons, home health aides, fast-food, nursing assistants, secretaries, customer service representatives, janitors…

It’s those face-to-face professions, ones in which being in contact with another human being are important, that are growing in numbers—almost every other profession is shrinking, numerically.

(No there won’t be a shortage of engineers and programmers either—engineers and programmers, better than anyone, should know that machine intelligence is coming for them fairly soon, and will move up the value chain pretty quickly. Also, much of this “shortage”, too, is about controlling workers and not paying them—note how Silicon Valley colluded to not pay its engineers too much, even as the companies in question had hoarded billions in cash. In a true shortage under market conditions, companies would pay more to that which was scarce).

Many of these jobs BLS says will grow, however, are only there for the grace-of-the-generation that still wants to see a cashiers while checking out—and besides, they are low-paid jobs. Automation plus natural language processing by machines is going to obliterate through those jobs in the next decade or two. (Is anyone ready for the even worse labor crisis that will ensue?) Machines will take your order at the fast-food joint, they will check out your groceries without having to scan them, it will become even harder to get a human on the customer service line.

What’s left as jobs is those transactions in which the presence of the human is something more than a smiling face that takes your order and enters into another machine—the cashier and the travel agent that has now been replaced by us, in the “self-serve” economy.

What’s left is deep emotional labor: taking care of each other.

by Zeynep Tufekci, Medium |  Read more:

Image: Kyodo via AP Images

via:

Arctic Man

Wild rides and crazed nights at America's most extreme ski race. 

It's April in Alaska so the traffic on the Glenn Highway can't be blamed on either winter snow or summer tourists. The line of yellowing motorhomes, bulbous camper trailers, jacked-up pickups and shopworn Subarus inching out of Wasilla onto the hairpins and steep climbs of the Glenn is, as the bumper stickers say, "Alaska Grown," the annual migration of the state's Sledneck population to Arctic Man. Once clear of the sprawl of Wasilla, the signs along the way read like pages flying back on a calendar, flipping past the state's prospector and homestead era — "Jackass Creek," "Frost Heave," "Eureka" — to the Native names, from long before there was English to write them down: "Matanuska," "Chickaloon," "Tazlina." Then there's the highway itself, named for Edwin Glenn, a Spanish-American war vet and Army officer who was the first American soldier ever court-martialed for waterboarding. But earlier in his career, in the late 1890s, Glenn led two expeditions into this wilderness.

Maybe that's the lesson: If you put your name in the ground up here, it stays. Your life outside the state is your own concern.

After the Glenn, you head up past Gulkana — Athabascan for "winding river" — and then a final rush out onto the frozen moonscape of Summit Lake, where the peaks of the Alaska Range fill the horizon, all the way to mighty Denali, which might be the best counterexample of Alaskan identity: William McKinley may have been president, but he never set foot in Alaska, so most Alaskans call the nation's largest mountain by its native name, Denali.

You turn off the highway, down a road piled with eight feet of snow on both sides. This is Camp Isabel, once the single biggest work camp along the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, now a forgotten gravel airstrip at the base of the Hoodoo Mountains. Perhaps 1,000 motorhomes, RVs and trailers are already here, strewn like fallen Jenga pieces inside the frozen walls. Snowmachines buzz past your doors, above your head on the snow banks and over the distant peaks like swarming gnats. The temperature is way below freezing, but the air still carries the smell of gasoline, grilled meat and alcohol. A four-wheeler rumbles past pulling a big sled and on the big sled is a couch, a so-called Alaskan Rickshaw. Four people are riding, holding drinks. One of them is wearing a full wolf pelt, snout, eyes, ears and all. He nods and tips his cup "Hello."

Arctic Man is a weeklong, booze and fossil-fueled Sledneck Revival bookended around the world's craziest ski race. Both the festival and the race at its heart have been firing off every year in these mountains for more than half as long as Alaska has been a state. Over the course of a week, something like 10,000 partiers and their snowmachines disgorge onto Camp Isabel's 300-acre pad to drink, grill, fight, drink and, at least while the sun is out, blast their sleds through the ear-deep powder in the surrounding hills one last time before it all melts away. Then on Friday morning, anyone not hopelessly hungover or already drunk by noon swarms up the valley south of camp to watch the damnedest ski race on earth.

by Matt White, SBNation |  Read more:

Image: Brian Montalbo

Henri Matisse, Bathers by a River
via:

Shining Light on Cutoff Culture

Most of us don’t blink when a friend says they’ve cut off an ex. But if you’ve ever been cut off by someone you care deeply for, then you know how distinctly painful an experience it can be. While it may be socially acceptable to cut off communication with our exes, we’re not always cognizant of the impacts on ourselves and our former partners. When we cut off, we may do so from anger but often we may be avoiding feelings of discomfort. Furthermore, if the person being cut off has trauma in their background, the psychological impacts can be devastating.

I’m not talking about distancing ourselves from those we casually date or asking for space after a breakup or simply choosing not to be friends with our exes. I’m talking about breaking off all contact with the most intimate person in our lives without civility — refusing to answer the phone, reply to emails, or acknowledge any aspect of their communication or needs — often without explanation.

Few of my friends know I’ve been nursing a broken heart, for nearly two and a half years. It’s not a typical broken heart but one that combines the end of a romance with the bewilderment and sadness of being cut off by a dear and trusted partner without explanation. It’s also one that echoes painful experiences from my childhood. (...)

Cutting off contact with exes seems to be a common practice. A friend of mine related being told by another friend to break up with her boyfriend via “JSC”; just stop communicating. “Love is a battlefield,” goes the saying.

When personal safety is involved, cutoff is warranted. But most times this isn’t the case. When it’s not, this kind of behavior dehumanizes the other and sends the message “your needs don’t matter, you don’t matter.” University of Chicago neuroscientist John Cacioppo told Psychology Today, “‘The pain of losing a meaningful relationship can be especially searing in the absence of direct social contact.’ With no definitive closure, we’re left wondering what the heck happened, which can lead to the kind of endless rumination that often leads to depression.”

Emma once told me, “You’re the first one to want me for me,” but her abrupt about-face might make you think I ran off with her best friend or boiled her rabbit … I did neither. In fact, to this day, I have only guesses to make sense of her hostility to me.

Because Emma’s withdrawal and eventual cutoff surprised me so much, I had a lot of intense emotions and questions about what she’d experienced and the choices she’d made. Rather than face my need for explanation and desire for resolution, she chose to withdraw.

Our society supports you when a loved one dies, but when someone dumps you and cuts off communication, you’re supposed to just get over it. Friends are often uncomfortable talking with you about these kinds of feelings. They want you to let go, move on, and definitely stop talking about it.

In The Journey from Abandonment to Healing, Susan Anderson writes, “When a loved one dies, the loss is absolutely final…[but] abandonment survivors may remain in denial and postpone closure, sometimes indefinitely.” We’re not comfortable witnessing the process of grief and acceptance when it stems from the loss of romantic attachment, especially when it’s extended.

When there are emotional loose ends — unanswered questions, mistrust, betrayal, disbelief, bewilderment (as it was for me with Emma) — it can be very difficult to heal. Our culture is very hostile to people in this situation. We often judge those who don’t move on right away. Being the one struggling without answers is one of the most difficult human experiences.

by Jeff Reifman, Medium |  Read more:

Image: Jeff Reifman

The Majority Of Today’s App Businesses Are Not Sustainable

Though the app stores continue to fill up with ever more mobile applications, the reality is that most of these are not sustainable businesses. According to a new report out this morning, half (50%) of iOS developers and even more (64%) Android developers are operating below the “app poverty line” of $500 per app per month.

This detail was one of many released in VisionMobile’s latest Developer Economics report (for Q3 2014), which was based on a large-scale online developer survey and one-to-one interviews with mobile app developers. This report included the responses from over 10,000 developers from 137 countries worldwide, taking place over 5 weeks in April and May.

That mobile app developers are challenged in getting their apps discovered, downloaded and then actually used, is a well-known fact. But seeing the figures associated with exactly how tough it is out there is rather revealing. It seems the “1%” is not only a term applicable to the economy as a whole – it’s also taking place within the app store economy, too.

The report’s authors detail the specifics around the trend where a tiny fraction of developers – actually, it’s 1.6% to be exact – generate most of the app store revenue. Slyly referencing the “disappearing middle class of app developers,” the report’s analysis groups the estimated 2.9 million mobile app developers worldwide into a handful of different categories for easy reference: the “have-nothings,” the “poverty-stricken,” the “strugglers,” and the “haves.” And, as you can tell, most of these categories don’t sound too great.

by Sarah Perez, TechCrunch |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

David Joly, Woods in Winter
via:

Lessons From Late Night

[ed. In advance of installing a paywall for all future New Yorker material, the magazine has opened its archive back to 2007 (for who knows how long?). You can find a good sampling here.]

In 1997, I realized one of my childhood dreams. (Not the one where I’m being chased by Count Chocula.) I flew to New York from Chicago, where I was working as a performer at Second City, to interview for a writing position at “Saturday Night Live.” It seemed promising, because I’d heard that the show was looking to diversify. Only in comedy, by the way, does an obedient white girl from the suburbs count as diversity. I arrived for my job interview in the only decent clothes I had: my “show clothes”—black pants and a lavender chenille sweater from Contempo Casuals. I went up to the security guard at the elevator and I heard myself say, “I’m here to see Lorne Michaels.” I couldn’t believe the words that were coming out of my mouth. This must be how people feel when they really do go to school naked by accident.

I went up to the seventeenth-floor offices, whose walls were lined with archival photographs from the show—Jane Curtin ripping her shirt open on “Weekend Update,” Gilda Radner in a “Beach Blanket Bingo” sketch, Al Franken’s head shot! Then I sat on a couch and waited for my meeting with Lorne. About an hour into the wait, some assistants started making popcorn in a movie-theatre popcorn machine—something that I would later learn signalled Lorne’s imminent arrival. To this day, the smell of fresh popcorn causes me to experience stress, hunger, and sketch ideas for John Goodman.

The only advice anyone had given me about meeting with Lorne was “Whatever you do, don’t finish his sentences.” A Chicago actress I knew had apparently made that mistake, and she believed it had cost her the job. So, when I was finally ushered into his office, I sat down, determined not to blow it.

Lorne said, “So, you’re from . . .”

The words seemed to hang there forever. Why wasn’t he finishing the sentence? If I answered now, would it count as talking over him? I couldn’t remember how normal human speech patterns worked. Another five seconds went by, and still no more sentence from Lorne. Oh, God! When I flew back to Chicago the next day, they were going to say, “How was your meeting with Lorne Michaels?” And I would have to reply, “He said, ‘So, you’re from,’ and then we sat there for an hour and then a girl came in and asked me to leave.”

After what was probably, realistically, ten seconds, I couldn’t take it anymore, and I blurted out, “Pennsylvania. I’m from Pennsylvania, a suburb of Philadelphia,” just as Lorne finally finished his thought—“Chicago.” I was sure I had blown it. I don’t remember anything else that happened in the meeting, because I just kept staring at the nameplate on his desk that said “Lorne Michaels” and thinking, This is the guy with the Beatles check! I couldn’t believe I was in his office. I could never have guessed that in a few years I’d be sitting in that office at two, three, four in the morning, thinking, If this meeting doesn’t end soon, I’m going to kill this Canadian bastard. Somehow, I got the job.

During my nine years at “Saturday Night Live,” my relationship with Lorne transitioned from Terrified Pupil and Reluctant Teacher, to Small-Town Girl and Streetwise Madam Showing Her the Ropes, to Annie and Daddy Warbucks (touring company), to a bond of mutual respect and friendship. Then it transitioned to Sullen Teen-Age Girl and Generous Stepfather, then to Mr. and Mrs. Michael Jackson, then, for a brief period, to Boy Who Doesn’t Believe in Christmas and Reclusive Neighbor Who Proves That Miracles Are Possible, then back to a bond of mutual respect and friendship.

I’ve learned many things from Lorne—in particular, a managerial style that was the opposite of my usual Bossypants mode. Here are some Things I Learned from Lorne Michaels:

(1) Producing is about discouraging creativity.

by Tina Fey, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: Mary Ellen Mathews

The Fun Stuff

My life as Keith Moon.

[ed. See also: The Ginger Boy.]

I had a traditional musical education, in a provincial English cathedral town. I was sent off to an ancient piano teacher with the requisite halitosis, who lashed with a ruler at my knuckles as if they were wasps; I added the trumpet a few years later, and had lessons with a younger, cheerier man, who told me that the best way to make the instrument “sound” was to imagine spitting paper pellets down the mouthpiece at the school bully. I sang daily in the cathedral choir, an excellent grounding in sight-reading and performance.

But what I really wanted to do, as a little boy, was play the drums, and, of those different ways of making music, only playing the drums still makes me feel like a little boy. A friend’s older brother had a drum kit, and as a twelve-year-old I gawped at the spangled shells of wood and skin, and plotted how I might get to hit them, and make a lot of noise. It wouldn’t be easy. My parents had no time for “all that thumping about,” and the prim world of ecclesiastical and classical music, which meant so much to me, detested rock. But I waited until the drums’ owner was off at school, and sneaked into the attic where they gleamed, fabulously inert, and over the next few years I taught myself how to play them. Sitting behind the drums was like the fantasy of driving (the other great prepubescent ambition), with my feet established on two pedals, bass drum and high hat, and the willing dials staring back at me like a blank dashboard.

Noise, speed, rebellion: everyone secretly wants to play the drums, because hitting things, like yelling, returns us to the innocent violence of childhood. Music makes us want to dance, to register rhythm on and with our bodies. The drummer and the conductor are the luckiest of all musicians, because they are closest to dancing. And in drumming how childishly close the connection is between the dancer and the dance! When you blow down an oboe, or pull a bow across a string, an infinitesimal hesitation—the hesitation of vibration—separates the act and the sound; for trumpeters, the simple voicing of a quiet middle C is more fraught than very complex passages, because that brass tube can be sluggish in its obedience. But when a drummer needs to make a drum sound he just . . . hits it. The stick or the hand comes down, and the skin bellows. The narrator in Thomas Bernhard’s novel “The Loser,” a pianist crazed with dreams of genius and obsessed with Glenn Gould, expresses the impossible longing to become the piano, to be at one with it. When you play the drums, you are the drums. “Tom-tom, c’est moi,” as Wallace Stevens put it.

The drummer who was the drums, when I was a boy, was Keith Moon, though he was dead by the time I first heard him. He was the drums not because he was the most technically accomplished of drummers but because his joyous, semaphoring lunacy suggested a man possessed by the antic spirit of drumming. He was pure, irresponsible, restless childishness. At the end of early Who concerts, as Pete Townshend smashed his guitar, Moon would kick his drums and stand on them and hurl them around the stage, and this seems a logical extension not only of the basic premise of drumming, which is to hit things, but of Moon’s drumming, which was to hit things exuberantly. “For Christ’s sake, play quieter,” the manager of a club once told Moon. To which Moon replied, “I can’t play quiet, I’m a rock drummer.”

The Who had extraordinary rhythmic vitality, and it died when Keith Moon died, thirty-two years ago. I had hardly ever heard any rock music when I first listened to albums like “Quadrophenia” and “Who’s Next.” My notion of musical volume and power was inevitably circumscribed by my fairly sheltered, austerely Christian upbringing—I got off on classical or churchy things like the brassy last bars of William Walton’s First Symphony, or the densely chromatic last movement of the “Hammerklavier” Sonata, or the way the choir bursts in at the start of Handel’s anthem “Zadok the Priest,” or the thundering thirty-two-foot bass pipes of Durham Cathedral’s organ, and the way the echo, at the end of a piece, took seven seconds to dissolve in that huge building. Those things are not to be despised, but nothing had prepared me for the ferocious energy of The Who. The music enacted the mod rebellion of its lyrics: “Hope I die before I get old”; “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss”; “Dressed right, for a beach fight”; “There’s a millionaire above you, / And you’re under his suspicion.” Pete Townshend’s hard, tense suspended chords seemed to scour the air around them; Roger Daltrey’s singing was a young man’s fighting swagger, an incitement to some kind of crime; John Entwistle’s incessantly mobile bass playing was like someone running away from the scene of the crime; and Keith Moon’s drumming, in its inspired vandalism, was the crime itself.

Most rock drummers, even very good and inventive ones, are timekeepers. There is a space for a fill or a roll at the end of a musical phrase, but the beat has primacy over the curlicues. In a regular 4/4 bar, the bass drum sounds the first beat, the snare the second, the bass drum again hits the third (often with two eighth notes at this point), and then the snare hits the bar’s final beat. This results in the familiar “boom-DA, boom-boom-DA” sound of most rock drumming. A standard-issue drummer, playing along, say, to the Beatles’ ”Carry That Weight,” would keep his 4/4 beat steady through the line “Boy, you’re gonna carry that weight, carry that weight, a long time,” until the natural break, which comes at the end of the phrase, where, just after the word “time,” a wordless, two-beat half-bar readies itself for the repeated chorus. In that half-bar, there might be space for a quick roll, or a roll and a triplet, or something fancy with snare and high hat—really, any variety of filler. The filler is the fun stuff, and it could be said, without much exaggeration, that nearly all the fun stuff in drumming takes place in those two empty beats between the end of one phrase and the start of another. Ringo Starr, who interpreted his role modestly, does nothing much in that two-beat space: mostly, he provides eight even, straightforward sixteenth notes (da-da-da-da / da-da-da-da). In a good cover version of the song, Phil Collins, a sophisticated drummer who was never a modest performer with Genesis, does a tight roll that begins with featherlight delicacy on a tomtom and ends more firmly on his snare, before going back to the beat. But the modest and the sophisticated drummer, whatever their stylistic differences, share an understanding that there is a proper space for keeping the beat, and a much smaller space for departing from it, like a time-out area in a classroom. The difference is just that the sophisticated drummer is much more often in time-out, and is always busily showing off to the rest of the class while he is there.

Keith Moon ripped all this up. There is no time-out in his drumming, because there is no time-in. It is all fun stuff. The first principle of Moon’s drumming was that drummers do not exist to keep the beat. He did keep the beat, and very well, but he did it by every method except the traditional one. Drumming is repetition, as is rock music generally, and Moon clearly found repetition dull. So he played the drums like no one else—and not even like himself. No two bars of Moon’s playing ever sound the same; he is in revolt against consistency. Everyone else in the band gets to improvise, so why should the drummer be nothing more than a condemned metronome? He saw himself as a soloist playing with an ensemble of other soloists. It follows from this that the drummer will be playing a line of music, just as, say, the guitarist does, with undulations and crescendos and leaps. It further follows that the snare drum and the bass drum, traditionally the ball-and-chain of rhythmic imprisonment, are no more interesting than any of the other drums in the kit; and that you will need lots of those other drums. By the mid-nineteen-seventies, when Moon’s kit was “the biggest in the world,” he had two bass drums and at least twelve tomtoms, arrayed in stacks like squadrons of spotlights; he looked like a cheerful boy who had built elaborate fortifications for the sole purpose of destroying them. But he needed all those drums, as a flute needs all its stops or a harp its strings, so that his tremendous bubbling cascades, his liquid journeys, could be voiced: he needed not to run out of drums as he ran around them.

by James Wood, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: Ross Halfin

Daria Petrilli
via:

Katsuro Yoshida, Work “9”, 1970
via:

The Real 10 Algorithms That Dominate Our World

The other day, while I was navigating Reddit I found an interesting post that was called The 10 Algorithms That Dominate Our World by the author George Dvorsky which was trying to explain the importance that algorithms have in our world today and which ones are the most important for our civilization.

Now if you have studied algorithms the first thing that could come to your mind while reading the article is “Does the author know what an algorithm is?” or maybe “Facebook news feed is an algorithm?” because if Facebook news feed is an algorithm then you could eventually classify almost everything as an algorithm. So I’m going to try to explain in this post what an algorithm is and which are the real 10 (or maybe more ) algorithms that rule our world.

What is an algorithm?

Informally, an algorithm is any well-defined computational procedure that takes some value, or set of values, as input and produces some value, or set of values, as output. An algorithm is thus a sequence of computational steps that transform the input into the output. Source: Thomas H. Cormen, Chales E. Leiserson (2009), Introduction to Algorithms 3rd edition.

In simple terms, it is possible to say that an algorithm is a sequence of steps which allow to solve a certain task ( Yes, not just computers use algorithms, humans also use them). Now, an algorithm should have three important characteristics to be considered valid:

1. It should be finite: If your algorithm never ends trying to solve the problem it was designed to solve then it is useless
2. It should have well defined instructions: Each step of the algorithm has to be precisely defined; the instructions should be unambiguously specified for each case.
3. It should be effective: The algorithm should solve the problem it was designed to solve. And it should be possible to demonstrate that the algorithm converges with just a paper and pencil.

Also it is important to point out that algorithms are not just used in Computing Sciences but are a mathematical entity. In fact the first recorded mathematical algorithms that we have date from 1600 BC — Babylonians develop earliest known algorithms for factorization and finding square roots. So here we have the first problem with the post mentioned before, it treats algorithms as computing entities, but if you take the formal meaning of the word the real top 10 algorithms that rule the world can be found in a book of arithmetic (addition, subtraction, product, etc).

But lets take computing algorithms as our definition of algorithm in this post, so the question remains: Which are the 10 algorithms that rule the world? Here I’ve put together a little list, in no particular order.

by Marcos Otero, Medium |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

Paul Manship, Diana and a Hound, 1925
via: