Poop Like a Caveman

Of all the rooms in my house, my favorite is the bathroom. Bedrooms and kitchens have their charms, sure, but neither approaches the bathroom’s blend of solitude and comfort. The bathroom is where magazines are read and ideas are generated; where a modicum of privacy and a moment of respite is possible. A good bathroom break is like a small-scale spa visit—a few minutes of self-care that can make the rest of the day a little more bearable.

For month two of my self-bettering experiment, I’m going to overhaul my bathroom—testing products, speaking to experts, and adopting the latest methods to make the most of my morning ablutions. What kind of toothbrush should I be using? How should I shower? Which brand of toilet paper is best? My goal is to make my bathroom as comfortable as possible—a luxurious Shangri-La retreat that will leave me coddled and rejuvenated.

The Toilet

My quest starts with the centerpiece of any bathroom: the toilet.

In his 1966 book The Bathroom, which is still considered the bible of bathroomology, Cornell professor Alexander Kira called the modern, sit-down toilet “the most ill-suited fixture ever designed.” Kira believed—and subsequent studies have confirmed—that toilets work against our bodies by forcing us into unnatural angles when we sit down to defecate.

The solution to hunched-over posture, Kira wrote, is squatting—a more natural position that opens the anal sphincter, moves the body’s plumbing into proper alignment, and allows us to evacuate more freely. A 2003 study published in Digestive Diseases and Sciences found that squatters took an average of 51 seconds to move their bowels, as opposed to 130 seconds for those sitting on a standard high toilet. A more recent study by a group of Japanese researchers found that “the greater the hip flexion achieved by squatting, the straighter the rectoanal canal will be, and accordingly, less strain will be required for defecation.” Our caveman ancestors, in other words, had it right.

I’m a renter, so I can’t exactly tear my toilet out of the wall and replace it with a hole in the ground. But I did figure out one way to replicate the pre-plumbing experience. I ordered the Squatty Potty, a nine-inch-tall stool ($24.99 on Amazon) that sits on the ground in front of your toilet.

“It’s all about basic mechanics,” Robert Edwards, the CEO of Squatty Potty, told me. “It’s about taking it back to the way it was done thousands of years ago.”

There are two ways to use the Squatty Potty, Edwards said. The easy (and recommended) way is to put your feet up on it while sitting down on the toilet, which raises your legs and simulates a shallow squat. The even more effective, harder way is to stand on the Squatty Potty and lower yourself into a deep squat, either hovering over or barely touching the seat while you do your business.

I experimented with both methods for several days, and I found the hard-core one more satisfying. It makes going to the bathroom easier, and it saves time. I used to dawdle on the toilet, finishing long New Yorker articles and completing tough Candy Crush levels. But with the Squatty Potty, that’s impossible. After 30 seconds of deep squatting, your quads start to burn, so you learn to finish your business, wipe, and move on.

After testing the Squatty Potty for a week, I decided to venture to the other end of the comfort-efficiency spectrum. I e-mailed Brondell, a company that makes high-end toilet seats, and asked for a review model of their top-of-the-line model, the Swash 1000. The Swash 1000 ($599, Brondell.com) is a marvel of modern engineering. It has two bidet attachments (one in back, one in front for “feminine” washing), a heated seat, an electric air dryer, and options for sanitizing and deodorizing your toilet bowl. I installed it on my toilet in about 10 minutes.

Bidets haven’t caught on in the U.S., but there’s a reason they’re standard in most European countries: They’re cleaner and more civilized than wiping with paper alone. (Alexander Kira, the late bathroom expert, agreed: “Many are prepared to complain about a tomato sauce stain on a restaurant tablecloth,” he wrote, “whilst they luxuriate on a plush seat in their faecially stained pants.”) The first squirt of the Swash 1000’s bidet attachment shocked me—I jumped off the seat in surprise. But the second and third were less abnormal. And by the fourth, I was hooked. The Swash 1000 isn’t the most luxurious toilet fixture on the market—that would probably be the $6,000-plus Kohler Numi toilet—but it is one of the best things I can put in my bathroom without violating my lease. (A warning about the Swash 1000, though: It makes sitting on the toilet so pleasant that you’ll end up staying for much longer than normal. Adjust your social calendar accordingly.)

While enjoying my bidet seat, I experimented with several types of toilet paper. Consumer Reports’s favorite brand, White Cloud 3-Ply Ultra Soft and Thick, is good—thick, soft, not too expensive —but I preferred Quilted Northern Ultra Plush, which felt like a soft chamois cloth. I also tried several other toilet accessories, such as Cottonelle wet wipes and something called the Bottom Buddy ($36.20 on Amazon), a plastic stick with a grabbing mechanism on the end that holds a wad of toilet paper and makes it possible to wipe with minimal effort. (It’s meant for people with physical impairments but also works for the truly lazy.) But neither struck me as necessary, especially now that I’ve got the Swash 1000.

The most far-out solution I tried was based on a 2005 study by Korean researchers that found that people who received an abdomen massage using essential oils had an easier time overcoming constipation. To test this finding myself, I ordered some vials of lemon, peppermint, and rosemary oils and tried rubbing my belly with them before I went to the bathroom. I’m not sure whether it helped, but it did make me smell like a Yankee Candle store for the rest of the day.

by Kevin Roose, Medium |  Read more:

Image: Giacomo Gambineri

We Are a Camera

[ed. The history and future of GoPro.]

Woodman had the good fortune to invent a product that was well suited to a world he had not yet imagined. The ripening of the technology in his camera, after a half decade of tinkering, coincided with the fruition of broadband and the emergence of YouTube, Facebook, and other social-media platforms for the wide distribution of video. GoPro rode the wave. What might have been just another camcorder became a leading connector between what goes on in the real world and what goes out in the virtual one—a perfect instrument for the look-at-me age. Its charm lies perhaps in its sublimated conveyance of self, its sneaky tolerable narcissism. GoPro footage is related to the selfie, in its “Here I am” (or “was”) ethos, and its wide view and variety of mounts often allow the filmmaker to include himself, or some part of himself, in the shot. But because it primarily points outward it’s a record of what an experience looks like, rather than what the person who had the experience looked like when he stopped afterward and arranged his features into his pretested photo face. The result is not as much a selfie as a worldie. It’s more like the story you’d tell about an adventure than the photo that would accompany it.

Though GoPro is known primarily for its connection to adventure sports, the camera is increasingly used in feature films and on TV, and by professionals of many stripes—musicians, surgeons, chefs. Many BMWs now come with an app to control a GoPro in the dash (in case you want to show the kids your commute). The company has been promoting its use in broadcasting traditional sports. An armada of GoPros greatly enhanced the coverage of last year’s America’s Cup, in San Francisco Bay, but perhaps they’d shed less light on the mysteries of an N.F.L. line of scrimmage: one imagines indecipherable grunting and rustling, the filmic equivalent of a butt dial. The opposite of this, and the big thing these days, is the footage that comes from mounting GoPros on small quadcopter drones: sublime sweeping shots and heretofore unseen bird’s-eye vantages, on the cheap.(...)

Two years ago, my son, then ten, won a GoPro in a school raffle. On a ski vacation that spring, he affixed it to the top of his helmet with the standard mount—Tinkywinky, we called him, after the Teletubby with the triangle on its head—and let it roll most of the day, five to fifteen minutes at a stretch. What struck me, while watching some of the footage on a laptop later, was the idiosyncratic ordinariness of it. As he skied, he whistled to himself, made odd sounds, looked around at the mountains, shouted to his brother and his cousin, cried out at the slightest hint of air, and now and then bent forward and filmed upside down through his legs. Even though the camera was turned outward, filled mainly by the sight of the terrain sliding past, it provided, more than anything, a glimpse into the mind of a dreamy and quiet boy—who, to my eyes, during the day, had been just a nose, his features and expressions otherwise hidden by helmet, neck gaiter, and goggles. I didn’t need a camera to show me what he looked like to the world, but was delighted to find one that could show me what the world looked like to him. It captured him better than any camera pointed at him could. This was a proxy, of sorts. (...)

At many ski areas nowadays, you can rent a GoPro for the day. The slopes teem with Teletubbies. People have helmet mounts for P.O.V. cameras of every make, and even smartphones in waterproof shells. It’s not just groms or pros. It’s grampas and gapers, too (“gapers” being the shredder’s term for hapless wannabes). A ski trip has become a kind of life-logging vacation. People who’d never film a minute of their ordinary lives deem a day riding chairlifts and creeping along groomed trails to be worthy of wall-to-wall coverage. The sense among many serious skiers is that the cameras have contributed to heedless, or at least distracted, behavior in the backcountry. Any attention given to getting the shot, or posing for it, is attention diverted from the task of staying safe. Of course, there is no data to support this, and it could well be mere curmudgeonly grumbling. It’s just that there are so many videos of bad stuff happening to backcountry skiers. GoPros have made it possible to see, really for the first time, the way the snowpack jigsaws around you (a skier’s version of a land mine’s click) when an avalanche kicks off or how it looks and sounds to be buried when the slide comes to a stop.

When it ends badly, the camera can be a kind of black box. A fantasy of the film-everything movement is an end to forensic uncertainty. Wearable P.O.V. cameras are also coming into vogue as a tool for soldiers and police. The premise is that reviewability makes for greater accountability—that seeing is knowing. After the Michael Brown shooting, in Ferguson, many commentators, accustomed already to the ubiquity of cameras, were dismayed that there was no footage of the incident. In this instance, we may wish we had some, but a world in which the police film every interaction with the public is not all sweetness and light. You may catch some bad cops, but you’d also hamstring the good ones. By enforcing uninterpretable standards of exchange, a video record has the effect of a mandatory sentence. It deprives the police of discretion, and the public of leniency. There are many things we’d rather not see or have seen.

GoPro, like Google Glass, has the insidious effect of making the pervasiveness of cameras seem playful and benign when it may one day be anything but. The Economist called the film-everything culture “the people’s panopticon”—the suggestion being that with all these nifty devices we might be unwittingly erecting a vast prison of self-administered surveillance.

by Nick Paumgarten, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: GoPro

Rogue Taxidermy

The back room is where they cut open the dead animals, and the front room is where they sell them. They choose the creatures carefully, dealing only in what is legal and authentic. Working as their ancestors would, they make sure to use every part of the animal.

They are not butchers.

They are not burly men mounting the spoils of a hunting expedition on plaques for a man cave.

They’re hipsters, 20- and 30-somethings with art backgrounds and thick-rimmed glasses and — “I hate the H-word,” one of them says.

“I mean, it’s really getting to be a slur, because it’s so broad. Like, what does that mean?” the 27-year-old Greg Hatem continues, standing in his Baltimore storefront. “There are all kinds of people doing what we do.”

What they do — and in this case, what they sell — is “rogue taxidermy.” (...)

Call it hipster or call it art, rogue taxidermy’s popularity in New York and London is making its way to other urban locations in the United States, where young and creative people have taken to reinventing the centuries-old process of removing and rearranging the skin of a dead animal.

Rogue taxidermy is about a decade old. The New York Times wrote about Marbury and his fellow rogue taxidermy pioneers in 2005, calling their work “absurdly gory” and “aggressively weird.” Marbury thought his run of cool might be over that year, with national media attention and, tragically, a few plastic versions of animal mounts being sold at Urban Outfitters. But a post-recession surge of do-it-yourself enthusiasm has launched rogue taxidermy onto Etsy, Pinterest and Instagram. There are goat heads turned into wedding hairpieces, mice with mohawks and leather jackets, and deer with golden Gucci symbols for antlers.

Bazaar, the oddities shop in Baltimore that Hatem owns with partner Brian Henry, regularly hosts taxidermy classes. A recent session sold out in less than 20 minutes. Although the instructors typically come from New York, the students — mostly 20- to 35-year-old women — come from Washington and Baltimore.

In a class on making a winged guinea pig, taxidermy novice Miranda Beck was thrilled to find an opportunity for formal instruction after years of trying to figure it out herself. She added the flying guinea pig, which she named Clarence, to a collection that included her first piece of taxidermy, a fox named Zelda. The 37-year-old aesthetician has since mummified a friend’s ferret, taxidermied a mole to dress him like Hamlet and started a small business selling Christmas ornaments made of deer bones. She works on her dining room table.

by Jessica Contrera, Washington Post | Read more:
Image: uncredited

via:

A Feeling of Control

In Mischel’s view, emotions are the bane of self-control: These “hot” responses make us impatient and cloud our logical judgment of what’s valuable. And so in his experiments, Mischel had children try to override their emotional responses to the marshmallow by having them use “cool” strategies like singing to distract themselves, focusing solely on the treat’s color, or pretending it was a cotton ball. When children tried these approaches, they demonstrated more willpower in resisting temptation. (...)

The trouble with all this is that willpower, for all its merits, is full of holes. Maintaining it requires not only a good deal of effort but also a conducive environment. The University of Minnesota psychologist Kathleen Vohs, one of the nation’s leading experts on willpower, has shown that seemingly irrelevant factors like being at home versus being at work, or even the need to make simple decisions unrelated to resisting temptation (“Should I wear a white shirt or a blue one?”) can diminish self-control. The result? People whose willpower is taxed fail to resist about one out of every six temptations they face, according to Vohs, even when they try using cognitive strategies to manage their “hot” responses. Willpower also appears to be quite finite in supply. One of Baumeister’s famous experiments demonstrated that, when people avoid eating chocolate chip cookies placed in front of them by using sheer determination and willpower, they become much more likely to give in to the temptation to shirk on a difficult task a few minutes later. If people don’t rest between temptations, it puts them in something of a death spiral in which each willpower success perversely increases the likelihood of willpower failure when facing the next temptation. In fact, Vohs’s most recent work shows that the people who appear the best at maintaining self-control succeed not because their willpower is actually greater, but because they employ the simple strategy of avoiding coming into contact with temptation in the first place.

So where does that leave us? There’s abundant evidence that self-control is an important skill for success and societal functioning, but we don’t have much to show for all our efforts aimed at devising strategies to cultivate it. As Duckworth herself has written, no one really yet knows how to teach people to cultivate self-control and grit in a way that endures.

It’s a safe bet that research on how to boost willpower will continue apace. But to my mind, our troubles may stem not so much from a failure to unlock some secret about willpower as from a rut in our thinking about emotion. (...)

Now, it’s certainly possible that this divergence from the usual set of cool, cognitive strategies for resisting temptation arises from the possibility that the brains of addicts, as some suggest, aren’t like those of the rest of the population. It’s also true that the efficacy of strategies like counting one’s blessings has yet to be subjected to rigorous scientific analysis in the context of addiction; it’s possible such strategies don’t work quite as well as 12-step advocates think they do.

But there’s another equally likely, and potentially profound, possibility that’s worth considering when it comes to understanding how self-control works. It’s a possibility that my lab at Northeastern University has been exploring in a series of experiments for the past few years: Maybe these kinds of emotion-based strategies have persisted in support groups because the usual methods to combat temptation—those based on willpower—simply aren’t strong enough to do the job. Maybe we, as individuals and as a society, have bet on the wrong horse. Maybe shortsightedness in decisions among the general populace is so widespread because we’re not using the most powerful weapons against temptation that are available to us—the ones based on emotion, not reason and cognitive control.

The idea that emotional responses can only hinder long-range thinking makes very little sense when you step back and think about how the mind truly works. There is almost universal agreement among psychologists studying emotion that these mental states exist to aid humans in meeting challenges. They are the engines that drive us toward adaptive behaviors in rapid and efficient ways. The state we call fear, for example, prepares our body to deal with threat and alters our decisions, making us proceed more cautiously. We don’t have to “think” about and institute such preparations; they happen automatically. And although it’s true that emotions can be problematic when experienced in inappropriate contexts or too intensely, it’s just as true that if emotions were always troublesome—if they always resulted in negative outcomes—they would have been extinguished by natural selection long ago.

When it comes to self-control, there’s certainly evidence thatsome emotions work against long-term thinking. In the buzzing world of neuroeconomics, brilliant scholars like the Harvard economist David Laibson and the Carnegie Mellon decision scientist George Loewenstein have shown that limbic systems of the brain—areas thought to involve emotion—specifically devalue future rewards. But there’s little reason to believe that this research examines the full range of human emotions. Yes, there are emotions that can lead to vice (envy, lust, anger). But there are also emotions associated with virtue (gratitude, compassion, love). At the same time, while it’s true that reason and willpower can engender virtuous action—as when people adhere to a code of ethics or a long-range plan—they can just as easily be used to motivate and justify quite impulsive behavior. (More on this later.) The first step in understanding how self-control really works, then, is to give up the idea that emotions necessarily lead to impatience.

by David Destend, Pacific Standard |  Read more:

Image: Getty

[ed. Just got back from a beautiful sunny weekend in Seattle and my first visit to Safeco Field. We'll resume our regularly scheduled programming shortly.] 

Linda Vachon, Affiche 39 (head noggin)
via:

[ed. Kurt Vonnegut on Lot's wife, Dresden, the horrors of war, and compassion.]
via:

Amazon, Publishers, and Readers

In the current fight between Amazon and the publisher Hachette over the price of ebooks and print-on-demand rights, Amazon’s tactics are awful, the worst possible in fact: They are denying readers access to books, removing pre-order options and slowing delivery of titles published by Hachette. Amazon’s image as a business committed to connecting readers to books is shredded by this sort of hostage-taking. The obvious goal for readers in should be to punish anyone using us as leverage.

This skirmish will end, though, and when it does, we’ll be left with the larger questions of what the landscape of writing and reading will look like in the English-speaking world. On those questions, we should be backing Amazon, not because different principles are at stake, but because the same principle — Whose actions will benefit the reader? — leads to different conclusions. Many of the people rightly enraged at Amazon’s mistreatment of customers don’t understand how their complaint implicates the traditional model of publishing and selling as well.

Some of the strongest criticism of Amazon comes from authors most closely aligned with the prestigious parts of the old system, many of those complaints appearing as reviews of “The Everything Store”, Brad Stone’s recent book on Amazon and Jeff Bezos. Steve Coll, Dean of the Columbia Journalism School, wrote one such, “Citizen Bezos,” in The New York Review of Books:

At least two qualities distinguished Bezos from other pioneers of e-commerce and help to explain his subsequent success. The first was his gargantuan vision. He did not see himself merely chipping away at Barnes & Noble’s share of retail book sales; he saw himself developing one of the greatest retailers in history, on the scale of Sears Roebuck or Walmart. Secondly, Bezos focused relentlessly on customer service — low prices, ease of use on his website, boundless inventory, and reliable shipping. To this day, Amazon is remarkably successful at pleasing customers.

Coll does not intend any of this as a compliment.

He writes about book-making and selling as if there are only two possible modes: Either the current elites remain firmly in charge, or else Amazon will become a soul-crushing monopoly. The apres nous, le deluge!-ness of this should be enough to convince anyone that the publishers are bullshitting, but if your worry is market manipulation, the publishing cartel we have today has has already created decidedly non-hypothetical harms.

Back in 2007, when publishers began selling large numbers of books in digital format, they used digital rights management (DRM) to lock their books to a particular piece of hardware, Amazon’s new Kindle. DRM is designed to transfer pricing power from content owners to hardware vendors. The publishers clearly assumed they could hand Amazon consolidated control without ever having to conspire with one another, and that Amazon would reward them by passing cost-savings back as inflated profits. When Amazon instead decided to side with the customer, passing the savings on as reduced price, they panicked, and started looking around for an alternative conspirator.

Starting in 2009, five of the six biggest publishers colluded with Apple to re-inflate ebook prices. The model they worked out netted them less revenue per digital sale, because of Apple’s cut, but ebooks were not their immediate worry. They wanted (and want) to protect first editions; as long as ebook prices remained high, hardback sales could be protected. No one had any trouble seeing the big record companies as unscrupulous rentiers when they tried to keep prices for digital downloads as high as they had been for CDs; the book industry went further, violating anti-trust law as they attempted to protect their more profitable product.

Faced with evidence of their connivance, the publishers all settled with the Department of Justice. (Apple argued they’d done nothing wrong, took the case to court, and lost.) For all the worries about a future where Justice has to investigate Amazon, nothing that company has done comes close to conspiring against their customers. Coll concedes that these publishers did, in fact, break the law, but excuses them on the grounds that had they not colluded, they might make less money. (...)

As has been widely noted, the last time the industry panicked about increased access to reading material was with the original spread of paperbacks, an invention that occasioned similar hand-wringing about the economics and prestige of publishing. “Successful authors are not interested in original publishing at 25 cents,” said one publisher at the time, a sentiment as vain as it was wrong. Whole genres were born after the spread of low-cost publishing, a happy colloquium of new writers and new readers previously thwarted by high prices.

Although Hachette’s CEO recently claimed “The invention of mass-market paperbacks was great for all”, the real story is one of co-optation. When paperback publishers were independent, prices fell for the first two decades of the new format. Agitated publishers worried that the new format “could undermine the whole structure of publishing.” They finally figured out how to restore that structure in the early 1960s, through industry-wide consolidation. Over the next two decades, hardback publishers bought up the competition and increased paperback prices by almost 300%, while delaying their publication for a year or more.

All this had the effect of degrading paperbacks as a substitute for hardbacks. The industry’s idea of co-existence looks like a reduction in competition rather than a response to it. The same dynamics are playing out today. The big publishers complain about the Kindle, but they could create a competitive market for ebook readers tomorrow morning, by simply publishing without DRM (as Tor, O’Reilly, Baen and other publishers currently do.) This would make digital distribution more attractive, though, which is the last thing they want. (...)

Similarly, the idea that only the Big Five will fund speculative work for small audiences doesn’t jibe with the growth of niche publishing enabled by lower publishing costs. (A quarter-million titles have appeared on the Kindle in the last 90 days.) Nothing here is magic. Books are just large chunks of writing. Digital publishing creates many new ways for delivering those chunks from writer to reader. Only some of those new ways require the services of people who work in lower Manhattan.

by Clay Shirky, Medium |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

Social Networks Are Like The Eye

On of the oft-repeated phrases on Edge is "New Technologies=New Perceptions". As we create tools we recreate ourselves. In the digital information age, we have moved from thinking about silicon, transistors, and microprocessors, to redefining, to the edge of creating life itself. As we have seen in recent editions of Edge — "Life: What A Concept!" (Freeman Dyson, Craig Venter, George Church, Robert Shapiro, Dimitar Sasselov, Seth Lloyd) at Eastover Farm in August, "Life: A Gene-Centric View" (Richard Dawkins and Craig Venter) in Munich in January; "Engineering Biology" (Drew Endy) in our most recent edition — we are redefining who and what we are.

Such scientific explorations are not limited to biology. Recently, Harvard professor and sociologist Nicholas Christakis has shown that there's more to think about regarding social networks such as Facebook, MySpace, Flickr, and Twitter than considerations of advertising and revenue models. According to The New York Times , ("On Facebook, Scholars Link Up With Data", by Stephanie Rosenbloom 12.17.07):

Each day about 1,700 juniors at an East Coast college log on to Facebook.com to accumulate "friends," compare movie preferences, share videos and exchange cybercocktails and kisses. Unwittingly, these students have become the subjects of academic research. To study how personal tastes, habits and values affect the formation of social relationships (and how social relationships affect tastes, habits and values), a team of researchers from Harvard and the University of California, Los Angeles, are monitoring the Facebook profiles of an entire class of students at one college, which they declined to name because it could compromise the integrity of their research.

Christakis notes that he is "interested not in biological contagion, but in social contagion. One possible mechanism is that I observe you and you begin to display certain behaviors that I then copy. For example, you might start running and then I might start running. Or you might invite me to go running with you. Or you might start eating certain fatty foods and I might start copying that behavior and eat fatty foods. Or you might take me with you to restaurants where I might eat fatty foods. What spreads from person to person is a behavior, and it is the behavior that we both might exhibit that then contributes to our changes in body size. So, the spread of behaviors from person to person might cause or underlie the spread of obesity." (...)

Christakis, along with his colleague James Fowler, "have started with several projects that seek to understand the processes of contagion, and we have also begun a body of work looking at the processes of network formation — how structure starts and why it changes. We have made some empirical discoveries about the nature of contagion within networks. And also, in the latter case, with respect to how networks arise, we imagine that the formation of networks obeys certain fundamental biological, genetic, physiological, sociological, and technological rules. "

"So we have been investigating both what causes networks to form and how networks operate."

by Nicholas A. Christakis, Edge | Read more:

Image: Nicoloas A Christakis

via:

Jeff Buckley & Elizabeth Fraser

The World’s Slowest Motorcycle Racing Is Also the Craziest

Motorcycles are dangerous, even when the rider is skilled and the bike is outfitted with modern safety features. So what happens when you ditch the paved roads for natural terrain and instead of simply avoiding the boulder in front you, you decide to ride up and over it? You have trials motorcycle riding, either the pinnacle of two-wheeled badassery or the dangerous product of gearheads with more ambition than brains.

The idea is simple: Strip a motorcycle of every part possible until it’s basically a mountain bike with a small motor, and take it up a massively treacherous hill. Speed isn’t the goal here, the way to win is to keep your feet off the ground and make it to the top. Since all riders have the same amount of power at their disposal, the game is about the exquisite use of throttle, breaking, and clutch, along with weight shifting. A good run requires a near perfect performance from the rider. (...)

A trials motorcycling course is the antithesis of a high-speed circuit. Sanctioned runs typically take place on natural terrain cluttered with logs, streams, and rock walls, with no pavement in sight. In North American competitions, riders follow a set course under the scrutiny of a judge (the sport is also called “Observed Trials”). The goal is to stay on the bike at all times–they pick up a point each time their feet touch the ground. Among those who finish within the time allowance, and without crashing, the rider with the fewest points wins.

The bikes don’t need big engines, so they run on spartan single-cylinders with small displacements, typically between 125- and 250-cc, occasionally as low as 50-cc. They do, however, need to be as light as possible. They’re stripped of anything that would make them even close to street-legal or civilized, all in the name of responsiveness. Cruise control? Nope. Aerodynamic fairings? None. A seat? Please. All told, they rarely break the 200-pound mark, nothing compared to a 452-pound Ducati Diavel, or even a street-legal 320-pound Honda CRF250L dual sport.

Riding a motorcycle slower than you walk is damn difficult, and it’s way tougher than going fast. Like on a bicycle, speed provides stability. At 5 mph, a motorcycle is liable to simply fall over, and knock its rider out of competition. Turning, for example, requires counter-balancing: Against your natural understanding of physics, you push your weight away from the turn, so the bike leans while you stay upright. “It can be frustrating if you’re not ready for it,” LaPlante says. “Your body is such a big portion of the overall weight.”

by Alexander George, Wired |  Read more:

Image: Javier Santos Romero

How I Rebuilt Tinder And Discovered The Shameful Secret Of Attraction

Suppose you’re a straight woman thumbing through Tinder while waiting for the train, avoiding your homework, or bored at work. A picture of a deeply bronzed man pops up in your stream. How do you swipe? More interestingly, if someone asked you to explain why, how would you answer?

Say that it’s this guy:

His location is exotic. He’s doing something that requires a wetsuit. Chances are, he needed a good amount of money to do what he’s doing in the place he’s doing it. But the dark tan, large tattoo, long hair, and name like “Kip” indicate a lifestyle that is probably not that of an investment banker. You can’t really see his face, but surprisingly that doesn’t really matter because the overwhelming reason that hundreds of men and women who swiped “no” in a full-fledged Tinder simulation I unleashed on the internet had nothing to do with attractiveness. Instead, it had everything to do with the type of person Kip seemed to be:

“He probably calls himself a ‘humanist’ instead of a feminist and tries to impress people with how much he ‘made friends with the natives’ when he travels. Barf.” —straight/white 

“I love the tattoo, but he seems too skeezy in a way I can’t put my finger on. Scuba is pretentious? Longer greasy hair?” —bi/Hapa/Japanese 

“close call, but i hate his sunglasses and also i am imputing all sorts of things about him. like he probably says namaste to the barista at the coffee shop and has a profile picture of him with a bunch of african children” —bi/white 

“Lol he’s too old and it looks like the sea is his mistress already I can’t compete with that.” —straight/white

It’s possible these respondents are “overthinking” their response to what, on the surface, is a very straightforward question: Am I attracted to this person or not? Indeed, some would argue that there’s no reason to even explain: You can’t argue with your genitals.

But maybe what we call the argument of one’s genitals is, in truth, incredibly — and both consciously and subconsciously — influenced by the cultures in which we grow up as well as our distinct (and equally culturally influenced) ideas of what a “good couple” or “good relationship” would look like. Put differently, we swipe because someone’s “hot,” but we find someone “hot” based on unconscious codes of class, race, education level, religion, and corresponding interests embedded within the photos of their profile.

Essentially, we’re constantly inventing narratives about the people who surround us — where he works, what he loves, whether our family would like him. And more than other dating services, which offer up comprehensive match dossiers, Tinder appears to encourage these narratives and crystallize the extrapolation process and package it into a five-second, low-stakes decision. We swipe, in other words, because of semiotics.

“Semiotics” is, quite simply, the study of signs. The field of semiotics tries to figure out how we come up with symbols — even as simple as the word in front of you — that stand in for a larger concept. Why does the word “lake” mean that massive blue watery thing? Or how does the stop sign, even without the word “stop,” make everyone understand not to go forward?

But signs aren’t always static in their meaning — it’s all about context. (...)

I first noticed this “crystallizing” tendency in Tinder when a friend, let’s call her Katie, starting playing it for fun, three beers in, at a bar. She was thumbing through prospective matches’ profiles (usually comprising six Facebook pictures, authenticated Facebook age, and a brief bio line) for the table, yelling out her immediate reaction: too old, too manscaped, too short, too bald, too Jersey, HOT, too douchey, too finance-bro, too “ew,” too hipster, too boring, too CrossFit, TOTALLY HOT. (...)

Katie’s verdicts were often based on obvious, glaring “facts” of the profile: A 5-foot-7 male was “too short.” A 39-year-old guy was decidedly “too old” for Katie’s 33 years. Another is bald; she decides him “too” much so. But other swipes relied upon more a more vague, albeit immediate, calculus. To be “too douchey” is to have a bad goatee, a shiny shirt, an unfortunate facial expression, or a certain type of sunglasses. “Too ew” could be any blend of traits that, to white, straight, middle-class Katie, read as repugnant.

But some judgments are too secret — and shameful — to say out loud, or even admit to ourselves. Katie never said “too not-white,” “too poor,” or “too uneducated.” We cloak those judgments in language that generally circles the issue: “Nothing in common,” “he wouldn’t like me,” “I can’t see us together.” Those statements aren’t necessarily lies, but they’re also not always full truths either — and often rely on overarching assumptions about what differences in race, class, education, and religion dictate not only in a relationship, but any interaction, romantic or otherwise.

After watching Katie and tinkering around on the app myself in a game-like fashion, I wanted to see if, relying on anonymity, I could get at the heart of the subconscious snap judgments behind each wipe. Why do we swipe the way we swipe? And are those assumptions “just human,” or indicative of larger, enduring, and possibly destructive cultural divides?

by Anne Helen Petersen, BuzzFeed |  Read more:

Image: Thinkstock/BuzzFeed

The Digital Wallet Revolution

This week Apple announced two new pieces of hardware, the iPhone 6 and a “smartwatch.” But as flashy as they are, neither item is as groundbreaking as a piece of software that will accompany them: a digital wallet, allowing users to eschew cash and credit cards for a quick swipe of their device at the register.

Apple’s digital wallet, if widely adopted, could usher in a new era of ease and convenience. But the really exciting part is the fast-emerging future that it points toward, in which virtual assets of all sorts — traditional currencies, but also Bitcoin, airline miles, cellphone minutes — are interchangeable, opening up enormous purchasing power for consumers and creating tough challenges for governments around the world. (...)

We don’t typically think of these as currency, because virtual money has traditionally been locked down, in the sense that its use was strictly limited: If you earned points from Amazon, only you could use them, and you could exchange them for dollars only within the Amazon marketplace. Meanwhile, up to now, the only currencies you could use everywhere in an economy were state-issued currencies, like the dollar.

But that distinction is eroding: After all, the value of a currency lies in what you can buy with it, not in the fact that a government says it’s worth something. So if I want to buy a widget, and the only thing I can use to buy it is Widgetcash, then I am willing to trade dollars or euros or anything else for Widgetcash. When I buy something with Widgetcash, it doesn’t go through any bank.

That’s why a digital wallet, loaded with your dollars, credit and loyalty points, is such a revolutionary technology — it makes those transfers and transactions seamless and safe. (...)

The revolution is what comes next: an exchange that connects and trades these different stores of value to find the most cost-efficient one to use, both within your wallet and between wallet users, worldwide. Let’s say you want to buy an audiobook from Best Buy. It costs $16, or 1,000 My Best Buy points, or M.B.B.P.s. Your wallet contains several hundred dollars and 200 Best Buy points. The wallet software automatically determines that, at the current exchange rate between M.B.B.P.s and dollars, it is better to buy using the points.

But then let’s say you only have 50 M.B.B.P.s. The wallet system searches its clients and finds someone — call her Hannah — with enough M.B.B.P.s for the transaction. It buys the audiobook with her points and sends it to you, and sends Hannah dollars from your account.

Following Bitcoin’s protocol, the wallet software broadcasts these transactions to the network, and every wallet in the world updates the M.B.B.P.-to-dollar exchange rate.

The idea is that you can buy anything, with anything. The wallet will find the best deal and execute it. In so doing, it will ignore the historical and cultural differences between dollars, points, coins and virtual property. It’s all bits anyway.

byEdward Castronova and Joshua A.T. Fairfield, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Getty

Manhattan Chinatown, nyclove on flickr.
via:

Talk Like a Physicist

• Use “canonical” when you mean “usual” or “standard.” As in, “the canonical example of talking like a physicist is to use the word ‘canonical.’”

• Use “orthogonal” to refer to things that are mutually-exclusive or can’t coincide. “We keep playing phone tag — I think our schedules must be orthogonal”

• “About” becomes “to a first-order approximation”

• Things are not difficult, they are “non-trivial”

• Large discrepancies are “orders of magnitude apart”

• Refer to coordinates and coordinate systems. “I got shafted” becomes “I took one up the z-axis”

• Any actual personal experience becomes “empirical data.” i.e. a burn on your hand is empirical data that the stove is hot.

• You’re not being lazy, you are in your "ground state"

• A semi-educated guess is an "extrapolation"

• You aren’t ignoring details, you are "taking the ideal case"

• A tiny amount is “vanishingly small” or “negligible.” Really small is “infinitesimal”

• You aren’t overweight, you are "thermodynamically efficient"

by Swans on Tea |  Read more:

Image: via:

Green Tea-Black Sesame Mousse Cake
[ed. I could never makes something like this, but it sure looks enticing. Recipe here.]
via:

Warning: Wild Extrapolation (A Classification System for Science News)

Science news and science writing is increasingly popular. There are increasing numbers of people getting into science, which is great. But science is a huge field, with many different disciplines and areas, all of which can go into quite painstaking detail. Obviously there’s a lot to talk about, which can prove daunting to the newly interested, so good science writing is important.

However, science and science news/reporting/writing is the work of humans, and humans are rarely 100% logical. So, to step into the world of science is to step into years/decades/centuries of disputes, controversies, unfamiliar habits, power-plays, strange politics and countless other things that manifest in science articles and could befuddle the unwary reader. What can we do about this?

One option is to adopt an approach from the world of film. Every film released to the public comes with a classification, to warn potential viewers of the type of content to expect without spoiling the actual thing itself, so the viewer can go in prepared. These classifications now come with explanations, like “contains mild peril”. Wouldn’t it be useful to adopt something similar for science articles, to give newcomers some grasp of what they’re looking at? So here’s a potential classification system for science writing. It’s a bit more complex admittedly, and unlike films, multiple classifications can be applied to a single piece. How like science, to be so uncertain.

by Dean Burnett, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: Barry Welch

Amazon vs Hachette is Nothing: Just Wait for the Audiobook Wars

In my latest Locus column, Audible, Comixology, Amazon, and Doctorow’s First Law, I unpick the technological forces at work in the fight between Amazon and Hachette, one of the "big five" publishers, whose books have not been normally available through Amazon for months now, as the publisher and the bookseller go to war over the terms on which Amazon will sell books in the future.

The publishing world is, by and large, rooting for Hachette, but hasn't paid much attention to the ways in which Hachette made itself especially vulnerable to Amazon in this fight: by insisting that all its books be sold with Amazon's DRM, it has permanently locked all its customers into Amazon's ecosystem, and if Hachette tries to convince them to start buying ebooks elsewhere, it would mean asking their readers to abandon their libraries in the bargain (or maintain two separate, incompatible libraries with different apps, URLs, and even devices to read them).

Worse still: people in publishing who are alarmed about Hachette are still allowing their audiobooks to be sold by Audible, the Amazon division that controls 90% of the audiobook market and will only sell audiobooks in a format that can't be legally played with anything except Amazon-approved technology. Audible has already started putting the screws to its audiobook suppliers -- the publishers and studios that make most of the audiobooks it sells -- even as it has gone into business competing with them.

It's profoundly, heartbreakingly naive to expect that Amazon will be any less ruthless in exploiting the advantage it is being handed over audiobooks than it has been in its exploitation of ebooks.

Take Amazon’s subsidiary Audible, a great favorite among science fiction writers and fans. The company has absolute dominance over the audiobook market, accounting for as much as 90 percent of sales for major audio publishers. Audible has a no-exceptions requirement for DRM, even where publishers and authors object (my own audiobooks are not available through Audible as a result). Audible is also the sole audiobook supplier for iTunes, meaning that authors and publishers who sell audiobooks through iTunes are likewise bound to lock these to Amazon’s platform and put them in Amazon’s perpetual control. 

by Cory Doctorow, Boing Boing |  Read more: 
Image: DRM PNG 900 2, Listentomyvoice, CC-BY-SA