Saturday, January 31, 2015
Marshawn and Gronk
[ed. The hopes and dreams of entire cities, millions of people, rest with these guys. Not Conan, the other two guys.]
The Secret to Raising Smart Kids
A brilliant student, Jonathan sailed through grade school. He completed his assignments easily and routinely earned As. Jonathan puzzled over why some of his classmates struggled, and his parents told him he had a special gift. In the seventh grade, however, Jonathan suddenly lost interest in school, refusing to do homework or study for tests. As a consequence, his grades plummeted. His parents tried to boost their son's confidence by assuring him that he was very smart. But their attempts failed to motivate Jonathan (who is a composite drawn from several children). Schoolwork, their son maintained, was boring and pointless.
Our society worships talent, and many people assume that possessing superior intelligence or ability—along with confidence in that ability—is a recipe for success. In fact, however, more than 35 years of scientific investigation suggests that an overemphasis on intellect or talent leaves people vulnerable to failure, fearful of challenges and unwilling to remedy their shortcomings.
The result plays out in children like Jonathan, who coast through the early grades under the dangerous notion that no-effort academic achievement defines them as smart or gifted. Such children hold an implicit belief that intelligence is innate and fixed, making striving to learn seem far less important than being (or looking) smart. This belief also makes them see challenges, mistakes and even the need to exert effort as threats to their ego rather than as opportunities to improve. And it causes them to lose confidence and motivation when the work is no longer easy for them.
Praising children's innate abilities, as Jonathan's parents did, reinforces this mind-set, which can also prevent young athletes or people in the workforce and even marriages from living up to their potential. On the other hand, our studies show that teaching people to have a “growth mind-set,” which encourages a focus on “process” (consisting of personal effort and effective strategies) rather than on intelligence or talent, helps make them into high achievers in school and in life.
The Opportunity of Defeat
I first began to investigate the underpinnings of human motivation—and how people persevere after setbacks—as a psychology graduate student at Yale University in the 1960s. Animal experiments by psychologists Martin Seligman, Steven Maier and Richard Solomon, all then at the University of Pennsylvania, had shown that after repeated failures, most animals conclude that a situation is hopeless and beyond their control. After such an experience, the researchers found, an animal often remains passive even when it can effect change—a state they called learned helplessness.
People can learn to be helpless, too, but not everyone reacts to setbacks this way. I wondered: Why do some students give up when they encounter difficulty, whereas others who are no more skilled continue to strive and learn? One answer, I soon discovered, lay in people's beliefs about why they had failed.
by Carol S. Dweck, Scientific American | Read more:
Image: Jim Cummins/Getty
Our society worships talent, and many people assume that possessing superior intelligence or ability—along with confidence in that ability—is a recipe for success. In fact, however, more than 35 years of scientific investigation suggests that an overemphasis on intellect or talent leaves people vulnerable to failure, fearful of challenges and unwilling to remedy their shortcomings.The result plays out in children like Jonathan, who coast through the early grades under the dangerous notion that no-effort academic achievement defines them as smart or gifted. Such children hold an implicit belief that intelligence is innate and fixed, making striving to learn seem far less important than being (or looking) smart. This belief also makes them see challenges, mistakes and even the need to exert effort as threats to their ego rather than as opportunities to improve. And it causes them to lose confidence and motivation when the work is no longer easy for them.
Praising children's innate abilities, as Jonathan's parents did, reinforces this mind-set, which can also prevent young athletes or people in the workforce and even marriages from living up to their potential. On the other hand, our studies show that teaching people to have a “growth mind-set,” which encourages a focus on “process” (consisting of personal effort and effective strategies) rather than on intelligence or talent, helps make them into high achievers in school and in life.
The Opportunity of Defeat
I first began to investigate the underpinnings of human motivation—and how people persevere after setbacks—as a psychology graduate student at Yale University in the 1960s. Animal experiments by psychologists Martin Seligman, Steven Maier and Richard Solomon, all then at the University of Pennsylvania, had shown that after repeated failures, most animals conclude that a situation is hopeless and beyond their control. After such an experience, the researchers found, an animal often remains passive even when it can effect change—a state they called learned helplessness.
People can learn to be helpless, too, but not everyone reacts to setbacks this way. I wondered: Why do some students give up when they encounter difficulty, whereas others who are no more skilled continue to strive and learn? One answer, I soon discovered, lay in people's beliefs about why they had failed.
by Carol S. Dweck, Scientific American | Read more:
Image: Jim Cummins/Getty
Friday, January 30, 2015
Go Ahead, Angela, Make My Day
It was in Greece that the infernal euro crisis began just over five years ago. So it is classically fitting that Greece should now be where the denouement may be played out—thanks to the big election win on January 25th for the far-left populist Syriza party led by Alexis Tsipras (see article). By demanding a big cut in Greece’s debt and promising a public-spending spree, Mr Tsipras has thrown down the greatest challenge so far to Europe’s single currency—and thus to Angela Merkel, Germany’s chancellor, who has set the austere path for the continent.
The stakes are high. Although everybody, including Mr Tsipras, insists they want Greece to stay in the euro, there is now a clear threat of Grexit. In 2011-12 Mrs Merkel wavered, but then decided to support the Greeks to keep them in the single currency. She did not want Germany to be blamed for another European disaster, and both northern creditors and southern debtors were nervous about the consequences of a chaotic Greek exit for Europe’s banks and their economies.
This time the odds have changed. Grexit would look more like the Greeks’ fault, Europe’s economy is stronger and 80% of Greece’s debt is in the hands of other governments or official bodies. Above all the politics are different. The Finns and the Dutch, like the Germans, want Greece to stick to promises it made when they twice bailed it out. And in southern Europe centrist governments fear that a successful Greek blackmail would push voters towards their own populist opposition parties, like Spain’s Podemos (see article).
A good answer to a bad question
It could all get very messy. But there are broadly three possible outcomes: the good, the disastrous, and a compromise to kick the can down the road. The history of the euro has always been to defer the pain, but now the battle is about politics not economics—and compromise may be much harder.
Tantalisingly, there is a good solution to be grabbed for both Greece and Europe. Mr Tsipras has got two big things right, and one completely wrong. He is right that Europe’s austerity has been excessive. Mrs Merkel’s policies have been throttling the continent’s economy and have ushered in deflation. The belated launch of quantitative easing (QE) by the European Central Bank admits as much. Mr Tsipras is also right that Greece’s debt, which has risen from 109% to a colossal 175% of GDP over the past six years despite tax rises and spending cuts, is unpayable. Greece should be put into a forgiveness programme just like a bankrupt African country. But Mr Tsipras is wrong to abandon reform at home. His plans to rehire 12,000 public-sector workers, abandon privatisation and introduce a big rise in the minimum wage would all undo Greece’s hard-won gains in competitiveness.
Hence this newspaper’s solution: get Mr Tsipras to junk his crazy socialism and to stick to structural reforms in exchange for debt forgiveness—either by pushing the maturity of Greek debt out even further or, better still, by reducing its face value. Mr Tspiras could vent his leftist urges by breaking up Greece’s cosy protected oligopolies and tackling corruption. The combination of macroeconomic easing with microeconomic structural reform might even provide a model for other countries, like Italy and even France.
A very logical dream—until you wake up and remember that Mr Tsipras probably is a crazy leftwinger and Mrs Merkel can barely accept the existing plans for QE. Hence the second, disastrous outcome: Grexit. Optimists are right that it would now be less painful than in 2012, but it would still hurt.
The stakes are high. Although everybody, including Mr Tsipras, insists they want Greece to stay in the euro, there is now a clear threat of Grexit. In 2011-12 Mrs Merkel wavered, but then decided to support the Greeks to keep them in the single currency. She did not want Germany to be blamed for another European disaster, and both northern creditors and southern debtors were nervous about the consequences of a chaotic Greek exit for Europe’s banks and their economies.This time the odds have changed. Grexit would look more like the Greeks’ fault, Europe’s economy is stronger and 80% of Greece’s debt is in the hands of other governments or official bodies. Above all the politics are different. The Finns and the Dutch, like the Germans, want Greece to stick to promises it made when they twice bailed it out. And in southern Europe centrist governments fear that a successful Greek blackmail would push voters towards their own populist opposition parties, like Spain’s Podemos (see article).
A good answer to a bad question
It could all get very messy. But there are broadly three possible outcomes: the good, the disastrous, and a compromise to kick the can down the road. The history of the euro has always been to defer the pain, but now the battle is about politics not economics—and compromise may be much harder.
Tantalisingly, there is a good solution to be grabbed for both Greece and Europe. Mr Tsipras has got two big things right, and one completely wrong. He is right that Europe’s austerity has been excessive. Mrs Merkel’s policies have been throttling the continent’s economy and have ushered in deflation. The belated launch of quantitative easing (QE) by the European Central Bank admits as much. Mr Tsipras is also right that Greece’s debt, which has risen from 109% to a colossal 175% of GDP over the past six years despite tax rises and spending cuts, is unpayable. Greece should be put into a forgiveness programme just like a bankrupt African country. But Mr Tsipras is wrong to abandon reform at home. His plans to rehire 12,000 public-sector workers, abandon privatisation and introduce a big rise in the minimum wage would all undo Greece’s hard-won gains in competitiveness.
Hence this newspaper’s solution: get Mr Tsipras to junk his crazy socialism and to stick to structural reforms in exchange for debt forgiveness—either by pushing the maturity of Greek debt out even further or, better still, by reducing its face value. Mr Tspiras could vent his leftist urges by breaking up Greece’s cosy protected oligopolies and tackling corruption. The combination of macroeconomic easing with microeconomic structural reform might even provide a model for other countries, like Italy and even France.
A very logical dream—until you wake up and remember that Mr Tsipras probably is a crazy leftwinger and Mrs Merkel can barely accept the existing plans for QE. Hence the second, disastrous outcome: Grexit. Optimists are right that it would now be less painful than in 2012, but it would still hurt.
by Editors, The Economist | Read more:
Image: Bridgeman
Hey, Newcomers—Welcome to the Only City in the Country that Isn't Ridiculous and Horrible!
Hey! Are you new here? Welcome. Have a seat. Don't sit there, it's wet, sit there. Would you like anything? We don't have that. Would you like something else? Would you like some weed? We have plenty of weed.
One more question: Who are you again?
Just to make things clear, it's not like the rest of us aren't happy you're here. We're happy you're here. Ish. Happy-ish. We're not super happy about what's happening to our rents, but we're happy that we're a bigger city than Boston now, because of you. (Fuck Boston.) We're happy to be going to the Super Bowl. (Once again: Fuck Boston.) We're happy you chose Seattle over all the other places you could have chosen, but it's not exactly like we're surprised, because all of us chose Seattle, too. Seattle is better than other places. FACT. We're also happy you're here because everyone currently living here who's single was just going, 'God, we could really use some new people to choose from.' The dating pool was getting gnarly. Please have sex with as many of us as you can.
Now, as to your questions. "Oooh, the Seattle Freeze—what do you do about the Seattle Freeze!?" Please stop asking this question. Kindly click here and stop asking us this question.
As for, "Oooh, I don't know how to find restaurants on my own! Tell me food secrets only locals know!" That's a reasonable request. Pro tip: Angela Garbes, who is hilarious, writes about eating out in the city every damn week in The Stranger, and all the damn time on Slog, our blog (slog.thestranger.com), and she's gone ahead and written down some foodie secrets only locals know here. Read it, memorize it, and then keep everything you learn secret from the next wave of newcomers. (...)
For those of you who just want to bitch and moan about how California is better than Seattle, or how New York City is better than Seattle, or how Vienna is better than Seattle, or how Spokane is better than Seattle, we have you covered, there, too. (Spoiler alert: Not even the person from Spokane thinks Spokane is better than Seattle.)
A whole bunch of newcomers to the city are living in micro-housing, aka apartments the size of closets, because Seattle is more lenient on developers building apartments the size of closets than any other city in the country, which we're quite proud of, because density is good, and people ought to be able to live in whatever shapes they damn well want to. But what is it like to live in one of those closets? Heidi Groover went and found out.
The other kind of newcomer to the city is living in a brand-new luxury building with a rooftop fire pit and boozy building-wide parties—and 9 times out of 10, this kind of newcomer works for Amazon or Microsoft. Brendan Kiley ascends to that world right here.
One more question: Who are you again?
Just to make things clear, it's not like the rest of us aren't happy you're here. We're happy you're here. Ish. Happy-ish. We're not super happy about what's happening to our rents, but we're happy that we're a bigger city than Boston now, because of you. (Fuck Boston.) We're happy to be going to the Super Bowl. (Once again: Fuck Boston.) We're happy you chose Seattle over all the other places you could have chosen, but it's not exactly like we're surprised, because all of us chose Seattle, too. Seattle is better than other places. FACT. We're also happy you're here because everyone currently living here who's single was just going, 'God, we could really use some new people to choose from.' The dating pool was getting gnarly. Please have sex with as many of us as you can.Now, as to your questions. "Oooh, the Seattle Freeze—what do you do about the Seattle Freeze!?" Please stop asking this question. Kindly click here and stop asking us this question.
As for, "Oooh, I don't know how to find restaurants on my own! Tell me food secrets only locals know!" That's a reasonable request. Pro tip: Angela Garbes, who is hilarious, writes about eating out in the city every damn week in The Stranger, and all the damn time on Slog, our blog (slog.thestranger.com), and she's gone ahead and written down some foodie secrets only locals know here. Read it, memorize it, and then keep everything you learn secret from the next wave of newcomers. (...)
For those of you who just want to bitch and moan about how California is better than Seattle, or how New York City is better than Seattle, or how Vienna is better than Seattle, or how Spokane is better than Seattle, we have you covered, there, too. (Spoiler alert: Not even the person from Spokane thinks Spokane is better than Seattle.)
A whole bunch of newcomers to the city are living in micro-housing, aka apartments the size of closets, because Seattle is more lenient on developers building apartments the size of closets than any other city in the country, which we're quite proud of, because density is good, and people ought to be able to live in whatever shapes they damn well want to. But what is it like to live in one of those closets? Heidi Groover went and found out.
The other kind of newcomer to the city is living in a brand-new luxury building with a rooftop fire pit and boozy building-wide parties—and 9 times out of 10, this kind of newcomer works for Amazon or Microsoft. Brendan Kiley ascends to that world right here.
by Staff, The Stranger | Read more:
Image: Malcolm Smith
New to Town: A Special Issue of The Stranger
First Impressions of Seattle by Someone from California
Eight Easy Steps to Help You Break Through the Dreaded "Seattle Freeze"
First Impressions of Seattle by Someone from Vienna
First Impressions of Seattle by Someone from New York
The Mysteries of Seattle's New-to-Town Tech Workers
First Impressions of Seattle by Someone from Spokane
A User's Guide to Seattle's Tourist Attractions (Which All New Residents Are Required to Visit at Least Once)
Hundreds of Newcomers in Seattle Are Refugees from Iraq
Living in a Micro-Apartment Is "Like Living in a Closet"
Okay, New Starbucks Palace on Pike Street, What the Hell Are You?
Image: Malcolm Smith
New to Town: A Special Issue of The Stranger
First Impressions of Seattle by Someone from California
Eight Easy Steps to Help You Break Through the Dreaded "Seattle Freeze"
First Impressions of Seattle by Someone from Vienna
First Impressions of Seattle by Someone from New York
The Mysteries of Seattle's New-to-Town Tech Workers
First Impressions of Seattle by Someone from Spokane
A User's Guide to Seattle's Tourist Attractions (Which All New Residents Are Required to Visit at Least Once)
Hundreds of Newcomers in Seattle Are Refugees from Iraq
Living in a Micro-Apartment Is "Like Living in a Closet"
Okay, New Starbucks Palace on Pike Street, What the Hell Are You?
Ann Greene Kelly, Untitled, 2013. Brick, shoe sole, wire, Quickcrete, found stone. 8x6x7”. Photo: Lance Brewer. Courtesy the artist.
via:
The Instant Ramen Power Rankings
And, after 17 packages of ramen, I couldn’t eat anymore. My feet were swollen like they’d been on a transcontinental flight. It had to stop somewhere.
If we can rank our pro football teams, I thought, we can do it to our food. Why not take the sports analogy even further, I asked myself through sodium-induced mania at 1:30 in the morning, and for a while, I was convinced I’d created a highly scientific and totally foolproof metric to measure instant noodle quality. The equation looked something like this:
rSCORE = (R_taste*1.1)〖+R〗_value+V_misc-((N_a-2000))/500
〖 R〗_value=(.69-Price)/1.1
V_misc= (E_prep+A_ttract+F_ind+S_num)/6
I eventually realized that what I had done didn’t make much sense at all; I’ll chalk it up to hallucinations due to consuming one million percent of my daily salt intake. In the end, I just assigned a 1-10 score and plotted the brands on a scatter chart based on taste and price.
MyKuali Penang White Curry
Like Hans Lienesch, The Ramen Rater, said in my interview with him, there’s just nothing like this on the market right now. The creamy, sinus-clearing broth actually tastes like it took more than three minutes to prepare. It includes a sachet of non-dairy creamer (!), and it is the one instant noodle you might be able to pass off in an actual restaurant. The only issue is that it’s difficult to find—I had to get it on eBay, where I paid about $2.75 per package.
Taste (out of 10): 9.5
Acecook Super Big Ramen Tonkotsu
I loved this ramen—the broth was deeply rich and creamy, like having a nice hot pig smoothie. The ramen block was also exceptional, with thicker-than-average noodles. This product also had, by a lot, the most insane amount of sodium: 3,080 mg, which is 128% of your daily allowance. Your rings won’t fit your hands after eating this, but your palate will thank you.
Taste: 9
by Lucas Peterson, Lucky Peach | Read more:
Image: uncredited
Black Mirror
Each episode of “Black Mirror” — named for the way our screens look while powered down — paints a different nightmarescape of a future gone technologically awry. In one episode, for example, a woman uses a mail-order kit to create a golem of her deceased boyfriend using his social-media profiles. Another follows an obnoxious cartoon character as he becomes a powerful political figure after performing a series of public stunts. Still another imagines a post-peak-oil future, wherein people generate energy and currency by pedaling on stationary bikes, and the only escape from the drudgery is reality-show fame. The show feels like required viewing for our always connected, device-augmented lives. (...)
That the show probably owes its American stature to social media is perfectly appropriate, because the series fixates on our codependent and contradictory relationship with technology and media. We love being able to share our inner monologues and the minutia of our lives with one another, until, that is, it all goes horribly wrong in ways previously unimaginable. Or even if it doesn’t, we still find ourselves annoyed, jealous, infuriated and even depressed by the behavior of others (and occasionally ourselves) online. And yet we keep logging on. (...)
In America, we treat the release of each new Apple product with the reverence usually reserved for pop icons. The sly ingenuity of “Black Mirror” is that it nails down our love for the same devices we blame for our psychological torment. Brooker understands that even as we swear off tweeting and promise to stop Googling our exes, our phones are still the last things we see before falling asleep and the first things we reach for when we awaken.
To that end, the gadgets in “Black Mirror,” including the creepy memory-recording devices, look sleek enough to want, which is perhaps the show’s cleverest trick. It is impossible to watch the show and not idly fantasize about having access to some of the services and systems they use, even as you see them used in horrifying ways. (You might not feel this way about, say, “The Terminator.”) Most television shows and movies can’t even correctly portray the standard interfaces that we use to browse the Web, send a text message or make a voice call, let alone design them in a desirable way.
by Jenna Wortham, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Tom Gauld
Thursday, January 29, 2015
Basic Bitch
[ed. See also: Columbusing, and overanalyzing the term Basic]
Over the past year, we have arrived at an odd cultural and lexicographical moment: To dress “normal” is the height of chic, yet to call someone “basic” is the chicest put-down, one that shows no signs of disappearing. This is despite the increasing obviousness, with ever-more widespread usage, that basic isn’t an especially new or insightful insult. It’s just about the oldest one in the book.
Basic, according to the BuzzFeed quizzes and CollegeHumor videos that wrested the term from the hip-hop world and brought it into the realm of white-girl-on-white-girl insults, means someone who owns things like Uggs and North Face and leggings. She likes yogurt and fears carbs (there is an exception for brunch), and loves her friends, unless and until she secretly hates them. She finds peplum flattering and long (or at least shoulder-grazing) hair reliably attractive. She exercises in various non-bulk-building ways, some of which have inspired her to purchase special socks for the experience. She bought the Us Weekly with Lauren Conrad’s wedding on the cover. She Pins. She runs her gel-manicured hands up and down the spine of female-centric popular culture of the last 15 years, and is satisfied with what she feels. She doesn’t, apparently, long for more.
The basic bitch — as she’s sometimes called because it’s funnier when things alliterate, and because you’re considered a poor sport if you don’t find it funny — is almost always a she. In more sophisticated renderings,her particularities vary by region and even neighborhood, but she is almost always portrayed as utterly besotted with Starbucks’s Pumpkin Spice Latte. It is the setup to nearly every now-familiar punch line about a basic bitch, her love for the autumnal mass-market beverage. Pumpkin Spice Lattes are “mall.” They reveal a girlish interest in seasonal changes and an unsophisticated penchant for sweet. They are sidewalk chalkboards announcing their existence in polka-dot bubble letters. They are from the mid-aughts. They are easy targets.
Basic rolls beautifully off the tongue. It’s a useful insult. Like trashy or gauche, it derives its power from the knowledge that if you can recognize someone or something as basic, you probably, yourself, aren’t it. It also feels restrained, somehow. You don’t quite have to stoop to calling someone a slut or a halfwit or anything truly cruel. It’s not as implicating as calling someone tacky — the basic woman is so evidently nonthreatening she doesn’t even deserve such a raised pulse. Basic-tagging is coolly lazy. It conveys a graduate seminar’s worth of semiotics in five letters. “So basic,” you think, scrolling through your Facebook feed. “She’s basic,” you offer to a friend, commenting on her ex-boyfriend’s new girlfriend. It was a word we’d been looking for.
Over the past year, we have arrived at an odd cultural and lexicographical moment: To dress “normal” is the height of chic, yet to call someone “basic” is the chicest put-down, one that shows no signs of disappearing. This is despite the increasing obviousness, with ever-more widespread usage, that basic isn’t an especially new or insightful insult. It’s just about the oldest one in the book.
Basic, according to the BuzzFeed quizzes and CollegeHumor videos that wrested the term from the hip-hop world and brought it into the realm of white-girl-on-white-girl insults, means someone who owns things like Uggs and North Face and leggings. She likes yogurt and fears carbs (there is an exception for brunch), and loves her friends, unless and until she secretly hates them. She finds peplum flattering and long (or at least shoulder-grazing) hair reliably attractive. She exercises in various non-bulk-building ways, some of which have inspired her to purchase special socks for the experience. She bought the Us Weekly with Lauren Conrad’s wedding on the cover. She Pins. She runs her gel-manicured hands up and down the spine of female-centric popular culture of the last 15 years, and is satisfied with what she feels. She doesn’t, apparently, long for more.The basic bitch — as she’s sometimes called because it’s funnier when things alliterate, and because you’re considered a poor sport if you don’t find it funny — is almost always a she. In more sophisticated renderings,her particularities vary by region and even neighborhood, but she is almost always portrayed as utterly besotted with Starbucks’s Pumpkin Spice Latte. It is the setup to nearly every now-familiar punch line about a basic bitch, her love for the autumnal mass-market beverage. Pumpkin Spice Lattes are “mall.” They reveal a girlish interest in seasonal changes and an unsophisticated penchant for sweet. They are sidewalk chalkboards announcing their existence in polka-dot bubble letters. They are from the mid-aughts. They are easy targets.
Basic rolls beautifully off the tongue. It’s a useful insult. Like trashy or gauche, it derives its power from the knowledge that if you can recognize someone or something as basic, you probably, yourself, aren’t it. It also feels restrained, somehow. You don’t quite have to stoop to calling someone a slut or a halfwit or anything truly cruel. It’s not as implicating as calling someone tacky — the basic woman is so evidently nonthreatening she doesn’t even deserve such a raised pulse. Basic-tagging is coolly lazy. It conveys a graduate seminar’s worth of semiotics in five letters. “So basic,” you think, scrolling through your Facebook feed. “She’s basic,” you offer to a friend, commenting on her ex-boyfriend’s new girlfriend. It was a word we’d been looking for.
by Noreen Malone, The Cut | Read more:
Image: Wikipedia
Three Feet by Six Feet by Three Feet
What sounded like a scream jolted me awake at 5:54 a.m. Less than two feet away, the man in the neighboring capsule had awakened from a nightmare, but the way he followed it with three quick sneezes made me wonder if his cry was actually the first in a series of predawn sneezes. There in my narrow capsule, at the top of two stacked rows of sleepers in a warren of hallways, I rolled on my side, my knees pressed against the tan plastic wall, and squeezed my eyes shut. I couldn’t fall back asleep.
Every sound was magnified in the polite, labored silence of the capsule hotel: a humming fan; a rattling curtain; a strange mechanical whoosh, whoosh. As time passed and the Tokyo sky lightened outside, the sound of rousing sleepers filled the hall. Men cleared their throats. One crinkled a plastic bag. Others coughed and sniffled. When a guest lowered a piece of luggage from his capsule, it hit the carpeted floor with a reverberating thud. This hotel contained 630 capsules spread throughout its many floors in what entomologists might describe as a human hive. In the neighboring cell, a man’s ring tapped the wall, rattling my ears with a clank. Seconds passed. Then some other part of his body bumped as he turned over in bed, his skin making the familiar rubbing sound as it pulled against the stiff cotton sheets. I wore earplugs, but earplugs could only filter so much.
The Green Plaza Capsule Hotel in Kabukichō, central Tokyo’s red light district, occupies a nondescript white tower on a narrow side street north of bustling Yasukuni-dori. Train tracks run beside it, diverting cross-town traffic to opposite blocks and creating a secluded section of this otherwise sleepless neighborhood of bars, love hotels, and barely concealed prostitution. What the capsule hotel calls a “room” costs 4,300 yen a night, or $36, and runs six feet long by three feet wide and three feet high. Those dimensions feel like a doghouse. Pickup trucks have bigger beds. Despite the red light location, the hotel is a respectable operation. It houses businessmen mostly, often drunk, and it segregates the sexes. Women and men stay on different floors; each group has its own traditional onsen bath and dining areas on other floors. On an upper level, men can pay half the price of a capsule to sleep side-by-side in a shared, open “napping” room, separated by dividers. A capsule is challenging; shared group space would be hell.
When I told my friends in Oregon that I’d be sleeping inside a fiberglass pod, they thought I was nuts, but my logic was simple: Small lodging meant a small bill, and in Tokyo, where budget hotels charge between $55 and $130 per night, capsules meant I could stretch my limited budget enough to stay in Japan for three weeks. If you booked in advance online, you could stay at a capsule hotel for $353.79 for 13 days. I considered it. Capsule-style hotels are coming to the US, and they’re cheap. My girlfriend swore she wouldn’t last a night. “Our closet is bigger than that,” she pointed out; we lived in a studio and stored clothes under our bed. But the time to reconsider had passed. “Thank you for booking with Expedia!” the confirmation email said.
In a capsule nearby, a man hacked, and, as I turned onto my stomach, I knew I wouldn’t be sleeping anymore that day. (...)
When traveling, I sleep in rental cars and on couches. I’ve spent the night on airport floors, in poolside chaise lounges, and in a hammock in Mt. Rainer National Park. I assumed I could handle a capsule.
Kabukichō, where Green Plaza is located, is the largest red-light district in Asia. Set inside central Tokyo’s neon intestines, bright vertical signs climb the sides of buildings and pedestrians fill the streets. Women in sequined dresses click by on high heels, long slits showing their calves, even in winter. Although prostitution isn’t legal in Japan, the law’s language makes non-coital acts permissible, so the sex trade thrives.
People come to Kabukichō to drink, to fuck, to throw up on their shoes. When they’re done, they spend the night in a capsule for the price of a fancy dinner and sweat out their hangovers in a bath the next day before catching a train home. I spent the night among them.
by Aaron Gilbreath, TMN | Read more:
Image: Matt Eshleman
Every sound was magnified in the polite, labored silence of the capsule hotel: a humming fan; a rattling curtain; a strange mechanical whoosh, whoosh. As time passed and the Tokyo sky lightened outside, the sound of rousing sleepers filled the hall. Men cleared their throats. One crinkled a plastic bag. Others coughed and sniffled. When a guest lowered a piece of luggage from his capsule, it hit the carpeted floor with a reverberating thud. This hotel contained 630 capsules spread throughout its many floors in what entomologists might describe as a human hive. In the neighboring cell, a man’s ring tapped the wall, rattling my ears with a clank. Seconds passed. Then some other part of his body bumped as he turned over in bed, his skin making the familiar rubbing sound as it pulled against the stiff cotton sheets. I wore earplugs, but earplugs could only filter so much.The Green Plaza Capsule Hotel in Kabukichō, central Tokyo’s red light district, occupies a nondescript white tower on a narrow side street north of bustling Yasukuni-dori. Train tracks run beside it, diverting cross-town traffic to opposite blocks and creating a secluded section of this otherwise sleepless neighborhood of bars, love hotels, and barely concealed prostitution. What the capsule hotel calls a “room” costs 4,300 yen a night, or $36, and runs six feet long by three feet wide and three feet high. Those dimensions feel like a doghouse. Pickup trucks have bigger beds. Despite the red light location, the hotel is a respectable operation. It houses businessmen mostly, often drunk, and it segregates the sexes. Women and men stay on different floors; each group has its own traditional onsen bath and dining areas on other floors. On an upper level, men can pay half the price of a capsule to sleep side-by-side in a shared, open “napping” room, separated by dividers. A capsule is challenging; shared group space would be hell.
When I told my friends in Oregon that I’d be sleeping inside a fiberglass pod, they thought I was nuts, but my logic was simple: Small lodging meant a small bill, and in Tokyo, where budget hotels charge between $55 and $130 per night, capsules meant I could stretch my limited budget enough to stay in Japan for three weeks. If you booked in advance online, you could stay at a capsule hotel for $353.79 for 13 days. I considered it. Capsule-style hotels are coming to the US, and they’re cheap. My girlfriend swore she wouldn’t last a night. “Our closet is bigger than that,” she pointed out; we lived in a studio and stored clothes under our bed. But the time to reconsider had passed. “Thank you for booking with Expedia!” the confirmation email said.
In a capsule nearby, a man hacked, and, as I turned onto my stomach, I knew I wouldn’t be sleeping anymore that day. (...)
When traveling, I sleep in rental cars and on couches. I’ve spent the night on airport floors, in poolside chaise lounges, and in a hammock in Mt. Rainer National Park. I assumed I could handle a capsule.
Kabukichō, where Green Plaza is located, is the largest red-light district in Asia. Set inside central Tokyo’s neon intestines, bright vertical signs climb the sides of buildings and pedestrians fill the streets. Women in sequined dresses click by on high heels, long slits showing their calves, even in winter. Although prostitution isn’t legal in Japan, the law’s language makes non-coital acts permissible, so the sex trade thrives.
People come to Kabukichō to drink, to fuck, to throw up on their shoes. When they’re done, they spend the night in a capsule for the price of a fancy dinner and sweat out their hangovers in a bath the next day before catching a train home. I spent the night among them.
by Aaron Gilbreath, TMN | Read more:
Image: Matt Eshleman
Comcast Renames Man ‘Asshole Brown’ After He Tries to Cancel Cable
Comcast probably doesn’t relish being one of those companies that many Americans love to hate. But sometimes, the cable giant makes this way too easy.
Consider the case of Ricardo Brown. After Brown’s wife had a disagreement with the cable company recently, Comcast started sending him monthly statements under the name “Asshole Brown.”
The disagreement happened when Brown’s wife Lisa tried to cancel her cable. She got referred to one of the company’s dreaded “retention specialists,” who apparently didn’t like being told “no,” as Lisa Brown told the blogger Christopher Elliott, who first reported the story.
“I was never rude,” she told Elliott. “It could have been that person was upset because I didn’t take the offer.”
Like many phone companies and ISPs, Comcast makes it frighteningly difficult to cancel an account. The company retains an army of retention specialists whose sole job is to keep you from signing off. Last year, the journalist Ryan Block recorded a Kafkaesque conversation he had with a Comcast retention specialist from hell. That call has been listened to nearly 6 million times.
Consider the case of Ricardo Brown. After Brown’s wife had a disagreement with the cable company recently, Comcast started sending him monthly statements under the name “Asshole Brown.”The disagreement happened when Brown’s wife Lisa tried to cancel her cable. She got referred to one of the company’s dreaded “retention specialists,” who apparently didn’t like being told “no,” as Lisa Brown told the blogger Christopher Elliott, who first reported the story.
“I was never rude,” she told Elliott. “It could have been that person was upset because I didn’t take the offer.”
Like many phone companies and ISPs, Comcast makes it frighteningly difficult to cancel an account. The company retains an army of retention specialists whose sole job is to keep you from signing off. Last year, the journalist Ryan Block recorded a Kafkaesque conversation he had with a Comcast retention specialist from hell. That call has been listened to nearly 6 million times.
by Robert McMillan, Wired | Read more:
Image: Joe Raedle/Getty Images
The Shape of the App Store
Every developer knows how tough it can be to make a living on the App Store. There’s a lot of money being made there, but it’s not spread very evenly. Those at the top of the charts make the lion’s share of revenue, while the vast majority are left to fight over the scraps. But exactly how lopsided is it? And how does that affect an indie developer’s chances of finding success? For a long time, I was resigned to never really knowing the answers to these questions, because although there’s wide consensus that the distribution of revenue in the App Store is best represented by a power law, I had no way of knowing how sharply or gently the graph of that power law curved. My own apps haven’t spent enough time on the Top Grossing list to collect the data I would need to make a prediction, and Apple sure isn’t sharing it.
And then on January 15, Marco Arment gave me (well, all of us) a belated Christmas present. In his piece titled Overcast’s 2014 Sales Numbers, Marco shared the financial performance of his podcast player, Overcast, through a series of statistics and graphs. Because the information he shared was so detailed, and because Overcast has been so successful, I realized that Marco’s post could provide some insight into how an app’s rank on the U.S. Top Grossing list correlates with its daily revenue. (...)
To provide some context to the results, you may be familiar with the Pareto distribution. It’s the origin of the classic “80-20 rule” that’s used to explain so many phenomena that obey a power law. “Twenty percent of the people in an organization do eighty percent of the work.” “Twenty percent of the population control eighty percent of the wealth.” You hear these types of statistics a lot, but they’re usually not very accurate. Often, they are useful as a first estimate at best. So I didn’t actually expect App Store revenue to obey the 80-20 rule. In fact, I expected it to be a much sharper curve, representing even greater disparity in the distribution of revenue than the 80-20 rule would suggest – maybe a 90-10 split, or even a 95-5 split. As it turns out, the revenue distribution curve of the App Store is even sharper than I imagined.
I expected a “hockey stick” curve that’s characteristic of power law models, but I didn’t expect one like this. The hockey stick breaks upwards at around position 870 on the U.S. Top Grossing list. With about 1.2 million apps in the App Store at the time the data was collected, that arguably puts 99.93% of apps in the “long tail” of the App Store. The “head” of the App Store, those 870 top grossing apps that make up 0.07% of the App Store population, collect over 40% of the App Store revenue that’s paid out.
Luckily, there’s a lot of money to be made in that long tail. At the top of the long tail, in position 871 on the U.S. Top Grossing list, an app still makes over $700 in revenue per day. That’s almost $260,000 per year. Even number 1,908 on the U.S. Top Grossing list makes over $100,000 per year. In fact all apps above number 3,175 on the U.S. Top Grossing list produce enough revenue to at least make its developer the United States household median income for 2014 ($53,891). And this is just for a single app. Most indies I know develop more than one app simultaneously. Developers who can put together a collection of apps that rank at about 6000 on the U.S. Top Grossing list (about $25,000 in revenue per year) stand a good chance of building an app business that can sustain them and their families.
by Charles Perry, Metakite Software | Read more:
Image: Metakite Software
Wednesday, January 28, 2015
Everybody Loves Marshawn Lynch
Has any nickname ever fit any human better than “Beast Mode” fits Marshawn Lynch?
Sometimes he’ll be running and it’ll seem like he’s cornered, and then he’ll just run right through whatever defenders looked like a problem. He finds cutback lanes that shouldn’t exist, he almost always falls forward for an extra few yards when he goes down, and as the game unfolds and the defense gets tired, he only gets better. Beast Mode.
On any given play, he can go from a regular running back to some kind of hulked-out superhero flying into the end zone. Beast Mode.
It’s not just your imagination if it feels like Marshawn Lynch never gets brought down by just one guy. As Danny Kelly wrote for SB Nation this week, Lynch broke 101 tackles in 2014, the most since Pro Football Focus started tracking that stat eight years ago. In the NFC Championship Game against the Packers, he was the most dominant player on either team. He forced a playoff-record 15 missed tackles, and 110 of his 157 yards came after contact. (...)
Now let’s talk about what he’s like off the field. What’s amazing about anyone complaining about Lynch’s media boycott is that nobody in the NFL has given us better quotes than Beast Mode.
“I’m just ’bout that action, boss,” he said at last year’s media day. “I ain’t never seen no talking win me nothing.”
“If I do [talk on the field],” he said in 2012, “only thing I tell them is, ‘You know where I’m at: seven yards deep. I ain’t too hard to find.’”
Last year, Deion Sanders asked him, “You don’t like podiums, do you?”
Lynch: “Nah, it ain’t my thing.”
Deion: “What is your thing?”
Lynch: “Lay back, kick back, mind my business, stay in my own lane.”
What does his dog do during Seahawks games? Does he watch him play?
Lynch: “No. He’s out doing his doggie dog thing, living in his doggie dog world. You feel me?”
Yesterday, he showed up to face thousands of reporters and said, “I’m here so I won’t get fined,” 29 times in a row. Anyone who can read that sentence without smiling is taking all this far too seriously.
The only real downside of Lynch’s silence turning into media day’s biggest story is that it obscures his actual story. It’s one of the more incredible tales we probably won’t hear this week.
Sometimes he’ll be running and it’ll seem like he’s cornered, and then he’ll just run right through whatever defenders looked like a problem. He finds cutback lanes that shouldn’t exist, he almost always falls forward for an extra few yards when he goes down, and as the game unfolds and the defense gets tired, he only gets better. Beast Mode.
On any given play, he can go from a regular running back to some kind of hulked-out superhero flying into the end zone. Beast Mode.It’s not just your imagination if it feels like Marshawn Lynch never gets brought down by just one guy. As Danny Kelly wrote for SB Nation this week, Lynch broke 101 tackles in 2014, the most since Pro Football Focus started tracking that stat eight years ago. In the NFC Championship Game against the Packers, he was the most dominant player on either team. He forced a playoff-record 15 missed tackles, and 110 of his 157 yards came after contact. (...)
Now let’s talk about what he’s like off the field. What’s amazing about anyone complaining about Lynch’s media boycott is that nobody in the NFL has given us better quotes than Beast Mode.
“I’m just ’bout that action, boss,” he said at last year’s media day. “I ain’t never seen no talking win me nothing.”
“If I do [talk on the field],” he said in 2012, “only thing I tell them is, ‘You know where I’m at: seven yards deep. I ain’t too hard to find.’”
Last year, Deion Sanders asked him, “You don’t like podiums, do you?”
Lynch: “Nah, it ain’t my thing.”
Deion: “What is your thing?”
Lynch: “Lay back, kick back, mind my business, stay in my own lane.”
What does his dog do during Seahawks games? Does he watch him play?
Lynch: “No. He’s out doing his doggie dog thing, living in his doggie dog world. You feel me?”
Yesterday, he showed up to face thousands of reporters and said, “I’m here so I won’t get fined,” 29 times in a row. Anyone who can read that sentence without smiling is taking all this far too seriously.
The only real downside of Lynch’s silence turning into media day’s biggest story is that it obscures his actual story. It’s one of the more incredible tales we probably won’t hear this week.
by Andrew Sharp, Grantland | Read more:
Image: Jonathan Ferrey/Getty
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