Friday, October 30, 2015
A $99.99 Surfboard Upends the Industry
On a recent Saturday along the Los Angeles coast, from Venice Beach all the way up past Malibu, tens of thousands of surfers jostled for position on the small, clean waves the Pacific was churning out. Many were riding the same board: an 8-foot blue-and-white Wavestorm, sold exclusively at Costco Wholesale stores for $99.99—the same price as the store’s Italian sausage-stuffed turducken.
Since its debut in 2007, Wavestorm has become the most popular surfboard in the U.S., with about half a million sold. Novices and veterans have embraced the mass-produced soft-foam boards, which cost much less than competing products. Entry-level soft boards typically sell for around $300, and hand-shaped long boards can go for upwards of $1,000. (...)
Surfing schools used to be the main customers for soft-top surfboards, which are covered in a thin membrane of absorbent foam that makes them more forgiving for beginners than traditional fiberglass models. In recent years, however, Wavestorm boards have found favor even among dedicated surfers, who buy them for their kids and friends, or for themselves. Veteran Scott Mortensen tested his Wavestorm against Hawaii’s epic waves. “The 8-foot model had good paddle power, turned well, and was very forgiving, unlike other soft-top boards with designs that caused the nose to pearl, ” says Mortensen, using surfer speak for a board that bends like a wet noodle, resulting in a wipeout. “We know how to put a sandwich of foam together with different layers and substrates,” Zilinskas says, “so it has adequate flexibility for different functions.”
AGIT says this year it will sell more than 100,000 Wavestorm surfboards through Costco, the only retailer that carries them. Because most board makers, including AGIT, are privately held, there are no reliable data on the size of the market. However, the industry consensus is that Wavestorm is now the leader, selling five times more boards annually than the largest surfboard brands.
Zilinskas, who as AGIT’s vice president for sales travels from his home in San Francisco to Taiwan several times a year to help oversee design, production, and marketing, says the decision to bypass traditional sales channels has been key to Wavestorm’s success. “We don’t want to mess around collecting money from little surf shops and sporting goods stores,” he says. “Margins are slim at Costco, but we pump out volume and get paid on time.”
While Costco stocks several Wavestorm products, with some paddleboards costing more than $500, the $100 8-foot board accounts for 90 percent of sales. That price, along with Costco’s policy of issuing refunds to customers whose boards break (a hazard of inexpensive foam models), has had a ripple effect on the industry. Huntington Surf & Sport, one of the largest surf shops in Huntington Beach, Calif., an epicenter of the global surf scene, no longer stocks soft-top boards. “Why even bother when you can go to Costco for $100?” says assistant manager Cody Quarress.
Since its debut in 2007, Wavestorm has become the most popular surfboard in the U.S., with about half a million sold. Novices and veterans have embraced the mass-produced soft-foam boards, which cost much less than competing products. Entry-level soft boards typically sell for around $300, and hand-shaped long boards can go for upwards of $1,000. (...)Surfing schools used to be the main customers for soft-top surfboards, which are covered in a thin membrane of absorbent foam that makes them more forgiving for beginners than traditional fiberglass models. In recent years, however, Wavestorm boards have found favor even among dedicated surfers, who buy them for their kids and friends, or for themselves. Veteran Scott Mortensen tested his Wavestorm against Hawaii’s epic waves. “The 8-foot model had good paddle power, turned well, and was very forgiving, unlike other soft-top boards with designs that caused the nose to pearl, ” says Mortensen, using surfer speak for a board that bends like a wet noodle, resulting in a wipeout. “We know how to put a sandwich of foam together with different layers and substrates,” Zilinskas says, “so it has adequate flexibility for different functions.”
AGIT says this year it will sell more than 100,000 Wavestorm surfboards through Costco, the only retailer that carries them. Because most board makers, including AGIT, are privately held, there are no reliable data on the size of the market. However, the industry consensus is that Wavestorm is now the leader, selling five times more boards annually than the largest surfboard brands.
Zilinskas, who as AGIT’s vice president for sales travels from his home in San Francisco to Taiwan several times a year to help oversee design, production, and marketing, says the decision to bypass traditional sales channels has been key to Wavestorm’s success. “We don’t want to mess around collecting money from little surf shops and sporting goods stores,” he says. “Margins are slim at Costco, but we pump out volume and get paid on time.”
While Costco stocks several Wavestorm products, with some paddleboards costing more than $500, the $100 8-foot board accounts for 90 percent of sales. That price, along with Costco’s policy of issuing refunds to customers whose boards break (a hazard of inexpensive foam models), has had a ripple effect on the industry. Huntington Surf & Sport, one of the largest surf shops in Huntington Beach, Calif., an epicenter of the global surf scene, no longer stocks soft-top boards. “Why even bother when you can go to Costco for $100?” says assistant manager Cody Quarress.
by David Sax, Bloomberg | Read more:
Image: Dave Weldon/A-Frame
R.E.M.
Readying to bury your father and your mother,
What did you think when you lost another?
I used to wonder why did you bother,
Distanced from one, blind to the other?
Listen here my sister and my brother
What would you care if you lost the other?
I always wonder why did we bother,
Distanced from one, deaf to the other.
Oh, oh, oh but sweetness follows
The Degeneration of Europe
There is a paradox at the heart of the new “Völkerwanderung,” the mass movement into Europe of people from all over North Africa, the Middle East and South Asia. From the outside Europe looks alluringly beautiful. But from the inside it is ugly, like one of those grand old Prussian or Polish manor houses that were turned into shabby workers’ sanitoriums under the communists.
The great migration of 2015 makes it clear that the European Union (EU) is an attractive destination for hundreds of thousands, and probably millions of people. It is so attractive that since January this year, 2,600 people have died crossing the Mediterranean trying to enter the EU. Yet, viewed from the inside, Europe looks a mess. The European economy seems much closer to “secular stagnation”—in Larry Summers’s phrase—than the United States economy. European politics is also in disarray. In almost every member state there is at least one populist party, and nearly all of them are deeply hostile to immigration.
No doubt, many forms of euroscepticism are unpleasant. But that is not to say that euroscepticism is all unwarranted. (...)
What does this mean in the great historical scheme of things? Europe is not quite stagnating, but it is certainly not growing dynamically. It is failing to create jobs, and it is failing especially to create jobs for young people and for immigrants. Seen in a broad historical perspective, this suggests that the great shift from the west to the rest is continuing apace. As I argued in my book Civilization: the West and the Rest, this is the biggest economic change the world has seen in 500 years.
If, 500 years ago, you had gone on a world tour, you would not have been especially struck by western Europe compared with some of the other great civilisations you could have visited. It would not have been obvious to a traveller that over the next five centuries there would be a huge divergence in living standards between Europe and the rest of the world. Five hundred years ago, Ming China was in many ways the most sophisticated civilisation in the world. It certainly had some of the biggest cities. Nanjing or Beijing, for example, were far larger than Paris or London. Between the 1600s and the 1970s, a great divergence occurred that saw living standards, on almost any conceivable measure, improve dramatically in western Europe and in places where western Europeans settled in large numbers, notably North America, relative to living standards in China and the rest of the world. This great divergence is the most striking feature of modern history.
The great empires that emerged from Europe together dominated the world’s political landscape (and seascape) as well as its economy. They may have accounted for a minority of the world’s population, but those European empires controlled a huge proportion of the rest of the world’s people.
In our lifetime, however, the great divergence stopped and went into reverse. Back in the late 1970s, when the People’s Republic of China first began to reintroduce market forces into the planned economy, its GDP was a small percentage of the world’s total: around 2 per cent. But last year China’s GDP (adjusted for differences in domestic purchasing power) exceeded that of the United States at more than 16 per cent of total global output.
What has driven this shift? One answer to that question is a good news story, the other a not-so-good news story. The good news is that China and other countries have adopted the things that after 1500 made Europe so successful. First, was the idea of competition in economic as well as in political life. Second, the notion of science that underpinned the scientific revolution of the 17th and 18th centuries. Third, was the notion of the rule of law based on private property rights. Fourth, modern medicine, the branch of the scientific revolution that doubled and then more than doubled life expectancy. Fifth, was the consumer society, and sixth, the work ethic.
Part of what we are seeing today is the belated adoption by the rest of the world of ideas and institutions that worked really well for Europe and the west. That is a cause for celebration. It can only be good news that increasing numbers of Asians and now Africans, too, are leaving poverty behind and discovering the benefits of these western institutions and ideas. They still have a long way to go (think about the lack of rule of law in China today, to give just one example), but they have covered an astonishing distance since the 1970s.
The bad news is that even as the rest of the world is getting better institutionally, we in Europe and the west appear to be getting worse. We are suffering from a strange institutional degeneration. This has four aspects.
The great migration of 2015 makes it clear that the European Union (EU) is an attractive destination for hundreds of thousands, and probably millions of people. It is so attractive that since January this year, 2,600 people have died crossing the Mediterranean trying to enter the EU. Yet, viewed from the inside, Europe looks a mess. The European economy seems much closer to “secular stagnation”—in Larry Summers’s phrase—than the United States economy. European politics is also in disarray. In almost every member state there is at least one populist party, and nearly all of them are deeply hostile to immigration.
No doubt, many forms of euroscepticism are unpleasant. But that is not to say that euroscepticism is all unwarranted. (...)What does this mean in the great historical scheme of things? Europe is not quite stagnating, but it is certainly not growing dynamically. It is failing to create jobs, and it is failing especially to create jobs for young people and for immigrants. Seen in a broad historical perspective, this suggests that the great shift from the west to the rest is continuing apace. As I argued in my book Civilization: the West and the Rest, this is the biggest economic change the world has seen in 500 years.
If, 500 years ago, you had gone on a world tour, you would not have been especially struck by western Europe compared with some of the other great civilisations you could have visited. It would not have been obvious to a traveller that over the next five centuries there would be a huge divergence in living standards between Europe and the rest of the world. Five hundred years ago, Ming China was in many ways the most sophisticated civilisation in the world. It certainly had some of the biggest cities. Nanjing or Beijing, for example, were far larger than Paris or London. Between the 1600s and the 1970s, a great divergence occurred that saw living standards, on almost any conceivable measure, improve dramatically in western Europe and in places where western Europeans settled in large numbers, notably North America, relative to living standards in China and the rest of the world. This great divergence is the most striking feature of modern history.
The great empires that emerged from Europe together dominated the world’s political landscape (and seascape) as well as its economy. They may have accounted for a minority of the world’s population, but those European empires controlled a huge proportion of the rest of the world’s people.
In our lifetime, however, the great divergence stopped and went into reverse. Back in the late 1970s, when the People’s Republic of China first began to reintroduce market forces into the planned economy, its GDP was a small percentage of the world’s total: around 2 per cent. But last year China’s GDP (adjusted for differences in domestic purchasing power) exceeded that of the United States at more than 16 per cent of total global output.
What has driven this shift? One answer to that question is a good news story, the other a not-so-good news story. The good news is that China and other countries have adopted the things that after 1500 made Europe so successful. First, was the idea of competition in economic as well as in political life. Second, the notion of science that underpinned the scientific revolution of the 17th and 18th centuries. Third, was the notion of the rule of law based on private property rights. Fourth, modern medicine, the branch of the scientific revolution that doubled and then more than doubled life expectancy. Fifth, was the consumer society, and sixth, the work ethic.
Part of what we are seeing today is the belated adoption by the rest of the world of ideas and institutions that worked really well for Europe and the west. That is a cause for celebration. It can only be good news that increasing numbers of Asians and now Africans, too, are leaving poverty behind and discovering the benefits of these western institutions and ideas. They still have a long way to go (think about the lack of rule of law in China today, to give just one example), but they have covered an astonishing distance since the 1970s.
The bad news is that even as the rest of the world is getting better institutionally, we in Europe and the west appear to be getting worse. We are suffering from a strange institutional degeneration. This has four aspects.
by Niall Ferguson, Prospect | Read more:
Image: REUTERS/Marko Djurica
The Football of Tomorrow Will Be Connected - And Undeflateable
[ed. See also: British bloggers who are reinventing how the NFL coaches.]
For a glimpse into football’s immediate future, you have to go back in time. Nestled among the silos and wheat fields and wind turbines that dot the rural northwest Ohio landscape, there’s a large white factory in the town of Ada. There are no sign markers to lead you there but drive toward the “ADA”-emblazoned water tower and, there in its shadow, you’ll come upon the Wilson Football Factory. It’s been in constant operation for 60 years with one primary purpose: manufacture official NFL game footballs. Every ball in every Super Bowl has come from here, crafted by the gnarled, taped-up hands of 120 or so local residents, who clock in at 7:30 a.m. and leave by 3:30 p.m. Many of the workers have been here 10, 20, even 30 years or more; one recent retirement party celebrated 48 years of service.
On a slow day, the workers pump out about 2,000 footballs, with the busiest times approaching 3,500 or more. The NFL may have a five-month season from opening day to the Super Bowl, but Wilson’s football-makers never stop. In all, about 700,000 footballs exit the Wilson warehouse doors every calendar year — about 70 percent of the global football market. “If they’re not perfect,” plant manager Dan Reigle, who’s been there 35 years, tells me, “they don’t go to the NFL.” (...)
The next wave of footballs is so close. For about five years or so, there’s been talk of chipping a football with some kind of Bluetooth- or RFID-transmitting device that can be tracked in real-time and let officials know, say, when a ball swallowed up in a scrum has crossed the plane of the goal line, even when obscured by all those 350-pound linemen. This has been one of the holy grails with football analytics for years. Baseball, soccer, and basketball have it easier because the game ball is rarely obscured from view, so they can rely on optical tracking (i.e. a camera being able to follow and calculate its movements). In the NFL, the football is often hidden so the only real way to crack this problem is to embed a chip in the ball that is self-powered and has a success rate somewhere on the order of 99.9 percent. Trying to determine a Super Bowl-deciding scoring play only to discover the ball’s gadgetry malfunctioned? That’d be bad for business.
But Wilson is close, as evinced by the ball being thrown around in its company parking lot on a recent afternoon. Randy Schreiner, who’s only been with the company about eight months, making him an extreme newbie around these parts, boots up the beta app that Wilson had built, slaps the ball in his hand to mimic it being “snapped” to the quarterback, and lets loose a 30-foot-long spiral. It looks perfect to me, but the iPad app shows an animated ball wobbling along a straight line and only gives the throw a 68 percent rating. It’s been a painstaking process to get this far — Wilson engineers have logged thousands of throws in the course of “teaching” the app what constitutes both a complete and incomplete pass — but this is proof of a concept that is inching ever closer to market. The idea is to unveil a few hundred of these balls to the public at the NFL Experience before Super Bowl 50 in Santa Clara and then start selling them in stores later in 2016. If all that goes well, Murphy says, you should see a connected football coming to the NFL in less than five years.
The NFL has been keen to get this done, but Wilson has had to basically create everything from scratch. The league came to them with the bulky impact sensors that are used in shoulder pads and said they wanted them in the ball, but they were heavy and had to be reduced down to the size of about six quarters stacked on top of each other. Then they had to decide where to put the transmitter. They found that smack in the core-middle of the football was best but they had to design a completely new bladder for this to happen, one that has a pouch in the middle to keep the chip and battery (which lasts about a year) stable and protected.
But while developing the technology has been a challenge — and Wilson owns all the IP, so the R&D expense will be worth it — the toughest part has been figuring how to incorporate the new materials into the traditional manufacturing process, and that’s something Wilson is still fine-tuning.
by Erik Malinowski, Wired | Read more:
For a glimpse into football’s immediate future, you have to go back in time. Nestled among the silos and wheat fields and wind turbines that dot the rural northwest Ohio landscape, there’s a large white factory in the town of Ada. There are no sign markers to lead you there but drive toward the “ADA”-emblazoned water tower and, there in its shadow, you’ll come upon the Wilson Football Factory. It’s been in constant operation for 60 years with one primary purpose: manufacture official NFL game footballs. Every ball in every Super Bowl has come from here, crafted by the gnarled, taped-up hands of 120 or so local residents, who clock in at 7:30 a.m. and leave by 3:30 p.m. Many of the workers have been here 10, 20, even 30 years or more; one recent retirement party celebrated 48 years of service.
On a slow day, the workers pump out about 2,000 footballs, with the busiest times approaching 3,500 or more. The NFL may have a five-month season from opening day to the Super Bowl, but Wilson’s football-makers never stop. In all, about 700,000 footballs exit the Wilson warehouse doors every calendar year — about 70 percent of the global football market. “If they’re not perfect,” plant manager Dan Reigle, who’s been there 35 years, tells me, “they don’t go to the NFL.” (...)The next wave of footballs is so close. For about five years or so, there’s been talk of chipping a football with some kind of Bluetooth- or RFID-transmitting device that can be tracked in real-time and let officials know, say, when a ball swallowed up in a scrum has crossed the plane of the goal line, even when obscured by all those 350-pound linemen. This has been one of the holy grails with football analytics for years. Baseball, soccer, and basketball have it easier because the game ball is rarely obscured from view, so they can rely on optical tracking (i.e. a camera being able to follow and calculate its movements). In the NFL, the football is often hidden so the only real way to crack this problem is to embed a chip in the ball that is self-powered and has a success rate somewhere on the order of 99.9 percent. Trying to determine a Super Bowl-deciding scoring play only to discover the ball’s gadgetry malfunctioned? That’d be bad for business.
But Wilson is close, as evinced by the ball being thrown around in its company parking lot on a recent afternoon. Randy Schreiner, who’s only been with the company about eight months, making him an extreme newbie around these parts, boots up the beta app that Wilson had built, slaps the ball in his hand to mimic it being “snapped” to the quarterback, and lets loose a 30-foot-long spiral. It looks perfect to me, but the iPad app shows an animated ball wobbling along a straight line and only gives the throw a 68 percent rating. It’s been a painstaking process to get this far — Wilson engineers have logged thousands of throws in the course of “teaching” the app what constitutes both a complete and incomplete pass — but this is proof of a concept that is inching ever closer to market. The idea is to unveil a few hundred of these balls to the public at the NFL Experience before Super Bowl 50 in Santa Clara and then start selling them in stores later in 2016. If all that goes well, Murphy says, you should see a connected football coming to the NFL in less than five years.
The NFL has been keen to get this done, but Wilson has had to basically create everything from scratch. The league came to them with the bulky impact sensors that are used in shoulder pads and said they wanted them in the ball, but they were heavy and had to be reduced down to the size of about six quarters stacked on top of each other. Then they had to decide where to put the transmitter. They found that smack in the core-middle of the football was best but they had to design a completely new bladder for this to happen, one that has a pouch in the middle to keep the chip and battery (which lasts about a year) stable and protected.
But while developing the technology has been a challenge — and Wilson owns all the IP, so the R&D expense will be worth it — the toughest part has been figuring how to incorporate the new materials into the traditional manufacturing process, and that’s something Wilson is still fine-tuning.
by Erik Malinowski, Wired | Read more:
Image: via:
Why Is There An ‘R’ in Mrs.?
There are a couple of odd things about the title Mrs. First, the word it stands for, missus, looks strange written out that way in full. In fact, except in the jokey context of “the missus,” meaning the wife, you almost never see it written out. “Missus Claus” looks far more awkward than “Mister Rogers.” Second, the abbreviation has an ‘r’ in it, and the word doesn’t. Why is there an ‘r’ in Mrs.?
Originally, Mrs. was an abbreviation for mistress, the female counterpart of master. There were various spellings for both forms—it might be maistresse/maistre or maystres/mayster—and variation in pronunciation too. The word mistress had a more general meaning of a woman who is in charge of something. A governess in charge of children was a mistress, as was a woman head of a household. The abbreviated form was used most frequently as a title for a married woman.
Originally, Mrs. was an abbreviation for mistress, the female counterpart of master. There were various spellings for both forms—it might be maistresse/maistre or maystres/mayster—and variation in pronunciation too. The word mistress had a more general meaning of a woman who is in charge of something. A governess in charge of children was a mistress, as was a woman head of a household. The abbreviated form was used most frequently as a title for a married woman.
Eventually, the title form took on a contracted, 'r'-less pronunciation, and by the end of the 18th century “missis” was the most acceptable way to say it. (A 1791 pronouncing dictionary said that to pronounce it "mistress" would “appear quaint and pedantic.”) The full word mistress had by then come to stand for a paramour, someone who was explicitly not a Mrs.
by Arika Okrent, Mental Floss | Read more:
by Arika Okrent, Mental Floss | Read more:
Image: iStock
Thursday, October 29, 2015
The Okinawa Missiles of October
John Bordne, a resident of Blakeslee, Penn., had to keep a personal history to himself for more than five decades. Only recently has the US Air Force given him permission to tell the tale, which, if borne out as true, would constitute a terrifying addition to the lengthy and already frightening list of mistakes and malfunctions that have nearly plunged the world into nuclear war.
The story begins just after midnight, in the wee hours of October 28, 1962, at the very height of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Then-Air Force airman John Bordne says he began his shift full of apprehension. At the time, in response to the developing crisis over secret Soviet missile deployments in Cuba, all US strategic forces had been raised to Defense Readiness Condition 2, or DEFCON2; that is, they were prepared to move to DEFCON1 status within a matter of minutes. Once at DEFCON1, a missile could be launched within a minute of a crew being instructed to do so.
Bordne was serving at one of four secret missile launch sites on the US-occupied Japanese island of Okinawa. There were two launch control centers at each site; each was manned by seven-member crews. With the support of his crew, each launch officer was responsible for four Mace B cruise missiles mounted with Mark 28 nuclear warheads. The Mark 28 had a yield equivalent to 1.1 megatons of TNT—i.e., each of them was roughly 70 times more powerful than the Hiroshima or Nagasaki bomb. All together, that’s 35.2 megatons of destructive power. With a range of 1,400 miles, the Mace B's on Okinawa could reach the communist capital cities of Hanoi, Beijing, and Pyongyang, as well as the Soviet military facilities at Vladivostok.
Several hours after Bordne's shift began, he says, the commanding major at the Missile Operations Center on Okinawa began a customary, mid-shift radio transmission to the four sites. After the usual time-check and weather update came the usual string of code. Normally the first portion of the string did not match the numbers the crew had. But on this occasion, the alphanumeric code matched, signaling that a special instruction was to follow. Occasionally a match was transmitted for training purposes, but on those occasions the second part of the code would not match. When the missiles' readiness was raised to DEFCON 2, the crews had been informed that there would be no further such tests. So this time, when the first portion of the code matched, Bordne’s crew was instantly alarmed and, indeed, the second part, for the first time ever, also matched.
At this point, the launch officer of Bordne's crew, Capt. William Bassett, had clearance, to open his pouch. If the code in the pouch matched the third part of the code that had been radioed, the captain was instructed to open an envelope in the pouch that contained targeting information and launch keys. Bordne says all the codes matched, authenticating the instruction to launch all the crew’s missiles. Since the mid-shift broadcast was transmitted by radio to all eight crews, Capt. Bassett, as the senior field officer on that shift, began exercising leadership, on the presumption that the other seven crews on Okinawa had received the order as well, Bordne proudly told me during a three-hour interview conducted in May 2015. He also allowed me to read the chapter on this incident in his unpublished memoir, and I have exchanged more than 50 emails with him to make sure I understood his account of the incident.
By Bordne's account, at the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis, Air Force crews on Okinawa were ordered to launch 32 missiles, each carrying a large nuclear warhead. Only caution and the common sense and decisive action of the line personnel receiving those orders prevented the launches—and averted the nuclear war that most likely would have ensued.
by Aaron Tovish, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists | Read more:
Image: uncredited
The story begins just after midnight, in the wee hours of October 28, 1962, at the very height of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Then-Air Force airman John Bordne says he began his shift full of apprehension. At the time, in response to the developing crisis over secret Soviet missile deployments in Cuba, all US strategic forces had been raised to Defense Readiness Condition 2, or DEFCON2; that is, they were prepared to move to DEFCON1 status within a matter of minutes. Once at DEFCON1, a missile could be launched within a minute of a crew being instructed to do so.
Bordne was serving at one of four secret missile launch sites on the US-occupied Japanese island of Okinawa. There were two launch control centers at each site; each was manned by seven-member crews. With the support of his crew, each launch officer was responsible for four Mace B cruise missiles mounted with Mark 28 nuclear warheads. The Mark 28 had a yield equivalent to 1.1 megatons of TNT—i.e., each of them was roughly 70 times more powerful than the Hiroshima or Nagasaki bomb. All together, that’s 35.2 megatons of destructive power. With a range of 1,400 miles, the Mace B's on Okinawa could reach the communist capital cities of Hanoi, Beijing, and Pyongyang, as well as the Soviet military facilities at Vladivostok. Several hours after Bordne's shift began, he says, the commanding major at the Missile Operations Center on Okinawa began a customary, mid-shift radio transmission to the four sites. After the usual time-check and weather update came the usual string of code. Normally the first portion of the string did not match the numbers the crew had. But on this occasion, the alphanumeric code matched, signaling that a special instruction was to follow. Occasionally a match was transmitted for training purposes, but on those occasions the second part of the code would not match. When the missiles' readiness was raised to DEFCON 2, the crews had been informed that there would be no further such tests. So this time, when the first portion of the code matched, Bordne’s crew was instantly alarmed and, indeed, the second part, for the first time ever, also matched.
At this point, the launch officer of Bordne's crew, Capt. William Bassett, had clearance, to open his pouch. If the code in the pouch matched the third part of the code that had been radioed, the captain was instructed to open an envelope in the pouch that contained targeting information and launch keys. Bordne says all the codes matched, authenticating the instruction to launch all the crew’s missiles. Since the mid-shift broadcast was transmitted by radio to all eight crews, Capt. Bassett, as the senior field officer on that shift, began exercising leadership, on the presumption that the other seven crews on Okinawa had received the order as well, Bordne proudly told me during a three-hour interview conducted in May 2015. He also allowed me to read the chapter on this incident in his unpublished memoir, and I have exchanged more than 50 emails with him to make sure I understood his account of the incident.
By Bordne's account, at the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis, Air Force crews on Okinawa were ordered to launch 32 missiles, each carrying a large nuclear warhead. Only caution and the common sense and decisive action of the line personnel receiving those orders prevented the launches—and averted the nuclear war that most likely would have ensued.
by Aaron Tovish, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists | Read more:
Image: uncredited
Wednesday, October 28, 2015
The Most Interesting Curator on the Internet Knows Exactly What You Want to See
Archillect’s brand of imagery consists of lots of abstract forms, fashion photography, and striking, surrealist GIFs. While nice to look at, it’s not a huge departure from some of the better-curated mood boards that have existed on Tumblr for quite some time. Instead, the thing that makes Archillect unique is who’s doing the curating.
No human is directly involved in deciding what gets posted on Archillect. Archillect herself is an artificial intelligence that curates her own content. Deploying a network of bots that crawl Tumblr, Flickr, 500px, and other image-heavy sites, Archillect hunts for keywords and metadata that she likes, and posts the most promising results.
Murat Pak, the creator of Archillect, has a difficult time defining what exactly he does for a living. Part developer, part designer, part artist, none of those terms on their own do a very good job of summarizing his work. Instead, he might be best described as an automator.
“I don’t like to actually do things manually,” Pak explains. “For instance, most of my designs, I didn’t actually design something, but I designed something that designed some other thing, and the second thing was the actual product. That’s how I like things.”
by Mitch Bowman, Motherboard | Read more:
Image: Archillect
A Penny for Your Books
Ever since a university gave me a literature degree certifying that I have read Chaucer in the original Middle English, my taste in books has reverted to very specific, lowbrow stuff. I like murder mysteries, heist books and spy books, preferably from the 1950s through the 1980s. These titles can be hard to find; many of them are out of print, unavailable on Kindle, and their presence in the New York Public Library is hit or miss.
But in recent years, my bookshelves have swelled. Old John le Carré and Donald E. Westlake and Lawrence Block titles are easier than ever to find online, along with pretty much every other book published in the last century. They’re all on Amazon, priced incredibly low, and sold by third-party booksellers nobody has ever heard of.
Better-known titles with more robust print circulation quickly obey the seesaw of supply and demand; after time, their prices can sink even lower, because of the increased number of copies floating around. Take Jennifer Egan’s “A Visit From the Goon Squad”: You can buy a new hardcover or paperback copy for $18.82 or $9.19, from Amazon itself, or download the Kindle version for $8.56. Or, as with hundreds of thousands of other books on Amazon, you can click through to the “used” section and buy the 2011 Pulitzer Prize winner for fiction for a penny.
Despite the naysaying about the death of publishing, the industry’s most vital numbers — sales and revenue — aren’t actually all that gloomy. In 2014, publishers sold just over 2.7 billion books domestically, for a total net revenue of just under $28 billion, a larger profit than in the preceding two years, according to the Association of American Publishers. There were just over 300,000 new titles (including re-releases) published in the United States in 2013. The book industry may not be as strong as it once was, but it’s still enormous, and generates a considerable amount of surplus product each year.
Enter the penny booksellers. There are dozens of sellers — Silver Arch Books, Owls Books, Yellow Hammer Books and Sierra Nevada Books — offering scores of relatively sought-after books in varying conditions for a cent. Even including the standard $3.99 shipping, the total sum comes out to several dollars cheaper than what you’d pay at most brick-and-mortar used-book stores.
“At some point in the next two to three years, I predict that ‘Go Set a Watchman’ will be selling for a penny,” says Mike Ward, president of the Seattle-based used-book seller Thriftbooks. Ward would know; though it isn’t considered in the same league as Barnes & Noble or Books-A-Million, Thriftbooks sells about 12 million books a year, mostly on Amazon, and many for a penny. (In comparison, Barnes & Noble, the country’s largest book retailer, sells somewhere around 300 million books a year, but has the added weight of hundreds of enormous, expensive megastores to run and thousands of employees.)
“We are taking garbage [and] running it through a very sophisticated salvage process in our warehouses, to create or find or discover products people want, and then we sell them at a very, very cheap price,” Ward explains. Garbage isn’t a value judgment: His company, along with several other enormous used-book-selling operations that have popped up online in the past decade, is literally buying garbage. Thrift stores like Goodwill receive many more donations than they can physically accommodate. Employees rifle through donations, pick out the stuff that is most likely to sell and send the rest to a landfill. The same thing happens at public libraries; they can take only as many donations as their space and storage will allow, so eventually they have to dispose of books, too. (For libraries, the process is a little more complicated; they can’t legally sell books, so they essentially launder them through groups with names like Friends of the Library, which sell the discards and donate the proceeds to the library.)
Operations like Thriftbooks step in and buy these landfill-bound books, sight unseen, for around 10 cents a pound. Thriftbooks has 10 warehouses across the country, each with its own name. Ward says each of them is “about the size of your typical Walmart,” somewhere between 70,000 and 90,000 square feet. The enterprise is still largely a human operation: Between 15 and 18 people at each warehouse sift through the truckloads of books, sending more than 80 percent of the material immediately to the recycling plant. (Hey, it’s better than the dump.) That 80 percent may include stuff that’s obviously garbage: old three-ring binders, notebooks, half of a Bible. Anything that might possibly be sellable is scanned into the company’s database.
Discover Books, another major used bookseller on Amazon, is also based in the Seattle area. Unlike Thriftbooks, Discover Books relies on automated scanners to enter books into its system, which can handle more than 60 books per minute. “If there’s any history of that book online, our system will pick it up,” says Tyler Hincy, Discover Books’ vice president of marketing. (...)
A “penny book” is something of a misnomer. Used books sold on Amazon typically carry a $3.99 shipping fee. But that isn’t a reflection of the actual cost of shipping them — it’s a function of the company’s rules, which mandate a consistent shipping cost for every category of the product in the Marketplace. Amazon takes a standard cut of every book sold — $1.35 — which leaves each of the penny sellers of “A Visit From the Goon Squad” with a whopping $2.65 to cover the cost of the item, shipping and handling, labor, rent on warehouses and all the other costs that come up along the way.
The sellers wouldn’t tell me exactly how much profit they make on penny books. Shipping costs vary depending on the kinds of deals you can cut with delivery services. “We make more than it costs us on the postage to ship it, but not much,” Ward says. “A couple of cents, to be honest.” But the sellers aren’t selling only penny books — Ward says that less than half of his stock sells for that price. And because processing costs don’t increase with book price, while Thriftbooks may only make a few cents on a penny book, it will make $2, plus a few cents, from a book priced at $2. Not bad, when you sell 12 million books a year.
But in recent years, my bookshelves have swelled. Old John le Carré and Donald E. Westlake and Lawrence Block titles are easier than ever to find online, along with pretty much every other book published in the last century. They’re all on Amazon, priced incredibly low, and sold by third-party booksellers nobody has ever heard of.
Better-known titles with more robust print circulation quickly obey the seesaw of supply and demand; after time, their prices can sink even lower, because of the increased number of copies floating around. Take Jennifer Egan’s “A Visit From the Goon Squad”: You can buy a new hardcover or paperback copy for $18.82 or $9.19, from Amazon itself, or download the Kindle version for $8.56. Or, as with hundreds of thousands of other books on Amazon, you can click through to the “used” section and buy the 2011 Pulitzer Prize winner for fiction for a penny.Despite the naysaying about the death of publishing, the industry’s most vital numbers — sales and revenue — aren’t actually all that gloomy. In 2014, publishers sold just over 2.7 billion books domestically, for a total net revenue of just under $28 billion, a larger profit than in the preceding two years, according to the Association of American Publishers. There were just over 300,000 new titles (including re-releases) published in the United States in 2013. The book industry may not be as strong as it once was, but it’s still enormous, and generates a considerable amount of surplus product each year.
Enter the penny booksellers. There are dozens of sellers — Silver Arch Books, Owls Books, Yellow Hammer Books and Sierra Nevada Books — offering scores of relatively sought-after books in varying conditions for a cent. Even including the standard $3.99 shipping, the total sum comes out to several dollars cheaper than what you’d pay at most brick-and-mortar used-book stores.
“At some point in the next two to three years, I predict that ‘Go Set a Watchman’ will be selling for a penny,” says Mike Ward, president of the Seattle-based used-book seller Thriftbooks. Ward would know; though it isn’t considered in the same league as Barnes & Noble or Books-A-Million, Thriftbooks sells about 12 million books a year, mostly on Amazon, and many for a penny. (In comparison, Barnes & Noble, the country’s largest book retailer, sells somewhere around 300 million books a year, but has the added weight of hundreds of enormous, expensive megastores to run and thousands of employees.)
“We are taking garbage [and] running it through a very sophisticated salvage process in our warehouses, to create or find or discover products people want, and then we sell them at a very, very cheap price,” Ward explains. Garbage isn’t a value judgment: His company, along with several other enormous used-book-selling operations that have popped up online in the past decade, is literally buying garbage. Thrift stores like Goodwill receive many more donations than they can physically accommodate. Employees rifle through donations, pick out the stuff that is most likely to sell and send the rest to a landfill. The same thing happens at public libraries; they can take only as many donations as their space and storage will allow, so eventually they have to dispose of books, too. (For libraries, the process is a little more complicated; they can’t legally sell books, so they essentially launder them through groups with names like Friends of the Library, which sell the discards and donate the proceeds to the library.)
Operations like Thriftbooks step in and buy these landfill-bound books, sight unseen, for around 10 cents a pound. Thriftbooks has 10 warehouses across the country, each with its own name. Ward says each of them is “about the size of your typical Walmart,” somewhere between 70,000 and 90,000 square feet. The enterprise is still largely a human operation: Between 15 and 18 people at each warehouse sift through the truckloads of books, sending more than 80 percent of the material immediately to the recycling plant. (Hey, it’s better than the dump.) That 80 percent may include stuff that’s obviously garbage: old three-ring binders, notebooks, half of a Bible. Anything that might possibly be sellable is scanned into the company’s database.
Discover Books, another major used bookseller on Amazon, is also based in the Seattle area. Unlike Thriftbooks, Discover Books relies on automated scanners to enter books into its system, which can handle more than 60 books per minute. “If there’s any history of that book online, our system will pick it up,” says Tyler Hincy, Discover Books’ vice president of marketing. (...)
A “penny book” is something of a misnomer. Used books sold on Amazon typically carry a $3.99 shipping fee. But that isn’t a reflection of the actual cost of shipping them — it’s a function of the company’s rules, which mandate a consistent shipping cost for every category of the product in the Marketplace. Amazon takes a standard cut of every book sold — $1.35 — which leaves each of the penny sellers of “A Visit From the Goon Squad” with a whopping $2.65 to cover the cost of the item, shipping and handling, labor, rent on warehouses and all the other costs that come up along the way.
The sellers wouldn’t tell me exactly how much profit they make on penny books. Shipping costs vary depending on the kinds of deals you can cut with delivery services. “We make more than it costs us on the postage to ship it, but not much,” Ward says. “A couple of cents, to be honest.” But the sellers aren’t selling only penny books — Ward says that less than half of his stock sells for that price. And because processing costs don’t increase with book price, while Thriftbooks may only make a few cents on a penny book, it will make $2, plus a few cents, from a book priced at $2. Not bad, when you sell 12 million books a year.
by Dan Nosowitz, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Thrifty Books
Makeup Face
My non-interest in cosmetics probably stemmed from growing up in a household that had never heavily encouraged, or even really talked about, them. My mother has never worn much makeup, so I grew up without a made-up influence or go-to instructor who could address my curiosities with the strange beige powders, face-crayons, or tubes of color I watched my friends obsessively collect.
Eventually as I matured, my annoyance with cosmetics dulled, and I began to see the appeal of putting the products on. Slowly, my own interest, in what I had come to see as an art form, began to build.
After nearly 23 years of steering clear from the stuff, I began to consider the possibility of applying more than the eyeliner and lip stick that I had moderately familiarized myself with in order to be “presentable” among the sea of gorgeous girls present in Southern California.
With the mystical fairy-godmothers of YouTube and Pinterest as my guides, I plunged headfirst into the world of makeup. I watched countless videos, read numerous articles, and pinned dozens of makeup tutorial pins before finally feeling satisfied that I had caught up with years of cosmetic progress. Armed with a long list of the necessary products I would need, I walked into the brightly lit cosmetics department of my local Target Store.
I can only imagine how much I would have spent at ULTA or Sephora, because I walked out from Target’s crimson doors with a single bag and over $100 emptied from my bank account. I assured myself and my debit card, that we would probably be returning it all anyway.
The following day, I applied all of my newly purchased products: face primer, eye lid primer, eye shadow, foundation, compact, bronzer, contour crayon, blush, eye pencil, liquid eye liner, mascara, lip primer, lip liner, lip stain… all of this tacking on an extra hour and a half to my normal 15 minute morning routine. If this was what it took to put on a pretty face, I wasn’t sure I could manage this on a daily basis.
However, when I entered my first class, and a friend of mine walked right by me before having to turn around and take another look, I realized that it may not have been a complete waste of my time after all.
Apparently Makeup Face, what I like to call the layers of product between my actual face and the world, is surprisingly attractive. The slew of compliments seemed unending.
I was hit on and flirted with by more people in the past few months than ever in my life. Suddenly men, and not just creepy old guys, but men my own age, some even incredibly attractive, were noticing me.
I’d never found myself to be anything more than average in the looks department; a characteristic I accepted after assuring myself that being intelligent was more important than being pretty. But I have to admit, having experienced what it feels like to have people flock to you and complement you non-stop, I can understand the obvious draw. I may have never brought in many suitors, but Makeup Face, Makeup Face brought in a ton. (...)
I began to wonder why everyone was so much more interested in Makeup Face, and for that matter, whether the difference between my face and Makeup face was so drastic that people actually thought I was sick when I wasn’t wearing makeup.
Which made me a tad peeved, if I’m going to be honest. I was not about to regress into the insecure teenage version of myself over Makeup Face. Clearly the reactions to both my actual face and Makeup Face had left me a little off-balanced, but having recently experienced both, I saw past my now insecure, if “perfect,” reflection and tried to take a deeper look.
I recognized the obvious benefits of people finding me attractive; the truth was, people treated Makeup face much better than they treated me. This isn’t to say that people were suddenly outright rude to me when I didn’t have makeup on, but they definitely didn’t notice me in the same way they did when I was.
Doors opened for Makeup Face. Like, literally every door was held open for her. Makeup Face was allowed to go first in line, given the best guest service, and did not, not even once, have to ask for a refill. Makeup Face was noticeably treated better, by strangers, than I had ever been.
Eventually as I matured, my annoyance with cosmetics dulled, and I began to see the appeal of putting the products on. Slowly, my own interest, in what I had come to see as an art form, began to build.After nearly 23 years of steering clear from the stuff, I began to consider the possibility of applying more than the eyeliner and lip stick that I had moderately familiarized myself with in order to be “presentable” among the sea of gorgeous girls present in Southern California.
With the mystical fairy-godmothers of YouTube and Pinterest as my guides, I plunged headfirst into the world of makeup. I watched countless videos, read numerous articles, and pinned dozens of makeup tutorial pins before finally feeling satisfied that I had caught up with years of cosmetic progress. Armed with a long list of the necessary products I would need, I walked into the brightly lit cosmetics department of my local Target Store.
I can only imagine how much I would have spent at ULTA or Sephora, because I walked out from Target’s crimson doors with a single bag and over $100 emptied from my bank account. I assured myself and my debit card, that we would probably be returning it all anyway.
The following day, I applied all of my newly purchased products: face primer, eye lid primer, eye shadow, foundation, compact, bronzer, contour crayon, blush, eye pencil, liquid eye liner, mascara, lip primer, lip liner, lip stain… all of this tacking on an extra hour and a half to my normal 15 minute morning routine. If this was what it took to put on a pretty face, I wasn’t sure I could manage this on a daily basis.
However, when I entered my first class, and a friend of mine walked right by me before having to turn around and take another look, I realized that it may not have been a complete waste of my time after all.
Apparently Makeup Face, what I like to call the layers of product between my actual face and the world, is surprisingly attractive. The slew of compliments seemed unending.
I was hit on and flirted with by more people in the past few months than ever in my life. Suddenly men, and not just creepy old guys, but men my own age, some even incredibly attractive, were noticing me.
I’d never found myself to be anything more than average in the looks department; a characteristic I accepted after assuring myself that being intelligent was more important than being pretty. But I have to admit, having experienced what it feels like to have people flock to you and complement you non-stop, I can understand the obvious draw. I may have never brought in many suitors, but Makeup Face, Makeup Face brought in a ton. (...)
I began to wonder why everyone was so much more interested in Makeup Face, and for that matter, whether the difference between my face and Makeup face was so drastic that people actually thought I was sick when I wasn’t wearing makeup.
Which made me a tad peeved, if I’m going to be honest. I was not about to regress into the insecure teenage version of myself over Makeup Face. Clearly the reactions to both my actual face and Makeup Face had left me a little off-balanced, but having recently experienced both, I saw past my now insecure, if “perfect,” reflection and tried to take a deeper look.
I recognized the obvious benefits of people finding me attractive; the truth was, people treated Makeup face much better than they treated me. This isn’t to say that people were suddenly outright rude to me when I didn’t have makeup on, but they definitely didn’t notice me in the same way they did when I was.
Doors opened for Makeup Face. Like, literally every door was held open for her. Makeup Face was allowed to go first in line, given the best guest service, and did not, not even once, have to ask for a refill. Makeup Face was noticeably treated better, by strangers, than I had ever been.
by Bree Lopes, Medium | Read more:
Image: via:
Tuesday, October 27, 2015
Inside the Secretive Circle That Rules a $14 Trillion Market
Fifteen of the biggest players in the $14 trillion market for credit insurance are also the referees.
Firms such as JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Goldman Sachs Group Inc. wrote the rules, are the dominant buyers and sellers and, ultimately, help decide winners and losers.
Has a country such as Argentina paid what it owes? Has a company like Caesars Entertainment Corp. kept up with its bills? When the question comes up, the 15 firms meet on a conference call to decide whether a default has triggered a payout of the bond insurance, called a credit-default swap. Investors use CDS to protect themselves from missed debt payments or profit from them.
Once the 15 firms decide that a default has taken place, they effectively determine how much money will change hands.
And now, seven years after the financial crisis first brought CDS to widespread attention, pressure is growing inside and outside what’s called the determinations committee to tackle conflicts of interest, according to interviews with three dozen people with direct knowledge of the panel’s functioning who asked that their names not be used. Scandals that exposed how bank traders rigged key interest rates and fixed currency values have given ammunition to those who say CDS may also be susceptible to collusion or, worse, outright manipulation. (...)
CDS on corporate and sovereign debt, which are subject to the panel’s decision-making, have bubbled into prominence lately. The plummeting price of oil and other commodities has caused some corporations and governments to struggle to keep current with creditors. For instance, CDS prices are showing that traders have priced in 95 percent odds that Venezuela will default within five years, according to S&P Capital IQ CDS data released Tuesday.
The stakes go far beyond a few hedge funds and banks. Although the market for credit insurance on individual companies and countries has shrunk by 59 percent since 2008, more money is now invested in benchmark CDS indexes than at any time since the committee’s creation in 2009, according to the Depository Trust & Clearing Corp. Mutual funds increasingly use CDS because they’re having trouble finding bonds to trade. That means the determinations committee is increasingly affecting the $3.5 trillion of bond mutual funds, a staple of U.S. retirement savings.
Though the determinations committee has rendered more than 1,000 judgments in the last six years, no records of its discussions have ever been made public -- nor is ISDA proposing they be.
“The problem is there’s no ability for an independent body to determine whether or not the process is fair, which ISDA says it is,” said Dennis Kelleher, CEO of Better Markets Inc., a Washington-based nonprofit watchdog group. (...)
Determining whether a company or government has formally defaulted might sound easy, but bonds are often freighted with covenants and structures that are virtually indecipherable to anyone but lawyers and traders.
Before the determinations committee was created, CDS sellers facing payouts on the insurance might insist a “default event” hadn’t been triggered.
After the collapse of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. in September 2008 exposed the complexity of the CDS market, Timothy Geithner, then president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, decided it needed an overhaul -- and fast. At his bidding, executives of the largest CDS dealers and money management firms met at Goldman Sachs’s headquarters in Lower Manhattan. Working with markers on paper white boards, the group drew up a new system for improving the settlement of CDS obligations.
Their solution: Let us decide.
by Nabila Ahmed, Bloomberg | Read more:
Image: via:
Firms such as JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Goldman Sachs Group Inc. wrote the rules, are the dominant buyers and sellers and, ultimately, help decide winners and losers.
Has a country such as Argentina paid what it owes? Has a company like Caesars Entertainment Corp. kept up with its bills? When the question comes up, the 15 firms meet on a conference call to decide whether a default has triggered a payout of the bond insurance, called a credit-default swap. Investors use CDS to protect themselves from missed debt payments or profit from them.Once the 15 firms decide that a default has taken place, they effectively determine how much money will change hands.
And now, seven years after the financial crisis first brought CDS to widespread attention, pressure is growing inside and outside what’s called the determinations committee to tackle conflicts of interest, according to interviews with three dozen people with direct knowledge of the panel’s functioning who asked that their names not be used. Scandals that exposed how bank traders rigged key interest rates and fixed currency values have given ammunition to those who say CDS may also be susceptible to collusion or, worse, outright manipulation. (...)
CDS on corporate and sovereign debt, which are subject to the panel’s decision-making, have bubbled into prominence lately. The plummeting price of oil and other commodities has caused some corporations and governments to struggle to keep current with creditors. For instance, CDS prices are showing that traders have priced in 95 percent odds that Venezuela will default within five years, according to S&P Capital IQ CDS data released Tuesday.
The stakes go far beyond a few hedge funds and banks. Although the market for credit insurance on individual companies and countries has shrunk by 59 percent since 2008, more money is now invested in benchmark CDS indexes than at any time since the committee’s creation in 2009, according to the Depository Trust & Clearing Corp. Mutual funds increasingly use CDS because they’re having trouble finding bonds to trade. That means the determinations committee is increasingly affecting the $3.5 trillion of bond mutual funds, a staple of U.S. retirement savings.
Though the determinations committee has rendered more than 1,000 judgments in the last six years, no records of its discussions have ever been made public -- nor is ISDA proposing they be.
“The problem is there’s no ability for an independent body to determine whether or not the process is fair, which ISDA says it is,” said Dennis Kelleher, CEO of Better Markets Inc., a Washington-based nonprofit watchdog group. (...)
Determining whether a company or government has formally defaulted might sound easy, but bonds are often freighted with covenants and structures that are virtually indecipherable to anyone but lawyers and traders.
Before the determinations committee was created, CDS sellers facing payouts on the insurance might insist a “default event” hadn’t been triggered.
After the collapse of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. in September 2008 exposed the complexity of the CDS market, Timothy Geithner, then president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, decided it needed an overhaul -- and fast. At his bidding, executives of the largest CDS dealers and money management firms met at Goldman Sachs’s headquarters in Lower Manhattan. Working with markers on paper white boards, the group drew up a new system for improving the settlement of CDS obligations.
Their solution: Let us decide.
by Nabila Ahmed, Bloomberg | Read more:
Image: via:
The First Time
When I was 7 or 8, I hoisted myself into a tree and accidentally gave myself an orgasm. It was snowy out, and I was bundled in a puffy winter jacket and cumbersome ski pants, which made the branch I’d been hanging from unusually difficult to straddle. As I struggled to pull myself higher, flexing my abdomen with every move, I noticed an unfamiliar kind of pelvic euphoria, which subsided by the time I finagled my way up.
That’s really all I remember — a flash of pleasure. I can’t say I knew then what the feeling was, or what it meant — I am not, I should note, a dendrophiliac — but it must have made an impression on me, somewhere deep in my psyche, because when I first started masturbating, around the age of 12 or 13, I went at it handless.
There was a green leather chair in the guest room of my childhood home, and it had sturdy armrests I’d use to lift myself up — then I'd tighten my stomach and do the deed. I don’t recall the first time I attempted this balancing act or the exact moment I realized it was masturbation. I only know that it made complete sense. I went at it with un-self-conscious zeal for a year or so, until I realized that it was kind of unusual and normalized my behavior by switching over to a more boring method. You know, the quick, furtive stroke.
It's often hard to take masturbation as anything more than a joke. Whenever I tell friends and colleagues about my original method, it elicits eyebrow raises and embarrassed chuckles. But I’ve always wondered if other kids have gotten off using the same technique I began with — besides my brother, who told me that, in his adolescent years, he’d hang from jungle gyms and shower-curtain rods in order to climax. (He called it his “funny feeling,” the perfect words for it, in my opinion.)
“We still can't be relaxed about the idea of giving ourselves an orgasm,” said Betty Dodson, who literally wrote the book on masturbation, Sex for One, “which simply displays how unfucked this country is.” She told me that my adolescent jerk-off method is most common among women, who will cross their legs, lie on their stomachs, and squeeze and release. Pleasure comes from pumping the pelvic floor muscle, which is at the base of the abdomen. “I have to give you credit,” Dodson told me. “You managed to have an orgasm without, quote, touching yourself, unquote, down there.”
by Matthew Kassel, NY Magazine | Read more:
Image: Universal Pictures
That’s really all I remember — a flash of pleasure. I can’t say I knew then what the feeling was, or what it meant — I am not, I should note, a dendrophiliac — but it must have made an impression on me, somewhere deep in my psyche, because when I first started masturbating, around the age of 12 or 13, I went at it handless.There was a green leather chair in the guest room of my childhood home, and it had sturdy armrests I’d use to lift myself up — then I'd tighten my stomach and do the deed. I don’t recall the first time I attempted this balancing act or the exact moment I realized it was masturbation. I only know that it made complete sense. I went at it with un-self-conscious zeal for a year or so, until I realized that it was kind of unusual and normalized my behavior by switching over to a more boring method. You know, the quick, furtive stroke.
It's often hard to take masturbation as anything more than a joke. Whenever I tell friends and colleagues about my original method, it elicits eyebrow raises and embarrassed chuckles. But I’ve always wondered if other kids have gotten off using the same technique I began with — besides my brother, who told me that, in his adolescent years, he’d hang from jungle gyms and shower-curtain rods in order to climax. (He called it his “funny feeling,” the perfect words for it, in my opinion.)
“We still can't be relaxed about the idea of giving ourselves an orgasm,” said Betty Dodson, who literally wrote the book on masturbation, Sex for One, “which simply displays how unfucked this country is.” She told me that my adolescent jerk-off method is most common among women, who will cross their legs, lie on their stomachs, and squeeze and release. Pleasure comes from pumping the pelvic floor muscle, which is at the base of the abdomen. “I have to give you credit,” Dodson told me. “You managed to have an orgasm without, quote, touching yourself, unquote, down there.”
by Matthew Kassel, NY Magazine | Read more:
Image: Universal Pictures
Monday, October 26, 2015
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