The Power of Embracing Uncertainty

Moments of confusion can be pretty memorable, and not in a good way. How is this thing supposed to work? What is the teacher’s point? Where am I, and how do I get to where I am going? But confusion is greatly underrated, argues the journalist Jamie Holmes in his new book, “Nonsense.” Naturally, it is good to understand. Yet, Holmes writes, our discomfort with not knowing can lead us astray — to bad solutions, or to brilliant options never spotted. If we could learn to embrace uncertainty, we’d all be better off — and better prepared for modern life. Holmes answered questions from Mind Matters editor Gareth Cook.

Cook: How did you become interested in this unusual topic?
Holmes: My childhood was full of jarring experiences—jarring in a good way—that felt at once bizarre, confusing, challenging, and enlightening. The social world of the south side of Chicago, where I started high school, was much more diverse than the one in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where I finished high school. My father threw me into a German school in Berlin, with two weeks of language lessons, when I was eleven. I went to high school in Budapest for a bit when I was 15. I taught high school classes in Romania after college. So I think one puzzle that I’ve always found really intriguing is how someone’s worldview changes when it’s challenged by radically unusual experiences, and how difficult and rewarding those time periods can be. The psychologist Dean Simonton calls them “diversifying experiences.” So, in a sense, one major theme of the book—what happens when beliefs collide with unexpected or unclear situations—is very personal to me.

More directly, I was looking into the psychologist Roy Baumeister’s research on willpower, which got me interested, more broadly, in how the mind handles mental conflicts. That led to me to the work of psychologist Arie Kruglanksi, and in particular a book called “The Psychology of Closed Mindedness.” And I realized very quickly that here was this rich vein of research on ambiguity and uncertainty from a highly-respected researcher, published in top journals, that had received almost no popular attention simply because Kruglanski hadn’t gotten around to writing a popular book about it. He joked to me that now he wouldn’t have to.

Cook: You write about our “need for closure.” Where does this come from, and why is it something that we should know about ourselves?
Holmes: Our need for closure is our natural preference for definite answers over confusion and ambiguity. The need-for-closure scale was developed by Kruglanski in the early 1990s, although forerunners of the concept appeared after World War II as psychologists struggled to understand Nazism. Every person has their own baseline level of need for closure. (Curious readers can test theirs, by the way, at my website.) It likely evolved via natural selection. If we didn’t have some capacity to shut down thinking, we’d deliberate forever. There must be some mechanism pushing us toward resolution, Kruglanski saw. We have to eliminate ambiguity.

What I find really fascinating is how our need for closure is affected by the situation we’re in. So, our need for closure rises when we have to act rather than just observe, and when we’re rushed, or bored, or tired. Any stress, really, can make our discomfort with ambiguity increase. And that matters, because a high need for closure negatively influences some of our most critical decisions: how we deal with perceived threats, who we decide to trust, whether we admit we’re wrong, whether we stereotype, and even how creative we are. So much of the book focuses on the dangers of a high need for closure, strategies for lowering it, and ways to learn from ambiguity rather than dismiss it.

by Gareth Cook , Scientific American | Read more:
Image: Nina Subin

Hedwig & the Angry Inch

Magic Leap

[ed. Can't wait to see this IRL. It'll be a game-changer.]

I’m sitting behind a workbench in a white-walled room in Dania Beach, Florida, in the office of a secretive startup called Magic Leap. I’m staring wide-eyed through a pair of lenses attached to what looks like metal scaffolding that towers over my head and contains a bunch of electronics and lenses. It’s an early prototype of the company’s so-called cinematic-­reality technology, which makes it possible for me to believe that the muscular beast with the gruff expression and two sets of swinging arms is actually in the room with me, hovering about seven feet in front of my face.

He’s not just visible at a set distance. I’m holding a video-game controller that’s connected to the demo station, and at the press of a button I can make the monster smaller or larger, move him right or left, bring him closer, or push him farther away.

Of course, I bring him as near as possible; I want to see how real he looks up close. Now he’s about 30 inches from my eyeballs and, though I’ve made him pocket-sized, looks about as authentic as a monster could—he seems to have rough skin, muscular limbs, and deep-set beady eyes. I extend my hand to give him a base to walk on, and I swear I feel a tingling in my palm in expectation of his little feet pressing into it. When, a split second later, my brain remembers that this is just an impressively convincing 3-D image displayed in the real space in front of me, all I can do is grin.

Virtual- and augmented-reality technologies used in movies, smartphone apps, and gadgets tend to underdeliver on overhyped promises with images that look crappy. Typically that’s because stereoscopic 3-D, the most commonly used method, is essentially tricking your eyes instead of working with the way you normally see things. It produces a sense of depth by showing each eye a separate image of the same object at a different angle. But since that forces you to look simultaneously at a flat screen in the distance and images that appear to be moving in front of you, it can make you dizzy and lead to headaches and nausea.

To be sure, stereoscopic 3-D has recently started getting better. The best system you can currently buy comes from Oculus VR, which Facebook purchased last spring for $2 billion; the $199 Gear VR, which was built in collaboration with Samsung and is aimed at software developers, lets you slide a Samsung smartphone into a headset to play games and watch videos.

But while Oculus wants to transport you to a virtual world for fun and games, Magic Leap wants to bring the fun and games to the world you’re already in. And in order for its fantasy monsters to appear on your desk alongside real pencils, Magic Leap had to come up with an alternative to stereoscopic 3-D—something that doesn’t disrupt the way you normally see things. Essentially, it has developed an itty-bitty projector that shines light into your eyes—light that blends in extremely well with the light you’re receiving from the real world.

As I see crisply rendered images of monsters, robots, and cadaver heads in Magic Leap’s offices, I can envision someday having a video chat with faraway family members who look as if they’re actually sitting in my living room while, on their end, I appear to be sitting in theirs. Or walking around New York City with a virtual tour guide, the sides of buildings overlaid with images that reveal how the structures looked in the past. Or watching movies where the characters appear to be right in front of me, letting me follow them around as the plot unfolds. But no one really knows what Magic Leap might be best for. If the company can make its technology not only cool but comfortable and easy to use, people will surely dream up amazing applications.

That’s no doubt why Google took the lead in an astonishingly large $542 million investment round in Magic Leap last October. Whatever it is cooking up has a good chance of being one of the next big things in computing, and Google would be crazy to risk missing out.

by Rachel Metz, MIT Technology Review |  Read more:

Image: YouTube

Yoshitaka Kashima (Jujo)
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Leos Carax, Paris, 2008 - David Balicki
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New MIT Code Makes Web Pages Load 34 Percent Faster in Any Browser

Internet connections get faster but websites get more complex—and that means we often still have to wait an age for pages to load. Now, a new technique from MIT that helps browsers gather files more efficiently could change that.

“As pages increase in complexity, they often require multiple trips that create delays that really add up,” explains Ravi Netravali, one of the researchers, in a press release. “Our approach minimizes the number of round trips so that we can substantially speed up a page’s load-time.” The new system, known as Polaris, was been developed by the University’s at Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.

Loading a web page is an oddly complex business. Hit enter after a URL or click on a link and your browser busies itself gathering a series of objects—HTML files, JavaScript, pictures and who knows what else. Each object is evaluated, then added to the page you’re looking at. But that evaluation can result in having to fetch other, dependent objects—and browsers don’t know what those dependencies are until they’ve grabbed the first object. If they did, they’d be able to pull across more files in one go, reducing the amount of back-and-forth across the network, reducing the time it takes to load a page.

That’s where Polaris comes in. What it does is log all the dependancies and inter-dependancies on a web page. It compiles all of these into a graph for the page that a browser can use to download page elements more efficiently. The researchers liken it to the work of travelling salesperson:

When you visit one city, you sometimes discover more cities you have to visit before going home. If someone gave you the entire list of cities ahead of time, you could plan the fastest possible route. Without the list, though, you have to discover new cities as you go, which results in unnecessary zig-zagging between far-away cities... 

For a web browser, loading all of a page’s objects is like visiting all of the cities. Polaris effectively gives you a list of all the cities before your trip actually begins.

The team’s tested the the system on 200 different websites, including ESPN, Weather.com, and Wikipedia. On average, it was able to load web pages 34 percent faster than a standard browser. The work will be presented later this week at the USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation.

The good news is that Polaris is written in JavaScript. That means that it could be introduced to any website—it’d just have to be running on the server in question, so it’d automatically kick in for any page load—and used with unmodified browsers.

by Jamie Condliffe, Gizmodo | Read more:
Image: Luis Llerena via Unsplash

The 12th Man Tradition

Earlier this month the Indianapolis Colts became the third NFL franchise to face the wrath of Aggie lawyers over the use of “12th Man” marketing terminology. In years past, the school has pried licensing fees out of the Buffalo Bills and the Seattle Seahawks for the use of the term, which they trademarked in 1990. No money changed hands this time around. The Colts simply agreed to stop using the words “12th Man” for merchandising purposes.

Today, any football team, college or pro, that refers to its fans as the 12th Man for commercial purposes can expect to hear from an Aggie lawyer tout suite. And per the tenets of trademark law, the cold hard facts are clear: A&M owns the “12th Man” trademark, and if they don’t enforce that trademark, the term could become generic, like “escalator,” “kerosene,” and “Aspirin.”

But there’s another possible argument for NFL teams who find themselves in court with the Ags could use: By the time the Aggies trademarked the “12th Man”—a reference to the team’s passionate fans—the term was already generic.

Or at least that’s a possibility vehemently promoted by a college football enthusiast who goes by the pseudonym “Randolph Duke.” Ahab had his white whale, Don Quixote had his windmills, Inspector Javert had his Jean Valjean, and Randolph Duke has the Fightin’ Texas Aggies 12th Man Tradition. Duke has spent a great many hours over the past three years working to debunk key elements of the Aggie 12th Man origin story, and thereby destroy the trademark. He has become a legend of college football message boards in the process, a hero to some (but not all) on Longhorn boards, a villain in Aggieland, and a source of amusement to neutral observers.

Duke shares his extensive research with every defendant the Aggies have sued. But he was never more active than in the run-up to the Colts settlement. For months, he had been crafting posts of many thousands of words stating his case, the crux of which is this: he believes that one of the pleadings in the Aggie lawsuit against the Colts was nothing short of “fraudulent,” an example of “public corruption” perpetrated by state employees.

And it all stems from this, paragraph 7, which reads thus:

Since as early as 1922, Texas A&M has used the mark 12th Man (hereinafter, the “12th Man Mark”) in connection with sporting events and numerous products and services. The 12th Man Mark was initially adopted in 1922 as a remembrance of a student at Texas A&M, E. King Gill, and his spirit of readiness to serve Texas A&M’s football team in time of need. The legend of E. King Gill grew, and the 12th Man Mark now identifies and distinguishes Texas A&M in connection with all of its athletic entertainment services and events, education-related services, and a wide variety of merchandise products for which Texas A&M and its licensees use the 12th Man Mark.

 Aggie Legend

To understand a key part of Randolph Duke’s argument, we need to dive into the origins of this treasured legend.

According to sacred Aggie text:

The tradition of the Twelfth Man was born on the second of January 1922, when an underdog Aggie team was playing Centre College, then the nation’s top ranked team. As the hard fought game wore on, and the Aggies dug deeply into their limited reserves, Coach Dana X. Bible remembered a squad man who was not in uniform. He had been up in the press box helping reporters identify players. His name was E. King Gill, and was a former football player who was only playing basketball. Gill was called from the stands, suited up, and stood ready throughout the rest of the game, which A&M finally won 22-14. When the game ended, E. King Gill was the only man left standing on the sidelines for the Aggies. Gill later said, “I wish I could say that I went in and ran for the winning touchdown, but I did not. I simply stood by in case my team needed me.” 

This gesture was more than enough for the Aggie Team. Although Gill did not play in the game, he had accepted the call to help his team. He came to be thought of as the Twelfth Man because he stood ready for duty in the event that the eleven men on the gridiron needed assistance. That spirit of readiness for service, desire to support, and enthusiasm helped kindle a flame of devotion among the entire student body; a spirit that has grown vigorously throughout the years. The entire student body at A&M is the Twelfth Man, and they stand during the entire game to show their support. The 12th Man is always in the stands waiting to be called upon if they are needed.

Much of the story is true. The Aggies did beat the highly-ranked Praying Colonels of Centre College in Dallas 22-14. E. King Gill did get summoned from the stands by Coach Bible, and ultimately, his services were not needed. After that things get murky, according to Duke. Here is his extremely detailed account of the game, but to make his long story short, it seems that Gill was not the lone man on the sideline when the final whistle blew. By Duke’s reckoning, A&M still had twenty healthy players by the time Gill came down from the stands, not twelve. The team had run out of substitute running backs, as mentioned in the one and only account of the game that mentions Gill by name.

So Gill was not the 12th man, but more like the 20th.

by John Nova Lomax, Texas Monthly |  Read more:

Image: John Rivera/ICON Sportswire

Marcelo Argolo
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Sparrow beside Bamboo in Snow - Kamisaka Sekka (1866-1942)
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Capitalism’s Capital

Robert Moses was a modernist pharaoh. Over the forty years from the early 1930s to the late 1960s, he became a virtual dictator of public works in all five boroughs of New York and much of its suburban surroundings. Almost singlehandedly, through chicanery, fraud and bullying, he created the modern infrastructure of the New York City area: expressways, tunnels and bridges, but also parks, beaches, swimming pools and high-rise housing projects. He envisioned an American version of Le Corbusier’s ideal city, cleansed of disorder and unpredictability, focused on cars rather than pedestrians, committed to an idea of urban public space as empty plazas dominated by glass towers. He aspired to be a master builder, and his achievements ranged from the elegant – the Art Deco bathhouses at Jones Beach on Long Island – to the catastrophic: the Cross-Bronx Expressway, which destroyed thriving neighbourhoods and displaced thousands of people.

By 1968, when Moses was finally forced from power, the catastrophes had become impossible to ignore. The bridges, tunnels and expressways had intensified traffic jams, not relieved them; the public transport system was perishing from neglect; the destroyed neighbourhoods and high-rise housing projects were all boarded-up windows, broken glass and drunks marinating in their own piss. Moses was becoming a symbol of everything that was wrong with modernist urban planning: its hostility to street life, its indifference to neighbourhood cohesion, its infatuation with cars and the comparatively well-off people who drove them.

The collapse of modernist grandiosity accelerated a swerve in urban planning towards the view articulated by Jane Jacobs in The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961), which promoted a new emphasis on protecting vital neighbourhoods and allowing for unpredictable social encounters in public spaces. This was a turn to a different modernism: the sort embodied in Stephen Dedalus’s definition of God as ‘a shout in the street’; the sort that celebrated spontaneity, improvisation and play. For half a century, Jacobs’s humane perspective has leavened the discourse of urban revitalisation while at the same time unleashing a flood of preppy bars and cleverly themed emporia – the benign but by now predictable markers of gentrification. Still Moses’s monuments remain: swooping ribbons of steel, clogged with cars; futuristic fantasies of speed, stuck in traffic; concrete embodiments of his modernist hubris.

While Moses’s utopia was crashing and burning, Robert Caro was writing The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York. It was first published in 1974. New York City was on the brink of bankruptcy, social breakdown seemed imminent. Elite institutions manifested a siege mentality: on a visit to Columbia University’s Butler Library in the early 1970s, I remember noticing that the floor lamps were chained to the radiators; anything not secured, it seemed, was liable to be carried off. No wonder Caro connected Moses with ‘the fall of New York’. The master builder had become the architect of urban collapse. The Power Broker showed, in overwhelming detail, how Moses’s overreach led to disaster. In the dark days of the 1970s, the book was celebrated as a shrewd diagnosis of the city’s ills; now, when the city is leaking capital out of every pore, New York triumphalists have taken to questioning Caro’s critique, claiming it’s time to revisit Moses’s work. But in the end the revisiting does little to alter the critique.

*

Caro’s epigraph is from Sophocles: ‘One must wait until the evening to see how splendid the day has been.’ Or, in Moses’s case, Caro implies, to see how hollow the splendour has been. Moses spent most of his career awash in adulation. For nearly four decades, every print medium from the Times to the tabloids, from Fortune to Architecture Forum, agreed that he was a preternaturally gifted and dedicated public servant, a man above politics, above graft and greed, committed to Getting Things Done quickly and efficiently. And the things themselves – the parks, playgrounds and beaches, the bridges and parkways and expressways – either epitomised the grandeur of American aspiration, or enhanced the innocent pleasure of the American people at play, or both. Who could not admire such a man, working for peanuts or sometimes for nothing at all, transforming the city into a fitting capital for the richest and most powerful nation on earth? What’s not to like?

Caro spends 1200 pages answering that question in detail. The legend of Robert Moses the disinterested public servant was always ‘a gigantic hoax’, he writes. Moses knew how to manipulate the local and national media, but he was as dependent on graft and patronage as any old pol from Tammany Hall, for decades the home of the Democratic Party machine. Though he didn’t sup directly at the public trough, he had no scruples about ignoring or stretching the law to advance his agenda, creating no-show jobs for friends who could do him favours and no-bid contracts for compliant contractors, courting politicians with lavish entertainment at public expense – providing, on many such occasions at Jones Beach, martinis from one fountain, Manhattans from another, and music from Guy Lombardo and his Royal Canadians, the maestros of cheesy white pop. For the first decade or so of his career, Moses preserved his youthful attachment to the ideals of the Progressive movement – parks for the people, clean government by the competent – and pursued power for the sake of those ideals. But from 1934 on, after he was appointed parks commissioner by Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, he pursued power for the sake of more power.

by Jackson Lears, London Review of Books |  Read more:

Image: Robert Moses

Surviving the Love Bomb

Colloquially speaking,“love bombing” is a coercive outpouring of support. Marketing teams love bomb customers. Politicians love bomb voters. Sirens love bomb sailors.

But sociologists reserve the term for exhibitions of unconditional acceptance geared toward indoctrination. Military recruiters, for instance, might love bomb a potential recruit—first by emphasizing the military’s exclusivity, then by asking questions that presumably speak to the newcomer’s idealized self-image, implying that he is one of few eligible to join.

The recruiter says, “You can’t be in the military unless you’re very, very strong—like Hercules.” And then, “How long have you had such enormous and impressive muscles attached to your body?”

Cults do it, too. And like any organization eager to enlist worshippers, certain religious groups (especially historically young religions, such as Scientology, born-again Evangelicalism, or Mormonism, whose very existence depends on conversion) will love bomb probable converts by exaggerating similarities between the group and the other, always in a way that promises acceptance and forthcoming exaltation.

In general, such tactics work best on the lonely.

*

I had never been lonelier. I lived alone, had very few friends, and worked seventy hours a week, for very little money, under the management of a physically affectionate boss named Wally, who occasionally wept in front of me about strained relations with his wife.

Our company was Wally’s brainchild. He’d pitched it to investors as “a newspaper website (a newspaper, except it’s only online),” during a time when newspapers already had websites. His underlings included one full-time employee (me) as well as seven very exhausted, unpaid interns, who I assume (and hope) were independently wealthy because they all went to Sarah Lawrence, which is the most expensive college in the world. We were in a recession. Since graduating college, nearly everyone I knew had already been fired at least once. But acquiring hundreds of thousands of dollars in student loans was often as easy as clicking a button that read, “I accept my award!” I felt lucky to have a job.

In general, the interns and I wrote articles that had no real angle, because the site had no niche, which in turn led to an online audience of about 20 or so people, mainly comprised of our parents. It had been funded, like my boss’s ranch house in the suburbs, entirely by his father.

Most days, Wally sat at his desk surfing the Internet, ignoring texts from his wife while the rest of us wrote terrible pieces that answered questions like, “Which bodily fluids can you send via mail?” I often caught him reading his own pieces, published years before, on online newspapers that people knew about. I thought he was very successful. My starting salary was one thousand dollars per month before taxes and the website’s profit margin remained steady at zero dollars. So, to supplement Wally’s slowly dwindling trust fund, the interns and I often jumped on unethical odd jobs for the “tutoring agency” with which we shared a Brooklyn office. The agency charged rich families in the tri-state area two hundred dollars an hour to consult on college applications, and we “ghost wrote” the personal essays for free in exchange for Wally’s office space.

“It has been a month now since the surgery,” I wrote in one such essay, under the byline of a girl who had recently undergone simple Lasik. “Occasionally, I hear my mom’s voice cautiously suggest that we add a few more colleges to my list—specifically, ones with amenities for the blind.”

I got into a lot of colleges that year.

Wally had to be home for dinner every night to eat with his family, but before he left us to our voluntary overtime, he always gave an extremely quiet motivational speech about how we had to keep the ship from going under.

“These projects might keep us afloat—Gupta, Abraham, Pinker,” Wally whispered, looking pale as he listed the names of college-bound, teenage clients we had never met, before slipping away to the elevators. “Please. I don’t want to lose my job.”

His reliance on us, and his perpetual fear of economic failure, made the interns and I feel grown up and important. It never occurred to me to ask for a raise, because I assumed that, if I did, Wally’s family would starve. Late at night, after Wally went home and the tutoring agency people turned out the lights, we talked in the dark, our faces lit by laptop screens, about what an “opportunity” it was to have the freedom to write what we wanted, and put it online—the word “exposure” was thrown around a lot, usually when Adderall was available—and we all agreed that Wally was a great guy for trusting us with his “brand.”

*

To save money I commuted four hours each day from a guesthouse in New Jersey that I’d found on Craiglist. I lived behind a towering, red-brick mansion for almost zero dollars. The guesthouse was the mansion’s miniature twin. Both resembled the dollhouses that I noticed in the cellar one day while doing my laundry.

My landlord was a pleasant-seeming woman named Maude, who liked to garden. She was petite, blonde and spritely, and lived in the Main House with her college-aged daughter, Elizabeth, who was home for the summer. She was more than willing to tell me about herself, which I liked, because often our stories contain secrets, and I adore secrets. I discovered that the mansion and the guesthouse and Maude’s ability to constantly garden had been secured through Maude’s thirty-odd years spent running what turned into a multi-million dollar corporate sweatshirt business, which she’d sold prior to the recession—a period during which few corporations needed swag because they’d all gone bankrupt. I found stacks of sweatshirts in every closet emblazoned with the names of economic casualties.

When I first arrived, Maude said that she and Elizabeth had just welcomed a houseguest named Salina—a former weight-loss instructor who had worked at a fat camp in Hawaii, and now lived in Salt Lake City, where she worked part time as a personal trainer. Maude alluded to the fact that Salina been contracted for the summer to help Elizabeth lose weight. I said I looked forward to meeting both of them. Maude smiled and disappeared inside.

I left early in the morning and returned late, so at first it didn’t seem strange to me that I hadn’t yet met Salina or Elizabeth. After being screamed at by strangers all day to walk faster, to get out of the way, to fuck off—or, occasionally, to go “touch butts with your sister” (shouted at me by a schizophrenic street person), stepping off the commuter train onto the sidewalk of Maude’s chirping, picket-fence little town felt like paradise. I was too intoxicated to harbor suspicion. She provided me with towels and Egyptian cotton bedding. The guesthouse lacked certain amenities, including a kitchen, so she hauled a microwave and mini-fridge into my room. I bought a book called The Adventures of Microwavable Cooking. I used the toilet as a garbage disposal and washed dishes in the gigantic shower in my private bathroom. Usually I took pride in these endeavors. I felt abstemious and handy. Maude welcomed, invited, intoxicated me. She wanted me to call her Auntie Maude.

But then weird things began happening to my body. I had grown up eating Hot Pockets, but after years of eating semi-normal college cafeteria food, my intestines had apparently gotten snobbish about Chef Boyardee, which is to say that the microwavable meals were giving me explosive diarrhea. I mentioned to Maude that I really missed cooking, and she said, “Fine—maybe you can use the Main House kitchen—we’ll talk about it.” I waited for our talk, and ate sandwiches. I knelt on the floor of the guest house with white bread and generic-brand Jiffy and Smuckers, and used whatever book I was reading as a cutting board. By the time I’d finish a novel, it was sticky with jelly.

“Stop by the Main House anytime—you know, to use the kitchen, cook, say, ‘Hi’,” Maude reiterated. “At the very least, come for dinner.”

I quickly tabulated how much money I could save per dinner. I considered the nutritional value of semi-regular meals that were neither microwavable nor freeze dried.

“How about now?” I asked.

“We’ll talk about it soon,” she said.

The guesthouse was not entirely mine. I slept in an enclave off the entryway, partially separated from the communal shoe rack by a walnut paneled room divider. Up the stairs from me: Maude’s office. Across the hallway: the living room that Maude used for her yoga practice. She came in at odd hours. Once I woke at two o’clock in the morning to see her silhouette in the doorway, backlit by the moon. “I can’t sleep so I’m going to do some Vinyasa,” she shout-whispered.

I tried to drag the room divider to fully block the sightlines between the front door and my bed, but once stretched wide enough, it always fell. No matter how I accordioned it, you could still see my coverlet. It was hard to focus on the work I brought home, knowing she could throw open the door at any moment, so I hung out a lot in the bathroom. I used the toilet as a desk and occasionally breaked from work to take long showers. The shower was bigger than my bed, and included a plastic bench that I could sit on while shampooing. In my mind, the only thing more luxurious than waiting for Wally to take his lunch break so I could re-watch one of two films involving my celebrity crush (an indie-film actor-director whom I’ll call Magnus), involved hunkering down on that waterproof chair. I stared into the shower blast and imagined myself as a naked queen on her throne, being carried on the backs of slaves through a thunderstorm, staring defiantly into the face of Rain Gods. Because I did not pay for water, wasting it made me feel wealthy. I flushed the toilet more than was strictly necessary, and began showering three times a day, anointing myself over and over again, just because.

by Kathleen Hale, Hazlit |  Read more:

Image: Jeremy Sorese

David Murobi
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Fasting Diets Are Gaining Acceptance

Mark Mattson, a neuroscientist at the National Institute on Aging in Maryland, has not had breakfast in 35 years. Most days he practices a form of fasting — skipping lunch, taking a midafternoon run, and then eating all of his daily calories (about 2,000) in a six-hour window starting in the afternoon.

“Once you get used to it, it’s not a big deal,” said Dr. Mattson, chief of the institute’s laboratory of neurosciences. “I’m not hungry at all in the morning, and this is other people’s experience as well. It’s just a matter of getting adapted to it.”

In a culture in which it’s customary to eat three large meals a day while snacking from morning to midnight, the idea of regularly skipping meals may sound extreme. But in recent years intermittent fasting has been gaining popular attention and scientific endorsement. (...)

Fasting to improve health dates back thousands of years, with Hippocrates and Plato among its earliest proponents. Dr. Mattson argues that humans are well suited for it: For much of human history, sporadic access to food was likely the norm, especially for hunter-gatherers. As a result, we’ve evolved with livers and muscles that store quickly accessible carbohydrates in the form of glycogen, and our fat tissue holds long-lasting energy reserves that can sustain the body for weeks when food is not available.

“From an evolutionary perspective, it’s pretty clear that our ancestors did not eat three meals a day plus snacks,” Dr. Mattson said.

Across the world, millions of people fast periodically for religious and spiritual reasons. But some are now looking at the practice as a source of health and longevity. (...)

Dr. Mattson’s interest in intermittent fasting grew out of work on animals that showed that alternate-day fasting protected mice from strokes, Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease, and consistently extended their life spans by 30 percent. Dr. Mattson and his colleagues found that alternate-day fasting increased the production of proteins that protect brain cells, enhancing their ability to repair damaged DNA. Fasting, he said, acts as a mild stress that makes cells throughout the body stronger, shoring up their ability to adapt to later insults.

In this way, intermittent fasting is like exercise, which causes immediate stress and inflammation, but protects against chronic disease in the long run. Eating fruits and vegetables may have a similar effect. While very large doses of antioxidants can cause cancer in humans, moderate amounts of exposure can make cells more resilient, Dr. Mattson said.

by Anahad O'Connor, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Gary Taxali

Ray LaMontagne

Yaki Onigiri (Grilled Rice Ball) with Miso Butter Sauce

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Visual Abyss

How black is the world's blackest material?

The world’s darkest material may have gotten even darker, defying even spectrometers, which cannot quantify its blackness.

Surrey NanoSystems’ Vertically Aligned Nanotube Array black, or Vantablack, was developed in 2014 as the blackest known substance on Earth. Vantablack was originally created for use on satellites, but its high light absorption and ability to convert the trapped light into heat have made it a desirable product across scientific and commercial domains.

The blackness of Vantablack is so extreme that it confounds the eye. “It is so dark that the human eye cannot understand what it is seeing. Shapes and contours are lost, leaving nothing but an apparent abyss,” Ian Johnston of The Independent wrote in 2014.

Vantablack is made up of “a ‘forest’ of aligned and equally spaced, high aspect-ratio carbon nanotubes,” according to Surrey NanoSystems’ product description. Photons entering the thicket of tubing become trapped in the microscopic system and are bounced between the carbon tubing, eventually becoming heat before dissipating. The scientific development company says that the composition of the tubes means that Vantablack coating is almost entirely made up of free space, making it extremely light, flexible, and durable - although applied pressure such as touch can damage the nanostructures.

by Ben Thompson, CSM |  Read more:

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The Echo From Amazon Brims With Groundbreaking Promise

[ed. See also: Amazon Echo Review (CNET)]

Many of the world’s largest technology companies have spent the last five years searching in vain for the holy grail, a machine to succeed the smartphone as the next must-have gadget.

They have made digital watches and fitness trackers, all manner of computerized glasses and goggles, and more doodads to plug into your TV than there are shows to watch on it.

Yet at the moment, the most promising candidate for the Next Great Gadget isn’t made by Apple, Google, Facebook or Microsoft. Instead, it is the Echo, a screenless, voice-controlled household computer built by Amazon — a company whose last big foray into consumer electronics, the Fire Phone, was a humiliating flop.

This time it may be different. A bit more than a year after its release, the Echo has morphed from a gimmicky experiment into a device that brims with profound possibility. The longer I use it, the more regularly it inspires the same sense of promise I felt when I used the first iPhone — a sense this machine is opening up a vast new realm in personal computing, and gently expanding the role that computers will play in our future.Photo

What is most interesting about the Echo is that it came out of nowhere. It isn’t much to look at, and even describing its utility is difficult. Here is a small, stationary machine that you set somewhere in your house, which you address as Alexa, which performs a variety of tasks — playing music, reading the news and weather, keeping a shopping list — that you can already do on your phone.

But the Echo has a way of sneaking into your routines. When Alexa reorders popcorn for you, or calls an Uber car for you, when your children start asking Alexa to add Popsicles to the grocery list, you start to want pretty much everything else in life to be Alexa-enabled, too.

In this way, Amazon has found a surreptitious way to bypass Apple and Google — the reigning monarchs in the smartphone world — with a gadget that has the potential to become a dominant force in the most intimate of environments: our homes.

If all this sounds over-the-top, read some of the reviews. On Amazon’s site, the Echo has racked up more stars than an Oscars party. Amazon doesn’t release sales numbers, but the company is investing big in Echo. It ran Super Bowl ads to push the device and last week it unveiled two new versions of the machine. One is a portable version of the Echo and the other is meant to plug into existing speaker systems.

Scot Wingo, the chairman of ChannelAdvisor, an e-commerce consulting firm, said the early signs suggested that the Echo was on a path to become Amazon’s next $1 billion business.

by Farhad Manjoo, NY Times |  Read more:

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Nootropics Survey

Nootropics are traditionally defined as substances that improve mental function. In practice they usually refer to psychoactive chemicals that are neither recreational drugs like cocaine and heroin, nor officially-endorsed psychiatric drugs like Prozac or Risperdal. Most are natural supplements, foreign medications available in US without prescription, or experimental compounds. They promise various benefits including clearer thinking, better concentration, improved mood, et cetera. You can read more about them here.

Although a few have been tested formally in small trials, many are known to work only based on anecdote and word of mouth. There are some online communities like r/nootropics where people get together, discuss them, and compare results. I’ve hung out there for a while, and two years ago, in order to satisfy my own curiosity about which of these were most worth looking into, I got 150 people to answer a short questionnaire about their experiences with different drugs.

Since then the field has changed and I wanted to get updated data. This year 850 (!) people agreed to fill out my questionnaire and rate various nootropics on a scale of 0 – 10 – thanks again to everyone who completed the survey. (...)

Some very predictable winners: Adderall is a prescription drug and probably doesn’t even qualify as a nootropic; I included it as a reference point, and it unsurprisingly did very well. LSD microdosing is the practice of taking LSD at one-tenth or less of the normal hallucinogenic dose; users say that it improves creativity and happiness without any of the typical craziness. Phenibut is a Russian anxiolytic drug of undenied effectiveness which is sort of notorious for building tolerance and addiction if used incorrectly. And modafinil is a prescription medication for sleep issues which makes users more awake and energetic. All of these are undeniably effective – but all are either addictive, illegal without prescription, or both.

I’m more interested by a second tier of winners, including tianeptine, Semax, and ashwagandha. Tianeptine is a French antidepressant available (legally? kind of a gray area) without prescription in the US; users say it both provides a quick fix for depression and makes them happier and more energetic in general. Semax is a Russian peptide supposed to improve mental clarity and general well-being. Ashwagandha might seem weird to include here since it’s all the way down at #15, but a lot of the ones above it had low sample size or were things like caffeine that everyone already knows about, and its high position surprised me. It’s an old Indian herb that’s supposed to treat anxiety.

The biggest loser here is Alpha Brain, a proprietary supplement sold by a flashy-looking company for $35 a bottle. Many people including myself have previously been skeptical that they can be doing much given how many random things they throw into one little pill. But it looks like AlphaBrain underperformed even the nootropics that I think of as likely placebo – things like choline and DMAE. It’s possible that survey respondents penalized the company for commercializing what is otherwise a pretty un-branded space, ranking it lower than they otherwise might have to avoid endorsing that kind of thing.

(I was surprised to see picamilon, a Russian modification of the important neurotransmitter GABA, doing so badly. I thought it was pretty well-respected in the community. As far as I can tell, this one is just genuinely bad.)

Finally, a note on addiction.

by Scott Alexander, Slate Star Codex |  Read more:

Image: Slate Star Codex