Sunday, March 13, 2016
Pax, the 'iPhone of Vaporizers'
Josh, a banker at a hedge fund in Manhattan, loves his Pax vaporizer.
He uses the small, sleek gadget to heat up his stash of weed just to the right temperature in under a minute — hot enough so he can inhale it and feel the effects, but not so hot that it burns — a few times each week.
He presses a button to turn it on while it’s in his pocket, and about a minute later, pulls it out, puts it to his lips, and inhales.
“You breathe in, you breath out, and you’re done,” he recently told Tech Insider.
Josh (we're not using his real name for obvious reasons) said he’s used his Pax to get high outside of a movie theater, on the subway, at concerts, and even on his way into the office.
He likes it because it’s not only convenient, but also inconspicuous. Because you’re not actually smoking, there isn’t as much of an odor, and it doesn’t create a huge cloud of smoke that draws attention.
Pax, he said, “has truly pushed the envelope and brought [smoking weed] into the 21st century.”
The Pax vaporizer is made by Pax Labs, one of the leading — and certainly one of the buzziest — companies cashing in on the growing demand for small, handheld battery-powered vaporizers that have revolutionized how people smoke weed in public.
The second generation Pax, the Pax 2, came out last year and is packed with technology: It has multiple sensors to measure temperature and an accelerometer that detects movement. The mouthpiece recognizes when your lips touch it, telling the heater to turn on and start heating up whatever you've packed inside of it. Insulation keeps the smooth exterior cool while the oven heats up to temperatures as high as 455 degrees Fahrenheit.
It's been referred to as "the iPhone of vaporizers," and, like the iPhone, it comes with a premium price tag — the Pax 2 will set you back $289.99.
by Tim Stenovec, Tech Insider | Read more:
Image: Pax
He uses the small, sleek gadget to heat up his stash of weed just to the right temperature in under a minute — hot enough so he can inhale it and feel the effects, but not so hot that it burns — a few times each week.
He presses a button to turn it on while it’s in his pocket, and about a minute later, pulls it out, puts it to his lips, and inhales.
“You breathe in, you breath out, and you’re done,” he recently told Tech Insider.
Josh (we're not using his real name for obvious reasons) said he’s used his Pax to get high outside of a movie theater, on the subway, at concerts, and even on his way into the office.He likes it because it’s not only convenient, but also inconspicuous. Because you’re not actually smoking, there isn’t as much of an odor, and it doesn’t create a huge cloud of smoke that draws attention.
Pax, he said, “has truly pushed the envelope and brought [smoking weed] into the 21st century.”
The Pax vaporizer is made by Pax Labs, one of the leading — and certainly one of the buzziest — companies cashing in on the growing demand for small, handheld battery-powered vaporizers that have revolutionized how people smoke weed in public.
The second generation Pax, the Pax 2, came out last year and is packed with technology: It has multiple sensors to measure temperature and an accelerometer that detects movement. The mouthpiece recognizes when your lips touch it, telling the heater to turn on and start heating up whatever you've packed inside of it. Insulation keeps the smooth exterior cool while the oven heats up to temperatures as high as 455 degrees Fahrenheit.
It's been referred to as "the iPhone of vaporizers," and, like the iPhone, it comes with a premium price tag — the Pax 2 will set you back $289.99.
by Tim Stenovec, Tech Insider | Read more:
Image: Pax
The Facebook Breakup
For Kate Sokoloff, a brand strategist in Portland, Ore., the Facebook mirror of her breakup with her boyfriend of three years was like “an emotional sucker punch,” she said. “Not 15 minutes after we broke up four years ago, and probably while he was still parked outside of my house, he changed his status to ‘single.’”
This meant that all of the couple’s Facebook friends, including her teenage sons, were instantly notified. “There was no hiding or time to cry on my own,” said Ms. Sokoloff, now 55.
She did message friends, asking them to remove any photos of herself and her former partner from their own Facebook albums, but she remembers wishing “there was a Facebook vacuum cleaner that could suck every trace of our relationship off the Internet. Photos, in particular. In fact, some just popped up yesterday.”
Since last November, there has been such a tool, part of a kit the social network has designed to manage and curate the digital archive that is growing with each relationship. It’s like cleaning your closet, said Kelly Winters, a product manager on Facebook’s designated “Compassion Team,” a changing squad of product managers and designers, engineers, researchers, social scientists and psychologists. “You don’t want to keep anything around that doesn’t spark joy,” she said, echoing the mantra of Marie Kondo, the Japanese decluttering guru.
Three million users have already deployed some aspect of the breakup flow, as it’s called, by choosing to minimize what they see of an ex going forward, and similarly hide their own postings, settings that can easily be reversed if the future brings a change of heart or a dulling of the ache.
Undoing the vacuum tool (to use Ms. Sokoloff’s words for the engineering feat that harnesses what is known as distributed computing to untag hundreds or even thousands of images that no longer spark joy) is more laborious. (...)
Finding the right tone was a big part of the design process, Ms. Albert said, language being crucial in creating a tool kit that would be flexible enough to address a 14-year-old breaking up with her boyfriend of four weeks as well as longtime married couples with children.
It also had to be neutral, not familiar, and not in any way hortatory. “If designers are in charge of surprise and delight,” she said, “what does it mean to design for aspects of life that are painful?”
Facebook language isn’t lyric poetry, by any means, but it does the trick. If you’re able to stumble onto the breakup flow (not an easy task, at this point; it’s only available on mobile and only in the United States), you should discover, as Ms. Winters described, a bento box of options.
“Take a Break. Here are some changes that might be helpful. We won’t notify Taylor of any changes you make. See less of Taylor. See Taylor on Facebook only if you visit his profile.” And so on. Mostly the language is like that of an instruction manual — “Turn on tag approvals for posts and photos you’re tagged in” — though at the end, it veers into self-care: “Reach out to people you trust for support. Stay Active. …”
There were some ideas that were, as Ms. Albert said, “out of scope to build, the idea of locking yourself out, temporarily, from one person’s account, trying to prevent that stalking behavior.” Technologically, she said, it was a bridge too far, and it led to a bigger conversation about what role Facebook wants to play in people’s lives. “It would be like Starbucks not accepting your credit card,” she said.
And just maybe such stalking is productive for some, a step toward resilience that would never accrue from watching baby sloth videos or mash-ups of Donald Trump tweets.
Ms. Sokoloff, the brand strategist who yearned for a digital vacuum cleaner, wondered if there wasn’t some emotional cost in making all traces of a relationship disappear. “Is there something important in the healing process that would be lost if we can essentially have the Facebook equivalent of the dream removers from ‘Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind’?”
This meant that all of the couple’s Facebook friends, including her teenage sons, were instantly notified. “There was no hiding or time to cry on my own,” said Ms. Sokoloff, now 55.
She did message friends, asking them to remove any photos of herself and her former partner from their own Facebook albums, but she remembers wishing “there was a Facebook vacuum cleaner that could suck every trace of our relationship off the Internet. Photos, in particular. In fact, some just popped up yesterday.”
Since last November, there has been such a tool, part of a kit the social network has designed to manage and curate the digital archive that is growing with each relationship. It’s like cleaning your closet, said Kelly Winters, a product manager on Facebook’s designated “Compassion Team,” a changing squad of product managers and designers, engineers, researchers, social scientists and psychologists. “You don’t want to keep anything around that doesn’t spark joy,” she said, echoing the mantra of Marie Kondo, the Japanese decluttering guru.Three million users have already deployed some aspect of the breakup flow, as it’s called, by choosing to minimize what they see of an ex going forward, and similarly hide their own postings, settings that can easily be reversed if the future brings a change of heart or a dulling of the ache.
Undoing the vacuum tool (to use Ms. Sokoloff’s words for the engineering feat that harnesses what is known as distributed computing to untag hundreds or even thousands of images that no longer spark joy) is more laborious. (...)
Finding the right tone was a big part of the design process, Ms. Albert said, language being crucial in creating a tool kit that would be flexible enough to address a 14-year-old breaking up with her boyfriend of four weeks as well as longtime married couples with children.
It also had to be neutral, not familiar, and not in any way hortatory. “If designers are in charge of surprise and delight,” she said, “what does it mean to design for aspects of life that are painful?”
Facebook language isn’t lyric poetry, by any means, but it does the trick. If you’re able to stumble onto the breakup flow (not an easy task, at this point; it’s only available on mobile and only in the United States), you should discover, as Ms. Winters described, a bento box of options.
“Take a Break. Here are some changes that might be helpful. We won’t notify Taylor of any changes you make. See less of Taylor. See Taylor on Facebook only if you visit his profile.” And so on. Mostly the language is like that of an instruction manual — “Turn on tag approvals for posts and photos you’re tagged in” — though at the end, it veers into self-care: “Reach out to people you trust for support. Stay Active. …”
There were some ideas that were, as Ms. Albert said, “out of scope to build, the idea of locking yourself out, temporarily, from one person’s account, trying to prevent that stalking behavior.” Technologically, she said, it was a bridge too far, and it led to a bigger conversation about what role Facebook wants to play in people’s lives. “It would be like Starbucks not accepting your credit card,” she said.
And just maybe such stalking is productive for some, a step toward resilience that would never accrue from watching baby sloth videos or mash-ups of Donald Trump tweets.
Ms. Sokoloff, the brand strategist who yearned for a digital vacuum cleaner, wondered if there wasn’t some emotional cost in making all traces of a relationship disappear. “Is there something important in the healing process that would be lost if we can essentially have the Facebook equivalent of the dream removers from ‘Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind’?”
by Penelope Green, NY Times | Read more:
Image: NY Times screenshots
A Century of Fakers
In Chatuchak, Bangkok’s largest outdoor market, smells compete. A bleachy chemical tang replaces a foul suggestion of powdered prawn. This is where you’ll find luxury of spurious origin—Mulberry bags, Lacoste polos, and Tom Ford perfume. There are also pets (lordly tortoises and exhausted rats) and snacks (garlicky sour sausage and thick guava juice). And there are chickens, which, I guess, straddle the pet-snack conceptual divide.
Chatuchak is a great mass of torsos swivelling in response to an abundance of stimuli. All the bodies create a constant cascade of spatial problems, which are solved immediately and inelegantly by seemingly involuntary amoeba-like movements of the general throng. It never feels like you’ve chosen to be where you are.
On this day at Chatuchak, Jennifer, a felicitous middle-aged Welsh woman on vacation, was going through a scary ordeal. She was buying gifts for her nephews in London, who had humiliated her last Christmas, when she gave them fake Paul Smith socks that they immediately threw in the garbage. They instantly knew the socks weren’t genuine. She didn’t really understand any of this. She grew up pretty poor—when she was a kid, anything that wasn’t black with coal was a nice outfit. She had no idea what made a sock anything other than a foot containment device. She was sweating gallons, trying to think like a pubescent aristocrat.
Taylor was from Utah. He had one of those meaty faces that you immediately trust—I suppose because mass is inherently trustworthy. He was wearing a fanny pack below his sleeveless black tee so I assumed he wouldn’t care about the authenticity of the Louis Vuitton bag he was buying his sister. I was wrong. He wanted to give her “the fucking stupid thing she really wants”—luxury, he said, was all about stupidity. But what really confused Taylor was that the rich kids back in Utah cared less about being rich than he did. They ate 7-Eleven hot dogs leaning on their beautiful cars. Having real money meant money meaning less. “They were just okay with that stuff,” he said, with a zoological tone in his voice. “It’s almost like they had an inherent sense of self-worth, or something.”
Counterfeit clothing is illegal in Thailand theory, but in Thailand practice, all legality feels dangerously fluid. A drug possession charge will get you years of jail time, complete with leg irons, while tourists scream enthusiasm about bars in Pai where hallucinogens are available over the counter. Porn is largely censored, but the blowjob bars are many. If you’re an unscrupulous criminal resembling this writer not one bit, you can ride a motorbike without a license, ripping through humorously dangerous traffic along a snaky mountain road. So, regardless of the law, everyone wears counterfeit everything—like a trio of panhandling children I saw wearing beautiful matching New Balance shoes.
In downtown Bangkok, MBK mall is where the real action is. It’s a place where it’s actually difficult to buy something legitimate. If you’re tired of Starbucks coffee, you can go to Star Back Coffee, right next door. You can buy Dior shades that are totally believable except for the words “so real” stenciled on the insides of their arms. Y’know, in case you were wondering.
Some of the fakes at MBK are eerily accurate. There are imitation Burberry briefcases costing about as much as decent moisturizer that nevertheless exude British expensiveness. Others are as convincing as the paper version of a plane.
The really hallucinatory thing about MBK is that prices bear no relation to quality whatsoever. I saw, for example, maybe a dozen different fake pairs of a certain Prada shoe, which were all—despite being wildly various in quality—the exact same price. A silk fake Armani tie is no more expensive than a rayon fake Armani tie. This seemed absolutely insane at first—but it actually makes perfect sense.
Say we’ve got two counterfeiters: Larry and Curly. Larry sells excellent fake Chanel bags. He has them made by skilled people in Vietnam. He charges $50 for them, making a decent profit off each bag. They sell well. Meanwhile, at the next stall over, Curly sells positively abortive fake Chanel bags. They are essentially branded plastic boxes. Curly makes them in his garage with his nephew. However, he matches Larry’s price of $50, because price is a mark of legitimacy. If Curly’s bags were on sale for $5, nobody would buy them, for the same reason that you wouldn’t buy a jam roll for a penny: it would feel suspicious, like it was made by someone intent on poisoning children. Curly sells fewer bags than Larry, but Curly still manages to sell a few to people who aren’t paying much attention. Each shitty bag Curly sells nets him an outrageous profit. He’s a highly successful fraudulent fraud.
Quality also varies in Pantip Plaza, the place where the computer stuff goes: shiny new machines all over a squat dirty sprawl. It’s three malls over fromMBK—central Bangkok is basically a forest of vertical shopping opportunities. The smell of cat pee flows around its malfunctioning escalators. The day I was there, they were filming a commercial in which an American GI shoots at a bosomy Santa in booty shorts while a robot sulks sadly in the background. I was with Courtney, a clever woman with a sly smile who ran away with me to Thailand for no discernible reason. She wanted a fake iPhone after we met someone who bought a perfectly-operational-you’d-never-guess-it-wasn’t-real model for $20. We wondered what kind of subtle insinuation she’d have to mumble to obtain such a thing. “Do you have iPhones?” she said to a guy at the stall. “Real or copy?” he replied.
The product Courtney received seemed genuine at first. It looked as pretty as an iPhone should. But it soon refused to do much of anything. When she tried to open crucial applications, the phone responded with the koan-like error message “Resources are not shelves.” Bikini’d women appeared in unbidden windows. She had to hit the screen hard to make it acknowledge her. The phone invited her to play a game of Look After Your Stone, where you take care of a pebble, by, for example, buying a piece of meat for it to cuddle.
It was about this time, while Courtney was loudly considering maiming the unit, when I started wondering why I gave a shit about all of this.
Chatuchak is a great mass of torsos swivelling in response to an abundance of stimuli. All the bodies create a constant cascade of spatial problems, which are solved immediately and inelegantly by seemingly involuntary amoeba-like movements of the general throng. It never feels like you’ve chosen to be where you are.
On this day at Chatuchak, Jennifer, a felicitous middle-aged Welsh woman on vacation, was going through a scary ordeal. She was buying gifts for her nephews in London, who had humiliated her last Christmas, when she gave them fake Paul Smith socks that they immediately threw in the garbage. They instantly knew the socks weren’t genuine. She didn’t really understand any of this. She grew up pretty poor—when she was a kid, anything that wasn’t black with coal was a nice outfit. She had no idea what made a sock anything other than a foot containment device. She was sweating gallons, trying to think like a pubescent aristocrat.Taylor was from Utah. He had one of those meaty faces that you immediately trust—I suppose because mass is inherently trustworthy. He was wearing a fanny pack below his sleeveless black tee so I assumed he wouldn’t care about the authenticity of the Louis Vuitton bag he was buying his sister. I was wrong. He wanted to give her “the fucking stupid thing she really wants”—luxury, he said, was all about stupidity. But what really confused Taylor was that the rich kids back in Utah cared less about being rich than he did. They ate 7-Eleven hot dogs leaning on their beautiful cars. Having real money meant money meaning less. “They were just okay with that stuff,” he said, with a zoological tone in his voice. “It’s almost like they had an inherent sense of self-worth, or something.”
Counterfeit clothing is illegal in Thailand theory, but in Thailand practice, all legality feels dangerously fluid. A drug possession charge will get you years of jail time, complete with leg irons, while tourists scream enthusiasm about bars in Pai where hallucinogens are available over the counter. Porn is largely censored, but the blowjob bars are many. If you’re an unscrupulous criminal resembling this writer not one bit, you can ride a motorbike without a license, ripping through humorously dangerous traffic along a snaky mountain road. So, regardless of the law, everyone wears counterfeit everything—like a trio of panhandling children I saw wearing beautiful matching New Balance shoes.
In downtown Bangkok, MBK mall is where the real action is. It’s a place where it’s actually difficult to buy something legitimate. If you’re tired of Starbucks coffee, you can go to Star Back Coffee, right next door. You can buy Dior shades that are totally believable except for the words “so real” stenciled on the insides of their arms. Y’know, in case you were wondering.
Some of the fakes at MBK are eerily accurate. There are imitation Burberry briefcases costing about as much as decent moisturizer that nevertheless exude British expensiveness. Others are as convincing as the paper version of a plane.
The really hallucinatory thing about MBK is that prices bear no relation to quality whatsoever. I saw, for example, maybe a dozen different fake pairs of a certain Prada shoe, which were all—despite being wildly various in quality—the exact same price. A silk fake Armani tie is no more expensive than a rayon fake Armani tie. This seemed absolutely insane at first—but it actually makes perfect sense.
Say we’ve got two counterfeiters: Larry and Curly. Larry sells excellent fake Chanel bags. He has them made by skilled people in Vietnam. He charges $50 for them, making a decent profit off each bag. They sell well. Meanwhile, at the next stall over, Curly sells positively abortive fake Chanel bags. They are essentially branded plastic boxes. Curly makes them in his garage with his nephew. However, he matches Larry’s price of $50, because price is a mark of legitimacy. If Curly’s bags were on sale for $5, nobody would buy them, for the same reason that you wouldn’t buy a jam roll for a penny: it would feel suspicious, like it was made by someone intent on poisoning children. Curly sells fewer bags than Larry, but Curly still manages to sell a few to people who aren’t paying much attention. Each shitty bag Curly sells nets him an outrageous profit. He’s a highly successful fraudulent fraud.
Quality also varies in Pantip Plaza, the place where the computer stuff goes: shiny new machines all over a squat dirty sprawl. It’s three malls over fromMBK—central Bangkok is basically a forest of vertical shopping opportunities. The smell of cat pee flows around its malfunctioning escalators. The day I was there, they were filming a commercial in which an American GI shoots at a bosomy Santa in booty shorts while a robot sulks sadly in the background. I was with Courtney, a clever woman with a sly smile who ran away with me to Thailand for no discernible reason. She wanted a fake iPhone after we met someone who bought a perfectly-operational-you’d-never-guess-it-wasn’t-real model for $20. We wondered what kind of subtle insinuation she’d have to mumble to obtain such a thing. “Do you have iPhones?” she said to a guy at the stall. “Real or copy?” he replied.
The product Courtney received seemed genuine at first. It looked as pretty as an iPhone should. But it soon refused to do much of anything. When she tried to open crucial applications, the phone responded with the koan-like error message “Resources are not shelves.” Bikini’d women appeared in unbidden windows. She had to hit the screen hard to make it acknowledge her. The phone invited her to play a game of Look After Your Stone, where you take care of a pebble, by, for example, buying a piece of meat for it to cuddle.
It was about this time, while Courtney was loudly considering maiming the unit, when I started wondering why I gave a shit about all of this.
by Sasha Chapin, Hazlitt | Read more:
Image: via Flickr user Tim Lucas
Saturday, March 12, 2016
For the Best
The Clavells weren’t the sort to play pranks, so the printed invitation to their annual Christmas party arrived after what Gerald and Charlotte’s son, Timothy, would call a “heads-up,” sent by e-mail, letting them know that both were invited to the event, at the Clavells’ apartment, on West Fifty-sixth Street. Gerald hadn’t seen Charlotte since their divorce, thirty-one years before, and this was the first time he’d seen her e-mail address. Whether she was on any social media he wouldn’t know, as he was not.
It was a rather jaunty message from the Clavells, who were not jaunty people. Intellectually, they were clear thinkers, and, as for jauntiness, Rorra Clavell had never totally recovered from a hip replacement years earlier, and her husband constantly fretted about why anyone would read a book on a Kindle. The brief e-mail message featured not one but two exclamation points, and offered no explanation as to why the Clavells had decided to invite them both. It seemed odd, but although Gerald did have some curiosity about how Charlotte looked and what she was doing, it did not keep him awake at night.
Gerald lived in a two-bedroom apartment on the East Side, next door to his oldest friend and former college roommate, Willers Caton, and his dog, Alexander the Great. A few days before the party, he happened to mention to Willers that he’d accepted an invitation to an event that Charlotte might also be attending. Without a second’s hesitation, Willers said, “She won’t show up. Watch.” Since Willers wasn’t usually a skeptic, Gerald asked how he could be so sure. To his great surprise, he found out that Charlotte and Willers had a psychiatrist in common, a Dr. Frederick Owls, known as the Owl, on Central Park West.
The day before the party, Gerald got a good jump on the season. He took a cab down to Kiehl’s, then worked his way back uptown, stopping at various stores, including the newly relocated Rizzoli. At each place, he picked out presents to be wrapped and mailed directly to his list of nineteen friends. (He counted his four cousins as friends, as he was not close enough to any of them to consider them family.) Outside the bookstore, he saw a man walking with a cane, his head bent in the wind. Was it Ned Farnsworth, his former accountant? He doubled back and managed to get a look at the man’s long, sharp nose as he was waiting for the light. He said Ned’s name, and the two warmly embraced. If such an embrace had happened with his son, Gerald would have had to suffer a series of violent thumps on the back, since young men who were affectionate in this way tended to act as if the other person were a baby in need of burping.
Gerald and Ned had coffee and caught up. (Ned had retired years before.) Ned said that he’d sold his beautiful Victorian upstate but was enjoying life on the twentieth floor of a new building in midtown that came complete with a dry cleaner’s, a lap pool, a gym he never used, and a concierge so eager for tips that he wrote thank-you notes for the simplest kindnesses—such as a resident remembering what team he wanted to win the World Series—then leaned them, in parchment envelopes, against the door to your apartment at night. Ned laughed heartily while telling him this. Years before, it had been Ned who’d recruited Gerald to pose in another client’s ad—almost to be mischievous, initially, but the ad had been so successful that Gerald had made a late career of modelling for others. As Ned gossiped, Gerald’s attention floated away. Might Ned also have been invited to the Clavells’? If memory served, he had been the Clavells’ accountant, too. But how to find out without risking making Ned feel excluded?
“Tell me the holiday party you’re most looking forward to!” Gerald exclaimed, thinking himself rather clever to have asked in such an open-ended way. “I don’t think I’m invited to any,” Ned replied, crestfallen. How rude of me, really unforgivable, Gerald thought, so he said, “Well, I’d like to invite you to dinner at my favorite Italian restaurant, on Fifty-fifth Street. Perhaps early January, when all the craziness has ended?” Oh, Ned said, he couldn’t eat much anymore; such an evening would be wasted on him, though he’d be happy to meet for coffee again. It would be something to look forward to. He produced his card, which Gerald pocketed with thanks. He found, to his surprise, that he had no card of his own in his wallet, so he jotted down his phone number on the back of a receipt. They parted with a firm handshake and a promise to meet again.
Late that same afternoon, Gerald had another thought. Or not so much a thought as a dream. He and Ned were swimming in the ocean, and he knew, though Ned did not, that a shark was lurking nearby. He tried to warn Ned, but some woman in the dream, an idiotic tourist, kept blocking his view, telling him that “Jaws” had scared an entire generation, and he really should shut up. However much he tried to look around her, or move to the side, no one seemed to notice him; nor was his shouting audible anymore. The dream ended abruptly when the heating turned on, with a series of little clicks, as it had been programmed to do, at 5 P.M. Gerald sat on the edge of the bed, sweating, distressed to have had such a vivid, disturbing dream, which he hoped was not a premonition.
The night of the party, Gerald nicked his cheek—with an electric razor, no less—and had to find the styptic pencil to stop the bleeding. He was perhaps more nervous than he’d thought. He showered, dried off, and dressed, making it a point not to care which of his white shirts he selected, except that regular cuffs seemed fine; hardly anyone still wore cufflinks.
Alonzo got him a cab with the first blow of his whistle. He might have walked to the party had he set out a little earlier, but it had rained all day, and more was predicted. Also, he didn’t want to arrive sweaty. It was early in the month for a Christmas party, though many people were sure to be out of town, or harder to get, closer to the holidays. His son had asked him to visit, but Seattle was too much for him in the winter—both the travel and the climate.
The Clavells’ lobby already had its Christmas tree up, resplendent in green and white lights, though it dangled no Christmas balls. At the top was an angel with sparkling white wings. She’d fallen forward a bit, so that it looked as if she were about to jump. “Darling!” Brenda Hampton called to Gerald, rushing in with a young woman she introduced as her goddaughter. They’d had their hair styled the same way, with a curly tendril hanging below one ear, and the rest neatly wound in a French twist. Each wore bright-red lipstick. “Brenda!” he exclaimed. The goddaughter extended her hand as if it were a gift. Indeed it was, with its slim fingers, absent of jewelry, its smooth skin, and glossy fingernails. He raised her hand and kissed it, which made her blush. “I’ll have to stick out my hand next time we meet, instead of hurling myself into your arms,” Brenda said, laughing.
It was a rather jaunty message from the Clavells, who were not jaunty people. Intellectually, they were clear thinkers, and, as for jauntiness, Rorra Clavell had never totally recovered from a hip replacement years earlier, and her husband constantly fretted about why anyone would read a book on a Kindle. The brief e-mail message featured not one but two exclamation points, and offered no explanation as to why the Clavells had decided to invite them both. It seemed odd, but although Gerald did have some curiosity about how Charlotte looked and what she was doing, it did not keep him awake at night.
Gerald lived in a two-bedroom apartment on the East Side, next door to his oldest friend and former college roommate, Willers Caton, and his dog, Alexander the Great. A few days before the party, he happened to mention to Willers that he’d accepted an invitation to an event that Charlotte might also be attending. Without a second’s hesitation, Willers said, “She won’t show up. Watch.” Since Willers wasn’t usually a skeptic, Gerald asked how he could be so sure. To his great surprise, he found out that Charlotte and Willers had a psychiatrist in common, a Dr. Frederick Owls, known as the Owl, on Central Park West.The day before the party, Gerald got a good jump on the season. He took a cab down to Kiehl’s, then worked his way back uptown, stopping at various stores, including the newly relocated Rizzoli. At each place, he picked out presents to be wrapped and mailed directly to his list of nineteen friends. (He counted his four cousins as friends, as he was not close enough to any of them to consider them family.) Outside the bookstore, he saw a man walking with a cane, his head bent in the wind. Was it Ned Farnsworth, his former accountant? He doubled back and managed to get a look at the man’s long, sharp nose as he was waiting for the light. He said Ned’s name, and the two warmly embraced. If such an embrace had happened with his son, Gerald would have had to suffer a series of violent thumps on the back, since young men who were affectionate in this way tended to act as if the other person were a baby in need of burping.
Gerald and Ned had coffee and caught up. (Ned had retired years before.) Ned said that he’d sold his beautiful Victorian upstate but was enjoying life on the twentieth floor of a new building in midtown that came complete with a dry cleaner’s, a lap pool, a gym he never used, and a concierge so eager for tips that he wrote thank-you notes for the simplest kindnesses—such as a resident remembering what team he wanted to win the World Series—then leaned them, in parchment envelopes, against the door to your apartment at night. Ned laughed heartily while telling him this. Years before, it had been Ned who’d recruited Gerald to pose in another client’s ad—almost to be mischievous, initially, but the ad had been so successful that Gerald had made a late career of modelling for others. As Ned gossiped, Gerald’s attention floated away. Might Ned also have been invited to the Clavells’? If memory served, he had been the Clavells’ accountant, too. But how to find out without risking making Ned feel excluded?
“Tell me the holiday party you’re most looking forward to!” Gerald exclaimed, thinking himself rather clever to have asked in such an open-ended way. “I don’t think I’m invited to any,” Ned replied, crestfallen. How rude of me, really unforgivable, Gerald thought, so he said, “Well, I’d like to invite you to dinner at my favorite Italian restaurant, on Fifty-fifth Street. Perhaps early January, when all the craziness has ended?” Oh, Ned said, he couldn’t eat much anymore; such an evening would be wasted on him, though he’d be happy to meet for coffee again. It would be something to look forward to. He produced his card, which Gerald pocketed with thanks. He found, to his surprise, that he had no card of his own in his wallet, so he jotted down his phone number on the back of a receipt. They parted with a firm handshake and a promise to meet again.
Late that same afternoon, Gerald had another thought. Or not so much a thought as a dream. He and Ned were swimming in the ocean, and he knew, though Ned did not, that a shark was lurking nearby. He tried to warn Ned, but some woman in the dream, an idiotic tourist, kept blocking his view, telling him that “Jaws” had scared an entire generation, and he really should shut up. However much he tried to look around her, or move to the side, no one seemed to notice him; nor was his shouting audible anymore. The dream ended abruptly when the heating turned on, with a series of little clicks, as it had been programmed to do, at 5 P.M. Gerald sat on the edge of the bed, sweating, distressed to have had such a vivid, disturbing dream, which he hoped was not a premonition.
The night of the party, Gerald nicked his cheek—with an electric razor, no less—and had to find the styptic pencil to stop the bleeding. He was perhaps more nervous than he’d thought. He showered, dried off, and dressed, making it a point not to care which of his white shirts he selected, except that regular cuffs seemed fine; hardly anyone still wore cufflinks.
Alonzo got him a cab with the first blow of his whistle. He might have walked to the party had he set out a little earlier, but it had rained all day, and more was predicted. Also, he didn’t want to arrive sweaty. It was early in the month for a Christmas party, though many people were sure to be out of town, or harder to get, closer to the holidays. His son had asked him to visit, but Seattle was too much for him in the winter—both the travel and the climate.
The Clavells’ lobby already had its Christmas tree up, resplendent in green and white lights, though it dangled no Christmas balls. At the top was an angel with sparkling white wings. She’d fallen forward a bit, so that it looked as if she were about to jump. “Darling!” Brenda Hampton called to Gerald, rushing in with a young woman she introduced as her goddaughter. They’d had their hair styled the same way, with a curly tendril hanging below one ear, and the rest neatly wound in a French twist. Each wore bright-red lipstick. “Brenda!” he exclaimed. The goddaughter extended her hand as if it were a gift. Indeed it was, with its slim fingers, absent of jewelry, its smooth skin, and glossy fingernails. He raised her hand and kissed it, which made her blush. “I’ll have to stick out my hand next time we meet, instead of hurling myself into your arms,” Brenda said, laughing.
by Ann Beattie, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: John Gall
Obama the Divider
One of the most annoying habits of the right is their propensity for "I know you are but what am I" rhetoric. Among the stupidest is their obstructing every proposal and bringing the government to a crashing halt and then blaming President Obama for failing to achieve bipartisan nirvana after promising that he "would bring people together." It's a cute trick.
They've gone one step beyond that in recent times by proclaiming that Obama is a divider because he somehow "made" them act like barbarians. He was asked about this at his press conference today:QUESTION: Some of your critics have pointed to the incredible polarized political climate as under your administration as contributing to the rise of someone as provocative as Donald Trump. Do you feel any responsibility for that, or for the protectionist rhetoric from some Democratic candidates. Do you have a timeline for when you may make a presidential endorsement?
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: I have been blamed by the Republicans for a lot of things, but to be blamed for their primaries and who they are selecting, that is taking place in their primary is... novel.
Look, I've said -- I said at the State of the Union that one of my regrets is the degree to which polarization and the nasty tone of our politics has accelerated, rather than waned over the course of the last seven and a half years, and I do all kinds of soul searching in terms of --- Are there things I can do better to make sure we're unifying the country, but I also have to say, Margaret, that objectively it's fair to say that the Republican political elites, and many of the information outlets, social media, television stations, talk radio, have been feeding the Republican base for the last seven years, a notion that everything I do is to be opposed, that cooperation or compromise somehow is a betrayal, that maximalist absolutist positions on issues are politically advantageous.
That there's a them and us, and it's the them that are causing the problems we're experiencing, and the tone of that politics -- which I certainly have not contributed to -- I have not -- you know, I don't think that I was the one to prompt questions about my birth certificate, for example. I don't remember saying, hey, why don't you ask me about that.
Why don't you question whether I'm American or whether I'm loyal or whether I have America's best interests at heart.
Those aren't things that were prompted by any actions of mine, and so what you're seeing within the Republican party is to some degree all those efforts over a course of time creating an environment where somebody like a Donald Trump can thrive. (...)I'm glad to hear the president answer that stupid question and answer it with the proper disdain. It's ridiculous.
by Digby | Read more:
Image: via:
‘Rented White Coats’ Who Defend Toxic Chemicals
How corporate-funded research is corrupting America’s courts and regulatory agencies
Now Evan Nelson of the law firm Tucker Ellis & West needed a scientist willing to publish it in a medical journal. If his theory were given scientific validity, Nelson could use it to win lawsuits.
Nelson defended companies that had exposed people to asbestos, a heat-resistant, fibrous mineral. Asbestos causes several deadly diseases, including mesothelioma, a rare cancer that often drowns the lungs in fluid.
Nelson had expressed frustration with the argument that asbestos is the only known cause of mesothelioma. After scouring the scientific literature and applying his own logic, Nelson came up with a new culprit: tobacco.
Nelson sent a typo-ridden email to Peter Valberg of Cambridge, Massachusetts. A former professor at the Harvard School of Public Health, Valberg was by then a principal at the environmental consulting firm Gradient Corporation, with offices in Harvard Square.
“We can collaborate to publish several key, revolutionary articles that you will see unfold as I present this stuff to you,” the lawyer wrote in the 2008 email.
Citing a few scientific articles, Nelson drew a hypothetical link between the fact that cigarette smoke contains radioactive particles and limited evidence that people exposed to radiation had higher rates of mesothelioma.
“It is amazing that no one has pout [sic] this together before me, but I am confident that you will agree it is solid science that proves tobacco smoke causes mesothelioma — you just have to look at the tissue [sic] through the proper lense [sic].”
There was an obvious problem with Nelson’s “science.” Researchers for decades have exhaustively analyzed data on the health of hundreds of thousands of smokers. Since 1964, the U.S. Surgeon General has summarized the findings of study after study, none of which shows evidence that tobacco causes mesothelioma.
Valberg wrote back within hours, calling Nelson’s scientific theory “very intriguing.” He was game to try to disseminate it in peer-reviewed journals. He later sent Nelson a contract agreeing to write the first of three articles and even offered him a 10-percent discount. In the meantime, Valberg would adopt Nelson’s theory as an expert witness in lawsuits, using it against mesothelioma victims such as Pam Collins of Bellevue, Ohio.
The emails offer a rare glimpse into a world where corporate interests can dictate their own science and scientists for hire willingly oblige. It’s a phenomenon that’s grown in recent decades as government-funded science dwindles. Its effects are felt not only in courtrooms but also in regulatory agencies that issue rules to try to prevent disease.
The National Institutes of Health’s budget for research grants has fallen 14 percent since its peak in 2004, according to the American Association for the Advancement of Science. With scarce resources, there’s little money for academics to study chemicals that most already deem to be toxic. Yet regulatory officials and attorneys say companies have a strong financial interest in continuing to publish research favorable to industry.
Gradient belongs to a breed of scientific consulting firms that defends the products of its corporate clients beyond credulity, even exhaustively studied substances whose dangers are not in doubt, such as asbestos, lead and arsenic.
Friday, March 11, 2016
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
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
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.
Thursday, March 10, 2016
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:
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
“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:
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:
So Gill was not the 12th man, but more like the 20th.
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
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
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