Monday, June 20, 2016
Why Dustin Johnson’s US Open Win Was Spoiled by the USGA’s Epic Rules Farce
[ed. Despite the controversy over The Putt, we can take comfort in Fox Sport's loving coverage of Paulina Gretzky's butt after the win.]
Let us briefly visit a land where common sense prevails. There, a significant sporting occasion would not be thrown into utter confusion in front of a worldwide audience at its key phase. There, a golf ball placed on a surface closely resembling a marble fireplace in texture may well move. There, the glaring evidence of no advantage either being sought or claimed would never result in a penalty.
Back in the real world of golf, a parallel universe sadly exists. Today we should be hailing Dustin Johnson’s major breakthrough. Arguably the most gifted American golfer of his time has finally offset years of underachievement, with the kind of victory he should have been accustomed to long ago. Instead, the shambles presided over by the United States Golf Association (USGA) for the second major of 2016 will dominate conversation. So it should, as other sports look on and laugh.
To the watching world the scene was ludicrous. To recap, a rules official informed Johnson that he would not be assessed for a penalty stroke after the ball moved when he addressed a putt on the 5th green. On the 12th tee, Johnson was told a decision would be made at the end of his round, forcing the player to complete the final six holes not knowing whether the assessment would take place or not. When the round was completed, Johnson was penalised a stroke and signed for a one-under-par 69, to win by three shots.
A sport seeking to emerge from dark age prejudice had once again taken an AK-47 to its foot, proving itself petty and unfathomable. Johnson arrived at the final holes of the biggest round of his life not knowing what his score was. Nobody watching on, including fellow competitors, knew for sure either.
It was akin to a cup final being halted with five minutes to go as officials tell the teams that the only goal of the match could, maybe, possibly be wiped out at full-time. Horse racing holds stewards enquiries, but not after the leading jockey has been informed three furlongs from home. Golf makes its return to the Olympics this summer; even the IOC would raise an eyebrow if a Johnson-esque saga were to be presided over by the USGA and its chums at the R&A. Suffice to say, it won’t be.
Let us briefly visit a land where common sense prevails. There, a significant sporting occasion would not be thrown into utter confusion in front of a worldwide audience at its key phase. There, a golf ball placed on a surface closely resembling a marble fireplace in texture may well move. There, the glaring evidence of no advantage either being sought or claimed would never result in a penalty.
Back in the real world of golf, a parallel universe sadly exists. Today we should be hailing Dustin Johnson’s major breakthrough. Arguably the most gifted American golfer of his time has finally offset years of underachievement, with the kind of victory he should have been accustomed to long ago. Instead, the shambles presided over by the United States Golf Association (USGA) for the second major of 2016 will dominate conversation. So it should, as other sports look on and laugh.To the watching world the scene was ludicrous. To recap, a rules official informed Johnson that he would not be assessed for a penalty stroke after the ball moved when he addressed a putt on the 5th green. On the 12th tee, Johnson was told a decision would be made at the end of his round, forcing the player to complete the final six holes not knowing whether the assessment would take place or not. When the round was completed, Johnson was penalised a stroke and signed for a one-under-par 69, to win by three shots.
A sport seeking to emerge from dark age prejudice had once again taken an AK-47 to its foot, proving itself petty and unfathomable. Johnson arrived at the final holes of the biggest round of his life not knowing what his score was. Nobody watching on, including fellow competitors, knew for sure either.
It was akin to a cup final being halted with five minutes to go as officials tell the teams that the only goal of the match could, maybe, possibly be wiped out at full-time. Horse racing holds stewards enquiries, but not after the leading jockey has been informed three furlongs from home. Golf makes its return to the Olympics this summer; even the IOC would raise an eyebrow if a Johnson-esque saga were to be presided over by the USGA and its chums at the R&A. Suffice to say, it won’t be.
by Ewan Murray, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: Christian Petersen / Getty Images
Sunday, June 19, 2016
What It Is Like to Like
Art and taste in the age of the Internet.
The subject of Tom Vanderbilt’s “You May Also Like” (Knopf) is taste, the term he uses for whatever it is that guides our preference for chocolate over vanilla, taupe over beige, “The Bourne Supremacy ” over “The Bourne Ultimatum,” and Artur Schnabel and Joseph Szigeti’s recording of Beethoven’s tenth violin sonata over Vladimir Ashkenazy and Itzhak Perlman’s rendering of the same work. Vanderbilt’s widely admired previous book, “Traffic,” examined a dangerous and complex activity that people pay about as much attention to while they’re doing it as they do to washing the dishes: driving a car. Making sense of driving was tough. Not nearly as tough, however, as taste.
Vanderbilt’s premise is: “We are strangers to our tastes.” He doesn’t mean that we don’t really like what we say we like. He means that we don’t know why. Our intuition that tastes are intuitive, that they are just “our tastes,” and spring from our own personal genome, has been disproved repeatedly by psychologists and market researchers. But where tastes do come from is extremely difficult to pin down. Taste is not congenital: we don’t inherit it. And it’s not consistent. We come to like things we thought we hated (or actually did hate), and we are very poor predictors of what we are likely to like in the future.
We have trouble articulating the reasons that we prefer the Schnabel to the Ashkenazy, or decide on the locally foraged fresh spring porcini mushrooms with roasted Sebastopol peaches, almonds, and crispy tempura—no, wait!, I’ll have the gâteau of Hudson Valley Moulard duck foie gras with roasted Chioggia beets, Brooks cherries, and Sicilian pistachios served with toasted brioche (thirty-dollar supplement). Just don’t ask me why.
Maybe “toasted” trumped “foraged.” Likes and dislikes can be triggered by random associations and can form in a split second. We make choices before we’ve had time to weigh the options. Vanderbilt tells us that the median amount of time spent looking at a work of art at the Met is seventeen seconds. Shopping for clothes, we say, “Oh, I love that!” before we have the first coherent idea about what it is that makes us love it.
And we are ridiculously, pathetically, embarrassingly suggestible. Cues that are barely liminal affect our preferences (which is why advertisers pay for product placement in films and TV shows). So do the choices we observe others making, the “I’ll have what she’s having” syndrome. We are also self-suggestible. “We seem to have a preference that we prefer our preference,” as Vanderbilt puts it. “There is a greater chance we will like something when we expect we are going to like it.” He calls this “a virtual law of liking.”
Vanderbilt is an intelligent writer, and there is a lot of interesting material in “You May Also Like,” but he has dived into a fathomless sea. He opens with an epigraph from Nietzsche, “All of life is a dispute over taste,” which pretty much sums up the problem. What does not, on some level, involve taste? Most of a day’s idle conversation is a sequence of thumbs-up, thumbs-down assertions expressed with varying degrees of sincerity and conviction. “Nice weather we’re having.” “I love your new haircut.” “This coffee is suboptimal.” “These are the best Sebastopol peaches I have ever eaten outside Sebastopol.” We don’t put a lot of thought into these judgments. They’re virtually automatic. Everything we experience gets an emoji.
And any action that entails a choice also entails a preference—what to read, what to wear, which brand of superglue to buy. Vanderbilt cites a researcher who estimates that people typically make two hundred food decisions a day. We try to find work we like, entertainment we like, people we like, shoes we like, political candidates we like. We want to sit at the best table, take the most scenic route, watch the funniest late-night talk show. Finally, there are what we think of as higher-order preferences, the astute critical appraisals we come up with when discussing the latest Don DeLillo novel or the new production of “Elektra.”
Understanding how traffic works is made exponentially more complicated by the fact that it’s not just one person who is barely paying attention; all the drivers on the road are barely paying attention, and they’re also reacting to each other. The same is true of taste. The reason stuff you don’t like is out there is that other people do like it. The continuously shifting array of “like” arrows emanating from you is reproduced billions of times across the planet and configured differently each time. Vanderbilt points out that someone who says, “I don’t want Thai food. I had some yesterday,” is forgetting that in Thailand people eat Thai food every day.
You can aggregate tastes, but only so far. Once you start lumping—once you declare that all x prefer y—you create the condition for splitting, since there will always be at least one x who is determined to stand apart from the herd. “Tastes can change when people aspire to be different from other people,” Vanderbilt says. “They can change when we are trying to be like other people.” Somewhere in America, there is a college professor who will never buy a Prius. The outlier is not extraneous to the type; the outlier is essential to the type. The outlier marks a boundary. Tastes are, by definition, things not universally shared.
The subject of Tom Vanderbilt’s “You May Also Like” (Knopf) is taste, the term he uses for whatever it is that guides our preference for chocolate over vanilla, taupe over beige, “The Bourne Supremacy ” over “The Bourne Ultimatum,” and Artur Schnabel and Joseph Szigeti’s recording of Beethoven’s tenth violin sonata over Vladimir Ashkenazy and Itzhak Perlman’s rendering of the same work. Vanderbilt’s widely admired previous book, “Traffic,” examined a dangerous and complex activity that people pay about as much attention to while they’re doing it as they do to washing the dishes: driving a car. Making sense of driving was tough. Not nearly as tough, however, as taste.
Vanderbilt’s premise is: “We are strangers to our tastes.” He doesn’t mean that we don’t really like what we say we like. He means that we don’t know why. Our intuition that tastes are intuitive, that they are just “our tastes,” and spring from our own personal genome, has been disproved repeatedly by psychologists and market researchers. But where tastes do come from is extremely difficult to pin down. Taste is not congenital: we don’t inherit it. And it’s not consistent. We come to like things we thought we hated (or actually did hate), and we are very poor predictors of what we are likely to like in the future.We have trouble articulating the reasons that we prefer the Schnabel to the Ashkenazy, or decide on the locally foraged fresh spring porcini mushrooms with roasted Sebastopol peaches, almonds, and crispy tempura—no, wait!, I’ll have the gâteau of Hudson Valley Moulard duck foie gras with roasted Chioggia beets, Brooks cherries, and Sicilian pistachios served with toasted brioche (thirty-dollar supplement). Just don’t ask me why.
Maybe “toasted” trumped “foraged.” Likes and dislikes can be triggered by random associations and can form in a split second. We make choices before we’ve had time to weigh the options. Vanderbilt tells us that the median amount of time spent looking at a work of art at the Met is seventeen seconds. Shopping for clothes, we say, “Oh, I love that!” before we have the first coherent idea about what it is that makes us love it.
And we are ridiculously, pathetically, embarrassingly suggestible. Cues that are barely liminal affect our preferences (which is why advertisers pay for product placement in films and TV shows). So do the choices we observe others making, the “I’ll have what she’s having” syndrome. We are also self-suggestible. “We seem to have a preference that we prefer our preference,” as Vanderbilt puts it. “There is a greater chance we will like something when we expect we are going to like it.” He calls this “a virtual law of liking.”
Vanderbilt is an intelligent writer, and there is a lot of interesting material in “You May Also Like,” but he has dived into a fathomless sea. He opens with an epigraph from Nietzsche, “All of life is a dispute over taste,” which pretty much sums up the problem. What does not, on some level, involve taste? Most of a day’s idle conversation is a sequence of thumbs-up, thumbs-down assertions expressed with varying degrees of sincerity and conviction. “Nice weather we’re having.” “I love your new haircut.” “This coffee is suboptimal.” “These are the best Sebastopol peaches I have ever eaten outside Sebastopol.” We don’t put a lot of thought into these judgments. They’re virtually automatic. Everything we experience gets an emoji.
And any action that entails a choice also entails a preference—what to read, what to wear, which brand of superglue to buy. Vanderbilt cites a researcher who estimates that people typically make two hundred food decisions a day. We try to find work we like, entertainment we like, people we like, shoes we like, political candidates we like. We want to sit at the best table, take the most scenic route, watch the funniest late-night talk show. Finally, there are what we think of as higher-order preferences, the astute critical appraisals we come up with when discussing the latest Don DeLillo novel or the new production of “Elektra.”
Understanding how traffic works is made exponentially more complicated by the fact that it’s not just one person who is barely paying attention; all the drivers on the road are barely paying attention, and they’re also reacting to each other. The same is true of taste. The reason stuff you don’t like is out there is that other people do like it. The continuously shifting array of “like” arrows emanating from you is reproduced billions of times across the planet and configured differently each time. Vanderbilt points out that someone who says, “I don’t want Thai food. I had some yesterday,” is forgetting that in Thailand people eat Thai food every day.
You can aggregate tastes, but only so far. Once you start lumping—once you declare that all x prefer y—you create the condition for splitting, since there will always be at least one x who is determined to stand apart from the herd. “Tastes can change when people aspire to be different from other people,” Vanderbilt says. “They can change when we are trying to be like other people.” Somewhere in America, there is a college professor who will never buy a Prius. The outlier is not extraneous to the type; the outlier is essential to the type. The outlier marks a boundary. Tastes are, by definition, things not universally shared.
by Louis Menand, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Javier Jaen
You Can Never Hide From Your Boss
When the news broke on Monday that Microsoft had purchased LinkedIn for $26.2 billion, most people likely read or heard about it on their way to work, checking their phones or sitting in front of a laptop with their morning coffee. It’s likely, too, that many were keeping up with emails at the same time, maybe getting a head start on a spreadsheet, or perhaps dipping into Slack or Yammer to see what coworkers were talking about. Work, of course, no longer happens only at work.
But if the acquisition itself produced a slew of jokes—most of them about how uniting the creator of Clippy and the purveyor of nagging emails might create the world’s most annoying organization—the implications of the move were bound up in exactly how and where people work today. After all, Microsoft didn’t purchase LinkedIn because it wants to get in on the job recruitment business. Rather, it wants to create the social connective tissue for the office, hoping to do to work life what Facebook did to our socializing: creating a persistent network in which to share, collaborate, perform—and, of course, to be tracked. If one consequence of Facebook was FOMO, a fear of missing out, then a “Facebook for work” may encourage something more like FONW: a fear of not working.
Large acquisitions are often disasters—witness Microsoft’s own $7.6 billion mistake in buying Nokia in 2014. But they can also augur the tech industry’s future. That same year, when Facebook bought WhatsApp for $22 billion, some questioned spending so much for a free app used for chatting with friends and family. Now, because apps occupy so much of people’s attention, messaging is becoming a platform unto itself—a way to not just communicate, but also to send people money, read the news, or order a ride. Facebook saw that messaging was the next wave of mobile computing, and so swallowed up a potential competitor with hundreds of millions of users around the world.
Microsoft’s purchase of LinkedIn is a similar herald. The acquisition was made for a variety of reasons, not least because, unlike Facebook, LinkedIn tracks both employment and skills—information that can be used to analyze everything from industry-wide trends to where a company is surreptitiously moving resources. Noted tech analyst Ben Thompson called it “the most valuable data in the world.” But more generally Microsoft is in search of a “social graph” for work—a base layer of connection that not only links a worker into all of a company’s applications, but also follows that worker around wherever they go. Microsoft wants to offer its enterprise clients the solution for connecting its entire workplace for the digital era.
The imagined scenarios are admittedly intriguing: Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella envisions being able to call up a coworker from within an Office document in order to bring their specific skills to a project, or have LinkedIn’s news feed serve you articles related to the work you are currently doing. Meanwhile, programmer and New Republic contributing editor Paul Ford sees an array of possible changes, from replacing email with a persistent messaging service, or turning LinkedIn into an internal way to share ideas, or simply having a company directory based on skills rather than an alphabetical list of names.
In short, the primary change envisioned is that instead of LinkedIn being where you look for another job, it becomes the way to centralize activity in the job you have now, becoming your professional identity technically as much as practically.
But if the acquisition itself produced a slew of jokes—most of them about how uniting the creator of Clippy and the purveyor of nagging emails might create the world’s most annoying organization—the implications of the move were bound up in exactly how and where people work today. After all, Microsoft didn’t purchase LinkedIn because it wants to get in on the job recruitment business. Rather, it wants to create the social connective tissue for the office, hoping to do to work life what Facebook did to our socializing: creating a persistent network in which to share, collaborate, perform—and, of course, to be tracked. If one consequence of Facebook was FOMO, a fear of missing out, then a “Facebook for work” may encourage something more like FONW: a fear of not working.Large acquisitions are often disasters—witness Microsoft’s own $7.6 billion mistake in buying Nokia in 2014. But they can also augur the tech industry’s future. That same year, when Facebook bought WhatsApp for $22 billion, some questioned spending so much for a free app used for chatting with friends and family. Now, because apps occupy so much of people’s attention, messaging is becoming a platform unto itself—a way to not just communicate, but also to send people money, read the news, or order a ride. Facebook saw that messaging was the next wave of mobile computing, and so swallowed up a potential competitor with hundreds of millions of users around the world.
Microsoft’s purchase of LinkedIn is a similar herald. The acquisition was made for a variety of reasons, not least because, unlike Facebook, LinkedIn tracks both employment and skills—information that can be used to analyze everything from industry-wide trends to where a company is surreptitiously moving resources. Noted tech analyst Ben Thompson called it “the most valuable data in the world.” But more generally Microsoft is in search of a “social graph” for work—a base layer of connection that not only links a worker into all of a company’s applications, but also follows that worker around wherever they go. Microsoft wants to offer its enterprise clients the solution for connecting its entire workplace for the digital era.
The imagined scenarios are admittedly intriguing: Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella envisions being able to call up a coworker from within an Office document in order to bring their specific skills to a project, or have LinkedIn’s news feed serve you articles related to the work you are currently doing. Meanwhile, programmer and New Republic contributing editor Paul Ford sees an array of possible changes, from replacing email with a persistent messaging service, or turning LinkedIn into an internal way to share ideas, or simply having a company directory based on skills rather than an alphabetical list of names.
In short, the primary change envisioned is that instead of LinkedIn being where you look for another job, it becomes the way to centralize activity in the job you have now, becoming your professional identity technically as much as practically.
by Navneet Alang, TNR | Read more:
Image: Shutterstock
Saturday, June 18, 2016
Facebook is Predicting the End of the Written Word
Back when humans were first grappling with the impact of a new, global forum for communication, Clay Shirky, a prominent thinker in the digital sphere, made the persuasive argument that the internet made us more creative—even if only in a small way.
Indeed, Facebook has arguably made us all writers, since it has become the medium of choice for millions to share their views and life experiences. But in five years that creativity may look very different. Facebook is predicting the end of the written word on its platform.
In five years time Facebook “will be definitely mobile, it will be probably all video,” said Nicola Mendelsohn, who heads up Facebook’s operations in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, at a conference in London this morning. Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s CEO, has already noted that video will be more and more important for the platform. But Mendelsohn went further, suggesting that stats showed the written word becoming all but obsolete, replaced by moving images and speech.
“The best way to tell stories in this world, where so much information is coming at us, actually is video,” Mendelsohn said. “It conveys so much more information in a much quicker period. So actually the trend helps us to digest much more information.”
In the room, there was a perceptible shifting—perhaps because the written word seems a rather major aspect of civilization to dispatch with so quickly. But it won’t disappear entirely, Mendelsohn assured the crowd: “You’ll have to write for the video.”
[ed. Pretty sad. I kind of like books and stuff... but, you know, progress.]
Indeed, Facebook has arguably made us all writers, since it has become the medium of choice for millions to share their views and life experiences. But in five years that creativity may look very different. Facebook is predicting the end of the written word on its platform.In five years time Facebook “will be definitely mobile, it will be probably all video,” said Nicola Mendelsohn, who heads up Facebook’s operations in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, at a conference in London this morning. Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s CEO, has already noted that video will be more and more important for the platform. But Mendelsohn went further, suggesting that stats showed the written word becoming all but obsolete, replaced by moving images and speech.
“The best way to tell stories in this world, where so much information is coming at us, actually is video,” Mendelsohn said. “It conveys so much more information in a much quicker period. So actually the trend helps us to digest much more information.”
In the room, there was a perceptible shifting—perhaps because the written word seems a rather major aspect of civilization to dispatch with so quickly. But it won’t disappear entirely, Mendelsohn assured the crowd: “You’ll have to write for the video.”
by Cassie Werber, Quartz | Read more:
Image: Robert Galbraith, Reuters[ed. Pretty sad. I kind of like books and stuff... but, you know, progress.]
Wiener-palooza
[ed. Dachsunds on Parade festival, Ellensburg, WA. June, 2015.]
photos: markk
More pics after the jump. (below)
IEX Gains Approval for New Stock Exchange
America is getting a new stock exchange from the most prominent critics of high-frequency trading.
After months of delays and a brutal lobbying battle that divided Wall Street, the IEX Group won approval on Friday from the Securities and Exchange Commission to become the nation’s 13th official stock exchange.
IEX is run by the people at the center of the Michael Lewis book, “Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt,” which profiles the early efforts of the IEX team to create a trading exchange that would be somewhat shielded from high-frequency traders.(...)
The most novel and controversial feature of the IEX exchange is a so-called speed bump that would slow down trading slightly to throw off traders that rely only on speed.
The speed bump slows trades down by only 350 microseconds — or millionths of a second — but that is an eternity in a stock exchange universe in which computers can buy and sell stocks in nanoseconds — or billionths of a second.
The Nasdaq, and other existing exchanges, have said that the IEX’s speed bump will violate rules mandating that exchanges make their prices available to all parties at the same time.
IEX’s critics have also said that the speed bump could add new complications into a stock market infrastructure that is already criticized for its complexity.
In a statement, the S.E.C. said that the commissioners “determined that a small delay will not prevent investors from accessing stock prices in a fair and efficient manner.”
The S.E.C. did say, though, that within two years it will do a study to examine whether the delays lead to problems in the markets.
If nothing else, the approval of the exchange will provide an opportunity to test the many competing theories about what impact the IEX’s speed bump will have on the pattern of trading.
The IEX has been a flash point in the broader debate over technological changes that have altered the basic functioning of the American stock markets over the last two decades. (...)
In addition to the speed bump, the IEX has said it will not offer the same fees or rebates that other exchanges do to attract traders, a common practice at other exchanges that has been criticized for distorting trading incentives. The IEX also offers fewer complicated ways to enter trades than other exchanges, in an effort to simplify trading.
Mr. Katsuyama has argued throughout the application process that IEX would provide a market-based solution to the problems created by high-frequency trading rather than requiring the S.E.C. to change the rules governing the markets.
The other exchanges have complained that the IEX was essentially asking to be exempt from rules that governed them.
After months of delays and a brutal lobbying battle that divided Wall Street, the IEX Group won approval on Friday from the Securities and Exchange Commission to become the nation’s 13th official stock exchange.
IEX is run by the people at the center of the Michael Lewis book, “Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt,” which profiles the early efforts of the IEX team to create a trading exchange that would be somewhat shielded from high-frequency traders.(...)
The most novel and controversial feature of the IEX exchange is a so-called speed bump that would slow down trading slightly to throw off traders that rely only on speed.The speed bump slows trades down by only 350 microseconds — or millionths of a second — but that is an eternity in a stock exchange universe in which computers can buy and sell stocks in nanoseconds — or billionths of a second.
The Nasdaq, and other existing exchanges, have said that the IEX’s speed bump will violate rules mandating that exchanges make their prices available to all parties at the same time.
IEX’s critics have also said that the speed bump could add new complications into a stock market infrastructure that is already criticized for its complexity.
In a statement, the S.E.C. said that the commissioners “determined that a small delay will not prevent investors from accessing stock prices in a fair and efficient manner.”
The S.E.C. did say, though, that within two years it will do a study to examine whether the delays lead to problems in the markets.
If nothing else, the approval of the exchange will provide an opportunity to test the many competing theories about what impact the IEX’s speed bump will have on the pattern of trading.
The IEX has been a flash point in the broader debate over technological changes that have altered the basic functioning of the American stock markets over the last two decades. (...)
In addition to the speed bump, the IEX has said it will not offer the same fees or rebates that other exchanges do to attract traders, a common practice at other exchanges that has been criticized for distorting trading incentives. The IEX also offers fewer complicated ways to enter trades than other exchanges, in an effort to simplify trading.
Mr. Katsuyama has argued throughout the application process that IEX would provide a market-based solution to the problems created by high-frequency trading rather than requiring the S.E.C. to change the rules governing the markets.
The other exchanges have complained that the IEX was essentially asking to be exempt from rules that governed them.
By Nathaniel Popper, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Cole Wilson
Friday, June 17, 2016
‘Could He Actually Win?’ Scenes From a Trump Rally
I spent five hours at the Donald Trump rally in Sacramento, California, on 1 June. I spoke to and overheard dozens of the rally’s attendees, not as a journalist but as one ticketholder to another – I was dressed in jeans, workboots and wore a Nascar hat – and found every last one of the attendees to be genial, polite and, with a few notable exceptions, their opinions to be within the realm of reasonable. The rally was as peaceful and patriotic as a Fourth of July picnic.
And yet I came away with a host of new questions and concerns. Among them: why is it that the song Trump’s campaign uses to mark his arrival and departure is Elton John’s “Tiny Dancer?” Is it more troubling, or less troubling, knowing that no one in the audience really cares what he says? And could it be that because Trump’s supporters are not all drawn from the lunatic fringe, but in fact represent a broad cross-section of regular people, and far more women than would seem possible or rational, that he could actually win?
It was a sweltering 95 degrees, the sky blue and sun punishing, when I pulled off the highway and, guided by a well-planned and orderly array of cops and cones and sirens, made my way to a peripheral part of the Sacramento airport, where the Trump rally would be held, in an empty hangar.
It was just before four o’clock in the afternoon, and the rally wouldn’t start until seven, but already the lot was crowded with cars and trucks – not all of them American-made. When I parked, I glanced at the car next to me, and found that a young couple in casual business attire was engaged in casual amorous activity. Seeing my car arrive, the woman straightened her skirt and the man removed his hand from under her bra, but otherwise they continued undeterred.
It was the first, but not the last time, that it was clear that a good portion of the audience saw the rally as not purely a political event, but as something else, too – an entertainment, a curiosity, an opportunity to sell merchandise and refreshments, a chance to do some late-afternoon groping in the parking lot.
For a year now, I’ve been watching the Trump candidacy the same way the rest of the world and at least half of the American population has – first as a harmless sideshow, then as a worrisome sideshow, then as an increasingly surreal and dangerous sideshow, and finally as a terrifying looming nightmare with echoes of Mussolini, Joseph McCarthy, Kristallnacht and Hitler. News reports and isolated video clips have made Trump’s rallies seem like bacchanalian proto-fascist white power orgies, fuelled by bald racism, pseudo-Nazi salutes and the imminent threat of violence toward any detractors. For months now I’ve believed that Trump’s candidacy was the most dangerous presidential campaign in modern American history. But the reality of a Trump rally, or at least this Trump rally, was about as threatening as a Garth Brooks concert.
Tickets to all Trump rallies are free and are available to anyone; you simply print one from Trump’s website and bring it with you. I chose not to go to the rally as a card-carrying member of the media, given at this point – and this truth was borne out repeatedly over the course of the day – Trump supporters, like Trump himself, are exceedingly distrustful of the media. If I had a notebook or microphone out, asking questions, the answers would be guarded or rehearsed, if anyone spoke to me at all. Instead, I decided I’d stand in line with everyone else, knowing that the six or seven people around me would be my window into at least a small portion of the Trump supporter’s mentality. I took my place at the back of the orderly line.
“See that?” the man in front of me said. He was pointing to a jet’s white trail in the sky above us. “That’s the air force. They’re spraying shit in the sky.”
I’ll call this man Jim. He was about 6ft tall, beer-bellied, and wearing shorts and a yellow T-shirt with the words “Don’t Tread on Me” printed above a rattlesnake. His hair and moustache were rust-coloured, his eyes small and wary.
Over the next 90 minutes, as we stood and occasionally shuffled toward the hangar together, Jim offered his theories on a variety of government and corporate conspiracies. This first one involved the air force releasing a toxic mixture of chemicals into the atmosphere, which he claimed they had been doing for 30 years. “They’re manipulating the weather with technology,” he said, “and they call it climate change. But really they’re changing the climate with technology.” He pointed to a wash of cirrus clouds high in the western sky. “See those fake-ass clouds? They use them to block out the sun. That’s why we don’t have springtime any more.”
By quoting Jim, I realise I’ve made him sound nuts. But Jim wasn’t all that nuts. His theories were occasionally bizarre, but he expressed them calmly, and to everyone in line he was gregarious and kind. He laughed at appropriate moments. He was friendly and generous, repeatedly buying water for people around him, expressing interest in people, doing normal-people things. Later in this piece, I’ll quote Jim again, and again he’ll sound nuts, but all I can say here is that when you spend 90 minutes next to someone, you can gauge their level of loony, and Jim was merely a low-grade crank – not unlike that certain uncle in any family who’s fun to be around but who holds strange views about, say, water fluoridation.
Jim had strange views about water fluoridation. (...)
As we’d been waiting, about 500 more people had arrived to stand in line behind us. Vendors moved up and down the line, selling Trump T-shirts, buttons and towels. And all the while, the scene was exceedingly calm. It might have been the heat. It might have been the fluoridation Jim was talking about. But the attendees could have easily been confused with people in line for a Disney ride or a holiday sale at Walmart. They were amiable, polite, dressed in red, white and blue shorts and tank tops and sandals, and surprisingly diverse.
Yes, they were generally white, but there were also African-Americans and plenty of Latinos. A startling number of Asian-Americans, Pacific Islanders and South Asian-Americans. There were the expected Harley-Davidson riders in black vests, but there were also a remarkable number of people with disabilities. There were families, professional types, veterans and one Filipino-American navy officer in full dress whites. It was not the homogenous sea of angry white men that one might have expected. Instead, it appeared to be a skewed but not wholly unrepresentative cross-section of the people of northern California.
Which made some interactions with the protesters feel odd. The demonstrators had every reason to denounce Trump’s past statements, but there seemed to be a wide gulf between the extreme things Trump has said and the more moderate views of the people who came out to this rally. One young man walked by with a bullhorn, followed by a handful of photographers and videographers.
“Trump supporters are assholes and idiots,” the young man hissed.
“Don’t take the bait,” Jim said to Belinda. The young man with the bullhorn repeated his assessment for the next half an hour as he made his way through the parking lot.
“You come up with that all by yourself?” Jim yelled after him.
The line moved on. As we got closer to the hangar, the merchandise tables became more frequent and their purveyors more surprising. A woman speaking heavily accented English and wearing a Service Employees International Union cap sold bright green Trump T-shirts. An older African-American couple were stationed at a table featuring a dozen different Trump shirts, hats and buttons.
“You guys look like Trump voters!” Jim said to them. They laughed and nodded, and asked him if he wanted to buy anything. The T-shirts were $20.
And yet I came away with a host of new questions and concerns. Among them: why is it that the song Trump’s campaign uses to mark his arrival and departure is Elton John’s “Tiny Dancer?” Is it more troubling, or less troubling, knowing that no one in the audience really cares what he says? And could it be that because Trump’s supporters are not all drawn from the lunatic fringe, but in fact represent a broad cross-section of regular people, and far more women than would seem possible or rational, that he could actually win?
It was a sweltering 95 degrees, the sky blue and sun punishing, when I pulled off the highway and, guided by a well-planned and orderly array of cops and cones and sirens, made my way to a peripheral part of the Sacramento airport, where the Trump rally would be held, in an empty hangar.It was just before four o’clock in the afternoon, and the rally wouldn’t start until seven, but already the lot was crowded with cars and trucks – not all of them American-made. When I parked, I glanced at the car next to me, and found that a young couple in casual business attire was engaged in casual amorous activity. Seeing my car arrive, the woman straightened her skirt and the man removed his hand from under her bra, but otherwise they continued undeterred.
It was the first, but not the last time, that it was clear that a good portion of the audience saw the rally as not purely a political event, but as something else, too – an entertainment, a curiosity, an opportunity to sell merchandise and refreshments, a chance to do some late-afternoon groping in the parking lot.
For a year now, I’ve been watching the Trump candidacy the same way the rest of the world and at least half of the American population has – first as a harmless sideshow, then as a worrisome sideshow, then as an increasingly surreal and dangerous sideshow, and finally as a terrifying looming nightmare with echoes of Mussolini, Joseph McCarthy, Kristallnacht and Hitler. News reports and isolated video clips have made Trump’s rallies seem like bacchanalian proto-fascist white power orgies, fuelled by bald racism, pseudo-Nazi salutes and the imminent threat of violence toward any detractors. For months now I’ve believed that Trump’s candidacy was the most dangerous presidential campaign in modern American history. But the reality of a Trump rally, or at least this Trump rally, was about as threatening as a Garth Brooks concert.
Tickets to all Trump rallies are free and are available to anyone; you simply print one from Trump’s website and bring it with you. I chose not to go to the rally as a card-carrying member of the media, given at this point – and this truth was borne out repeatedly over the course of the day – Trump supporters, like Trump himself, are exceedingly distrustful of the media. If I had a notebook or microphone out, asking questions, the answers would be guarded or rehearsed, if anyone spoke to me at all. Instead, I decided I’d stand in line with everyone else, knowing that the six or seven people around me would be my window into at least a small portion of the Trump supporter’s mentality. I took my place at the back of the orderly line.
“See that?” the man in front of me said. He was pointing to a jet’s white trail in the sky above us. “That’s the air force. They’re spraying shit in the sky.”
I’ll call this man Jim. He was about 6ft tall, beer-bellied, and wearing shorts and a yellow T-shirt with the words “Don’t Tread on Me” printed above a rattlesnake. His hair and moustache were rust-coloured, his eyes small and wary.
Over the next 90 minutes, as we stood and occasionally shuffled toward the hangar together, Jim offered his theories on a variety of government and corporate conspiracies. This first one involved the air force releasing a toxic mixture of chemicals into the atmosphere, which he claimed they had been doing for 30 years. “They’re manipulating the weather with technology,” he said, “and they call it climate change. But really they’re changing the climate with technology.” He pointed to a wash of cirrus clouds high in the western sky. “See those fake-ass clouds? They use them to block out the sun. That’s why we don’t have springtime any more.”
By quoting Jim, I realise I’ve made him sound nuts. But Jim wasn’t all that nuts. His theories were occasionally bizarre, but he expressed them calmly, and to everyone in line he was gregarious and kind. He laughed at appropriate moments. He was friendly and generous, repeatedly buying water for people around him, expressing interest in people, doing normal-people things. Later in this piece, I’ll quote Jim again, and again he’ll sound nuts, but all I can say here is that when you spend 90 minutes next to someone, you can gauge their level of loony, and Jim was merely a low-grade crank – not unlike that certain uncle in any family who’s fun to be around but who holds strange views about, say, water fluoridation.
Jim had strange views about water fluoridation. (...)
As we’d been waiting, about 500 more people had arrived to stand in line behind us. Vendors moved up and down the line, selling Trump T-shirts, buttons and towels. And all the while, the scene was exceedingly calm. It might have been the heat. It might have been the fluoridation Jim was talking about. But the attendees could have easily been confused with people in line for a Disney ride or a holiday sale at Walmart. They were amiable, polite, dressed in red, white and blue shorts and tank tops and sandals, and surprisingly diverse.
Yes, they were generally white, but there were also African-Americans and plenty of Latinos. A startling number of Asian-Americans, Pacific Islanders and South Asian-Americans. There were the expected Harley-Davidson riders in black vests, but there were also a remarkable number of people with disabilities. There were families, professional types, veterans and one Filipino-American navy officer in full dress whites. It was not the homogenous sea of angry white men that one might have expected. Instead, it appeared to be a skewed but not wholly unrepresentative cross-section of the people of northern California.
Which made some interactions with the protesters feel odd. The demonstrators had every reason to denounce Trump’s past statements, but there seemed to be a wide gulf between the extreme things Trump has said and the more moderate views of the people who came out to this rally. One young man walked by with a bullhorn, followed by a handful of photographers and videographers.
“Trump supporters are assholes and idiots,” the young man hissed.
“Don’t take the bait,” Jim said to Belinda. The young man with the bullhorn repeated his assessment for the next half an hour as he made his way through the parking lot.
“You come up with that all by yourself?” Jim yelled after him.
The line moved on. As we got closer to the hangar, the merchandise tables became more frequent and their purveyors more surprising. A woman speaking heavily accented English and wearing a Service Employees International Union cap sold bright green Trump T-shirts. An older African-American couple were stationed at a table featuring a dozen different Trump shirts, hats and buttons.
“You guys look like Trump voters!” Jim said to them. They laughed and nodded, and asked him if he wanted to buy anything. The T-shirts were $20.
Thursday, June 16, 2016
Private Landowner's Permit Approval Process
An Oregon couple’s snarky response to an agency’s request for unfettered access to their property to research an endangered frog has gone massively viral – and the reason why is perfectly clear.
Larry and Amanda Anderson received a letter from the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife requesting access to survey the creek on the Anderson’s property to look for the foothill yellow-legged frog.
The letter states that the department is worried about the rapid decline of the yellow-leg frog population.
After reviewing the letter last week, the Andersons sent a reply to the agency, outlining the conditions under which they would consider the request.
The Anderson’s letter permits the state to enter the property and survey the creek, but unleash a torrent of bureaucracy that needs to be completed, including permits, applications, vehicle inspections, before any representative of the state is allowed on the property.Once all of that is completed and approved, the Anderson’s detail what “survey gear” is permitted for capturing the frogs – specifically that the nets be made of 100% organic cotton netting with no longer than an 18″ handle
You can read the full response here:
Dear Mr. Niemela:
Thank you for your inquiry regarding accessing our property to survey for the yellow-legged frog. We may be able to help you out with this matter.
We have divided our 2.26 acres into 75 equal survey units with a draw tag for each unit. Application fees are only $8.00 per unit after you purchase the “Frog Survey License” ($120.00 resident / $180.00 Non-Resident). You will also need to obtain a “Frog Habitat” parking permit ($10.00 per vehicle). You will also need an “Invasive Species” stamp ($15.00 for the first vehicle and $5.00 for each add’l vehicle) You will also want to register at the Check Station to have your vehicle inspected for non-native plant life prior to entering our property. There is also a Day Use fee, $5.00 per vehicle.
by Hunter Roosevelt, Controversial Times | Read more:
Image: uncredited
How Yahoo Derailed Tumblr
Marissa Mayer was running late. This time, it wasn’t for a dinner with skeptical advertisers nor a conference call with her inner circle of Yahoo executives. She was late for a rare meeting with much of the team at Tumblr, nearly two years after acquiring the startup for $1.1 billion.
The biggest acquisition of Mayer’s tenure as Yahoo CEO, Tumblr was supposed to revive Yahoo by broadening its audience and bolstering its long declining advertising business. In a Tumblr post announcing the deal (complete with a flashing GIF urging people to “keep calm”), Mayer famously promised “not to screw it up” for users. She tried to make good on that pledge by staying mostly hands off for the first year. By early 2015, however, Tumblr was at risk of being dragged down by Mayer and Yahoo.
That January, Mayer broke the clear barrier between the companies by merging Tumblr’s ad sales team with Yahoo’s and putting them under a new executive who insiders say had little experience with Tumblr and even less rapport with its core employees. Soon after, Tumblr’s ad sales department was on the verge of a mass exodus.
The sales turmoil came at the worst possible time. Tumblr was fighting to hit a $100 million sales goal set very publicly by Mayer -- a lofty target that surprised members of the media almost as much as it surprised employees at Tumblr. "WTF is that based on?" an employee remembers thinking when it became public. “That was Marissa just picking a number,” says a former Yahoo executive. (Yahoo declined to comment about revenue matters on the record, but a source close to the company disputed this claim.)
The pressure and frustration bled into other departments leading up to Mayer's big meeting with the team, via video conference. One Yahoo source played it off as a routine meet-and-greet to kick off the new year. Numerous Tumblr employees characterized it as a much-needed pep talk from the distant executive shaking up their company. “The troops were restless,” says one former Tumblr employee who was in attendance that day.
David Karp, the 20-something wunderkind who founded Tumblr and got rich selling it to Mayer, sat waiting for his boss to appear on a big screen behind him for a Q&A. Karp, smart and eternally optimistic, but with little experience to prepare him for working at a large corporation, looked “out of his element,” according to another employee there. On a different screen, Karp pulled up a video of a yule log to accompany the “fireside chat.”
When Mayer showed up 20-30 minutes late, Karp and the audience listened as she talked about her time at Google, the thinking behind the ad sales transition and her intention to help Tumblr grow. Concerns went mostly unaired. One engineer made a GIF of Karp fiddling with his phone while Mayer talked on the screen overhead. He was Photoshopped to be eating while she talked.
“It really fell pretty flat,” one employee said of Mayer’s appearance. “It was too little, too late and off base,” says another.
Trouble dot Tumblr dot com
Tumblr launched in 2007 to make it easier for people to write, share and discover blogs about anything. Literally anything. You want to post pictures of hungover owls, or judge people for taking selfies at funerals, or get all existential looking at Garfield comics without Garfield present? Knock yourself out.
Tumblr built strong communities, launched Internet memes, led to countless book deals and helped shape the culture, online and offline. It remains an incredibly vibrant network with hundreds of millions of accounts spanning the full breadth of human interests, from powerful cultural commentary on women in Hollywood to raw teen shoplifting stories to discussions around the Black Lives Matter movement.
There was also that thing about the color of The Dress.
But the team behind Tumblr was derailed for a year by mass staff departures, internal politics with its parent company, Mayer's questionable executive appointments and a flawed attempt to integrate Tumblr's ad sales team with Yahoo’s, according to interviews with a dozen current and former employees from Tumblr and Yahoo as well as conversations with media buyers, analysts and peers in the industry, many of whom requested anonymity citing sensitive personal relationships with the company.
Some on the Yahoo side argue Mayer gave Tumblr and Karp too much freedom for too long after the acquisition considering the social network’s poor track record making money, and then ultimately put the wrong people in charge of the team and pushed too hard. Those on the Tumblr side, unsurprisingly, mostly agree on the latter points.
Top Yahoo executives clashed with Tumblr, or just flat out confused employees. On one occasion, an executive overseeing Karp and his division perplexed employees by saying he thought Tumblr had the potential to "create the next generation PDF," according to multiple sources. At other times, a top Yahoo sales exec spoke down to Tumblr’s advertising team and pushed aside a beloved leader, according to multiple employees. Tumblr staffers fled by the dozens, cutting into the company’s momentum and morale.
Yahoo tried to make things right a year later by separating the ad teams again, but the damage was done.
by Seth Fiegerman, Mashable | Read more:
Image: Christopher Mineses
The biggest acquisition of Mayer’s tenure as Yahoo CEO, Tumblr was supposed to revive Yahoo by broadening its audience and bolstering its long declining advertising business. In a Tumblr post announcing the deal (complete with a flashing GIF urging people to “keep calm”), Mayer famously promised “not to screw it up” for users. She tried to make good on that pledge by staying mostly hands off for the first year. By early 2015, however, Tumblr was at risk of being dragged down by Mayer and Yahoo.That January, Mayer broke the clear barrier between the companies by merging Tumblr’s ad sales team with Yahoo’s and putting them under a new executive who insiders say had little experience with Tumblr and even less rapport with its core employees. Soon after, Tumblr’s ad sales department was on the verge of a mass exodus.
The sales turmoil came at the worst possible time. Tumblr was fighting to hit a $100 million sales goal set very publicly by Mayer -- a lofty target that surprised members of the media almost as much as it surprised employees at Tumblr. "WTF is that based on?" an employee remembers thinking when it became public. “That was Marissa just picking a number,” says a former Yahoo executive. (Yahoo declined to comment about revenue matters on the record, but a source close to the company disputed this claim.)
The pressure and frustration bled into other departments leading up to Mayer's big meeting with the team, via video conference. One Yahoo source played it off as a routine meet-and-greet to kick off the new year. Numerous Tumblr employees characterized it as a much-needed pep talk from the distant executive shaking up their company. “The troops were restless,” says one former Tumblr employee who was in attendance that day.
David Karp, the 20-something wunderkind who founded Tumblr and got rich selling it to Mayer, sat waiting for his boss to appear on a big screen behind him for a Q&A. Karp, smart and eternally optimistic, but with little experience to prepare him for working at a large corporation, looked “out of his element,” according to another employee there. On a different screen, Karp pulled up a video of a yule log to accompany the “fireside chat.”
When Mayer showed up 20-30 minutes late, Karp and the audience listened as she talked about her time at Google, the thinking behind the ad sales transition and her intention to help Tumblr grow. Concerns went mostly unaired. One engineer made a GIF of Karp fiddling with his phone while Mayer talked on the screen overhead. He was Photoshopped to be eating while she talked.
“It really fell pretty flat,” one employee said of Mayer’s appearance. “It was too little, too late and off base,” says another.
Trouble dot Tumblr dot com
Tumblr launched in 2007 to make it easier for people to write, share and discover blogs about anything. Literally anything. You want to post pictures of hungover owls, or judge people for taking selfies at funerals, or get all existential looking at Garfield comics without Garfield present? Knock yourself out.
Tumblr built strong communities, launched Internet memes, led to countless book deals and helped shape the culture, online and offline. It remains an incredibly vibrant network with hundreds of millions of accounts spanning the full breadth of human interests, from powerful cultural commentary on women in Hollywood to raw teen shoplifting stories to discussions around the Black Lives Matter movement.
There was also that thing about the color of The Dress.
But the team behind Tumblr was derailed for a year by mass staff departures, internal politics with its parent company, Mayer's questionable executive appointments and a flawed attempt to integrate Tumblr's ad sales team with Yahoo’s, according to interviews with a dozen current and former employees from Tumblr and Yahoo as well as conversations with media buyers, analysts and peers in the industry, many of whom requested anonymity citing sensitive personal relationships with the company.
Some on the Yahoo side argue Mayer gave Tumblr and Karp too much freedom for too long after the acquisition considering the social network’s poor track record making money, and then ultimately put the wrong people in charge of the team and pushed too hard. Those on the Tumblr side, unsurprisingly, mostly agree on the latter points.
Top Yahoo executives clashed with Tumblr, or just flat out confused employees. On one occasion, an executive overseeing Karp and his division perplexed employees by saying he thought Tumblr had the potential to "create the next generation PDF," according to multiple sources. At other times, a top Yahoo sales exec spoke down to Tumblr’s advertising team and pushed aside a beloved leader, according to multiple employees. Tumblr staffers fled by the dozens, cutting into the company’s momentum and morale.
Yahoo tried to make things right a year later by separating the ad teams again, but the damage was done.
by Seth Fiegerman, Mashable | Read more:
Image: Christopher Mineses
Monday, June 13, 2016
What Are the Odds We Are Living in a Computer Simulation?
Last week, Elon Musk, the billionaire founder of Tesla Motors, SpaceX, and other cutting-edge companies, took a surprising question at the Code Conference, a technology event in California. What, a man in the audience asked, did Musk make of the idea that we are living not in the real world, but in an elaborate computer simulation? Musk exhibited a surprising familiarity with this concept. “I’ve had so many simulation discussions it’s crazy,” Musk said. Citing the speed with which video games are improving, he suggested that the development of simulations “indistinguishable from reality” was inevitable. The likelihood that we are living in “base reality,” he concluded, was just “one in billions.”
Musk, it seems, has been persuaded by what philosophers call the “simulation argument,” an idea given its definitive form in a 2003 paper by the Oxford philosopher and futurologist Nick Bostrom. (Raffi Khatchadourian profiled Bostrom for this magazine last year.) The simulation argument begins by noticing several present-day trends in technology, such as the development of virtual reality and the mapping of the human brain. (One such mapping effort, the brain Initiative, has been funded by the Obama Administration.) The argument ends by proposing that we are, in fact, digital beings living in a vast computer simulation created by our far-future descendants. Many people have imagined this scenario over the years, of course, usually while high. But recently, a number of philosophers, futurists, science-fiction writers, and technologists—people who share a near-religious faith in technological progress—have come to believe that the simulation argument is not just plausible, but inescapable.
The argument is based on two premises, both of which can be disputed but neither of which are unreasonable. The first is that consciousness can be simulated in a computer, with logic gates standing in for the brain’s synapses and neurotransmitters. (If self-awareness can arise in a lump of neurons, it seems likely that it can thrive in silicon, too.) The second is that advanced civilizations will have access to truly stupendous amounts of computing power. Bostrom speculates, for example, that, thousands of years from now, our space-travelling descendants might use nanomachines to transform moons or planets into giant “planetary computers.” It stands to reason that such an advanced civilization might use that computing power to run an “ancestor simulation”—essentially, a high-powered version of the video game “The Sims,” focussed on their evolutionary history. The creation of just one such simulated world might strike us as extraordinary, but Bostrom figures that thousands or even millions of ancestor simulations could be run by a single computer in the future. If that’s true, then simulated human consciousnesses could vastly outnumber non-simulated ones, in which case we are far more likely to be living inside a simulation right now than to be living outside of one.
Superficially, the simulation argument bears some resemblance to the one made by René Descartes, in the seventeenth century, that there could be an undetectable “evil demon” shaping our perceptions. But, where Descartes’s argument was essentially about skepticism—How do you know you’re not living in the Matrix?—the simulation argument is about how we envision the future. For more than a century, futurists and sci-fi writers have imagined that, someday, human beings will use technology to become “posthuman,” transcending the limits of the human condition. They picture a time when people cheat death by uploading their minds into computers, augment or replace themselves with artificial intelligences, or map the uncharted frontiers of physics, biology, and engineering to colonize the stars. It’s possible to discern, in today’s world, the roots of this emerging posthuman future: the computer Watson has won “Jeopardy!”; virtual reality has arrived; a group of researchers has succeeded in simulating the nervous system of a roundworm in a body made of Legos; and, in September, Musk plans to announce his detailed plan for colonizing Mars.
The posthuman future has never been easier to imagine—especially for those, like Musk, who work at the forefront of technology. Yet the idea that we are living in a kind of time loop adds a wrinkle to this dream. Maybe we’ll never reach the posthuman stage; at some point, technological development will cease. Perhaps our posthuman descendants simply won’t want to make simulations (although, given our own interest in doing so, that seems unlikely). Or perhaps our species will go extinct before we learn how to simulate ourselves. “Maybe we should be hopeful that this is a simulation,” Musk concluded, last week, since “either we’re going to create simulations that are indistinguishable from reality or civilization will cease to exist. Those are the two options.” If you hope that humanity will survive into the far future, growing in power and knowledge all the while, then you must accept the possibility that we are being simulated today.
Musk, it seems, has been persuaded by what philosophers call the “simulation argument,” an idea given its definitive form in a 2003 paper by the Oxford philosopher and futurologist Nick Bostrom. (Raffi Khatchadourian profiled Bostrom for this magazine last year.) The simulation argument begins by noticing several present-day trends in technology, such as the development of virtual reality and the mapping of the human brain. (One such mapping effort, the brain Initiative, has been funded by the Obama Administration.) The argument ends by proposing that we are, in fact, digital beings living in a vast computer simulation created by our far-future descendants. Many people have imagined this scenario over the years, of course, usually while high. But recently, a number of philosophers, futurists, science-fiction writers, and technologists—people who share a near-religious faith in technological progress—have come to believe that the simulation argument is not just plausible, but inescapable.The argument is based on two premises, both of which can be disputed but neither of which are unreasonable. The first is that consciousness can be simulated in a computer, with logic gates standing in for the brain’s synapses and neurotransmitters. (If self-awareness can arise in a lump of neurons, it seems likely that it can thrive in silicon, too.) The second is that advanced civilizations will have access to truly stupendous amounts of computing power. Bostrom speculates, for example, that, thousands of years from now, our space-travelling descendants might use nanomachines to transform moons or planets into giant “planetary computers.” It stands to reason that such an advanced civilization might use that computing power to run an “ancestor simulation”—essentially, a high-powered version of the video game “The Sims,” focussed on their evolutionary history. The creation of just one such simulated world might strike us as extraordinary, but Bostrom figures that thousands or even millions of ancestor simulations could be run by a single computer in the future. If that’s true, then simulated human consciousnesses could vastly outnumber non-simulated ones, in which case we are far more likely to be living inside a simulation right now than to be living outside of one.
Superficially, the simulation argument bears some resemblance to the one made by René Descartes, in the seventeenth century, that there could be an undetectable “evil demon” shaping our perceptions. But, where Descartes’s argument was essentially about skepticism—How do you know you’re not living in the Matrix?—the simulation argument is about how we envision the future. For more than a century, futurists and sci-fi writers have imagined that, someday, human beings will use technology to become “posthuman,” transcending the limits of the human condition. They picture a time when people cheat death by uploading their minds into computers, augment or replace themselves with artificial intelligences, or map the uncharted frontiers of physics, biology, and engineering to colonize the stars. It’s possible to discern, in today’s world, the roots of this emerging posthuman future: the computer Watson has won “Jeopardy!”; virtual reality has arrived; a group of researchers has succeeded in simulating the nervous system of a roundworm in a body made of Legos; and, in September, Musk plans to announce his detailed plan for colonizing Mars.
The posthuman future has never been easier to imagine—especially for those, like Musk, who work at the forefront of technology. Yet the idea that we are living in a kind of time loop adds a wrinkle to this dream. Maybe we’ll never reach the posthuman stage; at some point, technological development will cease. Perhaps our posthuman descendants simply won’t want to make simulations (although, given our own interest in doing so, that seems unlikely). Or perhaps our species will go extinct before we learn how to simulate ourselves. “Maybe we should be hopeful that this is a simulation,” Musk concluded, last week, since “either we’re going to create simulations that are indistinguishable from reality or civilization will cease to exist. Those are the two options.” If you hope that humanity will survive into the far future, growing in power and knowledge all the while, then you must accept the possibility that we are being simulated today.
by Joshua Rothman, NewYorker | Read more:
Image: Janus Films
Did Led Zeppelin steal a riff for 'Stairway to Heaven'?
[ed. Listen to the Taurus version, it's pretty clear. That said, music is an evolving culture. How many times did the Bo Diddley beat get get ripped off...umm, I mean riffed off? (or maybe, re-imagined)]
Who really created one of the most famous riffs in all of rock ’n’ roll?
That question is at the heart of a trial scheduled to begin Tuesday in Los Angeles, where members of Led Zeppelin are expected to appear in federal court to defend their 1971 rock epic “Stairway to Heaven” against claims that they stole it from another band.
At issue is whether Zeppelin nicked “Stairway’s” famous opening passage, which evokes centuries-old Renaissance folk music, from L.A. rock band Spirit, which shared some concert billings with the iconic British band when it was in its infancy.
A loss for Led Zeppelin could mean millions of dollars in royalties going to the estate of Spirit guitarist and songwriter Randy Craig Wolfe, aka Randy California, for one of the most recognized and played recordings of the rock era.
It’s the highest profile infringement case to make it to the courtroom since last year’s suit in which R&B-soul singer Marvin Gaye’s family was awarded $7.4 million by a jury that decided pop stars Robin Thicke and Pharrell Williams’ monster hit “Blurred Lines” had infringed on Gaye’s “Got to Give It Up.”
It’s also the latest in a long line of plagiarism cases involving some of pop music’s biggest acts and most iconic songs, among them the Beach Boys’ “Surfin’ USA,” the Beatles’ “Come Together,” George Harrison’s “My Sweet Lord” and even the ubiquitous “Happy Birthday to You.” Just last week, Richard Busch, the lawyer who represented Gaye’s family, filed a new infringement suit in Los Angeles against English singer-songwriter Ed Sheeran, saying his 2015 hit “Photograph” bears a “striking similarity” to the song “Amazing” by Martin Harrington and Thomas Leonard.
The common ground between “Stairway to Heaven” and “Taurus” largely comes down to a 10-second musical theme that appears 45 seconds into “Taurus,” an instrumental from the band’s 1968 debut album, which is similar to the opening acoustic guitar pattern on “Stairway.” That song was released three years before “Stairway to Heaven” surfaced on Zeppelin’s untitled fourth album, commonly referred to as “Led Zeppelin IV.”
Zeppelin surviving members Jimmy Page, Robert Plant and John Paul Jones and their legal team are expected to argue that the similarity is nothing more than coincidence between musicians working in a field rooted in commonly used and re-used musical ideas. Or they may attempt to cite earlier precursors to both songs from the public domain, which could render moot the Wolfe estate’s copyright claim.
“It’s a tough one to call,” says singer-songwriter Richard Thompson, whose 1960s band Fairport Convention helped pioneer the merger of traditional British folk music with the amplified energy of rock ’n’ roll that Led Zeppelin took to its apotheosis in the 1970s.
“They were on the same bill together before [Zeppelin guitarist] Jimmy Page wrote ‘Stairway,’ there’s that,” Thompson said, referring to the Wolfe estate’s claiming that because the two bands played shows together in the late 1960s, and that Spirit often included “Taurus” in those shows, Zeppelin’s members at least had the opportunity to have heard the song.
“On the other hand,” Thompson said, “it’s not an uncommon riff, and the melody not that unusual.”
Guitarist Laurence Juber, who used to play with Paul McCartney’s band Wings, noted that the opening progression can be heard in a 16th century sonata for guitar, violin and strings by Italian composer Giovanni Battista Granata.
“The reality is that to have a descending bass line with an A minor chord on top of it is a common musical device.”
Francis Malofiy, the lawyer representing Wolfe’s estate, cleared a major hurdle in April when U.S. District Court Judge R. Gary Klausner allowed the case to proceed to trial, rejecting a bid by Led Zeppelin’s legal team to have the case tossed out.
In his ruling, Klausner found that Malofiy had failed to establish that “Stairway to Heaven” bears a “striking similarity” to “Taurus” – a high legal standard in copyright cases.
Klausner, however, decided there was enough substance to Malofiy’s claims that a jury should decide the case on slightly different legal grounds: whether members of Led Zeppelin had sufficient access to “Taurus” – that is, they heard the song played enough times – to conceivably rip it off, and whether the two songs meet a lesser infringement threshold of “substantial similarity.”
Led Zeppelin’s lawyers said both bands simply relied on a “centuries-old, common musical element” that is not protected by copyright law. Klausner disagreed, saying he found that “the similarities here transcend this core structure.”
For jurors, it will not be as easy as simply listening to full recordings of the two songs. Because copyright law protects only the composition that a songwriter submits in writing to the country’s copyright office, jurors will hear a stripped-down version of “Taurus” that is likely to make parallels between the two songs less pronounced.
by Randy Lewis and Joel Rubin, LA Times | Read more:
Image: Andy Rain
Who really created one of the most famous riffs in all of rock ’n’ roll?
That question is at the heart of a trial scheduled to begin Tuesday in Los Angeles, where members of Led Zeppelin are expected to appear in federal court to defend their 1971 rock epic “Stairway to Heaven” against claims that they stole it from another band.
At issue is whether Zeppelin nicked “Stairway’s” famous opening passage, which evokes centuries-old Renaissance folk music, from L.A. rock band Spirit, which shared some concert billings with the iconic British band when it was in its infancy.A loss for Led Zeppelin could mean millions of dollars in royalties going to the estate of Spirit guitarist and songwriter Randy Craig Wolfe, aka Randy California, for one of the most recognized and played recordings of the rock era.
It’s the highest profile infringement case to make it to the courtroom since last year’s suit in which R&B-soul singer Marvin Gaye’s family was awarded $7.4 million by a jury that decided pop stars Robin Thicke and Pharrell Williams’ monster hit “Blurred Lines” had infringed on Gaye’s “Got to Give It Up.”
It’s also the latest in a long line of plagiarism cases involving some of pop music’s biggest acts and most iconic songs, among them the Beach Boys’ “Surfin’ USA,” the Beatles’ “Come Together,” George Harrison’s “My Sweet Lord” and even the ubiquitous “Happy Birthday to You.” Just last week, Richard Busch, the lawyer who represented Gaye’s family, filed a new infringement suit in Los Angeles against English singer-songwriter Ed Sheeran, saying his 2015 hit “Photograph” bears a “striking similarity” to the song “Amazing” by Martin Harrington and Thomas Leonard.
The common ground between “Stairway to Heaven” and “Taurus” largely comes down to a 10-second musical theme that appears 45 seconds into “Taurus,” an instrumental from the band’s 1968 debut album, which is similar to the opening acoustic guitar pattern on “Stairway.” That song was released three years before “Stairway to Heaven” surfaced on Zeppelin’s untitled fourth album, commonly referred to as “Led Zeppelin IV.”
Zeppelin surviving members Jimmy Page, Robert Plant and John Paul Jones and their legal team are expected to argue that the similarity is nothing more than coincidence between musicians working in a field rooted in commonly used and re-used musical ideas. Or they may attempt to cite earlier precursors to both songs from the public domain, which could render moot the Wolfe estate’s copyright claim.
“It’s a tough one to call,” says singer-songwriter Richard Thompson, whose 1960s band Fairport Convention helped pioneer the merger of traditional British folk music with the amplified energy of rock ’n’ roll that Led Zeppelin took to its apotheosis in the 1970s.
“They were on the same bill together before [Zeppelin guitarist] Jimmy Page wrote ‘Stairway,’ there’s that,” Thompson said, referring to the Wolfe estate’s claiming that because the two bands played shows together in the late 1960s, and that Spirit often included “Taurus” in those shows, Zeppelin’s members at least had the opportunity to have heard the song.
“On the other hand,” Thompson said, “it’s not an uncommon riff, and the melody not that unusual.”
Guitarist Laurence Juber, who used to play with Paul McCartney’s band Wings, noted that the opening progression can be heard in a 16th century sonata for guitar, violin and strings by Italian composer Giovanni Battista Granata.
“The reality is that to have a descending bass line with an A minor chord on top of it is a common musical device.”
Francis Malofiy, the lawyer representing Wolfe’s estate, cleared a major hurdle in April when U.S. District Court Judge R. Gary Klausner allowed the case to proceed to trial, rejecting a bid by Led Zeppelin’s legal team to have the case tossed out.
In his ruling, Klausner found that Malofiy had failed to establish that “Stairway to Heaven” bears a “striking similarity” to “Taurus” – a high legal standard in copyright cases.
Klausner, however, decided there was enough substance to Malofiy’s claims that a jury should decide the case on slightly different legal grounds: whether members of Led Zeppelin had sufficient access to “Taurus” – that is, they heard the song played enough times – to conceivably rip it off, and whether the two songs meet a lesser infringement threshold of “substantial similarity.”
Led Zeppelin’s lawyers said both bands simply relied on a “centuries-old, common musical element” that is not protected by copyright law. Klausner disagreed, saying he found that “the similarities here transcend this core structure.”
For jurors, it will not be as easy as simply listening to full recordings of the two songs. Because copyright law protects only the composition that a songwriter submits in writing to the country’s copyright office, jurors will hear a stripped-down version of “Taurus” that is likely to make parallels between the two songs less pronounced.
by Randy Lewis and Joel Rubin, LA Times | Read more:
Image: Andy Rain
The Price of Player Safety: What Would the NFL Lose by Eliminating Kickoffs?
Back when people still needed cameras to take pictures, every Super Bowl highlight started the same way. As a line of 11 men ran in unison toward a teed-up football, thousands of flashbulbs exploded on screen, making for a monochromatic light show just before the kicker’s foot swung.
Given the sport’s very nature, every great moment in NFL history has been preceded by a kickoff. For some moments, though, the kickoff has been essential to that greatness. Desmond Howard brought home a Super Bowl MVP award with the Packers on the shoulders of his return work, and the best memory of my football life is still Devin Hester, in Super Bowl XLI, corralling an Adam Vinatieri kick on the 8-yard line and taking it for a touchdown. My euphoria lasted about 10 minutes before Rex Grossman turned into a pumpkin and the Colts started to handle the Bears. But damn, those 10 minutes were sweet.
Hester’s return was the first place my mind went after reading what the Patriots’ Matthew Slater told local reporters after an OTA late last week. Slater, by a wide margin, is the most notable non-kicker, non-returner special teams player in the league; he’s gone to the Pro Bowl in each of the past five years. After being asked about the NFL’s new one-year rule that will place the ball on the 25-yard line following a touchback, he responded with this:
“I’m very disappointed, obviously, in the way we’re discussing the future of the kickoff … The kickoff is a big part of the history of the NFL and the history of football. For us to be sitting here talking about maybe doing away with the kickoff, it’s very disappointing.”
After naming some of the famous return men from his father’s playing days — former Rams great Jackie Slater is his dad! Who knew? — Slater went on.
“The kicking game has meant a lot to the game of football and a lot of players individually and has enabled guys to have careers. You think about [longtime Patriots special teamer] Larry Izzo, you think about myself. Without the kicking game, we don’t have a career. I’m very disappointed with some of the things I hear in regards to getting rid of the kickoff. I surely hope that’s not the case. I hope that’s not the direction we’re moving in, but we’ll see.”
The NFL has been trying to legislate kick returns for a while. From a player-safety perspective, it does make sense: Kickoff returns have been called the most dangerous plays in sports. But the effects of eliminating kickoffs would go beyond making the NFL a safer workplace. It would alter strategic approaches in both game plan and roster construction, all while costing plenty of players their jobs.
The league moved kickoffs from the 30- to the 35-yard line before the 2011 season, and the percentage that resulted in touchbacks jumped from 16.4 percent to 43.5 percent that year before rising steadily to 56 percent in ’15. Still, as ESPN’s Brian Burke and Sharon Katz wrote in March, deeper kicks failed to provide enough of a deterrent. Even with an uptick in touchbacks, the decision to take them wasn’t statistically savvy. According to Burke and Katz, an average kick return yielded an expected .59 points for an offense, while a touchback translated into an expected .29 points. Regardless of whether players were aware of that gap, return men last season still elected to run kickoffs back 46 percent of the time. By giving offenses 5 more yards for taking a knee, the NFL’s hope, clearly, is that this incentive disappears.
When Giants owner and NFL Competition Committee member John Mara was asked about the rule in April, he acknowledged that although the committee was “not at the point where we want to take the kickoff out of the game completely,” it “may be moving in that direction.” Based on Mara’s comments, it feels like the only hang-up preventing the kickoff’s extinction is figuring out how a team, after scoring in the fourth quarter but still trailing, could attempt to get the ball back without an onside kick. If this year’s rule change doesn’t limit the frequency of returns, though, late-game scenarios probably wouldn’t be enough to stop the committee from doing away with kickoffs entirely.
Since this latest rule was passed, there have already been some indicators that the committee might not get the outcome it anticipates. And that starts with teams’ never-ending search for even the slimmest competitive advantage. For the past five years, the ideal kickoff specialist has been someone who could pound the ball out of the end zone and ensure the opposition starts at its own 20-yard line. With touchbacks becoming more punitive, the most valuable kickers may be the ones who can consistently loft high kicks inside the 5 — finding the sweet spot between distance and hang time, and pinning teams inside the 25.
“Every NFL kicker I talked to said he would change to a high, short kick to the goal line,” retired kicker Jay Feely told NFL.com’s Judy Battista in March. “It’s not hard to do at all. The hard part will be the amount of hang time. The best kickers will be able to get 4.4 to 4.6 [second] hang time kicking it to the goal line.”
Given the sport’s very nature, every great moment in NFL history has been preceded by a kickoff. For some moments, though, the kickoff has been essential to that greatness. Desmond Howard brought home a Super Bowl MVP award with the Packers on the shoulders of his return work, and the best memory of my football life is still Devin Hester, in Super Bowl XLI, corralling an Adam Vinatieri kick on the 8-yard line and taking it for a touchdown. My euphoria lasted about 10 minutes before Rex Grossman turned into a pumpkin and the Colts started to handle the Bears. But damn, those 10 minutes were sweet.
Hester’s return was the first place my mind went after reading what the Patriots’ Matthew Slater told local reporters after an OTA late last week. Slater, by a wide margin, is the most notable non-kicker, non-returner special teams player in the league; he’s gone to the Pro Bowl in each of the past five years. After being asked about the NFL’s new one-year rule that will place the ball on the 25-yard line following a touchback, he responded with this:“I’m very disappointed, obviously, in the way we’re discussing the future of the kickoff … The kickoff is a big part of the history of the NFL and the history of football. For us to be sitting here talking about maybe doing away with the kickoff, it’s very disappointing.”
After naming some of the famous return men from his father’s playing days — former Rams great Jackie Slater is his dad! Who knew? — Slater went on.
“The kicking game has meant a lot to the game of football and a lot of players individually and has enabled guys to have careers. You think about [longtime Patriots special teamer] Larry Izzo, you think about myself. Without the kicking game, we don’t have a career. I’m very disappointed with some of the things I hear in regards to getting rid of the kickoff. I surely hope that’s not the case. I hope that’s not the direction we’re moving in, but we’ll see.”
The NFL has been trying to legislate kick returns for a while. From a player-safety perspective, it does make sense: Kickoff returns have been called the most dangerous plays in sports. But the effects of eliminating kickoffs would go beyond making the NFL a safer workplace. It would alter strategic approaches in both game plan and roster construction, all while costing plenty of players their jobs.
The league moved kickoffs from the 30- to the 35-yard line before the 2011 season, and the percentage that resulted in touchbacks jumped from 16.4 percent to 43.5 percent that year before rising steadily to 56 percent in ’15. Still, as ESPN’s Brian Burke and Sharon Katz wrote in March, deeper kicks failed to provide enough of a deterrent. Even with an uptick in touchbacks, the decision to take them wasn’t statistically savvy. According to Burke and Katz, an average kick return yielded an expected .59 points for an offense, while a touchback translated into an expected .29 points. Regardless of whether players were aware of that gap, return men last season still elected to run kickoffs back 46 percent of the time. By giving offenses 5 more yards for taking a knee, the NFL’s hope, clearly, is that this incentive disappears.
When Giants owner and NFL Competition Committee member John Mara was asked about the rule in April, he acknowledged that although the committee was “not at the point where we want to take the kickoff out of the game completely,” it “may be moving in that direction.” Based on Mara’s comments, it feels like the only hang-up preventing the kickoff’s extinction is figuring out how a team, after scoring in the fourth quarter but still trailing, could attempt to get the ball back without an onside kick. If this year’s rule change doesn’t limit the frequency of returns, though, late-game scenarios probably wouldn’t be enough to stop the committee from doing away with kickoffs entirely.
Since this latest rule was passed, there have already been some indicators that the committee might not get the outcome it anticipates. And that starts with teams’ never-ending search for even the slimmest competitive advantage. For the past five years, the ideal kickoff specialist has been someone who could pound the ball out of the end zone and ensure the opposition starts at its own 20-yard line. With touchbacks becoming more punitive, the most valuable kickers may be the ones who can consistently loft high kicks inside the 5 — finding the sweet spot between distance and hang time, and pinning teams inside the 25.
“Every NFL kicker I talked to said he would change to a high, short kick to the goal line,” retired kicker Jay Feely told NFL.com’s Judy Battista in March. “It’s not hard to do at all. The hard part will be the amount of hang time. The best kickers will be able to get 4.4 to 4.6 [second] hang time kicking it to the goal line.”
by Robert Mays, The Ringer | Read more:
Image: Getty
Sunday, June 12, 2016
Nebraska's Hemp Battle: Farmers Say Officials Are Blocking a Gold Rush
[ ed. Funny story: back in college my girlfriend and I traveled to Minnesota to visit relatives. While we were there we'd sometimes go out trout fishing on the back roads just to get away for a while. One day, standing next to a small stream, I happened to look up and there must have been an acre of weed, just out there, growing on the other side. Beautiful tall plants, flowering stalks, everything you can imagine. We freaked out! Wading into the dense field of greenery felt like some kind of stoner's dream. Anyway, long story short, we stripped as many plants as we could, crammed them into garbage bags and stashed them in the trunk of my little Datsun. We must have scored several pounds. Later, we drove all the way back to Colorado with our "contraband", dreaming all the way about the ton of money we were going to make (and constantly paranoid about being stopped and arrested along the way). We made it back. But after careful drying and processing (dry ice was involved) we lit up and.... nothing. WTF? It never occurred to us it was just hemp. We could have rolled a joint the size of a Cuban Cigar and still not have gotten a buzz. So we ended up throwing it all away (after risking arrest and a criminal record for transporting an illegal drug across numerous state lines). Ahh, the days of youth and stupidity.]
Twenty miles east of his office at the University of Nebraska, plant geneticist Ismail Dweikat finds what he’s looking for at the fringe of a budding cornfield: wild hemp.
Mixed among other roadside weeds, the hemp bears the familiar narrow five-fingered leaves synonymous with marijuana but almost none of pot’s psychoactive component, tetrahydrocannabinol (THC).
But hemp is unlikely to be anything more than a ditch weed in the Cornhusker state this year and possibly for years to come. Despite terrain that farmers say is ideal for growing hemp, Nebraskans haven’t been able to cash in on what they believe is a potential gold rush, caught in an epic battle with the government.
“There are so many obstacles,” bemoans Dweikat.
The only permissible means of growing hemp in the state is through university research. But even researchers have faced a series of hurdles that have meant not a single hemp growing operation has launched in Nebraska.
Dweikat was hoping to plant two acres of hemp this spring at a test plot but almost four months after the University of Nebraska sent paperwork seeking to import seeds from Canada to the Drug Enforcement Administration, researchers do not have all the permits necessary to import special seeds from Manitoba, Canada, with THC content certified at less than 0.3%.
If and when the seeds arrive at the university, they will receive the kind of security usually reserved for precious gems. Dweikat says the seeds will be locked in a metal safe inside a locked cage. The university was asked to add metal reinforcement under the safe when DEA agents worried someone could saw the wood beneath the strongbox to get to the seeds, he says.
“There is such a misunderstanding of hemp, it just dumbfounds me,” explains Jon Hanson, an organic farmer in Marquette, who says he’d love to grow hemp on his 480-acre farm.
Unlike neighboring Colorado, where it’s legal to grow such commercial marijuana strains as Purple Haze and Chemdawg, farmers in Nebraska and elsewhere are forbidden by law from planting industrial hemp for prosaic purposes such as fiber and seed oil.
The DEA considers hemp a Schedule I drug – the same as heroin and LSD. The US Farm Bill signed by Barack Obama in 2014 carved out an exception for research and pilot programs, if states pass laws permitting it. Twenty-nine states have done so, according to the Hemp Industries Association.
But in Nebraska, a state bill to allow farmers to apply for this exception was thwarted by senators and police officials who feared hemp would be a gateway crop to recreational marijuana. (...)
“We’re stuck in the mud,” Lupien says. “There are lots and lots of farmers interested in growing an alternative crop in the rotation. It would break the disease and pest cycles and have huge benefits economically and environmentally.”
The Hemp Industries Association estimates some $573m of goods containing hemp were in the United States in 2015, almost all of it imported. These goods included foods, supplements, body care products, clothing, auto parts, insulation and construction materials and medicine. (....)
According to advocates, hemp is as American as apple pie. George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams all grew hemp, which was used for paper, rope and cloth. The first flag of the United States, sewn by Betsy Ross, is said to have been made from hemp, and the Declaration of Independence was drafted on hemp paper.
by David Steen Martin, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: David Steen Martin
Twenty miles east of his office at the University of Nebraska, plant geneticist Ismail Dweikat finds what he’s looking for at the fringe of a budding cornfield: wild hemp.
Mixed among other roadside weeds, the hemp bears the familiar narrow five-fingered leaves synonymous with marijuana but almost none of pot’s psychoactive component, tetrahydrocannabinol (THC).But hemp is unlikely to be anything more than a ditch weed in the Cornhusker state this year and possibly for years to come. Despite terrain that farmers say is ideal for growing hemp, Nebraskans haven’t been able to cash in on what they believe is a potential gold rush, caught in an epic battle with the government.
“There are so many obstacles,” bemoans Dweikat.
The only permissible means of growing hemp in the state is through university research. But even researchers have faced a series of hurdles that have meant not a single hemp growing operation has launched in Nebraska.
Dweikat was hoping to plant two acres of hemp this spring at a test plot but almost four months after the University of Nebraska sent paperwork seeking to import seeds from Canada to the Drug Enforcement Administration, researchers do not have all the permits necessary to import special seeds from Manitoba, Canada, with THC content certified at less than 0.3%.
If and when the seeds arrive at the university, they will receive the kind of security usually reserved for precious gems. Dweikat says the seeds will be locked in a metal safe inside a locked cage. The university was asked to add metal reinforcement under the safe when DEA agents worried someone could saw the wood beneath the strongbox to get to the seeds, he says.
“There is such a misunderstanding of hemp, it just dumbfounds me,” explains Jon Hanson, an organic farmer in Marquette, who says he’d love to grow hemp on his 480-acre farm.
Unlike neighboring Colorado, where it’s legal to grow such commercial marijuana strains as Purple Haze and Chemdawg, farmers in Nebraska and elsewhere are forbidden by law from planting industrial hemp for prosaic purposes such as fiber and seed oil.
The DEA considers hemp a Schedule I drug – the same as heroin and LSD. The US Farm Bill signed by Barack Obama in 2014 carved out an exception for research and pilot programs, if states pass laws permitting it. Twenty-nine states have done so, according to the Hemp Industries Association.
But in Nebraska, a state bill to allow farmers to apply for this exception was thwarted by senators and police officials who feared hemp would be a gateway crop to recreational marijuana. (...)
“We’re stuck in the mud,” Lupien says. “There are lots and lots of farmers interested in growing an alternative crop in the rotation. It would break the disease and pest cycles and have huge benefits economically and environmentally.”
The Hemp Industries Association estimates some $573m of goods containing hemp were in the United States in 2015, almost all of it imported. These goods included foods, supplements, body care products, clothing, auto parts, insulation and construction materials and medicine. (....)
According to advocates, hemp is as American as apple pie. George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams all grew hemp, which was used for paper, rope and cloth. The first flag of the United States, sewn by Betsy Ross, is said to have been made from hemp, and the Declaration of Independence was drafted on hemp paper.
by David Steen Martin, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: David Steen Martin
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