The Undeniable Facts About the Safety of Diet Coke

[ed. This post from the archives must have been forwarded somewhere because its been quite popular lately. Unfortunately, the original link went dead. This one should work.]

I sat down at the table with friends, enjoying our get-together at the diner. The waitress took my order for a Diet Coke. She left. A friend spoke up.

“They say that Diet Coke increases your chance of getting diabetes by a factor of seven.”

“I heard people were getting seizures from the aspartame in it.”

“Today the news said a lady died after drinking 10 liters of Coke.”

“That’s nice. Enjoy your glass of city water filled with chemicals like fluoride,” I replied.

Are you kidding me?

Not much for alcohol. Never smoked. Don’t do drugs, and barely take aspirin. I exercise at the gym three times a week. I walk to work briskly every day, which comes to around 3/4 of a mile daily. When I get home, I try to avoid sitting and work at a standing desk. I go for walks when weather allows. I don’t eat much red meat at all, mainly poultry if any. I drink plenty of water, and often it is in the form of green, white, or herbal teas. I don’t drink coffee. In other words, I’m not health-obsessed, but I do alright.

My two vices?

An occasional Diet Coke as a treat a couple of times a week (and not even full cans!) and chocolate.

There are two important facts about life:

• I am going to die.
• You are going to die.

Let’s just be honest: people who point out the inadequacies in my eating and health regimen are merely quibbling over the bet they’re placing that I’ll die first. You’re telling me I’m killing myself and it’s my fault. You almost hint that I can take the blame for any physical ailment coming my way. I propose that cellular degeneration and the natural order of things might get some blame, and not just that Snickers I ate yesterday.

“Oh, but it’s a quality of life thing.”

Snow White's poisoned apple is a metaphor for supermarkets

The fact that I’m not fixating on the perfect purity of my food and not doing it to those around me means I have a pretty good quality of life.

When I eat a burger, I am thankful I have food, and that I don’t have to go out and gut the cow myself.

As I’m standing in the grocery store, I think of some of the poorest people in Nicaragua I’ve seen living and scrounging for food near the garbage dump. I get a bit upset at the arrogance that says the strawberries or apples or oranges stacked in heaping piles before me are “not good enough” because they are not organic.

I am repulsed by the idolatry that my body is so precious that I must find something more healthy and pure, that these non-organic fruits lack enough nutritional value for the little god that is me.

How does it work, that having a bountiful supply of food before me is seen as the enemy instead of a blessing?

Do I think I’m better than those people in poverty, so I deserve optimal “natural” food? Or, do I think that everyone deserves it, but because not everyone is in a place to access it, rice and corn mash are good enough for their kids but definitely not mine? When you donate food to the food pantry, do you donate the expensive organic carefully-sourced food that you insist is the only acceptable thing to put in your body and that you feed yourself and your family, or do you get the cheapest canned and boxed food at the store?

If your diet requires it, great. If you prefer it, fine. If you think it’s the only way to go, have at it. But don’t lecture me especially while we’re in the process of eating. I shouldn’t have to defend my digestive history. (...)

Maybe people ought to be more concerned about what they’re allowing in their head, rather than just their mouth. Shall I get after you for what you do and don’t read? Shall I lecture you on the shallow life of pursuing bodily health and not a robust mental existence?

Turn the TV off, unplug the internet, and shut out the voices convincing you that a world of unimaginable plenty isn’t good enough, isn’t healthy enough. Eat the food you have in moderation. The quality of my life, and my health, is fine. Someday it might not be. The same is true for you. Whether I drop over dead tomorrow or live to be 104, I’m not going to enjoy it any more by skipping the Diet Coke or excessive chocolate consumption. Keep your own guilt.

by Julie R. Neidlinger, Lone Prairie |  Read more:
Photo: uncredited

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Wayne Thiebaud, Candy Counter, 1962
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How Google Tracks You

[ed. Go to Google and click on the My Account settings.]

Ever get the feeling you’re being watched?

It’s because you are – and for a rough proxy of this, use the browser extension Ghostery to see how many tracking scripts are watching you on a typical media site. (It doesn’t work for everything, but a large media site like Vice.com has 50+ trackers, with 40 of them focused on advertising).

Capturing this user data helps sites sell their inventory to advertisers, but a select few companies operate in this capacity at a whole different level. Google and Facebook are the best of examples of this, as nearly $0.60 of every dollar spent on digital advertising goes to them. They both have the sophistication and ubiquity to capture incredible amounts of information about you.

Google is Everywhere

Today’s infographic, which comes to us from Mylio, focuses in on Google in particular.

The search giant is massive in size, and there is a good chance you tap into Googleverse in some way:

Global market penetration for Android is 61-81%.
Google has a 78.8% market share for online search.
The company generates $67.4 billion in annual ad revenue.
Google processes two trillion searches annually.
30-50 million websites use Google Analytics to for tracking.
There are 700,000 apps available in the Google Play store.
82% of videos watched online come from YouTube.
In total, Google has at least 79 products and services.

According to Google’s documentation, it uses these services to pull out information on the “things you do”, “things you create”, and the things that make you unique.

See What Google Collects

All in all, Google tracks your activity history, location history, audio history, and device history. It also builds a profile for you for serving ads – age, gender, location, income, and other demographic data.

You can view and actually download this history by using a tool called Google Takeout.

Many people understand that their data helps support advertising revenues on websites they enjoy. Others are rightly concerned about their privacy, and how their information is used. Regardless of which category you fit in, becoming informed about how privacy on the internet works will help you craft an experience that best fits your preferences.

by Jeff Desjardins, Visual Capitalist |  Read more:

Image: Mylio

Politics 101

Watch New Health Picks

How Pundits Get Everything Wrong and Still Keep Their Jobs

Don’t think of a rampaging elephant

Why Joe Biden was a most unusual — and effective — vice president

Remarks by the President and the Vice President in Presentation of the Medal of Freedom to Vice President Joe Biden

Bush Counting Down Days Until He is No Longer Worst President in History

When Tweets Trump Diplomacy

Marcelo Pedroso’s ‘Brazilian Dream’ Poster
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[ed. I usually never watch network nightly news, but since I'm traveling that's all there is on the local channels. Tonight it was CBS, and I'd guess that about a third of the show was actually devoted to 'news' (I won't even mention what that news was about...ackk). The rest of the half-hour was given over to commercials for pharmaceutical products (with a couple of retirement investment services added for diversity). There must have been 15-20 commercials in half an hour (I didn't count). It was worse than an NFL game. I suppose you get used to this if you watch network news regularly, but the relentless drug pushing was quite an eye-opener.]

Image: via:

Transcript: President Obama on What Books Mean to Him

Michiko Kakutani, the chief book critic for The New York Times, interviewed President Obama about literature on Friday at the White House. Here are excerpts from the conversation, which have been edited and condensed.

These books that you gave to your daughter Malia on the Kindle, what were they? Some of your favorites?

I think some of them were sort of the usual suspects, so “The Naked and the Dead” or “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” I think she hadn’t read yet.

Then there were some books I think that are not on everybody’s reading list these days, but I remembered as being interesting, like “The Golden Notebook” by Doris Lessing, for example. Or “The Woman Warrior,” by Maxine [Hong Kingston].

Part of what was interesting was me pulling back books that I thought were really powerful, but that might not surface when she goes to college.

Have you had a chance to discuss them with her?

I’ve had the chance to discuss some. And she’s interested in being a filmmaker, so storytelling is of great interest to her. She had just read “A Moveable Feast.” I hadn’t included that, and she was just captivated by the idea that Hemingway described his goal of writing one true thing every day.

What made you want to become a writer?

I loved reading when I was a kid, partly because I was traveling so much, and there were times where I’d be displaced, I’d be the outsider. When I first moved to Indonesia, I’m this big, dark-skinned kid that kind of stood out. And then when I moved back from Indonesia to Hawaii, I had the manners and habits probably of an Indonesian kid.

And so the idea of having these worlds that were portable, that were yours, that you could enter into, was appealing to me. And then I became a teenager and wasn’t reading that much other than what was assigned in school, and playing basketball and chasing girls, and imbibing things that weren’t very healthy.

I think all of us did.

Yeah. And then I think rediscovered writing and reading and thinking in my first or second year of college and used that as a way to rebuild myself, a process I write about in “Dreams From My Father.”

That period in New York, where you were intensely reading.

I was hermetic — it really is true. I had one plate, one towel, and I’d buy clothes from thrift shops. And I was very intense, and sort of humorless. But it reintroduced me to the power of words as a way to figure out who you are and what you think, and what you believe, and what’s important, and to sort through and interpret this swirl of events that is happening around you every minute.

And so even though by the time I graduated I knew I wanted to be involved in public policy, or I had these vague notions of organizing, the idea of continuing to write and tell stories as part of that was valuable to me. And so I would come home from work, and I would write in my journal or write a story or two.

The great thing was that it was useful in my organizing work. Because when I got there, the guy who had hired me said that the thing that brings people together to have the courage to take action on behalf of their lives is not just that they care about the same issue, it’s that they have shared stories. And he told me that if you learn how to listen to people’s stories and can find what’s sacred in other people’s stories, then you’ll be able to forge a relationship that lasts.

But my interest in public service and politics then merged with the idea of storytelling.

What were your short stories like?

It’s interesting, when I read them, a lot of them had to do with older people.

I think part of the reason was because I was working in communities with people who were significantly older than me. We were going into churches, and probably the average age of these folks was 55, 60. A lot of them had scratched and clawed their way into the middle class, but just barely. They were seeing the communities in which they had invested their hopes and dreams and raised their kids starting to decay — steel mills had closed, and there had been a lot of racial turnover in these communities. And so there was also this sense of loss and disappointment.

And so a bunch of the short stories I wrote had to do with that sense, that atmosphere. One story is about an old black pastor who seems to be about to lose his church, his lease is running out and he’s got this loyal woman deacon who is trying to buck him up. Another is about an elderly couple — a white couple in L.A., — and he’s like in advertising, wrote jingles. And he’s just retired and has gotten cranky. And his wife is trying to convince him that his life is not over.

So when I think back on what’s interesting to me, there is not a lot of Jack Kerouac, open-road, young kid on the make discovering stuff. It’s more melancholy and reflective. (...)

It’s what you said in your farewell address about Atticus Finch, where you said people are so isolated in their little bubbles. Fiction can leap —

It bridges them. I struck up a friendship with [the novelist] Marilynne Robinson, who has become a good friend. And we’ve become sort of pen pals. I started reading her in Iowa, where “Gilead” and some of her best novels are set. And I loved her writing in part because I saw those people every day. And the interior life she was describing that connected them — the people I was shaking hands with and making speeches to — it connected them with my grandparents, who were from Kansas and ended up journeying all the way to Hawaii, but whose foundation had been set in a very similar setting.

And so I think that I found myself better able to imagine what’s going on in the lives of people throughout my presidency because of not just a specific novel but the act of reading fiction. It exercises those muscles, and I think that has been helpful.

And then there’s been the occasion where I just want to get out of my own head. [Laughter] Sometimes you read fiction just because you want to be someplace else. (...)

What books would you recommend at this moment in time, that captures this sense of turmoil?

I should probably ask you or some people who have had time to catch up on reading. I’ll confess that since the election, I’ve been busier than I expected. So one of the things I’m really looking forward to is to dig into a whole bunch of literature.

But one of the things I’m confident about is that, out of this moment, there are a whole bunch of writers, a lot of them young, who are probably writing the book I need to read. [Laughter] They’re ahead of me right now. And so in my post-presidency, in addition to training the next generation of leaders to work on issues like climate change or gun violence or criminal justice reform, my hope is to link them up with their peers who see fiction or nonfiction as an important part of that process.

When so much of our politics is trying to manage this clash of cultures brought about by globalization and technology and migration, the role of stories to unify — as opposed to divide, to engage rather than to marginalize — is more important than ever.

There’s something particular about quieting yourself and having a sustained stretch of time that is different from music or television or even the greatest movies.

And part of what we’re all having to deal with right now is just a lot of information overload and a lack of time to process things. So we make quick judgments and assign stereotypes to things, block certain things out, because our brain is just trying to get through the day.

We’re bombarded with information. Technology is moving so rapidly.

Look, I don’t worry about the survival of the novel. We’re a storytelling species.

I think that what one of the jobs of political leaders going forward is, is to tell a better story about what binds us together as a people. And America is unique in having to stitch together all these disparate elements — we’re not one race, we’re not one tribe, folks didn’t all arrive here at the same time.

What holds us together is an idea, and it’s a story about who we are and what’s important to us. And I want to make sure that we continue that.

by Michiko Kakutani, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Doug Mills/The New York Times

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Chargers Owner Dean Spanos Screwed San Diego, and L.A. Is About to Screw Him

I was born and raised in San Diego. I grew up 10 minutes from the beach in a small naval community, went to San Diego State University, and wore shorts 363 days a year. The only way I could have been more San Diego is if I were a carne asada burrito made by Tony Gwynn that said only the phrase, “Get out of the water, this is a fuckin’ local break, bro.”

But in 2003, after graduating college, I decided to move to Los Angeles. I wanted to become a screenwriter, and if I was ever truly going to “make it” I had to make the move. So I packed up all my shit, got an apartment in Hollywood next to a rent-by-the-hour motel, and started waiting tables. Fast-forward three years and I was in that same apartment, still waiting tables and desperately trying to get someone, anyone, to read one of my screenplays. Only two things brought me joy: listening to a coworker of mine who used to be in porn tell me about the weirdest dicks she ever saw, and watching the San Diego Chargers play football on Sunday afternoons. For a couple of hours, watching LaDainian Tomlinson bust through sure tackles made me feel like I was back home, where my life felt like it still had promise. Los Angeles had kicked the shit out of me in a way that only Los Angeles can.

Los Angeles is built on apathy. It has perfected the art of letting you know it doesn’t give a fuck about you. Everyone comes here to “make it,” and, because it’s so hard to do that, no one has the time or the sympathy to give a shit about you. You never even get a “no” in Los Angeles, because a “no” takes almost a second, and fuck you if you think you’re worth that. In fact, Los Angeles gives a shit about you only once you’ve become successful enough that the approval is no longer something you need. Apathy always seems better than hatred until you realize that at least someone has to put in effort to hate you. So when I saw the news that the Chargers were officially moving to Los Angeles, my mind immediately went to their owner, Dean Spanos.

Dean Spanos was given charge of the San Diego Chargers by his father in 1994, and, from minute one, no one in San Diego ever took him seriously. He so perfectly looked and sounded the part of “fuckwit son of a rich guy” that he was never really going to have any other identity unless he did something truly great. Unfortunately for him, and San Diego, that was not to be his destiny. Year after year he made decisions so dumb that even the incredibly mild San Diego sports media took notice. When he fired Marty Schottenheimer after a 14–2 season, he hired Norv Turner, a man who had finished 9–23 with the Oakland Raiders in his last head-coaching stint, to handle the primes of Philip Rivers and LT. And Dean did this not because he had any real faith in Norv as a head coach (no one did, not even Norv), but because Norv was the kind of coach who would pretend that Dean was somebody. Marty Schottenheimer made it very clear he did not give two shits about what Dean Spanos thought. Norv treated Deano like a smart football mind who had earned the job of president instead of like the son of the guy who owned the team. Every year, the Chargers found new and embarrassing ways to lose, and the once-pliable identity of Dean Spanos as “fuck-up rich kid” began to harden. Barring a Super Bowl win, Dean was running out of ways to become the respected big shot he so desperately wanted to be. There was one more way to create his own legacy: build a brand-new stadium.

If you’re not rich enough to build a football stadium, then you’re not rich enough to own a football team. It’s like owning a Ferrari; you can’t just be a guy who has the money for a Ferrari. You gotta be someone that can afford all the bullshit that comes with owning a Ferrari. Dean Spanos is like a dipshit who saved all his money for a Ferrari and now lives in a one-bedroom apartment and has to park that thing on the street, where it gets fucked with daily. In the mid-aughts, he started asking the city of San Diego to build him a stadium so he could feel like a big shot. We told him to fuck off and pay for it himself. We did it several times, in several different ways. At some point he realized he was never going to get his stadium. He would always be a loser in SD, and the only way he was going to be able to feel like a big shot was if he took the Chargers and left the city. He was like a high school nobody named Josh who dreamed of going to college in another place and rebranding himself as J-Money. So every year Dean would put forth some kind of bullshit proposal that he knew was bullshit to try to get us to help him build this stadium, just so he could someday say, “Hey NFL, I did my best, see? Can I be allowed to move to L.A. now?”

by Justin Halpern, The Ringer |  Read more:

Image: Getty Images/The Ringer

Image: Bert T.

How Designers Engineer Luck Into Video Games

The responsibilities and challenges of programmed luck.

On Sept. 16, 2007, a Japanese YouTuber who goes by the handle “Computing Aesthetic” uploaded a forty-eight-second-long video with the deafening title, “ULTRA MEGA SUPER LUCKY SHOT.” The video shows a high-scoring shot in Peggle, a vastly popular video game, loosely based on Japanese pachinko machines, in which a ball bearing clatters down the screen, accruing points as it bounces through a crowd of candy-colored pegs, which disappear shortly after being touched; more bounces, more points. Although Peggle involves some skill—before firing the ball, the player must carefully aim the launcher that dangles at the top of the screen—you are principally at the mercy of the luck of the bounce. In Computing Aesthetic’s footage, the points pile up as the ball bounces fortuitously between pegs. To underscore the seemingly miraculous shot, Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” blares euphorically until, in the video’s final moments, the ball bearing sinks into the bucket at the base of the screen and the words “FEVER SCORE” flash onscreen. The description on the video, which has been watched nearly a quarter of a million times, reads, “I couldn’t balieve this when it happened!!!!!!!!!”

Computing Aesthetic’s video is just one of nearly 20,000 such YouTube clips labelled with the words “Peggle” and “Lucky,” uploaded by players so amazed at their good fortune in the game that they were moved to share the achievement with the world. But these players may not be as lucky as they’ve been led to believe. “In Peggle, the seemingly random bouncing of the balls off of pegs is sometimes manipulated to give the player better results,” Jason Kapalka, one of the game’s developers, admitted to me. “The Lucky Bounce that ensures that a ball hits a target peg instead of plunking into the dead ball zone is used sparingly. But we do apply a lot of extra ‘luck’ to players in their first half-dozen levels or so to keep them from getting frustrated while learning the ropes.” Tweaking the direction of any given bounce by just a few compass degrees—but not so much that the ball swerves unrealistically in mid-air—is enough to encourage beginners and not make the game too unbelievable, Kapalka said.

Fairness is the unspoken promise of most video games. Controlled by an omniscient and omnipotent designer, a video game has the capacity to be ultimately just, and players expect that it will be so. (Designers also have an incentive to be even-handed: A game that always beats you is a game you’ll soon stop playing.) And yet, when video games truly play by the rules, the player can feel cheated. Sid Meier, the designer of the computer game Civilization, in which players steer a nation through history, politics, and warfare, quickly learned to modify the game’s odds in order to redress this psychological wrinkle. Extensive play-testing revealed that a player who was told that he had a 33 percent chance of success in a battle but then failed to defeat his opponent three times in a row would become irate and incredulous. (In Civilization, you can replay the same battle over and over until you win, albeit incurring costs with every loss.) So Meier altered the game to more closely match human cognitive biases; if your odds of winning a battle were 1 in 3, the game guaranteed that you’d win on the third attempt—a misrepresentation of true probability that nevertheless gave the illusion of fairness. Call it the Lucky Paradox: Lucky is fun, but too lucky is unreal. The resulting, on-going negotiation among game players and designers must count as one of our most abstract collective negotiations. (...)

In mechanical games, luck is the player’s saving grace against the mechanism itself. In the early 1950s, the Chicago-based pinball manufacturer Gottlieb noticed that novice pinball players would occasionally lose a ball in the first few moments of a game. So it introduced an inverted V-shaped metal wall that, during a game’s opening seconds, would rise between the flippers at the base of the machine in order to keep an errant ball from disappearing down the gulley. In newer pinball machines, the blocking gate, known as a “ball saver” (a phrase invented by Chicago Coin for its 1968 pinball machine, Gun Smoke), is controlled by software; whether the wall rises or not is a matter of luck, of a kind that has been engineered into the algorithm.

In fully digital video games, luck is even more deeply baked into the experience, and must be actively simulated. When the soccer ball sails past the goalkeeper in FIFA, or when, inexplicably, a herd of race cars slows down to allow you to catch up, a game designer’s hand has just acted to provide some ghostly rigging. The effect of this manipulation is to flatter you and thereby keep you engaged. But it’s a trick that must be deployed subtly. A player who senses that he’s secretly being helped by the game will feel patronized; after all, luck is only luck if it’s truly unpredictable.

Which is where the problems begin.

by Simon Parkin, Nautilus |  Read more:

Image: Wren McDonald

The Death of the Tunnel Tree

Early last Monday morning, a friend of mine sent news that a tree we knew, a sequoia, had collapsed in a winter mountain storm. I was in New York, where two inches of hard snow sat on cars and tree branches that themselves looked like death. He was in Northern California, near the place where we grew up. No one is certain of the fallen tree’s age, but it is thought to have lived at least a thousand years. Any tribute I could give it would be fatuous; the tree was older than the language in which I can write.

The tree meant something more time-bound to humans, though, and, like a playboy worn down by the party circuit, bore the traces of a personable past. Giant sequoias are believed to be the largest living thing on Earth by volume. They are tall with short branches, and wear mantles of thick, russet bark that feels like Styrofoam and has the soft curves of poured wax. This one had a huge hole in its base—about ten feet tall, and even wider—that was carved in the eighteen-eighties. The idea was to let you walk not just around the tree but through it, making it a kind of skyscraper, a place in the forest where people could dwell. Over the years, the hollowed-out sequoia came to be called the Pioneer Cabin Tree, like a built thing, or the tunnel tree, like an essential piece of infrastructure. What was really meant was that it was our tree, our human tree, the one we singled out and marked with the illusions of our time. Its hollow had been razored with initials, and its wood had the polish of frequent touch. When the dusty, ferny mountain forest became Calaveras Big Trees State Park, in 1931, the tunnel tree emerged as a centerpiece, the California mountains’ Tour Eiffel.

In death, it was more. The A section of the Times, a paper not traditionally much concerned with California flora, gave the tree more than ten inches of space. The Los Angeles Times called it “iconic.” I watched the coverage with the media-age awkwardness of someone trying to feel the touch of death from a great distance. No one knew quite what to say, it seemed, and, although we all felt some vague measure of loss, it was unclear what to think about a life that had lasted longer than all memory. In the way of human grief, I want, instead of honoring the tree directly, to conjure up the world in which it was a monument for me. (...)

Most summers, as long as I remember, my family has rented, for a week, a cabin in the middle Sierras just off Highway 4. It’s quiet there, and inexpensive, and there aren’t a lot of Jet Skis on the water. When we started going up to Calaveras—that’s the family expression, “up to Calaveras”—it was because that’s where my mother’s parents took her. Later, my mother began urging other families to take cabins nearby. We arranged big dinners on creaking wood decks and ate grilled chicken in the light of citronella candles. When the summer meteor showers came, we’d lie on empty roads and watch the stars. The rented cabins would invariably be A-frames in the style of the high Carter Administration (ski-lodge shag carpet, macramé owls on the walls), and you would will yourself to sleep despite fears that a giant spider was about to leap down from the eaves. These unfamiliar terrors made the weeks seem long and sweet. One August, we were nearly washed off some boulders and downriver in an unexpected thunderstorm; the next July, I floated with the special harmony of adolescent lassitude across a lake, on an air mattress, with friends. I was fifteen, and it was the night when, by the prophecies of Nostradamus, the world was sure to end. That it didn’t end then, or the evening after, taught me something about wise men. That I’d felt at peace with the apocalypse—I was confident my fifteen-year-old life had a pleasant roundness, even a fulfillment—teaches me today how poorly we can see beyond the near horizon of experience. Visiting a place again and again, year after year, annunciates the slow progress of human growth. A kid that you recall shows up, abruptly, with the problems and the powers of a woman or a man.

That’s what the tunnel tree in Big Trees State Park meant to me: the function of eternity to graduate the progress of a life. The first time I saw the tree, I was about five, and my family took a photo in its hollow. We took another photo the next time we visited, and again after that. Over the years, I’ve been back probably twenty times, and a catalogue of imagery—first film, then digital—marks my family’s slow, peculiar progress. We look heartbreakingly small. The tree is really very big. That record ended this week, and I cannot shake the feeling that a certain vector of our history ended then as well.(...)

The temptation is to herald the tunnel tree’s death as an emblem. (The Times, in a second piece, presented its collapse as a symbol of this dire American season.) It is also easy, maybe just, for humans to take blame. Although trees often fall in storms, sequoias are equipped for the long haul—their stance is wide; their bark is fire-resistant—and a spell of winter weather is unlikely to have felled the tunnel tree without the huge, destabilizing chasm near its roots. We made the tree our own and, in the process, took away its immortality. It experienced time as few sequoias can, through human eyes: with friendship, wounds, some fame, and death.

by Nathan Heller, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: Calif. State Parks/AFP/Getty

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Forgiveness Is Not a Binary State

In the summer of 2015, less than a week after Dylann Roof murdered nine black churchgoers in Charleston, South Carolina — a crime for which, yesterday, he was sentenced to death — the relatives of his victims arrived at his first court appearance with a surprising message: forgiveness.

“We have no room for hating, so we have to forgive,” said one woman whose brother was killed in the attack. Another, whose mother was among the deceased, expressed similar sentiments: “You took something very precious from me,” she said, “but I forgive you.”

And a few days after that, writer Roxane Gay published a moving op-ed in the New York Times explaining why she did not. “I have no immediate connection to what happened in Charleston, S.C., last week beyond my humanity and my blackness,” she wrote, “but I do not foresee ever forgiving his crimes, and I am wholly at ease with that choice.”

Together, these two reactions — both powerful, both valid, diametrically opposed to each other — raise an important question about the slippery concept at their center. Forgiveness, clearly, is a highly personal choice, speeding healing for some and precluding healing for others. But what does it even mean to forgive, anyway?

It’s something we haven’t been asking ourselves for very long — it wasn’t until 1989 that psychologists even started to really study forgiveness — but psychologist Harriet Lerner believes we’ve been too hasty to rush into an answer. In her new book Why Won’t You Apologize?: Healing Big Betrayals and Everyday Hurts, Lerner argues that we’re flying blind: Academic research and conventional wisdom alike emphasize the positive effects of forgiveness without having reached any clear consensus as to what the act of forgiving really looks like.

“When I read the literature on forgiveness, I found myself confused. And it took me a while to sort out that the confusion was not mine, and had more to do with the way that forgiveness is talked about and written about,” she says. “What I began to be aware of is that the forgiveness experts were collapsing the messy complexity of human emotions into simplistic dichotomous equations, like you either forgive the wrongdoer or you’re a prisoner of your own anger and hate. Either you forgive, or your life will be mired down in corrosive emotions and you’ll never move forward.” The reality, she says, is that forgiveness is rarely so tidy — and that placing too much faith in its powers can actually harm, rather than help.

Forgiveness isn’t always a good idea.

Scientific literature is chock-full of ways that forgiveness can improve your mental and physical health: It can ease anxiety and depression, cut down on your risk of heart attack, even help you live longer. Letting go of a grudge, it seems, may be up there with exercising and getting enough sleep as one of the best things you can do for yourself.

But the problem with this framing, Lerner says, is that it can push people into extending the olive branch before they’re ready, turning forgiveness from a personal choice into something closer to an obligation: the emotional equivalent of eating your vegetables. And if you can’t bring yourself to do it, you’re going to feel all the worse.

“It’s a terribly hurtful thing to put forth the notion, which is everywhere, that there can be no peace or healing without forgiveness,” she says. “To suggest that the only way out of their unhappiness is that they have to transcend their legitimate anger and pain … It’s not anybody’s place — not your therapist, or your minister, or your coach, or Facebook, or whatever — it’s no one else’s job to tell you to forgive or not to.”

Lerner offers an example of what happens when they do: “[Let’s say] the hurt party opens a conversation with their mother about some earlier neglect or injustice. And the mother says, ‘I’m really sorry, what I did was wrong, do you forgive me?’” Most of the time, she says, “The impulse is to say, ‘I forgive you,’ because they’re so relieved the mother has acknowledged the harm. But the problem is that forgiveness takes its own time to hold.”

And if the hurt party can’t actually bring themselves to forgive, one of two things happens: On the one hand, they could power through, accept the apology anyway, and then grapple with lingering feelings of anger that now feel invalidated. Or, on the other hand, “If the hurt party says, ‘I don’t forgive you, I need more time,’ very often the hurt party becomes the bad guy. And the wrongdoer feels self-righteous because they’re angry the other person isn’t saying ‘I forgive you,’ and blame is shifted to the one who doesn’t forgive.” True forgiveness, she says, is something you earn, and something you wait for. It isn’t something you can request — because if you have to ask, odds are you won’t be getting the real thing.

by Cari Romm, Science of Us | Read more:
Image: Photo: Dennis Hallinan/Getty Images

All Bets Are Off

The bizzare saga of potential Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election has created a genuine emergency in American politics. This isn’t necessarily because of Russia’s actual actions — unless the most peculiar allegations turn out to be accurate — but because of Donald Trump’s response, and what this indicates about how he’ll govern.

Ignore the Trump “dossier” for the moment and forget the baseless conjecture about Russia hacking the U.S. voting process itself. All we need to know about Trump and the Republican Party can be found in their position on the simplest, most plausible part of the story: that Russia was behind the hacked emails from the Democratic National Committee, Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and John Podesta.

Is this in fact what happened? Certainly the Obama administration did itself no favors by failing to release any of the evidence underlying the strong conclusions in the the Office of the Director of National Intelligence’s report. But Trump himself said at last week’s press conference, presumably based on a classified briefing, that “I think it was Russia.” Mike Pompeo, Trump’s nominee to run the Central Intelligence Agency, agreed during his confirmation hearings. There’s also the crucial dog that hasn’t barked: Unlike during the lead up to the Iraq War, no one from the intelligence agencies has been leaking doubts or claims that they’re being leaned on by the White House to provide the desired conclusion.

Under these circumstances, the reaction of anyone who actually cares about the United States has to be: We must investigate this with great seriousness and impartiality and find out exactly what happened. This requires an independent commission with sufficient funding, a broad mandate and legal authority that Congress creates but then can no longer influence.

Nothing should be less controversial than this. Whatever a nation’s political disagreements, in any functioning democracy there’s just one position on this issue: Only citizens can participate in deciding who governs it.

In every other circumstance Republicans love wrapping themselves in the flag and vowing to protect us from dastardly foreigners, even if this requires renaming the french fries in the congressional cafeteria. Few do this more than Trump himself, whose entire campaign was about the apocalyptic danger posed to us by China, Mexico, the freeloaders of NATO, Muslims from anywhere, and so on. Yet on the subject of Russia and this election he’s suddenly indifferent — even though fear of this type of foreign influence doesn’t require jingoistic xenophobia but just a rational, healthy belief in small-d democratic self-determination.

This is one of the key topics of George Washington’s 1796 Farewell Address, the most famous political rhetoric in American history until the Gettysburg Address. “Against the insidious wiles of foreign influence,” Washington warned, “the jealousy of a free people ought to be constantly awake, since history and experience prove that foreign influence is one of the most baneful foes of republican government.”

Washington was particularly concerned by the “common and continual mischiefs of the spirit of party” – that is, loyalty to your own faction within the country above the country overall. This, he said, “opens the door to foreign influence and corruption, which finds a facilitated access to the government itself through the channels of party passions” and allows other countries to “practice the arts of seduction, to mislead public opinion, to influence or awe the public councils.”

Trump and the GOP are now busy proving how prescient Washington was. Trump has not endorsed an independent investigation of any Russian actions aimed at the election, nor released the financial information that would clarify any business relationships he has with Russians or Russian banks. Moreover, he can’t even bring himself to pretend in public that any of it matters much (although it’s hard to tell whether this is because he fears we’ll find out something nefarious he did or simply because his ego can’t bear his victory being thrown into doubt). Of all of Trump’s violations of basic democratic norms, his indifference to this most basic principle of self-government is the most shocking of all.

by Jon Schwarz, The Intercept | Read more:
Image: Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Physicists Will Soon Rule Silicon Valley

It's a bad time to be a physicist.

At least, that’s what Oscar Boykin says. He majored in physics at the Georgia Institute of Technology and in 2002 he finished a physics PhD at UCLA. But four years ago, physicists at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland discovered the Higgs boson, a subatomic particle first predicted in the 1960s. As Boykin points out, everyone expected it. The Higgs didn’t mess with the theoretical models of the universe. It didn’t change anything or give physcists anything new to strive for. “Physicists are excited when there’s something wrong with physics, and we’re in a situation now where there’s not a lot that’s wrong,” he says. “It’s a disheartening place for a physicist to be in.” Plus, the pay isn’t too good.

Boykin is no longer a physicist. He’s a Silicon Valley software engineer. And it’s a very good time to be one of those.

Boykin works at Stripe, a $9-billion startup that helps businesses accept payments online. He helps build and operate software systems that collect data from across the company’s services, and he works to predict the future of these services, including when, where, and how the fraudulent transactions will come. As a physicist, he’s ideally suited to the job, which requires both extreme math and abstract thought. And yet, unlike a physicist, he’s working in a field that now offers endless challenges and possibilities. Plus, the pay is great.

If physics and software engineering were subatomic particles, Silicon Valley has turned into the place where the fields collide. Boykin works with three other physicists at Stripe. In December, when General Electric acquired the machine learning startup Wise.io, CEO Jeff Immelt boasted that he had just grabbed a company packed with physicists, most notably UC Berkeley astrophysicist Joshua Bloom. The open source machine learning software H20, used by 70,000 data scientists across the globe, was built with help from Swiss physicist Arno Candel, who once worked at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. Vijay Narayanan, Microsoft’s head of data science, is an astrophysicist, and several other physicists work under him.

It’s not on purpose, exactly. “We didn’t go into the physics kindergarten and steal a basket of children,” says Stripe president and co-founder John Collison. “It just happened.” And it’s happening across Silicon Valley. Because structurally and technologically, the things that just about every internet company needs to do are more and more suited to the skill set of a physicist.

The Naturals

Of course, physicists have played a role in computer technology since its earliest days, just as they’ve played a role in so many other fields. John Mauchly, who helped design the ENIAC, one of the earliest computers, was a physicist. Dennis Ritchie, the father of the C programming language, was too.

But this is a particularly ripe moment for physicists in computer tech, thanks to the rise of machine learning, where machines learn tasks by analyzing vast amounts of data. This new wave of data science and AI is something that suits physicists right down to their socks.

by Cade Metz, Wired |  Read more:

Image: Einstein's Zurich Notebook

Resistance to the Antibiotic of Last Resort Is Silently Spreading

[ed. I've been keeping track of mcr-1 for a while now and surprised it hasn't gotten more coverage. There's a possible world pandemic in the making and no one seems to have noticed.]

The alarm bells sounded on November 18, 2015.

Antibiotic resistance is usually a slow-moving crisis, one of the reasons its danger can be hard to convey. One by one, over the years, the drugs used to fight the most stubborn infections have fallen by the wayside as bacteria have evolved resistance to them. For certain infections, the only drug left is colistin. Then on November 18, 2015, scientists published a report in the British medical journal The Lancet: A single, easily spreadable gene makes the bacteria that carry it resistant to colistin, our antibiotic of last resort.

Chinese scientists had found this gene, called mcr-1, in pig farms and on meat in supermarkets. Why pigs? Herein lies in the irony. Colistin is an old drug and, by modern standards, not a great one. It can cause severe kidney damage. As scientists developed better antibiotics over the decades, colistin fell out of human use. So in China, farmers started using it by the tons in animals, where low doses of antibiotics can promote growth.

Now it’s come full circle. Bacteria have evolved resistance to so many of those “better” antibiotics that colistin is critical for human health again. China didn’t use colistin in humans, but many countries including the U.S. do as a last resort.

Even more worrisome in the Lancet report was evidence that mcr-1 had already leapt from pigs to humans. Out of 1322 patient samples from hospitals in China, the team found 16 containing mcr-1. And, of course, drug-resistant bacteria don’t respect national borders. As the team was writing up its report, it noticed other researchers had uploaded genomes of bacteria in Malaysia containing the mcr-1 gene sequence to an online database. “The possibility that mcr-1-positive E. coli have spread outside China and into other countries in southeastern Asia is deeply concerning,” the authors warned.

To be clear, these E. coli with mcr-1 found in China were still susceptible to antibiotics other than colistin, but if a bacterium with genes that make it resistant to every other drug then picks up mcr-1, you get the nightmare scenario: a pan-resistant bacteria. These drug- resistant infections usually happen in people who are already sick or have weakened immune systems. (...)

The story of mcr-1’s silent spread is, by now, a familiar one. Over and over, scientists have identified genes conferring resistance to a class of antibiotics, only to find the gene had circled the globe. Another recent example is ndm-1, a gene found in 2009 that confers resistance to class of antibiotics called carbapenems. “It’s very rare to catch something at the very beginning,” says Alexander Kallen, a medical epidemiologist with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Looking for resistance is a constant game of catch-up. You don’t notice anything until there is something to notice; by the time there is something to notice, something bad has already happened. And you have to have eyes everywhere: Resistance initially found on a Chinese pig farm could repercussions all over the world.

When Timothy Walsh, a microbiologist at Cardiff University first heard of mcr-1’s existence from his colleague Yang Wang of China Agricultural University, he didn’t believe it. “It’s like the holy grail of resistance,” says Walsh. He was also skeptical because of the way colistin works. The antibiotic binds to molecules on the surface of bacteria—and modifying those molecules typically requires mutations in several different genes. Instead of getting lucky just once, that bacteria would have to get lucky several times to beat off colistin. In fact, other researchers had identified colistin-resistant bacteria before, which had multiple mutations in the DNA in their chromosomes.

But mcr-1 was just one gene. And more importantly, it didn’t live on chromosomes, which are tightly wound pieces of DNA. The mcr-1 gene sits on a little loop of free-floating DNA called a plasmid, which bacteria—even bacteria of different species—can easily swap like bracelets. That makes mcr-1 much easier to spread. A single bacteria might collect multiple plasmids with multiple genes for resistance to multiple antibiotics. Scientist have not yet found bacteria with mcr-1 that is resistant to all antibiotics, but don’t make the mistake of optimism. “It’s not a case of ‘if.’ It’s a case of ‘when,’” says Walsh.

by Sarah Zhang, The Atlantic |  Read more:

Image: Ho New / Reuters

The xx

I See You

Taking a Break

[ed. I'm traveling so posts will be sporadic for a while. It also seems like a good time to share a personal milestone here at Duck Soup - half a million pageviews. I know, nothing like what the Death Star (Facebook) probably gets in 5 seconds. But still, a satisfying achievement nonetheless, and a good reason to thank this blog's loyal readers and contributors. The best way I can describe blogging is that it's like having your own little radio station in the middle of nowhere. There's this compulsion to put things out that you find interesting, regardless of who's listening. Hopefully, someone will get something out of it.

Clive Thompson wrote a book a while ago called Smarter Than You Think: How Technology is Changing Our Minds for the Better.  Talking about the satisfactions of blogging, one of the observations he made was: "Many people have told me that they feel the dynamic kick in with even a tiny handful of viewers. I’d argue that the cognitive shift in going from an audience of zero (talking to yourself) to an audience of 10 (a few friends or random strangers checking out your online post) is so big that it’s actually huger than going from 10 people to a million."  I can certainly agree with that. Half a million is a nice metric, but the biggest motivation is still just providing some value to someone regardless of the numbers. So, thanks again to everyone and I hope to be back soon. In the mean time, check out the archives.]

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