Wednesday, April 11, 2018
Tuesday, April 10, 2018
Data Lords
This afternoon I saw a friend on Twitter say that he doesn’t buy the idea that if people just paid Facebook some sort of fee the data and privacy issue would go away. Because he subscribes to the Times, the Post and the WSJ and they each track his readership habits and sell that data to advertisers or make it available to them for targeting. This is at least partly true – I’ll discuss the ins and outs of that point in a moment. But this is a good opportunity to discuss the real relationship between publishers and big data. It’s actually very different than it looks.
First, what my friend says is true. These publications are all in the data collection and sale business. Indeed, TPM is too – not directly at all but because of the ad networks (like Google and others) we have no choice but to work with. The key on the main claim is that the issue is one of diversity of revenue streams. Each of those big publications mentioned has at least three big revenue sources that are relevant to this conversation. They have premium advertisers for which the kind of data we’re talking about has limited importance. They also have subscriptions. The final bucket is made up of advertising that is heavily reliant on data and targeting.
The difference is that Facebook is almost 100% reliant on advertising which is not only reliant on data and targeting but reliant on the most aggressive kinds of data collection, tracking and targeting. That is Facebook’s entire business. Anything that cuts deeply into that model and advantage represents an existential threat.
But here’s the really salient point. Almost every publication participates in the data economy. But the data economy is almost universally a bad thing for publications, especially ones that have real audiences.
Allow me to explain.
Different publications have different kinds of audiences. If you want to sell consumer goods to a mass audience, you might advertise in People magazine or Yahoo News. If you want to advertise to affluent investors you might advertise on WSJ or Barron’s. If you want to advertise to highly educated progressive news junkies who are what ad industry types call ‘opinion leaders’ you might advertise on TPM.
Different publications have different audiences and they have different relationships with those audiences. Some have deep bonds of trust, others don’t. Historically (and increasingly today), publications sell subscriptions. They also sell ads which can command different rates depending the value advertisers attach to talking to different groups of people. If you have a strong brand and a key audience, a publication can command profitable advertising rates because they become a kind of gatekeeper for a given audience.
The evolution of big data, tracking, targeting and advertising over the last half dozen years has transformed this dynamic.
Let’s take a hypothetical publication, Fishing Times. In the old days, paper or digital, if you’re advertising fishing equipment, Fishing Times is a must-buy. But tracking and targeting changes that. Now Google or Facebook or a number of other players whose names you haven’t heard of can target people interested in fishing or even Fishing Times readers wherever they go on the internet. Let’s call these “Fishing Times readers” collectively.
So Fishing Times’s ad department is selling access to the prime Fishing Times readership. But the Data Lords can say, ‘we can show your ad just to Fishing Times readers when they’re on Facebook, or on some meme site, on the Times or TPM or really anywhere.’ Because the Data Lords have the data and they can track and target you. The publication’s role as the gatekeeper to an audience is totally undercut because the folks who control the data and the targeting can follow those readers anywhere and purchase the ads at the lowest price.
That’s not all. The Data Lords can also create something called ‘look alike audiences’, a key part of what Facebook (but by no means only Facebook) does. This means that the data may show that people with brown eyes, Toyota Camrys, fans of Katie Perry and chocolate milk buy the most fishing equipment and are the most intensely loyal readers of Fishing Times. Now the Data Lords can show your ads not only to Fishing Times readers (wherever they go on the web) but to this demographic profile which may seem to have no connection to fishing but yet has a demonstrated propensity to purchase fishing gear in the same way Fishing Times readers do.
There’s one final part of the equation. Let’s go back to advertising at Fishing Times. We have an advertiser who sells hand crafted fly fishing gear. This is pricey stuff and it appeals to only one, fairly small part of the Fishing Times demographic. The advertiser may set up a private auction or marketplace with Google which will allow them to show their ads on Fishing Times only when a reader fits a very specific demographic profile. So Fishing Times is getting those dollars but only a tiny fraction of them because the Data Lords have allowed them to pick and choose the small subset of the audience they want to show their ads to.
A few caveats: This transformation is not quite as total as I suggest. Some publications have sufficient brand cachet that appearing on their site retains a value of its own. Some have enough market power that they can keep the data/targeting world off their most prized publication real estate. But the dynamics I’ve noted are affecting all publications and most of them to a great degree. If you’re hearing about the advertising and monetization crisis so many publishers are facing, what I’m describing here is a huge part of what is going on.
There’s one more indeterminate asterisk that floats over all these calculations: that is, the Facebooks’, Googles’ and other Data Lords’ data pretty clearly isn’t as good as they claim. In recent weeks, for instance, Facebook has had to repeatedly reduce estimates of the “reach” of their ads (how many people actually see them). Since the value of ads is whether and how many people see them, having the reach numbers wrong is a pretty big deal.
In pure efficiency terms, most of this is great. As an advertiser I don’t have to pay high rates to reach New York Times readers on The New York Times. I can pay Google or Facebook to find them for me elsewhere for much cheaper prices. But as you can see, in this new world of data, tracking and targeting, it’s the Data Lords who have the power and get the money. It’s comparable to the way Apple’s iTunes and Spotify dramatically reduced the amount of money in music sales and took a big, big chunk of the reduced size pie for themselves. Amazon is comparable with books and a lot else.
by Josh Marshall, TPM | Read more:
First, what my friend says is true. These publications are all in the data collection and sale business. Indeed, TPM is too – not directly at all but because of the ad networks (like Google and others) we have no choice but to work with. The key on the main claim is that the issue is one of diversity of revenue streams. Each of those big publications mentioned has at least three big revenue sources that are relevant to this conversation. They have premium advertisers for which the kind of data we’re talking about has limited importance. They also have subscriptions. The final bucket is made up of advertising that is heavily reliant on data and targeting.The difference is that Facebook is almost 100% reliant on advertising which is not only reliant on data and targeting but reliant on the most aggressive kinds of data collection, tracking and targeting. That is Facebook’s entire business. Anything that cuts deeply into that model and advantage represents an existential threat.
But here’s the really salient point. Almost every publication participates in the data economy. But the data economy is almost universally a bad thing for publications, especially ones that have real audiences.
Allow me to explain.
Different publications have different kinds of audiences. If you want to sell consumer goods to a mass audience, you might advertise in People magazine or Yahoo News. If you want to advertise to affluent investors you might advertise on WSJ or Barron’s. If you want to advertise to highly educated progressive news junkies who are what ad industry types call ‘opinion leaders’ you might advertise on TPM.
Different publications have different audiences and they have different relationships with those audiences. Some have deep bonds of trust, others don’t. Historically (and increasingly today), publications sell subscriptions. They also sell ads which can command different rates depending the value advertisers attach to talking to different groups of people. If you have a strong brand and a key audience, a publication can command profitable advertising rates because they become a kind of gatekeeper for a given audience.
The evolution of big data, tracking, targeting and advertising over the last half dozen years has transformed this dynamic.
Let’s take a hypothetical publication, Fishing Times. In the old days, paper or digital, if you’re advertising fishing equipment, Fishing Times is a must-buy. But tracking and targeting changes that. Now Google or Facebook or a number of other players whose names you haven’t heard of can target people interested in fishing or even Fishing Times readers wherever they go on the internet. Let’s call these “Fishing Times readers” collectively.
So Fishing Times’s ad department is selling access to the prime Fishing Times readership. But the Data Lords can say, ‘we can show your ad just to Fishing Times readers when they’re on Facebook, or on some meme site, on the Times or TPM or really anywhere.’ Because the Data Lords have the data and they can track and target you. The publication’s role as the gatekeeper to an audience is totally undercut because the folks who control the data and the targeting can follow those readers anywhere and purchase the ads at the lowest price.
That’s not all. The Data Lords can also create something called ‘look alike audiences’, a key part of what Facebook (but by no means only Facebook) does. This means that the data may show that people with brown eyes, Toyota Camrys, fans of Katie Perry and chocolate milk buy the most fishing equipment and are the most intensely loyal readers of Fishing Times. Now the Data Lords can show your ads not only to Fishing Times readers (wherever they go on the web) but to this demographic profile which may seem to have no connection to fishing but yet has a demonstrated propensity to purchase fishing gear in the same way Fishing Times readers do.
There’s one final part of the equation. Let’s go back to advertising at Fishing Times. We have an advertiser who sells hand crafted fly fishing gear. This is pricey stuff and it appeals to only one, fairly small part of the Fishing Times demographic. The advertiser may set up a private auction or marketplace with Google which will allow them to show their ads on Fishing Times only when a reader fits a very specific demographic profile. So Fishing Times is getting those dollars but only a tiny fraction of them because the Data Lords have allowed them to pick and choose the small subset of the audience they want to show their ads to.
A few caveats: This transformation is not quite as total as I suggest. Some publications have sufficient brand cachet that appearing on their site retains a value of its own. Some have enough market power that they can keep the data/targeting world off their most prized publication real estate. But the dynamics I’ve noted are affecting all publications and most of them to a great degree. If you’re hearing about the advertising and monetization crisis so many publishers are facing, what I’m describing here is a huge part of what is going on.
There’s one more indeterminate asterisk that floats over all these calculations: that is, the Facebooks’, Googles’ and other Data Lords’ data pretty clearly isn’t as good as they claim. In recent weeks, for instance, Facebook has had to repeatedly reduce estimates of the “reach” of their ads (how many people actually see them). Since the value of ads is whether and how many people see them, having the reach numbers wrong is a pretty big deal.
In pure efficiency terms, most of this is great. As an advertiser I don’t have to pay high rates to reach New York Times readers on The New York Times. I can pay Google or Facebook to find them for me elsewhere for much cheaper prices. But as you can see, in this new world of data, tracking and targeting, it’s the Data Lords who have the power and get the money. It’s comparable to the way Apple’s iTunes and Spotify dramatically reduced the amount of money in music sales and took a big, big chunk of the reduced size pie for themselves. Amazon is comparable with books and a lot else.
by Josh Marshall, TPM | Read more:
Image: Tobias Hase/picture-alliance/dpa/AP Images
Report: This is Not a Gun
NEW YORK—In a discovery that flies in the face of conventional law enforcement wisdom of what does and does not constitute a deadly firearm, weapons and non-weapons experts alike reported Thursday that an array of objects including but not limited to steel pipes, wallets, and cell phones are not, in fact, guns. “After extensive research and careful analysis, we can definitively state that these objects are not guns and cannot inflict harm by firing bullets,” said head researcher Jerome Morvis, whose team found no reason why, despite obvious differences in the size, shape, and color of the objects in question, the items so often appear as firearms to the not-completely-untrained eye. “To any law enforcement officer unsure about the object a civilian is holding, we recommend looking at the firearm in your own hand and looking back for parallels between its physical qualities and those of the object in a suspect’s hands. If you find no similarities, the object does not pose an immediate danger.” In related news, the experts have released a guide to help law enforcement officials discern the difference between a gun and an African American man’s empty, upraised hand.
by The Onion | Read more:
Image: uncredited
[ed. Please share with the TSA, re: deadly food items.]
When Do You Know You're Old Enough to Die?
Four years ago, Barbara Ehrenreich, 76, reached the realisation that she was old enough to die. Not that the author, journalist and political activist was sick; she just didn’t want to spoil the time she had left undergoing myriad preventive medical tests or restricting her diet in pursuit of a longer life.
While she would seek help for an urgent health issue, she wouldn’t look for problems.
Now Ehrenreich felt free to enjoy herself. “I tend to worry that a lot of my friends who are my age don’t get to that point,” she tells the Guardian. “They’re frantically scrambling for new things that might prolong their lives.”
It is not a suicidal decision, she stresses. Ehrenreich has what she calls “a very keen bullshit detector” and she has done her research.
The results of this are detailed in her latest book, Natural Causes: An Epidemic of Wellness, the Certainty of Dying, and Killing Ourselves to Live Longer, published on 10 April.
Part polemic, part autobiographical, Ehrenreich – who holds a PhD in cellular immunology – casts a skeptical, sometimes witty, and scientifically rigorous eye over the beliefs we hold that we think will give us longevity.
She targets the medical examinations, screenings and tests we’re subjected to in older age as well as the multibillion-dollar “wellness” industry, the cult of mindfulness and food fads.
These all give us the illusion that we are in control of our bodies. But in the latter part of the book, Ehrenreich argues this is not so. For example, she details how our immune systems can turn on us, promoting rather than preventing the spread of cancer cells.
When Ehrenreich talks of being old enough to die, she does not mean that each of us has an expiration date. It’s more that there’s an age at which death no longer requires much explanation.
“That thought had been forming in my mind for some time,” she says. “I really have no hard evidence about when exactly one gets old enough to die, but I notice in obituaries if the person is over 70 there’s not a big mystery, there’s no investigation called for. It’s usually not called tragic because we do die at some age. I found that rather refreshing.” (...)
Ehrenreich, who is divorced, has talked to her children – Rosa, a law professor, and Ben, a journalist and novelist – about her realisation she is old enough to die, but “not in a grim way”. That wouldn’t be her style. While a sombre subject, she chats about it with a matter-of-fact humour.
“I just said: ‘This is bullshit. I’m not going to go through this and that and the other. I’m not going to spend my time, which is very precious, being screened and probed and subjected to various kinds of machine surveillance.’ I think they’re with me. I raised them right,” she laughs.
“The last time I had to get a new primary care doctor I told her straight out: ‘I will come to you if I have a problem, but do not go looking for problems.’”
She pauses: “I think I beat her into submission.”
[ed. See also: Why Are the Poor Blamed and Shamed for Their Deaths?]
While she would seek help for an urgent health issue, she wouldn’t look for problems.
Now Ehrenreich felt free to enjoy herself. “I tend to worry that a lot of my friends who are my age don’t get to that point,” she tells the Guardian. “They’re frantically scrambling for new things that might prolong their lives.”
It is not a suicidal decision, she stresses. Ehrenreich has what she calls “a very keen bullshit detector” and she has done her research.The results of this are detailed in her latest book, Natural Causes: An Epidemic of Wellness, the Certainty of Dying, and Killing Ourselves to Live Longer, published on 10 April.
Part polemic, part autobiographical, Ehrenreich – who holds a PhD in cellular immunology – casts a skeptical, sometimes witty, and scientifically rigorous eye over the beliefs we hold that we think will give us longevity.
She targets the medical examinations, screenings and tests we’re subjected to in older age as well as the multibillion-dollar “wellness” industry, the cult of mindfulness and food fads.
These all give us the illusion that we are in control of our bodies. But in the latter part of the book, Ehrenreich argues this is not so. For example, she details how our immune systems can turn on us, promoting rather than preventing the spread of cancer cells.
When Ehrenreich talks of being old enough to die, she does not mean that each of us has an expiration date. It’s more that there’s an age at which death no longer requires much explanation.
“That thought had been forming in my mind for some time,” she says. “I really have no hard evidence about when exactly one gets old enough to die, but I notice in obituaries if the person is over 70 there’s not a big mystery, there’s no investigation called for. It’s usually not called tragic because we do die at some age. I found that rather refreshing.” (...)
Ehrenreich, who is divorced, has talked to her children – Rosa, a law professor, and Ben, a journalist and novelist – about her realisation she is old enough to die, but “not in a grim way”. That wouldn’t be her style. While a sombre subject, she chats about it with a matter-of-fact humour.
“I just said: ‘This is bullshit. I’m not going to go through this and that and the other. I’m not going to spend my time, which is very precious, being screened and probed and subjected to various kinds of machine surveillance.’ I think they’re with me. I raised them right,” she laughs.
“The last time I had to get a new primary care doctor I told her straight out: ‘I will come to you if I have a problem, but do not go looking for problems.’”
She pauses: “I think I beat her into submission.”
by Lucy Rock, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: Stephen Voss for the Guardian[ed. See also: Why Are the Poor Blamed and Shamed for Their Deaths?]
Pay for Your Words
There used to be two kinds of words: written or spoken. Written statements were more consciously edited. You’d take full responsibility for what you wrote, and you’d have the chance to hone your words. One was always aware one was writing at least in part for posterity, whether literary or legal. One consciously crafted a voice. One expected to be judged for it.
And then there were the words used in bars and restaurants and rows, still performative of course but also meant to remain largely unrecorded: uttered to blow off steam, as a momentary flirtation or provocation, meant to then fall to the ground and be swept away.
Social media occupies a third, hybrid space – the worst of both worlds. On the one hand a post only makes sense in the context of a specific time and conversation, with its temperature and colour, like dinner-party discussion. But it is recorded like a seriously intended text, and can be judged with that severity long after the fact.
Or, naked and without context, these posts can be stripped for their behavioural qualities. Instead of information or meaning they are read for data: the frequency of certain words; how close certain words are to others; sentiment analysis; whether we use more aggressive language as a conversation proceeds; times of postings and what that says about our personality; whether our grammar, likes and dislikes indicate that we are conscientious or open, extrovert or neurotic.
The idea that our words can betray something about ourselves beyond what we think we are saying has always been the premise of psychoanalysis. When one talks to therapists the way we use words, our Freudian slips and ellipses, is how our unconscious is meant to emerge. But psychoanalysis’ confessions take place in a closed, secure space. Social media uses the same trick as the psychoanalyst: ‘What’s on your mind’ is the question Facebook asks when you open it, much like the shrink does when you enter their cabinet. But this time the unconscious is being revealed not to a doctor but a data broker.
This is the real nightmare of social media. Not so much that ‘they’ know something about me I considered private, hidden. Though that’s unpleasant it’s also somehow comforting, reinforcing the idea that there’s a stable ‘me’ I am fully aware of, to protect from ‘them’. More worrying is the idea that ‘they’ know something about me which I hadn’t realised myself, that my data betrays more about me than I know about myself: that I’m not who I think I am. Ones complete dissolution into data.
There’s a morality tale here: social media, that little narcissism machine, the easiest way we have ever had to place ourselves on a pedestal of vanity, propagandise ourselves, is also the mechanism that most efficiently breaks you up.
The more skilful social media user will claim that they have successfully created a persona, that they are involved in a creative game, that they are playing the data field not it them. But social media has its own logic which dictates that persona. (...)
‘The most tragic part of social media’, the writer Zinovy Zinik told me the other evening, ‘is that though people think they are expressing their personalities they’re always just quoting someone else’.
He meant that when people think they are writing ‘what’s on their mind’ on Facebook they are just following a set of sub-literary tropes, prescribed poses. And in the sense that people choose social media as the main forum to express themselves, that means there’s less of themselves all the time. For those who are more passive-expressive, there is always the option to re-post other people as a way of signalling your position: literally transforming oneself into a series of quotes.
As the evening wore on, Zinik and I looked back to the Moscow Conceptualists of the 1970s and 80s, a movement obsessed with the idea of how you could express the individual in a world where Soviet propaganda had occupied all modes of expression. Our politics are more Orson Wellesian than Orwellian, more Twitter-narcissistic than top-down totalitarian, but were there be tactics to be gleaned from them?
by Peter Pomerantsev, Granta | Read more:
And then there were the words used in bars and restaurants and rows, still performative of course but also meant to remain largely unrecorded: uttered to blow off steam, as a momentary flirtation or provocation, meant to then fall to the ground and be swept away.
Social media occupies a third, hybrid space – the worst of both worlds. On the one hand a post only makes sense in the context of a specific time and conversation, with its temperature and colour, like dinner-party discussion. But it is recorded like a seriously intended text, and can be judged with that severity long after the fact.Or, naked and without context, these posts can be stripped for their behavioural qualities. Instead of information or meaning they are read for data: the frequency of certain words; how close certain words are to others; sentiment analysis; whether we use more aggressive language as a conversation proceeds; times of postings and what that says about our personality; whether our grammar, likes and dislikes indicate that we are conscientious or open, extrovert or neurotic.
The idea that our words can betray something about ourselves beyond what we think we are saying has always been the premise of psychoanalysis. When one talks to therapists the way we use words, our Freudian slips and ellipses, is how our unconscious is meant to emerge. But psychoanalysis’ confessions take place in a closed, secure space. Social media uses the same trick as the psychoanalyst: ‘What’s on your mind’ is the question Facebook asks when you open it, much like the shrink does when you enter their cabinet. But this time the unconscious is being revealed not to a doctor but a data broker.
This is the real nightmare of social media. Not so much that ‘they’ know something about me I considered private, hidden. Though that’s unpleasant it’s also somehow comforting, reinforcing the idea that there’s a stable ‘me’ I am fully aware of, to protect from ‘them’. More worrying is the idea that ‘they’ know something about me which I hadn’t realised myself, that my data betrays more about me than I know about myself: that I’m not who I think I am. Ones complete dissolution into data.
There’s a morality tale here: social media, that little narcissism machine, the easiest way we have ever had to place ourselves on a pedestal of vanity, propagandise ourselves, is also the mechanism that most efficiently breaks you up.
The more skilful social media user will claim that they have successfully created a persona, that they are involved in a creative game, that they are playing the data field not it them. But social media has its own logic which dictates that persona. (...)
‘The most tragic part of social media’, the writer Zinovy Zinik told me the other evening, ‘is that though people think they are expressing their personalities they’re always just quoting someone else’.
He meant that when people think they are writing ‘what’s on their mind’ on Facebook they are just following a set of sub-literary tropes, prescribed poses. And in the sense that people choose social media as the main forum to express themselves, that means there’s less of themselves all the time. For those who are more passive-expressive, there is always the option to re-post other people as a way of signalling your position: literally transforming oneself into a series of quotes.
As the evening wore on, Zinik and I looked back to the Moscow Conceptualists of the 1970s and 80s, a movement obsessed with the idea of how you could express the individual in a world where Soviet propaganda had occupied all modes of expression. Our politics are more Orson Wellesian than Orwellian, more Twitter-narcissistic than top-down totalitarian, but were there be tactics to be gleaned from them?
by Peter Pomerantsev, Granta | Read more:
Image: uncredited
Monday, April 9, 2018
The Why of Cooking
It’s a shame that the standard way of learning how to cook is by following recipes. To be sure, they are a wonderfully effective way to approximate a dish as it appeared in a test kitchen, at a star chef’s restaurant, or on TV. And they can be an excellent inspiration for even the least ambitious home cooks to liven up a weeknight dinner. But recipes, for all their precision and completeness, are poor teachers. They tell you what to do, but they rarely tell you why to do it.
This means that for most novice cooks, kitchen wisdom—a unified understanding of how cooking works, as distinct from the notes grandma lovingly scrawled on index-card recipes passed down through the generations—comes piecemeal. Take, for instance, the basic skill of thickening a sauce. Maybe one recipe for marinara advises reserving some of the starchy pasta water, for adding later in case the sauce is looking a little thin. Another might recommend rescuing a too-watery sauce with some flour, and still another might suggest a handful of parmesan. Any one of these recipes offers a fix under specific conditions, but after cooking through enough of them, those isolated recommendations can congeal into a realization: There are many clever ways to thicken a sauce, and picking an appropriate one depends on whether there’s some leeway for the flavor to change and how much time there is until dinner needs to be on the table.
The downside of learning to cook primarily through recipes, then, is that these small eurekas—which, once hit upon, are instantly applicable to nearly any other dish one prepares—are most often arrived at via triangulation. It’s like trying to learn a language only by copying down others’ sentences, instead of learning the grammar and vocabulary needed to put to paper lines of one’s own.
Short of enrolling in a cooking school, is there not a more direct, less haphazard way to arrive at a fuller idea of the theory behind good cooking? One gets the sense that chefs and cookbook authors are in possession of some magnificent guidebook full of culinary insights, consulting it to construct their dishes and revealing its secrets to everyday cooks only in fragments. No book could live up to that hyperbolic image, but I was still surprised, after roughly a year of searching, to find that there are very few books that concisely articulate the concepts that underlie good cooking, in a way that neither patronizes nor overwhelms. One might call what I was looking for “a metacookbook”—a book not about a certain cuisine or style of cooking, but about cooking itself—and I found good ones to be surprisingly rare.
One of the reasons for this is that the standard recommendations for a concept-based book about cooking are not completely helpful. Many of them, I found, were not metacookbooks at all, but rather in-depth guides to mastering the fundamentals of a classically respected cuisine (most often French or Italian) or matter-of-fact catalogues of cooking techniques, such as how to poach an egg or make a soufflé that doesn’t cave in. And of the recommendations that did fit the category, few struck a readable balance between in-the-weeds scientific digressions and everyday pragmatism. After reading through about a dozen metacookbooks, I did eventually arrive at the sort of knowledge I’d hoped for, but I also saw how some were much better than others at getting me there. Of all of them, my favorite—and the one I’m most likely to recommend to a beginning cook with even a faint desire to improve—is Samin Nosrat’s Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat, which is out this week.
This means that for most novice cooks, kitchen wisdom—a unified understanding of how cooking works, as distinct from the notes grandma lovingly scrawled on index-card recipes passed down through the generations—comes piecemeal. Take, for instance, the basic skill of thickening a sauce. Maybe one recipe for marinara advises reserving some of the starchy pasta water, for adding later in case the sauce is looking a little thin. Another might recommend rescuing a too-watery sauce with some flour, and still another might suggest a handful of parmesan. Any one of these recipes offers a fix under specific conditions, but after cooking through enough of them, those isolated recommendations can congeal into a realization: There are many clever ways to thicken a sauce, and picking an appropriate one depends on whether there’s some leeway for the flavor to change and how much time there is until dinner needs to be on the table.The downside of learning to cook primarily through recipes, then, is that these small eurekas—which, once hit upon, are instantly applicable to nearly any other dish one prepares—are most often arrived at via triangulation. It’s like trying to learn a language only by copying down others’ sentences, instead of learning the grammar and vocabulary needed to put to paper lines of one’s own.
Short of enrolling in a cooking school, is there not a more direct, less haphazard way to arrive at a fuller idea of the theory behind good cooking? One gets the sense that chefs and cookbook authors are in possession of some magnificent guidebook full of culinary insights, consulting it to construct their dishes and revealing its secrets to everyday cooks only in fragments. No book could live up to that hyperbolic image, but I was still surprised, after roughly a year of searching, to find that there are very few books that concisely articulate the concepts that underlie good cooking, in a way that neither patronizes nor overwhelms. One might call what I was looking for “a metacookbook”—a book not about a certain cuisine or style of cooking, but about cooking itself—and I found good ones to be surprisingly rare.
One of the reasons for this is that the standard recommendations for a concept-based book about cooking are not completely helpful. Many of them, I found, were not metacookbooks at all, but rather in-depth guides to mastering the fundamentals of a classically respected cuisine (most often French or Italian) or matter-of-fact catalogues of cooking techniques, such as how to poach an egg or make a soufflé that doesn’t cave in. And of the recommendations that did fit the category, few struck a readable balance between in-the-weeds scientific digressions and everyday pragmatism. After reading through about a dozen metacookbooks, I did eventually arrive at the sort of knowledge I’d hoped for, but I also saw how some were much better than others at getting me there. Of all of them, my favorite—and the one I’m most likely to recommend to a beginning cook with even a faint desire to improve—is Samin Nosrat’s Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat, which is out this week.
by Joe Pinsker, The Atlantic | Read more:
Image: Amazon
The Big Question for Markets
These are unsettled times in financial markets.
Stock prices rose or fell by more than 1 percent in four of five days last week, and if anything those closing numbers masked even larger swings within each trading sessions. A common measure of expected stock market volatility is about to double its level from early January.
The proximate cause is pretty obvious: President Trump is threatening a trade war with China and perhaps other trading partners. But beneath those daily headlines are two more fundamental questions: Is there a Kudlow Put? And is there a Powell Put?
More specifically, will the White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow (and his free-trader allies within the administration) be able to rein in the Trump administration’s trade stance if markets keep falling? And will the Federal Reserve’s chairman, Jerome Powell, be ready to take action, such as by delaying interest rate increases or even cutting rates, if markets tumble further?
If the answers are “yes,” there isn’t much to worry about and the stock market should be able to keep humming along at its current high levels. If it’s a “no,” well, in a word, uh-oh.
A “put” is an option contract that offers its buyer protection against losses. If you own a stock worth $100 and buy a put with a strike price of $80, you are ensuring the ability to sell for that price if you wish, so you can’t lose more than 20 percent of your money.
Back in the 1990s, traders started referring to the “Greenspan Put,” the notion that the stock market as a whole had the equivalent of a giant put option in the form of the Fed chairman Alan Greenspan. Amid an emerging markets debt crisis in 1998, the Fed cut interest rates to try to guard the United States against economic fallout, which helped the stock market gain a whopping 29 percent that year despite the global troubles.
This notion that the Fed is always ready to act when the stock markets start to dip has almost become a piece of conventional wisdom in market circles over the years — often said with a bit of snark and implicit criticism of the Fed for supposedly bailing out investors whenever the going gets tough. Fed officials themselves hate the idea, and argue that they’re looking out for the economy, not markets.
Nonetheless, in the popular discourse the Greenspan Put gave way to the (Ben) Bernanke Put, and to the (Janet) Yellen Put, as Mr. Greenspan’s successors engaged in multiple rounds of “quantitative easing” in recent years.
Which brings us to the 2018 equivalents. (...)
The pattern on trade policy through the first 14 months of the Trump administration has been to pair blustery talk — about pulling out of the North American Free Trade Agreement, for example — with more modest policy actions and negotiations that may avert real economic damage.
But the question is whether that dynamic is changing, with the departure of more internationalist voices within the administration like Mr. Kudlow’s predecessor, Gary Cohn, and the former secretary of state Rex Tillerson.
If Mr. Kudlow is able to offer only soothing words in the White House driveway — and those words aren’t matched by restraint in policymaking — the Kudlow Put will turn out to be fairly worthless. A warning sign about that possibility came Thursday night, when the administration threatened tariffs on an additional $100 billion in Chinese imports, in retaliation to China’s retaliation.
This is the kind of escalation that would, if it became policy rather than mere threat, be quite ominous for financial markets. Again on Friday, Mr. Kudlow offered calming messages, saying “there are all kinds of back-channel discussions going on.” But given the continued escalation after his earlier attempts at calm, the Kudlow Put didn’t quite work, and the market fell 2 percent that day.
Then there is Mr. Powell, who is in his second month as Federal Reserve chairman. He delivered a speech Friday that threw into doubt whether the Powell Put exists — at least with respect to potential economic disruption from a trade war.
He mentioned that business contacts had told Fed officials they were worried that trade tensions could spill into broader economic distress. But he did not go the next step of giving any hint that this might lead the Fed to reconsider its plans to raise interest rates gradually in the year ahead.
There’s good reason for that. If the trade skirmish escalates into a trade war, it will harm economic growth, but it will also be inflationary. Prices would rise for American consumers in the near term because of the new tariffs, and would rise in the medium term as production of goods moved to less economically advantageous locations.
It is an economic problem that the Fed’s tools would be particularly ill suited to solve; the Fed can help address weak demand in the economy but can’t do much about a negative supply shock, which is what a trade war would be.
So it’s understandable that Mr. Powell would be quiet on the subject, and disinclined to float the possibility that Fed interest rate policy could or would prevent damage from a trade war. But if things continue to escalate, expect markets to hang on his every word even more in search of evidence that the Powell Put is real.
Stock prices rose or fell by more than 1 percent in four of five days last week, and if anything those closing numbers masked even larger swings within each trading sessions. A common measure of expected stock market volatility is about to double its level from early January.
The proximate cause is pretty obvious: President Trump is threatening a trade war with China and perhaps other trading partners. But beneath those daily headlines are two more fundamental questions: Is there a Kudlow Put? And is there a Powell Put?
More specifically, will the White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow (and his free-trader allies within the administration) be able to rein in the Trump administration’s trade stance if markets keep falling? And will the Federal Reserve’s chairman, Jerome Powell, be ready to take action, such as by delaying interest rate increases or even cutting rates, if markets tumble further?If the answers are “yes,” there isn’t much to worry about and the stock market should be able to keep humming along at its current high levels. If it’s a “no,” well, in a word, uh-oh.
A “put” is an option contract that offers its buyer protection against losses. If you own a stock worth $100 and buy a put with a strike price of $80, you are ensuring the ability to sell for that price if you wish, so you can’t lose more than 20 percent of your money.
Back in the 1990s, traders started referring to the “Greenspan Put,” the notion that the stock market as a whole had the equivalent of a giant put option in the form of the Fed chairman Alan Greenspan. Amid an emerging markets debt crisis in 1998, the Fed cut interest rates to try to guard the United States against economic fallout, which helped the stock market gain a whopping 29 percent that year despite the global troubles.
This notion that the Fed is always ready to act when the stock markets start to dip has almost become a piece of conventional wisdom in market circles over the years — often said with a bit of snark and implicit criticism of the Fed for supposedly bailing out investors whenever the going gets tough. Fed officials themselves hate the idea, and argue that they’re looking out for the economy, not markets.
Nonetheless, in the popular discourse the Greenspan Put gave way to the (Ben) Bernanke Put, and to the (Janet) Yellen Put, as Mr. Greenspan’s successors engaged in multiple rounds of “quantitative easing” in recent years.
Which brings us to the 2018 equivalents. (...)
The pattern on trade policy through the first 14 months of the Trump administration has been to pair blustery talk — about pulling out of the North American Free Trade Agreement, for example — with more modest policy actions and negotiations that may avert real economic damage.
But the question is whether that dynamic is changing, with the departure of more internationalist voices within the administration like Mr. Kudlow’s predecessor, Gary Cohn, and the former secretary of state Rex Tillerson.
If Mr. Kudlow is able to offer only soothing words in the White House driveway — and those words aren’t matched by restraint in policymaking — the Kudlow Put will turn out to be fairly worthless. A warning sign about that possibility came Thursday night, when the administration threatened tariffs on an additional $100 billion in Chinese imports, in retaliation to China’s retaliation.
This is the kind of escalation that would, if it became policy rather than mere threat, be quite ominous for financial markets. Again on Friday, Mr. Kudlow offered calming messages, saying “there are all kinds of back-channel discussions going on.” But given the continued escalation after his earlier attempts at calm, the Kudlow Put didn’t quite work, and the market fell 2 percent that day.
Then there is Mr. Powell, who is in his second month as Federal Reserve chairman. He delivered a speech Friday that threw into doubt whether the Powell Put exists — at least with respect to potential economic disruption from a trade war.
He mentioned that business contacts had told Fed officials they were worried that trade tensions could spill into broader economic distress. But he did not go the next step of giving any hint that this might lead the Fed to reconsider its plans to raise interest rates gradually in the year ahead.
There’s good reason for that. If the trade skirmish escalates into a trade war, it will harm economic growth, but it will also be inflationary. Prices would rise for American consumers in the near term because of the new tariffs, and would rise in the medium term as production of goods moved to less economically advantageous locations.
It is an economic problem that the Fed’s tools would be particularly ill suited to solve; the Fed can help address weak demand in the economy but can’t do much about a negative supply shock, which is what a trade war would be.
So it’s understandable that Mr. Powell would be quiet on the subject, and disinclined to float the possibility that Fed interest rate policy could or would prevent damage from a trade war. But if things continue to escalate, expect markets to hang on his every word even more in search of evidence that the Powell Put is real.
by Neil Irwin, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Alex Wong/Getty Images
Jordan Spieth Misses a Victory, but Gains Another Masters Memory
When Jordan Spieth’s birdie putt on the 16th green dropped into the hole just after 5:40 p.m. on another stirring Masters Sunday, Spieth had made up the nine strokes that formed the gap between him and Patrick Reed at the beginning of the day.
At that moment, any number of stunning outcomes were possible for Spieth over the next hour. The Augusta National course record was in reach. So was the record for the biggest final-round comeback in Masters history. And, oh yes, Spieth could have won his second Masters and his fourth major championship, all three months before his 25th birthday.
But as the ball disappeared into the cup at No. 16 and the gallery erupted with an ovation that shook a sturdy grandstand, Spieth did not react.
There was no celebration, not even a smile. At last, he turned to his caddie, Michael Greller, and said, “Are you kidding me?”
Throughout a worldwide golf community that is drawn annually to the final two hours of the Masters tournament precisely because it produces examples of unmatched drama like Spieth’s rousing charge, there must have been a lot of people with the same notion on their lips.
Are you kidding me?
And while Spieth did not set any records and he finished in third place, two strokes behind Reed, he nonetheless created another indelible Masters memory, something he has done in each of the last five Aprils as a perennial contender here.
One takeaway from the 2018 Masters might be this: Golf fans might as well get used to Spieth as a dominant story line at Augusta National’s famed competition for a green jacket. Since 2014, Spieth has always seemed to be the one to watch — even when he has begun the day as an afterthought, as on Sunday.
All eyes did not turn to him immediately. The attention was on the final-group pairing of Reed and Rory McIlroy, whose Masters aspirations fizzled yet again. But Spieth began his day with birdies on the first and second holes.
Then he birdied the fifth, eighth and ninth holes, capping a torrid opening nine-hole score of five-under-par 31. Spieth was still four strokes behind Reed, who did not appear rattled. But perhaps because he is neither physically imposing nor long off the tee, Spieth attracts a fervent following in nearly every golf circle. And on Sunday, on the hills and hollows of Augusta National, the galleries began to relocate, quick-stepping so they could watch Spieth perform in Amen Corner.
At that moment, any number of stunning outcomes were possible for Spieth over the next hour. The Augusta National course record was in reach. So was the record for the biggest final-round comeback in Masters history. And, oh yes, Spieth could have won his second Masters and his fourth major championship, all three months before his 25th birthday.
But as the ball disappeared into the cup at No. 16 and the gallery erupted with an ovation that shook a sturdy grandstand, Spieth did not react.
There was no celebration, not even a smile. At last, he turned to his caddie, Michael Greller, and said, “Are you kidding me?”Throughout a worldwide golf community that is drawn annually to the final two hours of the Masters tournament precisely because it produces examples of unmatched drama like Spieth’s rousing charge, there must have been a lot of people with the same notion on their lips.
Are you kidding me?
And while Spieth did not set any records and he finished in third place, two strokes behind Reed, he nonetheless created another indelible Masters memory, something he has done in each of the last five Aprils as a perennial contender here.
One takeaway from the 2018 Masters might be this: Golf fans might as well get used to Spieth as a dominant story line at Augusta National’s famed competition for a green jacket. Since 2014, Spieth has always seemed to be the one to watch — even when he has begun the day as an afterthought, as on Sunday.
All eyes did not turn to him immediately. The attention was on the final-group pairing of Reed and Rory McIlroy, whose Masters aspirations fizzled yet again. But Spieth began his day with birdies on the first and second holes.
Then he birdied the fifth, eighth and ninth holes, capping a torrid opening nine-hole score of five-under-par 31. Spieth was still four strokes behind Reed, who did not appear rattled. But perhaps because he is neither physically imposing nor long off the tee, Spieth attracts a fervent following in nearly every golf circle. And on Sunday, on the hills and hollows of Augusta National, the galleries began to relocate, quick-stepping so they could watch Spieth perform in Amen Corner.
by Bill Pennington, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Lucy Nicholson/Reuters
[ed. It was a great tournament.]
Sunday, April 8, 2018
Reamde: Neal Stephenson’s Novel of Computer Viruses and Welsh Terrorists
Let us say that novelists are like unannounced visitors. While Norman Mailer and Saul Bellow pound manfully on the door, Jonathan Franzen and Zadie Smith knock politely, little preparing you for the emotional ferociousness with which they plan on making themselves at home. Neal Stephenson, on the other hand, shows up smelling vaguely of weed, with a bunch of suitcases. Maybe he can crash for a couple of days? Two weeks later he is still there. And you cannot get rid of him. Not because he is unpleasant but because he is so interesting. Then one morning you wake up and find him gone. You are relieved, a little, but you also miss him. And you wish he’d left behind whatever it was he was smoking, because anything that allows a human being to write six 1,000-page novels in 12 years is worth the health and imprisonment risk.
It is tempting to call Stephenson a “cult writer,” but cult writers are typically under-or selectively read. All of Stephenson’s novels published since the late 1990s have been best sellers, and some of his original editions go for precious-metal asking prices online. His still-fresh, still-astounding cyberpunk parody “Snow Crash” (1992) standardized use of the Sanskrit word “avatar” to denote virtual human identities and came impressively close to predicting how the Internet would come to be understood, which is to say as a “metaverse” paradoxically larger than the world that enfolds it. For these and other reasons, Stephenson is the rare writer whose 20-year-old magazine essays have their own Wikipedia pages.
That leaves us with his dense, funny and erudite novels, which are packed with so many different kinds of information, they sometimes scarcely feel like novels at all. What do they feel like? Eldritch downloads, maybe, from some mind-flaying computer brain.
This critic — a Stephenson fan and admirer of long standing — has read most of Stephenson’s novels. His “Baroque Cycle,” a three-volume megatome about 17th- and 18th-century Europe and New England published over 2003 and 2004, put the author’s many gifts on full display. But halfway through the second volume I set the “Cycle” aside. Mainly it was the prose, which made it feel as if one were being winked at for a thousand pages by a Laurence Sterne impersonator. Stephenson followed up with “Anathem” (2008), a work of philosophically inclined science fiction that seemed determined to scare away anyone who regards “A Canticle for Leibowitz” as anything less than the premier achievement of human imagination.
If you are a Stephenson fan who believes “Snow Crash” and “Cryptonomicon” (1999) are his greatest novels, “Reamde” will come as very good news, for in many ways it can be read as a thematic revisitation of those excellent precursors. Once again Stephenson is asking us to think about virtual worlds and information storage; once again, by God, he makes reading so much fun it feels like a deadly sin.
Just about any novel’s plot can be made to sound ridiculous in summary, but the plot of “Reamde” is ridiculous no matter how sympathetically one summarizes. Here goes: Richard Forthrast, an erstwhile drug smuggler who funneled his earnings into founding a Fortune 500 video game company, takes under his wing a young woman named Zula, who was born to hardship in East Africa and later adopted by Richard’s Iowan sister. Richard’s company is the publisher of a massively multiplayer online game called T’Rain, which has eclipsed World of Warcraft as the world’s most popular such entertainment. Zula’s boyfriend, Peter, borrows a thumbstick from Richard, which he uses to save stolen credit card information and gives to an associate of the Russian mafia. Richard’s thumbstick, unfortunately, is tainted with a T’Rain virus called REAMDE (“an accidental or deliberate/ironical misspelling of README”), created by a Chinese T’Rain player. The virus incapacitates the Russians’ computers, after which they come violently calling for assistance. With Peter and Zula in tow, the Russians fly illegally into Xiamen, China, to find and kill the Chinese hacker responsible for the virus. This brings them into accidental contact with a jihadist cell led by one Abdallah Jones, a wanted terrorist, who despite being black and British somehow regards China as an appropriate place to hide. Jones kidnaps Zula and flies her into the wilds of British Columbia. The novel ends with a 150-page-long running firefight along the Canadian-American border. So it turns out you can make this stuff up.
Stephenson’s novels have always been a little nuts, but thoughtfully nuts. That he is even able to keep this big, careening, recreational-vehicular novel on the road during its hairpin narrative turns says a lot about him as a plot juggler and information wrangler. But “Reamde,” at a certain point, becomes less a novel than a book-shaped IV bag from which plot flows.
It is tempting to call Stephenson a “cult writer,” but cult writers are typically under-or selectively read. All of Stephenson’s novels published since the late 1990s have been best sellers, and some of his original editions go for precious-metal asking prices online. His still-fresh, still-astounding cyberpunk parody “Snow Crash” (1992) standardized use of the Sanskrit word “avatar” to denote virtual human identities and came impressively close to predicting how the Internet would come to be understood, which is to say as a “metaverse” paradoxically larger than the world that enfolds it. For these and other reasons, Stephenson is the rare writer whose 20-year-old magazine essays have their own Wikipedia pages.That leaves us with his dense, funny and erudite novels, which are packed with so many different kinds of information, they sometimes scarcely feel like novels at all. What do they feel like? Eldritch downloads, maybe, from some mind-flaying computer brain.
This critic — a Stephenson fan and admirer of long standing — has read most of Stephenson’s novels. His “Baroque Cycle,” a three-volume megatome about 17th- and 18th-century Europe and New England published over 2003 and 2004, put the author’s many gifts on full display. But halfway through the second volume I set the “Cycle” aside. Mainly it was the prose, which made it feel as if one were being winked at for a thousand pages by a Laurence Sterne impersonator. Stephenson followed up with “Anathem” (2008), a work of philosophically inclined science fiction that seemed determined to scare away anyone who regards “A Canticle for Leibowitz” as anything less than the premier achievement of human imagination.
If you are a Stephenson fan who believes “Snow Crash” and “Cryptonomicon” (1999) are his greatest novels, “Reamde” will come as very good news, for in many ways it can be read as a thematic revisitation of those excellent precursors. Once again Stephenson is asking us to think about virtual worlds and information storage; once again, by God, he makes reading so much fun it feels like a deadly sin.
Just about any novel’s plot can be made to sound ridiculous in summary, but the plot of “Reamde” is ridiculous no matter how sympathetically one summarizes. Here goes: Richard Forthrast, an erstwhile drug smuggler who funneled his earnings into founding a Fortune 500 video game company, takes under his wing a young woman named Zula, who was born to hardship in East Africa and later adopted by Richard’s Iowan sister. Richard’s company is the publisher of a massively multiplayer online game called T’Rain, which has eclipsed World of Warcraft as the world’s most popular such entertainment. Zula’s boyfriend, Peter, borrows a thumbstick from Richard, which he uses to save stolen credit card information and gives to an associate of the Russian mafia. Richard’s thumbstick, unfortunately, is tainted with a T’Rain virus called REAMDE (“an accidental or deliberate/ironical misspelling of README”), created by a Chinese T’Rain player. The virus incapacitates the Russians’ computers, after which they come violently calling for assistance. With Peter and Zula in tow, the Russians fly illegally into Xiamen, China, to find and kill the Chinese hacker responsible for the virus. This brings them into accidental contact with a jihadist cell led by one Abdallah Jones, a wanted terrorist, who despite being black and British somehow regards China as an appropriate place to hide. Jones kidnaps Zula and flies her into the wilds of British Columbia. The novel ends with a 150-page-long running firefight along the Canadian-American border. So it turns out you can make this stuff up.
Stephenson’s novels have always been a little nuts, but thoughtfully nuts. That he is even able to keep this big, careening, recreational-vehicular novel on the road during its hairpin narrative turns says a lot about him as a plot juggler and information wrangler. But “Reamde,” at a certain point, becomes less a novel than a book-shaped IV bag from which plot flows.
by Tom Bissell, NY Times | Read more:
Image: via:
[ed. I stumbled upon Neal Stephenson's "Snow Crash" just over a year ago and have been reading everything I can since (no small feat considering most of his novels are 900 pages+ long). Currently reading Reamde. Favorites in order: Snow Crash, Cryptonomicon, The Diamond Age (Or, a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer), and Seveneves. It feels like Reamde just might muscle its way into third place when I'm done with it. Recommendation: Forget the Baroque Cycle (starting with Quicksilver). I didn't care for it at all. Stephenson seems almost prescient, each novel focusing on a different technology long before each became current: Snow Crash (virtual reality and bitmapped viruses); Cryptonomicon (cryptocurrencies, offshore data havens, encryption); Dimond Age (nanotechnology); Seveneves (space technology, end of the world); and Reamde (ransomware and security on a world-wide gaming network - Facebook, anyone?). Take my word for it Stephenson is the real deal.]
[ed. I stumbled upon Neal Stephenson's "Snow Crash" just over a year ago and have been reading everything I can since (no small feat considering most of his novels are 900 pages+ long). Currently reading Reamde. Favorites in order: Snow Crash, Cryptonomicon, The Diamond Age (Or, a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer), and Seveneves. It feels like Reamde just might muscle its way into third place when I'm done with it. Recommendation: Forget the Baroque Cycle (starting with Quicksilver). I didn't care for it at all. Stephenson seems almost prescient, each novel focusing on a different technology long before each became current: Snow Crash (virtual reality and bitmapped viruses); Cryptonomicon (cryptocurrencies, offshore data havens, encryption); Dimond Age (nanotechnology); Seveneves (space technology, end of the world); and Reamde (ransomware and security on a world-wide gaming network - Facebook, anyone?). Take my word for it Stephenson is the real deal.]
Saturday, April 7, 2018
The Pain and the Passion That Fuel the Rock
If the world seemed a little bit sluggish this morning – if the birds weren't singing as sweetly, or the sun hung a bit lower in the sky – it might be because Dwayne Johnson didn't work out.
On any other day, Johnson would be up before dawn, clanging and banging on the 45,000 pounds of equipment in the torture chamber of a home gym he calls his Iron Paradise. But not today. Today Johnson slept in until the downright slothful hour of 6 a.m., in a hotel suite in Beverly Hills under the alias Sam Cooke, where he now sits perusing the newspaper while his longtime girlfriend, Lauren Hashian, enjoys a bowl of room-service granola.
The reason for this uncharacteristic idleness? Johnson and Hashian have a two-year-old daughter, Jasmine, and a second child arriving in a few weeks. "We're in the home stretch," says Hashian, rubbing her belly – so they left the toddler with the nanny for the night and snuck off for a little romantic getaway. "We're getting it in now before it's too late." Johnson, padding around the suite in gym socks and a T-shirt that reads BLOOD SWEAT RESPECT, says he and Hashian were originally going to get married this spring in Hawaii. "But then we got pregnant," he says. "And Mama don't wanna take wedding pictures with a big belly – Mama wanna look good." They weren't exactly trying to have another baby. "We were talking about it," he says. "And then all of a sudden I get a text from her with a [picture of a] pregnancy test." Apparently it didn't take much. "All I did was look at her," Johnson jokes. "Guess what. You're pregnant. Baby in you now."
"He just gave me the eyebrow," says Hashian. "Pew. Here's a baby."
Johnson says he's excited. "I had Simone when I was 29" – his older daughter, now 16, whom he had with his ex-wife, Dany Garcia, who's now his manager. (They make it work.) "Guys don't mature until much, much later, so it's nice to be in my fourth level and have babies again." Fourth level – that's a new one. Johnson, 45, grins. "It's better than saying the actual number."
Do they have a name picked out? "I think we do," Hashian says. "We're thinking about Tia. It's simple, it's Polynesian-ish. And I feel like she might come out looking like a Tia. I mean, she could come out any which way, because we're complete opposites" – she's fair and delicate, he's brown and colossal. I love that name, I tell her.
"Yeah?" says Johnson, sounding pleased. "Thank you. You're probably the fourth person who's heard it. It was funny – we were having dinner with Emily Blunt, who I'm getting ready to work with [on Disney's Jungle Cruise], and I said, 'What do you think of Tia?' And she went – beat, beat, beat – 'No one's gonna fuck with a Tia Johnson.' "
Especially not when her father is Dwayne Johnson, roughly the size of a grain elevator. When he was in high school, other kids were suspicious of him because they thought he was an undercover cop. (For the record, a pretty solid pitch for a Dwayne Johnson movie.) Even now, as the most beloved star in Hollywood not named Tom Hanks, Johnson and his giganticness can still give pause. Director Brad Peyton, who's worked with him on three films – including the new monster romp Rampage – says the first time they met, Johnson was dressed as Hobbs, from the Fast & Furious franchise. "I was like, 'Oh, my God – this guy is frighteningly large,' " Peyton says. "I was shitting myself he looked so intimidating. It took me, like, 15 minutes to get over it."
As if to combat this, Johnson carries himself with an abiding gentleness, like a grizzly bear who rolls over so you can rub its belly. On our way to the hotel restaurant for breakfast, we pass a manager who apologizes to him for last night. "Oh, it's all good!" Johnson says. Only after we're out of earshot does he reluctantly relate what happened. It turns out when he got back to the suite around 2 a.m., following a long day of work, Hashian was still wide awake, thanks to a mysterious buzzing near the bed. "I shut the AC off, we called for earplugs, maintenance came," Johnson says. "Finally they had to move us at, like, three in the morning. It was a whole thing."
[ed. For Calvin, who loves Moana (and Maui).]
On any other day, Johnson would be up before dawn, clanging and banging on the 45,000 pounds of equipment in the torture chamber of a home gym he calls his Iron Paradise. But not today. Today Johnson slept in until the downright slothful hour of 6 a.m., in a hotel suite in Beverly Hills under the alias Sam Cooke, where he now sits perusing the newspaper while his longtime girlfriend, Lauren Hashian, enjoys a bowl of room-service granola.
The reason for this uncharacteristic idleness? Johnson and Hashian have a two-year-old daughter, Jasmine, and a second child arriving in a few weeks. "We're in the home stretch," says Hashian, rubbing her belly – so they left the toddler with the nanny for the night and snuck off for a little romantic getaway. "We're getting it in now before it's too late." Johnson, padding around the suite in gym socks and a T-shirt that reads BLOOD SWEAT RESPECT, says he and Hashian were originally going to get married this spring in Hawaii. "But then we got pregnant," he says. "And Mama don't wanna take wedding pictures with a big belly – Mama wanna look good." They weren't exactly trying to have another baby. "We were talking about it," he says. "And then all of a sudden I get a text from her with a [picture of a] pregnancy test." Apparently it didn't take much. "All I did was look at her," Johnson jokes. "Guess what. You're pregnant. Baby in you now.""He just gave me the eyebrow," says Hashian. "Pew. Here's a baby."
Johnson says he's excited. "I had Simone when I was 29" – his older daughter, now 16, whom he had with his ex-wife, Dany Garcia, who's now his manager. (They make it work.) "Guys don't mature until much, much later, so it's nice to be in my fourth level and have babies again." Fourth level – that's a new one. Johnson, 45, grins. "It's better than saying the actual number."
Do they have a name picked out? "I think we do," Hashian says. "We're thinking about Tia. It's simple, it's Polynesian-ish. And I feel like she might come out looking like a Tia. I mean, she could come out any which way, because we're complete opposites" – she's fair and delicate, he's brown and colossal. I love that name, I tell her.
"Yeah?" says Johnson, sounding pleased. "Thank you. You're probably the fourth person who's heard it. It was funny – we were having dinner with Emily Blunt, who I'm getting ready to work with [on Disney's Jungle Cruise], and I said, 'What do you think of Tia?' And she went – beat, beat, beat – 'No one's gonna fuck with a Tia Johnson.' "
Especially not when her father is Dwayne Johnson, roughly the size of a grain elevator. When he was in high school, other kids were suspicious of him because they thought he was an undercover cop. (For the record, a pretty solid pitch for a Dwayne Johnson movie.) Even now, as the most beloved star in Hollywood not named Tom Hanks, Johnson and his giganticness can still give pause. Director Brad Peyton, who's worked with him on three films – including the new monster romp Rampage – says the first time they met, Johnson was dressed as Hobbs, from the Fast & Furious franchise. "I was like, 'Oh, my God – this guy is frighteningly large,' " Peyton says. "I was shitting myself he looked so intimidating. It took me, like, 15 minutes to get over it."
As if to combat this, Johnson carries himself with an abiding gentleness, like a grizzly bear who rolls over so you can rub its belly. On our way to the hotel restaurant for breakfast, we pass a manager who apologizes to him for last night. "Oh, it's all good!" Johnson says. Only after we're out of earshot does he reluctantly relate what happened. It turns out when he got back to the suite around 2 a.m., following a long day of work, Hashian was still wide awake, thanks to a mysterious buzzing near the bed. "I shut the AC off, we called for earplugs, maintenance came," Johnson says. "Finally they had to move us at, like, three in the morning. It was a whole thing."
What a bummer – and on their special night, too. "One night!" Johnson says. He throws his hands up, mock-exasperated. "The hits just keep on coming."
They do, actually. Johnson is riding a wave of success as the most bankable star in Hollywood – the closest that movies in 2018 have to a sure thing. A recent Wall Street Journal report revealed that his upfront payday for an upcoming film would be $22 million; a source close to Johnson says that figure is low by "two bills." But the most surprising part of the news may have been how unsurprising it was: Of course the Rock is worth $20 million-plus. After all, there's a reason last year's Jumanji sequel grossed nearly $1 billion worldwide, and all due respect, it's not Jack Black.
As producer Beau Flynn, who's made six of Johnson's films, says, even at that price, "Dwayne is a massive steal and a bargain."
"He's a freak of nature," says Johnson's Rampage co-star Jeffrey Dean Morgan. "It seems like every month he's in a movie and making a killing. In the middle of shooting Rampage, he's off hosting SNL and doing ads for Apple and running for president and whatever else. He works out at 3:30 in the morning so he can get to set on time. I don't know how he does it. And the other thing is, he's a family dude, so not only is he juggling the 9 million things he's got on his plate for work, he's also raising kids and got a happy marriage. Jesus Christ. I kind of fucking hate him."
Spending time with Dwayne Johnson is pretty much as uplifting as you'd expect. He will give you a fist bump that makes your humerus vibrate. He will ask your spouse and/or child's name and then make a point to repeat it 17 times. His warmth and enthusiasm will be infectious, and you will leave with newfound inspiration to wake up earlier and exercise more and be kinder to people and also maybe join the Marines? That's just the kind of guy he is. (...)
Johnson has found a sweet spot with the characters he plays: highly skilled bad-asses who are also sensitive and vulnerable, flawed yet decent men with big biceps and bigger hearts. "No one's going to see me play a borderline psychopath suffering from depression," he says. "I have friends I admire, Oscar winners, who approach our craft with the idea of 'Sometimes it comes out a little darker, and nobody will see it, but it's for me.' Great. But I have other things I can do for me. I'm gonna take care of you, the audience. You pay your hard-earned money – I don't need to bring my dark shit to you. Maybe a little – but if it's in there, we're gonna overcome it, and we're gonna overcome it together."
They do, actually. Johnson is riding a wave of success as the most bankable star in Hollywood – the closest that movies in 2018 have to a sure thing. A recent Wall Street Journal report revealed that his upfront payday for an upcoming film would be $22 million; a source close to Johnson says that figure is low by "two bills." But the most surprising part of the news may have been how unsurprising it was: Of course the Rock is worth $20 million-plus. After all, there's a reason last year's Jumanji sequel grossed nearly $1 billion worldwide, and all due respect, it's not Jack Black.
As producer Beau Flynn, who's made six of Johnson's films, says, even at that price, "Dwayne is a massive steal and a bargain."
"He's a freak of nature," says Johnson's Rampage co-star Jeffrey Dean Morgan. "It seems like every month he's in a movie and making a killing. In the middle of shooting Rampage, he's off hosting SNL and doing ads for Apple and running for president and whatever else. He works out at 3:30 in the morning so he can get to set on time. I don't know how he does it. And the other thing is, he's a family dude, so not only is he juggling the 9 million things he's got on his plate for work, he's also raising kids and got a happy marriage. Jesus Christ. I kind of fucking hate him."
Spending time with Dwayne Johnson is pretty much as uplifting as you'd expect. He will give you a fist bump that makes your humerus vibrate. He will ask your spouse and/or child's name and then make a point to repeat it 17 times. His warmth and enthusiasm will be infectious, and you will leave with newfound inspiration to wake up earlier and exercise more and be kinder to people and also maybe join the Marines? That's just the kind of guy he is. (...)
Johnson has found a sweet spot with the characters he plays: highly skilled bad-asses who are also sensitive and vulnerable, flawed yet decent men with big biceps and bigger hearts. "No one's going to see me play a borderline psychopath suffering from depression," he says. "I have friends I admire, Oscar winners, who approach our craft with the idea of 'Sometimes it comes out a little darker, and nobody will see it, but it's for me.' Great. But I have other things I can do for me. I'm gonna take care of you, the audience. You pay your hard-earned money – I don't need to bring my dark shit to you. Maybe a little – but if it's in there, we're gonna overcome it, and we're gonna overcome it together."
by Josh Eells, Rolling Stone | Read more:
Image: Mark Seliger[ed. For Calvin, who loves Moana (and Maui).]
Paul Simon/Photek Remix
[ed. Ackk... what next? A dance remix of the Beatles White Album? Leave a masterpiece alone (although, apparently, this was approved by The Master himself). Since he allegedly ripped this track off from Los Lobos to begin with, what are we to make of all this? Irony? Self-inflicted wound? Senility? Late-stage capitalism?]
Taylor's Revolutionary V-Brace
In an age when eye-catching, futuristic musical instrument designs grab headlines and social media buzz—whether it’s a 3D-printed violin or a sleek, carbon-fiber piano—a new system of guitar bracing might appear to be a tougher sell. After all, these braces, which reinforce a guitar’s top and back, are all but invisible to the player and listener, and they can seem rather inconsequential even to a guitarist.
But some guitar lovers know how crucial the unglamorous bracing is to the sound and playability of any instrument. When Taylor Guitars unveiled its new V-Class bracing system in January, the company insisted it would be a groundbreaking step designed to boost the volume and sustain of its instruments, while also improving their intonation. The company presented several models to dealers, the music press, and select performers, followed by a formal rollout at the 2018 Winter NAMM trade show in Anaheim, California.
Bob Taylor, who cofounded the El Cajon, California–based company in 1974, said it was time to “stop trying to tweak our inventory within an inch of its life” and instead make a bolder, more decisive change. He entrusted Andy Powers, the company’s 37-year-old master designer, to develop a new system that would challenge X-bracing, long the most popular pattern for flattop guitars, and pioneered by Taylor’s closest competitor, C.F. Martin. The new system would signify a passing of the baton (or pick) as Powers makes his mark on a company whose greatest designs have upended tradition.
A Dance of Strength and Flexibility
As the name implies, V-bracing consists of two braces that join at the base of the top, near the end block, and extend out on either side of the soundhole in the form of a V. Three cross-braces add further support. “I took a fresh look at the X-brace design and thought, Well, for one, it works pretty good,” Powers told Acoustic Guitar. “But it represents a compromise. That compromise would be: How do you make something that’s really strong and really flexible? How can it be those two things?”
More to the point, Powers identified an uneasy tradeoff between volume and sustain. The rigidity of X-bracing, he says, enables notes to have a longer sustain—the kind of effect one finds on a solidbody guitar like a Gibson Les Paul, for example. But achieving volume requires a more flexible surface that promotes air movement. A banjo, with its flexible drumhead, has such qualities—tremendous volume with little sustain. “You try and tweak that balance between volume and sustain and sometimes you lean a little more in one direction or another,” Powers said of his quandary.
Powers, who is a lifelong surfer and occasional surfboard shaper, had a revelation one morning as he watched the waves off the San Diego coast. He observed how a stone jetty was funneling the churning surf into smoother wave patterns. Watching further, he wondered if one could create a bracing pattern that would have a similar effect. It would allow the sides of a guitar body to freely vibrate, enhancing volume while providing a stiff foundation for the strings, thereby promoting sustain.
“Calm, still waters with good waves coming in—that’s what I wanted to happen,” Powers said. As he developed a solution, he also fell back on his studies of mandolin, violin, and archtop guitar construction.
With so much contemporary popular music played on electronic instruments and relying on pitch-corrected vocals, guitarists are increasingly expected to have flawless intonation. Powers discovered that the V-bracing had the added effect of improving intonation within chords. “There’s always a fighting, or beating, between what a guitar can deliver and the note you’re actually trying to play,” he noted. “You get this rub. There’s a friction,” which Powers says can make a guitar sound slightly out-of-tune.
George Gruhn, the owner of Gruhn Guitars in Nashville, Tennessee, was pleased with a model that he tried last year. “Tone is difficult to describe, but in general, I think the V-brace gives a remarkably well-balanced sound,” he said. “It seems to cancel out some conflicting harmonics that make things sound out of tune at times. It’s one of the most in-tune guitars I’ve ever played by any maker.”
Building on a History of Innovation
Powers’ use of a surf analogy recalls an early episode in the history of this Southern California company. In one of his first, scrappy efforts to rethink guitar construction procedures, Bob Taylor sought to decorate a fretboard with mother-of-pearl. Unaware that he could purchase the materials at a guitar shop, Taylor went diving for abalone off the coast of La Jolla, broke up the shells with a hammer, and ground the pearl into usable pieces. This freewheeling approach to materials and craftsmanship has underpinned the company’s design changes over the decades, whether it was the launch of computer-controlled production machinery in the 1980s, inventing a new type of bolt-on neck joint in the 1990s, or investing heavily in sourcing sustainable wood in recent years.
To this day, Taylor and company co-founder Kurt Listug insist that a skilled artisan should be high up in the corporate ranks. “Think of other guitar builders,” Taylor says, “and ask yourself, ‘Can I put a name to that company’s luthier? What’s the wellspring of their guitars?’”
The son of a carpenter and artist in Oceanside, California, Powers crafted his first guitar by the age of eight. As a home-schooled teenager, he began building and selling guitars and ukuleles to his friends. After receiving an associate of arts degree from MiraCosta College in San Diego, he studied guitar performance and musicology at the University of California at San Diego. During this time, he established the Andy Powers Instrument Co.
Just as his business was starting to evolve, Powers crossed paths with Bob Taylor, who eventually set up a meeting and convinced him to join his company. The veteran guitar builder was planning for the future of the company, with the eventual goal of scaling back his direct involvement, and needed a builder with deep historical knowledge and the potential to stay on for the long haul.
Since Powers’ arrival, he has ushered in several changes to Taylor’s line of guitars: re-voicing the company’s top-selling 800 and 600 series, introducing a line of small-body 12-string guitars, and making a number of subtle bracing changes across the catalog. But company officials see Powers’ V-bracing development as analogous to an automaker that moves from internal combustion to an electric-powered engine.
But some guitar lovers know how crucial the unglamorous bracing is to the sound and playability of any instrument. When Taylor Guitars unveiled its new V-Class bracing system in January, the company insisted it would be a groundbreaking step designed to boost the volume and sustain of its instruments, while also improving their intonation. The company presented several models to dealers, the music press, and select performers, followed by a formal rollout at the 2018 Winter NAMM trade show in Anaheim, California.Bob Taylor, who cofounded the El Cajon, California–based company in 1974, said it was time to “stop trying to tweak our inventory within an inch of its life” and instead make a bolder, more decisive change. He entrusted Andy Powers, the company’s 37-year-old master designer, to develop a new system that would challenge X-bracing, long the most popular pattern for flattop guitars, and pioneered by Taylor’s closest competitor, C.F. Martin. The new system would signify a passing of the baton (or pick) as Powers makes his mark on a company whose greatest designs have upended tradition.
A Dance of Strength and Flexibility
As the name implies, V-bracing consists of two braces that join at the base of the top, near the end block, and extend out on either side of the soundhole in the form of a V. Three cross-braces add further support. “I took a fresh look at the X-brace design and thought, Well, for one, it works pretty good,” Powers told Acoustic Guitar. “But it represents a compromise. That compromise would be: How do you make something that’s really strong and really flexible? How can it be those two things?”
More to the point, Powers identified an uneasy tradeoff between volume and sustain. The rigidity of X-bracing, he says, enables notes to have a longer sustain—the kind of effect one finds on a solidbody guitar like a Gibson Les Paul, for example. But achieving volume requires a more flexible surface that promotes air movement. A banjo, with its flexible drumhead, has such qualities—tremendous volume with little sustain. “You try and tweak that balance between volume and sustain and sometimes you lean a little more in one direction or another,” Powers said of his quandary.
Powers, who is a lifelong surfer and occasional surfboard shaper, had a revelation one morning as he watched the waves off the San Diego coast. He observed how a stone jetty was funneling the churning surf into smoother wave patterns. Watching further, he wondered if one could create a bracing pattern that would have a similar effect. It would allow the sides of a guitar body to freely vibrate, enhancing volume while providing a stiff foundation for the strings, thereby promoting sustain.
“Calm, still waters with good waves coming in—that’s what I wanted to happen,” Powers said. As he developed a solution, he also fell back on his studies of mandolin, violin, and archtop guitar construction.
With so much contemporary popular music played on electronic instruments and relying on pitch-corrected vocals, guitarists are increasingly expected to have flawless intonation. Powers discovered that the V-bracing had the added effect of improving intonation within chords. “There’s always a fighting, or beating, between what a guitar can deliver and the note you’re actually trying to play,” he noted. “You get this rub. There’s a friction,” which Powers says can make a guitar sound slightly out-of-tune.
George Gruhn, the owner of Gruhn Guitars in Nashville, Tennessee, was pleased with a model that he tried last year. “Tone is difficult to describe, but in general, I think the V-brace gives a remarkably well-balanced sound,” he said. “It seems to cancel out some conflicting harmonics that make things sound out of tune at times. It’s one of the most in-tune guitars I’ve ever played by any maker.”
Building on a History of Innovation
Powers’ use of a surf analogy recalls an early episode in the history of this Southern California company. In one of his first, scrappy efforts to rethink guitar construction procedures, Bob Taylor sought to decorate a fretboard with mother-of-pearl. Unaware that he could purchase the materials at a guitar shop, Taylor went diving for abalone off the coast of La Jolla, broke up the shells with a hammer, and ground the pearl into usable pieces. This freewheeling approach to materials and craftsmanship has underpinned the company’s design changes over the decades, whether it was the launch of computer-controlled production machinery in the 1980s, inventing a new type of bolt-on neck joint in the 1990s, or investing heavily in sourcing sustainable wood in recent years.
To this day, Taylor and company co-founder Kurt Listug insist that a skilled artisan should be high up in the corporate ranks. “Think of other guitar builders,” Taylor says, “and ask yourself, ‘Can I put a name to that company’s luthier? What’s the wellspring of their guitars?’”
The son of a carpenter and artist in Oceanside, California, Powers crafted his first guitar by the age of eight. As a home-schooled teenager, he began building and selling guitars and ukuleles to his friends. After receiving an associate of arts degree from MiraCosta College in San Diego, he studied guitar performance and musicology at the University of California at San Diego. During this time, he established the Andy Powers Instrument Co.
Just as his business was starting to evolve, Powers crossed paths with Bob Taylor, who eventually set up a meeting and convinced him to join his company. The veteran guitar builder was planning for the future of the company, with the eventual goal of scaling back his direct involvement, and needed a builder with deep historical knowledge and the potential to stay on for the long haul.
Since Powers’ arrival, he has ushered in several changes to Taylor’s line of guitars: re-voicing the company’s top-selling 800 and 600 series, introducing a line of small-body 12-string guitars, and making a number of subtle bracing changes across the catalog. But company officials see Powers’ V-bracing development as analogous to an automaker that moves from internal combustion to an electric-powered engine.
by Brian Wise, Acoustic Guitar | Read more:
Image: uncredited
Hot-Air Dryers Suck in Bathroom Bacteria and Shoot Them at Your Hands
Washing your grubby mitts is one of the all-time best ways to cut your chances of getting sick and spreading harmful germs to others. But using the hot-air dryers common in bathrooms can undo that handy hygienic work.
Hot-air dryers suck in bacteria and hardy bacterial spores loitering in the bathroom—perhaps launched into the air by whooshing toilet flushes—and fire them directly at your freshly cleaned hands, according to a study published in the April issue of Applied and Environmental Microbiology. The authors of the study, led by researchers at the University of Connecticut, found that adding HEPA filters to the dryers can reduce germ-spewing four-fold. However, the data hints that places like infectious disease research facilities and healthcare settings may just want to ditch the dryers and turn to trusty towels.
Indeed, in the wake of the blustery study—which took place in research facility bathrooms around UConn—"paper towel dispensers have recently been added to all 36 bathrooms in basic science research areas in the UConn School of Medicine surveyed in the current study,” the authors note.
The research findings largely square with other data showing that hot-air dryers and jet dryers can launch and disperse germs from hands into the air and onto surfaces—essentially setting off a very dirty bathroom bomb. But the new study clearly demonstrates that the less powerful hot-air dryers can also bathe hands with germs already swirling in the wash room.
The researchers speculated that “one reason hand dryers may disperse so many bacteria is the large amount of air that passes through hand dryers, 19,000 linear feet/min at the nozzle. The convection generated by high airflow below the hand dryer nozzles could also draw in room air.”
Hot-air dryers suck in bacteria and hardy bacterial spores loitering in the bathroom—perhaps launched into the air by whooshing toilet flushes—and fire them directly at your freshly cleaned hands, according to a study published in the April issue of Applied and Environmental Microbiology. The authors of the study, led by researchers at the University of Connecticut, found that adding HEPA filters to the dryers can reduce germ-spewing four-fold. However, the data hints that places like infectious disease research facilities and healthcare settings may just want to ditch the dryers and turn to trusty towels.Indeed, in the wake of the blustery study—which took place in research facility bathrooms around UConn—"paper towel dispensers have recently been added to all 36 bathrooms in basic science research areas in the UConn School of Medicine surveyed in the current study,” the authors note.
The research findings largely square with other data showing that hot-air dryers and jet dryers can launch and disperse germs from hands into the air and onto surfaces—essentially setting off a very dirty bathroom bomb. But the new study clearly demonstrates that the less powerful hot-air dryers can also bathe hands with germs already swirling in the wash room.
The researchers speculated that “one reason hand dryers may disperse so many bacteria is the large amount of air that passes through hand dryers, 19,000 linear feet/min at the nozzle. The convection generated by high airflow below the hand dryer nozzles could also draw in room air.”
by Beth Mole, Ars Technica | Read more:
Image: Alisha Vargas
The Scientific Paper Is Obsolete
The scientific paper—the actual form of it—was one of the enabling inventions of modernity. Before it was developed in the 1600s, results were communicated privately in letters, ephemerally in lectures, or all at once in books. There was no public forum for incremental advances. By making room for reports of single experiments or minor technical advances, journals made the chaos of science accretive. Scientists from that point forward became like the social insects: They made their progress steadily, as a buzzing mass.
The earliest papers were in some ways more readable than papers are today. They were less specialized, more direct, shorter, and far less formal. Calculus had only just been invented. Entire data sets could fit in a table on a single page. What little “computation” contributed to the results was done by hand and could be verified in the same way.
The more sophisticated science becomes, the harder it is to communicate results. Papers today are longer than ever and full of jargon and symbols. They depend on chains of computer programs that generate data, and clean up data, and plot data, and run statistical models on data. These programs tend to be both so sloppily written and so central to the results that it’s contributed to a replication crisis, or put another way, a failure of the paper to perform its most basic task: to report what you’ve actually discovered, clearly enough that someone else can discover it for themselves.
Perhaps the paper itself is to blame. Scientific methods evolve now at the speed of software; the skill most in demand among physicists, biologists, chemists, geologists, even anthropologists and research psychologists, is facility with programming languages and “data science” packages. And yet the basic means of communicating scientific results hasn’t changed for 400 years. Papers may be posted online, but they’re still text and pictures on a page.
What would you get if you designed the scientific paper from scratch today? A little while ago I spoke to Bret Victor, a researcher who worked at Apple on early user-interface prototypes for the iPad and now runs his own lab in Oakland, California, that studies the future of computing. Victor has long been convinced that scientists haven’t yet taken full advantage of the computer. “It’s not that different than looking at the printing press, and the evolution of the book,” he said. After Gutenberg, the printing press was mostly used to mimic the calligraphy in bibles. It took nearly 100 years of technical and conceptual improvements to invent the modern book. “There was this entire period where they had the new technology of printing, but they were just using it to emulate the old media.”
Victor gestured at what might be possible when he redesigned a journal article by Duncan Watts and Steven Strogatz, “Collective dynamics of ‘small-world’ networks.” He chose it both because it’s one of the most highly cited papers in all of science and because it’s a model of clear exposition. (Strogatz is best known for writing the beloved “Elements of Math” column for The New York Times.)
The Watts-Strogatz paper described its key findings the way most papers do, with text, pictures, and mathematical symbols. And like most papers, these findings were still hard to swallow, despite the lucid prose. The hardest parts were the ones that described procedures or algorithms, because these required the reader to “play computer” in their head, as Victor put it, that is, to strain to maintain a fragile mental picture of what was happening with each step of the algorithm.
Victor’s redesign interleaved the explanatory text with little interactive diagrams that illustrated each step. In his version, you could see the algorithm at work on an example. You could even control it yourself.
Strogatz admired Victor’s design. He later told me that it was a shame that in mathematics it’s been a tradition for hundreds of years to make papers as formal and austere as possible, often suppressing the very visual aids that mathematicians use to make their discoveries.
Strogatz studies nonlinear dynamics and chaos, systems that get into sync or self-organize: fireflies flashing, metronomes ticking, heart cells firing electrical impulses. The key is that these systems go through cycles, which Strogatz visualizes as dots running around circles: When a dot comes back to the place where it started—that’s a firefly flashing or a heart cell firing. “For about 25 years now I’ve been making little computer animations of dots running around circles, with colors indicating their frequency,” he said. “The red are the slow guys, the purple are the fast guys ... I have these colored dots swirling around on my computer. I do this all day long,” he said. “I can see patterns much more readily in colored dots running, moving on the screen than I can in looking at 500 simultaneous time series. I don’t see stuff very well like that. Because it’s not what it really looks like ... What I’m studying is something dynamic. So the representation should be dynamic.”
Software is a dynamic medium; paper isn’t. When you think in those terms it does seem strange that research like Strogatz’s, the study of dynamical systems, is so often being shared on paper, without the benefit of his little swirling dots—because it’s the swirling dots that helped him to see what he saw, and that might help the reader see it too.
This is, of course, the whole problem of scientific communication in a nutshell: Scientific results today are as often as not found with the help of computers. That’s because the ideas are complex, dynamic, hard to grab ahold of in your mind’s eye. And yet by far the most popular tool we have for communicating these results is the PDF—literally a simulation of a piece of paper.
The earliest papers were in some ways more readable than papers are today. They were less specialized, more direct, shorter, and far less formal. Calculus had only just been invented. Entire data sets could fit in a table on a single page. What little “computation” contributed to the results was done by hand and could be verified in the same way.
The more sophisticated science becomes, the harder it is to communicate results. Papers today are longer than ever and full of jargon and symbols. They depend on chains of computer programs that generate data, and clean up data, and plot data, and run statistical models on data. These programs tend to be both so sloppily written and so central to the results that it’s contributed to a replication crisis, or put another way, a failure of the paper to perform its most basic task: to report what you’ve actually discovered, clearly enough that someone else can discover it for themselves.
Perhaps the paper itself is to blame. Scientific methods evolve now at the speed of software; the skill most in demand among physicists, biologists, chemists, geologists, even anthropologists and research psychologists, is facility with programming languages and “data science” packages. And yet the basic means of communicating scientific results hasn’t changed for 400 years. Papers may be posted online, but they’re still text and pictures on a page.
What would you get if you designed the scientific paper from scratch today? A little while ago I spoke to Bret Victor, a researcher who worked at Apple on early user-interface prototypes for the iPad and now runs his own lab in Oakland, California, that studies the future of computing. Victor has long been convinced that scientists haven’t yet taken full advantage of the computer. “It’s not that different than looking at the printing press, and the evolution of the book,” he said. After Gutenberg, the printing press was mostly used to mimic the calligraphy in bibles. It took nearly 100 years of technical and conceptual improvements to invent the modern book. “There was this entire period where they had the new technology of printing, but they were just using it to emulate the old media.”
Victor gestured at what might be possible when he redesigned a journal article by Duncan Watts and Steven Strogatz, “Collective dynamics of ‘small-world’ networks.” He chose it both because it’s one of the most highly cited papers in all of science and because it’s a model of clear exposition. (Strogatz is best known for writing the beloved “Elements of Math” column for The New York Times.)
The Watts-Strogatz paper described its key findings the way most papers do, with text, pictures, and mathematical symbols. And like most papers, these findings were still hard to swallow, despite the lucid prose. The hardest parts were the ones that described procedures or algorithms, because these required the reader to “play computer” in their head, as Victor put it, that is, to strain to maintain a fragile mental picture of what was happening with each step of the algorithm.
Victor’s redesign interleaved the explanatory text with little interactive diagrams that illustrated each step. In his version, you could see the algorithm at work on an example. You could even control it yourself.
Strogatz admired Victor’s design. He later told me that it was a shame that in mathematics it’s been a tradition for hundreds of years to make papers as formal and austere as possible, often suppressing the very visual aids that mathematicians use to make their discoveries.
Strogatz studies nonlinear dynamics and chaos, systems that get into sync or self-organize: fireflies flashing, metronomes ticking, heart cells firing electrical impulses. The key is that these systems go through cycles, which Strogatz visualizes as dots running around circles: When a dot comes back to the place where it started—that’s a firefly flashing or a heart cell firing. “For about 25 years now I’ve been making little computer animations of dots running around circles, with colors indicating their frequency,” he said. “The red are the slow guys, the purple are the fast guys ... I have these colored dots swirling around on my computer. I do this all day long,” he said. “I can see patterns much more readily in colored dots running, moving on the screen than I can in looking at 500 simultaneous time series. I don’t see stuff very well like that. Because it’s not what it really looks like ... What I’m studying is something dynamic. So the representation should be dynamic.”
Software is a dynamic medium; paper isn’t. When you think in those terms it does seem strange that research like Strogatz’s, the study of dynamical systems, is so often being shared on paper, without the benefit of his little swirling dots—because it’s the swirling dots that helped him to see what he saw, and that might help the reader see it too.
This is, of course, the whole problem of scientific communication in a nutshell: Scientific results today are as often as not found with the help of computers. That’s because the ideas are complex, dynamic, hard to grab ahold of in your mind’s eye. And yet by far the most popular tool we have for communicating these results is the PDF—literally a simulation of a piece of paper.
by James Somers, The Atlantic | Read more:
Image: Bret Victor
Friday, April 6, 2018
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