RC Airbus A380 Second Flight

RC AIRBUS A380 SECOND FLIGHT
Rainer Kamitz was at the sticks and did an impressive flight. 

Builder and owner: Christopher Ferkl from Austria 

Scale 1/13 

Span: 6.13m / 20 feet 

Length: 5.60 m / 18.5 feet 

Weight: 102.7 kg / 226 pounds 

Turbine: 4 x JetsMunt 166 (here)​ 

Fuel capaticy: 12 liters / 2.2 gallons (UK)
Time to build 3 years / 1700 hours

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Gary Player: On Shooting His Age

When Gary Player is invited to reflect on the fact he is now the oldest living Champion Golfer, he instantly raises a smile.

“Is that a good thing or a bad thing,” he asks, before bursting into laughter.

In the course of a lengthy interview with Player to mark his 85th birthday on November 1, it soon becomes clear the statistic is one that understandably provokes feelings of great pride for the three-time Open winner.

“I think the word that comes to mind is gratitude,” says Player. “A lot of my golfing friends have passed away, so every day I’m aware of this and fortunately I’m very fit at the moment. (...)

Player’s extraordinary commitment to a healthy and active lifestyle is well-known, and he remains remarkably fit as he enters his 86th year. Such is his enduring energy, it is hard to believe 65 years have passed since he first travelled to The Open. (...)

The South African cannot recall the last time he completed 18 holes in a score higher than his age, and he continues to set new golfing goals for the years to come.

“The highest score I can think that I’ve shot in the last I don’t know how many years, I’m taking a guess, maybe 10 years, is 77,” he states emphatically. “On a normal golf course I average 72. I smash my age. I don’t beat it, I smash it.

“I’d like to beat it 3,000 times in a row. I don’t think anyone’s ever done that. And my other dream is to beat my age by 18 shots, a shot a hole.

“So the older I get, the easier it is, as long as I stay well. I work out hard, I rest well, I laugh a lot and I try to do the things to lead to longevity, but we cannot take health for granted.”

Player’s current fitness regime includes the “hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of sit-ups” he has sworn by for decades, and he insists he feels much younger than his actual age.

“I try and exercise four times a week,” he says. “The things that I’m doing are showing that it’s right and leading to longevity.

“I still run the treadmill at max (speed) and I can run, I can swim, I can ride a horse. All these things at 85.

“Today it’s astounding when you hear that and it shouldn’t be. Because actually at 85 I feel like a young man.”

by The Open |  Read more:
Image: via
[ed. I saw something on Golf Channel about Gary shooting his age over 3000 times. I thought that couldn't be right, too crazy. Hardly anyone does that even once. Well...]

***

If you were playing in this era and having the benefit in using today’s equipment would your total number of majors and PGA TOUR wins be the same or even greater?

Definitely more! Hard to hit the ball off-line with today’s equipment. I have broken my age well over 2000 times and with the old equipment I couldn’t have done that. Don’t forget traveling without jets played a large part, plus perfect greens and bunkers that are exactly the same all over the world today.

Moby

Ricardo Montinez, Moby Dick
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[ed. See also: Ahab's Arithmetic: The Mathematics of Moby-Dick (Journal of Humanist Mathematics - pdf); also One Drawing for Every Page of Moby Dick (Matt Kish).]

Melville spent almost four years at sea on several different ships, at one point spending a month in the South Pacific with a Polynesian tribe called the Typee. There was also time in Tahiti, Honolulu and elsewhere, finally returning to Boston on October 3rd 1844. On his return, after encouragement from friends and family, he began writing a fictionalised account of his experiences with the Typee tribe. The book, Typee, was submitted in the summer of 1845 to Harper Brothers, who immediately rejected it on the grounds that it was “impossible it could be true”. The manuscript was eventually accepted by Wiley and Putnam, and appeared in February 1846. He followed it up with Omoo (the title is the transliteration of a Polynesian word meaning “wanderer”). 

Omoo appeared in the spring of 1847. Melville was married in August 1847, to Elizabeth Shaw, and they moved to New York with Herman’s younger brother Allan and his new wife. From 1847 to 1849, Herman was very productive, writing most of Mardi, all of Redburn and White-Jacket, and in the first weeks of 1850 the first few chapters of a new book that would eventually metamorphose into Moby-Dick. Seafaring tales were popular at that time, and Melville’s books, especially the first two, were well received as part of that type. However with each succeeding book the reception was less positive, and indeed Melville himself was rather scathing about his own work. About Redburn he said “I, the author, know [it] to be trash, and wrote it to buy some tobacco with”. However, this was a fertile time creatively for Melville. As well as writing three novels, Melville was reading voraciously: “I have swam through libraries”, he said. He read Virgil, Milton, Shakespeare, Voltaire, Mary Shelley, Dante, Schiller, Thackeray and many others. It was also around this time that he met and became close friends with the author Nathaniel Hawthorne, who supplied one of the few descriptive remarks we have about Melville as a man: he was apparently, though a gentleman, “a little heterodox in the matter of clean linen”. 

Melville moved out of New York in the summer of 1850 and completed Moby Dick over the next year. It was published on November 14th 1851. Reviews were, to say the least, mixed. It was completely different from, and hugely more ambitious than, anything he had produced before. Readers hoping for a standard seafaring yarn would have been sorely disappointed. It almost sunk without trace in his lifetime — his lifetime earnings from it were a grand total of $556.37. Things got worse: his next novel Pierre was universally panned as was the vast majority of his subsequent work. He wrote almost no prose after 1853, the memorable exceptions being the compelling but strange novella Bartleby, the Scrivener (1853) and the late work Billy Budd (1889), which remained unpublished until 1924. He spent most of the last two decades of his life working for the United States Customs Service. He died on September 28, 1891, largely forgotten. 

(Ahab's Arithmetic: The Mathematics of Moby Dick)

Cesare Maggi, Playing golf in Sestriere, 1929

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Dr. B: Standby Site Wants to Help

Here in the U.S., the COVID-19 vaccination picture looks far rosier than it did even a few weeks ago. Nearly one in five Americans have received at least one dose, according to TIME’s vaccine tracker, the authorization of Johnson & Johnson’s shot brings a third vaccine onto the public health battlefield, and President Joe Biden recently moved up his vaccination timetable, saying on March 2 that the U.S. will have enough doses to cover all American adults by the end of May.

Yet spend any amount of time in one of the many ad-hoc Facebook groups where volunteers are helping eligible vaccine recipients book appointments, and it becomes clear that actually getting a shot remains a challenge for many—especially people who are less tech-savvy, less connected, or simply less able to spend hours on end refreshing websites in the hunt for a slot. Meanwhile, no-shows are a problem for vaccine providers: if somebody books a vaccine appointment but doesn’t show up—perhaps because they booked multiple appointments and forgot to cancel their extras—a dose could go to waste (since all doses in a vial must be administered within a certain amount of time after the vial is punctured), or at least be given to someone who doesn’t yet qualify.

Dr. B, an online vaccine standby list that quietly launched in January, aims to help solve both problems. Users enter their name, contact information and other details related to their vaccination priority ranking, like their occupation and medical risk factors. If a vaccine provider partnering with Dr. B has an extra dose, the platform sends a text message to nearby users based on their prioritization as set by their state or other jurisdiction. Users then have a limited window of time to claim that dose and get to the provider for their shot.

“We thought there needed to be a nationwide standby system where any vaccine provider who has excess doses indicates how many vaccines are available, and immediately it goes out to the appropriately-prioritized people based on local government priority criteria,” says Dr. B founder Cyrus Massoumi, a technology executive and investor best known as the founder and former CEO of medical appointment-booking site Zocdoc. Massoumi says he’s self-funding Dr. B, which is free for both vaccine recipients and providers.

At the moment, demand for Dr. B’s offering is clearly outstripping supply. More than half a million people have signed up for the service, but only two pilot providers are currently on board: one in New York and another in Arkansas. However, Massoumi says more than 200 other providers across 30 states have expressed interest. “They range everywhere from individual pharmacies in rural settings to homeless shelters, academic medical centers, you name it—it’s a pretty representative set of who’s actually giving the vaccine,” says Massoumi, though he declined to say how many people have been vaccinated so far via Dr. B. “It’s still early innings…we’re just trying to get every site up and running as quickly as we can.” While vaccination sites often have their own manually-run standby lists, there are obvious advantages to having a more universal tool, with more automated processes—Massoumi’s team is working on a way to occasionally ask registrants if they have already gotten their shot through other means, so they can trim the list and improve efficiency, for instance.

by Alex Fitzpatrick, Time |  Read more:

Image: Dr B 

[ed. Worth a try. More providers soon, so get on the list as early as possible. Dr B site here.]

Building the Big One

On January 5, as results came in from the Senate runoff election in Georgia, the texts between President-elect Joe Biden's senior staff went late into the night and into the next morning. With the Senate majority on the line, and full control of Washington in their grasp, the outcome of the two Georgia races would determine the fate of what they all agreed was their top priority for the new administration — passing a massive Covid relief package in the opening weeks.

They'd been working on it for nearly two months, identifying needs and, at Biden's direction, crafting the plan around them, regardless of cost. But if the Democrats won in Georgia, the plan would suddenly go from an aspiration they would have to bargain with Republicans over, to a reality as long as they kept their party unified.

With no war room to report to that night, no headquarters or even a transition office to gather in, the Biden staffers were all glued to the TVs in their homes around Washington, or, in the case of incoming White House chief of staff Ron Klain, in Delaware with Biden, firing off texts to one another as each Georgia county reported results.

"Everybody understood for weeks what the impact of winning the two Georgia races might be," Steve Ricchetti, the long-time Biden adviser who would become counselor to the president, told CNN in an interview. "We invested a lot of time and effort in it in the weeks leading up to it because we obviously understood what it could mean for our agenda."

By late morning the next day, it was clear that Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock had done the improbable, sweeping both races in Georgia and delivering the Senate back to the Democrats less than a month before Biden took office.

The twin victories marked a political earthquake for the incoming president and opened the door to one of the largest public health and economic relief proposals in US history.

For all of Biden's talk of bipartisanship, Democrats now had the power to move their top priority without a single Republican vote. It was the same situation as 2009, when the Obama administration rushed to pass a relief package during his first month in office. Back then Democrats lowered the size of the plan to garner some Republican support, a decision many of them came to regret during the slow recovery that followed.

This time would be different. From the outset, the common goal among Biden's team was to go big -- even if that meant going it alone.

At $1.9 trillion, the American Rescue Plan is second only in size to last year's $2.2 trillion CARES Act. When it was first unveiled to the public on January 14, the assumption among Republicans and even some Democrats was that Biden's nearly $2 trillion moonshot was an opening offer, a place to start negotiations that would inevitably lead to a smaller price tag.

But there would be no negotiating from Biden's team. That was the number, and while there was room to bargain over marginal side items, the topline wasn't moving.

This story is based on interviews with more than two dozen officials from the White House, Capitol Hill and outside interest groups who worked directly with the campaign and transition on Biden's cornerstone legislative proposal. CNN also spoke to Republican lawmakers and aides who remain agog at the size of the package and the speed with which Biden has pushed it along. (...)

Building the bill

The meetings began in November, not long after the election was called for Biden. Even before the President-elect's transition officially kicked into gear, Biden's top advisers, many of whom would get jobs in the White House, gathered daily -- and always virtually -- to hash out what they knew would become the single most prominent marker of their accomplishments in their first 100 days in office.

From the start, they took a unique approach.

Often, when spending bills are crafted, the topline number is settled on first as lawmakers and officials figure out what is possible and work down from there. But Biden's team says it started at the bottom and built up. The $1.9 trillion figure wasn't nailed down until the days before its public release, advisers say.

As they went, the goal was two-fold -- fund everything needed to end the pandemic, while also doling out enough money to float struggling Americans until things got back to normal. The proposal includes $160 billion for vaccine distribution and testing, $130 billion for K-12 schools, and $350 billion for state and local governments. It also contains hundreds of billions more in aid to families, including $1,400 in direct monthly payments, expanded nutrition assistance programs, extensions of emergency unemployment programs, and big expansions of the Child Tax and Earned income Tax Credits, boosting the benefits to a level some economists project could cut child poverty in half.

As the plan came together, administration officials said one priority remained clear: Biden didn't want just a short-term infusion of stimulus, with patches and temporary extensions to various aid provisions to keep the economy afloat for a few months -- he wanted to lock in long-term aid and investment. Enough money not just to pull the US out of the pandemic, but to give it the fuel for a massive future expansion.

by Phil Mattingly, CNN | Read more:
Image: Uncredited

[ed. About time the Dems starting acting with some backbone. Does anyone seriously think Republicans would give one second's damn about bipartisan cooperation if they were in charge? See also: The Senate Passed a $1.9 Trillion COVID-19 Relief Bill. Here's What's In It (Time).]

A Better Way to Parent: Less Yelling, Less Praise

At one point in her new book, the NPR journalist Michaeleen Doucleff suggests that parents consider throwing out most of the toys they’ve bought for their kids. It’s an extreme piece of advice, but the way Doucleff frames it, it seems entirely sensible: “Kids spent two hundred thousand years without these items,” she writes.

Her deeply researched book, Hunt, Gather, Parent: What Ancient Cultures Can Teach Us About the Lost Art of Raising Happy, Helpful Little Humans, contains many moments like this, in which an American child-rearing strategy comes away looking at best bizarre and at worst counterproductive. “Our culture often has things backward when it comes to kids,” she writes.

Doucleff arrives at this conclusion while traveling, with her then-3-year-old daughter, to meet and learn from parents in a Maya village on the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico; in an Inuit town in a northern Canadian territory; and in a community of hunter-gatherers in Tanzania. During her outings, she witnesses well-adjusted, drama-free kids share generously with their siblings and do chores without being asked.

She takes care to portray her subjects not as curiosities “frozen in time,” but instead as modern-day families who have held on to invaluable child-rearing techniques that likely date back tens of thousands of years. I recently spoke with Doucleff about these techniques, and our conversation, below, has been edited for brevity and clarity.

Joe Pinsker: Many American parenting strategies, you estimate, are only about 100 years old, and some of them arose more recently than that. What about American parenting sticks out to you as distinctive and particularly strange?

Michaeleen Doucleff: One of the craziest things we do is praise children constantly. When I was first working on the book, I recorded myself to see how frequently I praised my little girl, Rosy, and I noticed that I would exaggeratedly react to even her smallest accomplishments, like drawing a flower or writing a letter, with a comment like “Good job!” or “Wow! What a beautiful flower!”

This is insane if you look around the world and throughout human history. Everywhere I went, I don’t know if I ever heard a parent praise a child. Yet these kids are incredibly self-sufficient, confident, and respectful—everything we want praise to do, these kids already have it, without the praise.

It’s hard to cut back on praise, because it’s so baked in, but later on, I decided to try. It’s not that there’s no feedback, but it’s much gentler feedback—parents will smile or nod if a child is doing something they want. I started doing that, and Rosy’s behavior really improved. A lot of the attention-seeking behavior went away.

Pinsker: You visited an Inuit town in the Canadian territory of Nunavut, and spent time in households where children were almost mysteriously immune to tantrums. How did the parents you met respond when kids misbehaved?

Doucleff: One night while I was there, Rosy and I were staying with a woman named Sally who was watching three of her grandchildren—so, four kids under 6 years old in this house. Sally just approached everything they did with the most calmness and composure I have ever seen. At one point, a little toddler, maybe 18 months at the time, I think he was pulling the dog's tail or something. Sally picked him up and, when she did, he scratched her face so hard that it was bleeding. I would have been irate, but Sally, I saw her kind of clench her teeth, and just say, in the calmest voice, “We don’t do this.” Then she took him and flipped him around with this playful helicopter move, and they both started laughing. Then it was over—there was no conflict around it.

If the child's energy goes high—if they get very upset—the parent’s energy goes so low. Another time on our trip, in the grocery store, Rosy started having a tantrum, and I was getting ready to yell at her to stop. But Elizabeth, our interpreter, came over to her and addressed her in the calmest voice. Immediately, Rosy just stopped—when she was around that calmness, her whole body relaxed. I was like, Okay, I’m just doing this tantrum thing completely wrong.

Pinsker: You write about how when Sally and Elizabeth see behavior like that, they think about the causes of it differently than many American parents do. What is the narrative they have for why young kids act out?

Doucleff: Yeah, this is huge—it single-handedly changed my life, and it’s something you hear in other parts of the Arctic. In the U.S., when a child calls you a name or smacks you, many parents think that the child is pushing your buttons, that they’re testing boundaries and want to manipulate you.

The Inuit parents and elders I interviewed almost laughed when I said that. One woman said something like, “She’s a kid—she doesn’t know how to manipulate like that.” Instead, what they told me is that young children are just these illogical, irrational beings who haven’t matured enough and haven’t acquired understanding or reason yet. So there’s no reason to get upset or argue back—if you do, you’re being just like the child.

This has totally shifted the way I interact with Rosy—I have so much less anger. She’s trying her best. Maybe she’s clumsy and illogical and irrational, but in her heart, she loves me, she wants to do well, and she wants to help.

by Joe Pinsker, The Atlantic |  Read more:

Image: Classicstock/Getty

Tik Toks

 [ed. Enjoy (press play arrow twice)]

Guntars Grebezs, Penicillin 

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The Singleton Hypothesis

Does history have a goal? Is it possible that all the human societies that existed are ultimately a prelude to establishing a system where one entity will govern everything the world over? The Oxford University philosopher Nick Bostrom proposes the "singleton hypothesis," maintaining that intelligent life on Earth will at some point organize itself into a so-called "singleton" – one organization that will take the form of either a world government, a super-intelligent machine (an AI) or, regrettably, a dictatorship that would control all affairs.

Other forms of a singleton may exist, and, ultimately, Bostrom believes one of them will come into existence. The philosopher argues that historically there's been a trend for our societies to converge in "higher levels of social organization". We went from bands of hunter gatherers to chiefdoms, city-states, nation states and now multi-national corporations, the United Nations and so forth, all the way to globalization – one of President Donald Trump's favorite targets for attack. One view of that trend sees increased power going to multi-national businesses and world government bodies, making globalization somewhat of a punching bag concept, often seen not as a needed re-organization of societies around the world, leading to increased cooperation and a peaceful international order, but rather for its potential to bring about the loss of jobs and undermine the sovereignties of individual countries, making citizens beholden to faceless totalitarian bureaucrats from foreign lands.

But a singleton doesn't have to result in a bad outcome, argues Bostrom. In fact, he thinks it could also be a good thing or at least something that's neither obviously positive or negative – just neutral. One way to get to a singleton, according to the philosopher, is through technology. Improved surveillance and communication, mind-control tech, molecular nanotechnology and artificial intelligence could all bring about a singleton.

While some aspects of such technologies could certainly be unwanted and infringe upon individual freedoms, Bostrom thinks that there are situations in which there could be broad support for either a technological solution or a single government agency to take control of the society. As the world grows more complex, it's harder to achieve efficient coordination between countries and individuals within them. Tech solutions in conjunction with converging moral values and a democratic worldwide government could facilitate that. (...)

Before you get set for your life to be dominated by a single agency, Bostrom's classic paper on the subject lays out some specific pros and cons of a singleton. (...)

by Paul Ratner, Big Think |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. Read Nick Bostrom's paper "What is a Singleton?" here.]

Sigmar Polke, Stadtbild II (City Painting II), 1968

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Macmuffin: A Tragedy

McDonald’s will test a meat-free burger in several markets . . . which it has dubbed “McPlant.”
                                                                                                                              —CNBC.

SCENE 1. The S’moors.

SHAKES: Bubble, bubble, rat hair and stubble

Cellulose churn, diglycerides bubble.

(Enter Macmuffin.)

1 SHAKE: All hail Macmuffin! We bring good tidings to thee

Who is morning taste treat now, Mayor of Arches soon.

MAC: Thy speakest vanilla falsehood, though ’tis true:

I am now morning taste treat; but Mayor of Arches?

I knowest not of what you speak.

2 SHAKE: By my froth, do not doubt:

In menu marquee

Macmuffin shall appear above all:

Above McNuggets, ’bove McCheese.

MAC: Above McCheese? But this cannot be! The Mayor lives.

Are you sure ’tis I who shall reign?

3 SHAKE: Fear not, Macmuffin. No burger born of beef

Shall e’er have power upon thee.

(Exeunt.)

MAC: This strange news hath poached double my yolk.

Could it be true the news from paper cups parted?

Just as milkshakes boast o’ no dairy

And factory farm is a phrase contrary

A muffin testing destiny must be wary.

SCENE 2: Macmuffin’s Castle.

(Enter Lady Filet-O-Fish and Mac.)

MAC: Lady Filet!

How fares my tender fish sandwich?

LADY: Golden brown, my lord, with the news of late:

The forecast of those triple thick hath reached my ears. And hast thou heard? With Mayor McCheese have we for lunch together been order’d.

MAC: ’Tis true then the prophecy!

But dar’st I yank

The sweating patty from its limp bun?

LADY: Hear me now: for with my plan

Greasy arches we shall quickly span.

When McCheese comes, greet him with the smile of Ronald,

But with the heart of Hamburglar.

Mayor Macmuffin you shall be

And no burger born of beef

Shall have the power to stop thee.

This sauce offer, laced it is with drug.

Strike first and never worry

Your heart as cold as a McFlurry.

(Exit. Enter McCheese, Lords, Fries.)

MAYOR: Hail noble Macmuffin of Egg

Fulfiller of that most important meal.

MAC: Hail Mayor McCheese!

Yet I see thy patty hath grown dry.

A special sauce will surely greasen thy extremities, making thee juicy anew.

MAYOR: Spread on, then, McMuffin!

My beefy Cheddar awaits.

MAC (aside): Special it is, in both intent and effect.

MAYOR: Yet I feel a sudden fatigue. Go forth, and I will join thee of late.

To my chamber I’ll retire for twenty winks to take. (Exeunt.)

MAC: More than twenty winks into this night he’ll fit—

A sleep of no waking: I’m lovin’ it.

by Jay Martel, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Luci Gutiérrez

In Hawaii, Reimagining Tourism for a Post-Pandemic World

In Hawaii, Reimagining Tourism for a Post-Pandemic World (NYT)
Image: Marco Garcia

Art is a Game

We struggle to understand art. We pore over the details; we search for the best interpretations. We argue with each other, fighting over whether a work is brilliant or pretentious. We trade ‘Best of All Time’ lists and then quibble about the rankings. But why do we seem to care so mightily about getting things right? We can’t we just relax and take whatever pleasures we can?

Here’s my suggestion: The struggle is actually the point. We don’t study art and have long conversations about it just in order to understand the art. It’s actually the other way around. We take on the task of trying to understand art so that we may have those delightful conversations and be propelled into those wonderful studies. We have shaped our practice of art appreciation for the joys of the process. We engage with art for the satisfactions of the struggle—for the pleasures of careful attention, interpretation, and evaluation. In this way, art appreciation is like a game. In a game, the goals and restrictions shape the gaming activity, fine-tuning it into just the kind of struggle we wish to be absorbed in.

And thinking of art appreciation as a kind of game will help us to understand some of the oddly Byzantine ‘rules’ of art appreciation. It will help us resolve a long-running debate about the value of independent judgement in art appreciation. Consider: There are two norms of art appreciation that seem deeply in tension. On the one hand, we seem to care about making correct judgements. We want our beliefs and judgements to match the fine details of the artworks. On the other hand, we seem to also value a radical independence of mind. We are supposed to judge the Van Gogh for ourselves, to experience its strange twisting bubbling life for ourselves. We are supposed to decide for ourselves whether Kanye’s new album is a tragic overreach, a misunderstood masterpiece, or a lazy sell-out. We seem to think that an we should not declare that an artwork is beautiful or failed, based simply on the testimony of another. We are supposed to judge art for ourselves.

But these two demands seem deeply at odds. Elsewhere in intellectual life, our interest in correctness usually trumps the demand for independence. When we want to get it right, we usually defer to experts. I defer to my doctor about what medicines to take; I defer to my mechanic about which repairs my car needs. Even the scientific experts need to depend on thousands of other experts. So: if we really care about getting things right with art, shouldn’t we also defer to experts there, too? After all, Beethoven may give me all kinds of rich, shimmering feelings and responses, but I know so little of the music theory that is apparently required to understand much of what Beethoven is doing. If I wanted to have the right judgements about Beethoven, shouldn’t I just defer to some classical music expert? But such deference seems to miss something crucial about the whole activity of art appreciation. Here’s one traditional explanation: such deferences misses the essential subjectivity of aesthetic judgement. It would be absurd defer to others in our aesthetic judgements, if those judgements were just expressions of our own subjective responses.

I wish, here, to offer a very different explanation. It could very well be that some aesthetic judgements are objective. But the reason we pursue those right answers are different with art appreciation than with many other objective domains. In science, we care about actually getting the right answers. But with art appreciation, we care most about engaging in the activity of trying to get it right—about going through the whole process of looking and searching and imagining and interpreting. This is why we don’t defer to experts. Correct judgements are the goal, but not the purpose, of art appreciation. The value of art appreciation lies in the activity of trying to get correct judgements, rather than actually having made correct judgements.

The games analogy is quite useful here. With a puzzle game, we don’t just look up the answers online. We avoid deferring to the experts who have already solved the puzzles. But the reason we don’t defer to experts here is not because the solutions are subjective. For many puzzles, there is, indeed, a single objectively correct solution. And if the whole point of the exercise was simply to have the correct solution, then we should proceed to that solution by the most efficient means possible, which often will be looking it up online. But often we don’t just look it up online, because the whole point of the activity is to try and figure it out for ourselves.

To understand this point better, we need to distinguish between goals and purposes. The local goal of an activity is what you aim at and pursue during the activity. The purpose of an activity is your reason for taking it up in the first place; it is the real value you find in the activity. For some players, goal and purpose can be identical, or close to it: like the Olympic athlete trying to win because they really just want to win; or the professional poker player trying to win because they want the money that follows from winning. But for many other players, goal and purpose sharply diverge. A lot of the time, my purpose in going rock climbing is to relax and shut up the endless, nattering voice in my head. But in order to relax, I have to throw myself into the local goal of getting to the top of the rock. I need local dedication in order to fully absorb myself in the climb—and that absorption is exactly what I need to clear my head. But in the larger scheme of things, I don’t really care if I get to the top. If I spend the day failing and failing, but go home mentally and spiritually refreshed, then it is a day well spent.

There are, then, two very different motivational structures that can be involved with playing games. First, one could be engaged in ‘achievement play’—playing a game for the value of winning itself (or something that follows from the win, like money). Second, one could be engaged in ‘striving play’—playing a game for the value of the struggle (or something that follows from that struggle, like fitness or relaxation). Notice that, for a striving player to have that desirable struggle, they have to actually try to win. But winning isn’t the point for them; playing is. 

by C. Thi Nguyen, Forum For Philosophy |  Read more:

Image: Katrien Vanderlinden

Pat Steir - Dahlia, 1983

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The Agoraphobic Traveller
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America Is Not Made for People Who Pee

Here’s a populist slogan for President Biden’s infrastructure plan: Pee for Free!

Sure, we need investments to rebuild bridges, highways and, yes, electrical grids, but perhaps America’s most disgraceful infrastructure failing is its lack of public toilets.

Greeks and Romans had public toilets more than 2,000 years ago, with people sitting on benches with holes to do their business. There were no partitions, and Romans wiped with sponges on sticks that were dipped in water and shared by all users.

I’m not endorsing that arrangement, but at least the ancient Romans operated large numbers of public latrines, which is more than can be said of the United States today.

The humorist Art Buchwald once recounted an increasingly desperate search for a toilet in Manhattan. He was turned down at an office building, a bookstore and a hotel, so he finally rushed into a bar and asked for a drink.

“What kind of drink?” the bartender replied.

“Who cares?” Buchwald answered. “Where’s the men’s room?”

America should be better than that. Japan manages what may be the world’s most civilized public toilets — ubiquitous, clean and reliably equipped with paper — and almost every industrialized country is more bladder-friendly than America. Even poorer countries like China and India manage networks of public latrines. But the United States is simply not made for people who pee.

“I go between cars or in bushes,” Max McEntire, 58, who has been homeless about 10 years, told me as he stood outside the tent where he lives here. “Sometimes at my age, if your body says pee, you’ve got to pee. If your body says poop, you can’t wait.” (...)

Most stores and businesses are of little help, he said, because they often insist on a purchase to use the restroom — and that’s even before a pandemic closed many shops.

“At night you’ll see men and women pulling their pants down and peeing and pooping in the gutter,” McEntire said. “People lose their dignity, they lose their pride.”

Cities also lose their livability, and open defecation becomes a threat to public health. Americans have painstakingly built new norms about dog owners picking up after their pets, but we’ve gone backward with human waste. (...)

In the 19th century, the United States did set up public toilets in many cities. They were often called public urinals, abbreviated as P.U. (this may be part of the origin of “P.U.” to mean something that stinks, although there are competing theories). In the early 20th century, these were supplemented by “comfort stations” for men and women alike, but most closed in waves of cost-cutting over the years.

That’s partly because this is a class issue. Power brokers who decide on infrastructure priorities can find a restaurant to duck into, while that is less true of a Black teenage boy and utterly untrue of an unwashed homeless person with a shopping cart.

by Nicholas Kristof, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Jan Buchczik

Google’s FLoC Is a Terrible Idea

The third-party cookie is dying, and Google is trying to create its replacement.

No one should mourn the death of the cookie as we know it. For more than two decades, the third-party cookie has been the lynchpin in a shadowy, seedy, multi-billion dollar advertising-surveillance industry on the Web; phasing out tracking cookies and other persistent third-party identifiers is long overdue. However, as the foundations shift beneath the advertising industry, its biggest players are determined to land on their feet.

Google is leading the charge to replace third-party cookies with a new suite of technologies to target ads on the Web. And some of its proposals show that it hasn’t learned the right lessons from the ongoing backlash to the surveillance business model. This post will focus on one of those proposals, Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC), which is perhaps the most ambitious—and potentially the most harmful.

FLoC is meant to be a new way to make your browser do the profiling that third-party trackers used to do themselves: in this case, boiling down your recent browsing activity into a behavioral label, and then sharing it with websites and advertisers. The technology will avoid the privacy risks of third-party cookies, but it will create new ones in the process. It may also exacerbate many of the worst non-privacy problems with behavioral ads, including discrimination and predatory targeting.

Google’s pitch to privacy advocates is that a world with FLoC (and other elements of the “privacy sandbox”) will be better than the world we have today, where data brokers and ad-tech giants track and profile with impunity. But that framing is based on a false premise that we have to choose between “old tracking” and “new tracking.” It’s not either-or. Instead of re-inventing the tracking wheel, we should imagine a better world without the myriad problems of targeted ads.

We stand at a fork in the road. Behind us is the era of the third-party cookie, perhaps the Web’s biggest mistake. Ahead of us are two possible futures.

In one, users get to decide what information to share with each site they choose to interact with. No one needs to worry that their past browsing will be held against them—or leveraged to manipulate them—when they next open a tab.

In the other, each user’s behavior follows them from site to site as a label, inscrutable at a glance but rich with meaning to those in the know. Their recent history, distilled into a few bits, is “democratized” and shared with dozens of nameless actors that take part in the service of each web page. Users begin every interaction with a confession: here’s what I’ve been up to this week, please treat me accordingly.

Users and advocates must reject FLoC and other misguided attempts to reinvent behavioral targeting. We implore Google to abandon FLoC and redirect its effort towards building a truly user-friendly Web.

by Bennett Cyphers, EFF | Read more:
Image: uncredited

[ed. Not sure about "terrible", but incomprehensible definitely. I wonder how they sell this to advertisers.]

How the Senate Pared Back Biden’s Stimulus Plan

WASHINGTON — The $1.9 trillion economic stimulus plan approved by the Senate on Saturday follows the outlines of the sweeping pandemic aid package that President Biden proposed, but senators made a series of notable changes that narrowed the bill.

While the House passed a version of the bill that largely kept Mr. Biden’s proposals intact, the Senate omitted an increase in the minimum wage that he had included and limited how much Americans will receive in supplemental unemployment benefits in the coming months. It also pared back eligibility for the next round of stimulus checks compared with the House’s bill.

The changes made by the Senate are likely to stick, as the version passed by the chamber is scheduled to go before the House for its final approval on Tuesday. The bill would then head to Mr. Biden for his signature.

Here are some of the major differences between the two chambers’ bills.

The minimum wage increase was dropped.

The House bill would gradually raise the federal minimum wage, which is currently $7.25 per hour, to $15 per hour by 2025. The Senate bill does not incorporate a wage increase.

The Senate parliamentarian said last month that the wage increase violated the strict rules governing what can be included in bills passed through a special process known as budget reconciliation — prompting Democrats to jettison it from the package.

Democrats used the reconciliation process because it allowed the bill to pass the Senate with only a simple majority, protecting it from a filibuster — which requires 60 votes to break — and thus eliminating the need to win support from Republicans.

On Friday, an amendment to add back the minimum wage increase fell well short of the 60 votes needed to do so, failing 42 to 58 in a procedural vote. Seven Democrats and one independent who caucuses with them joined all 50 Republicans in opposition, signaling that the wage increase lacked sufficient support to clear the Senate regardless of the parliamentarian’s ruling.

Stimulus checks will be available to fewer Americans.

Both the House and Senate bills would provide another round of direct payments to Americans, with payments of up to $1,400 going to hundreds of millions of people. But the Senate bill places stricter income limits on who is eligible, disqualifying millions of people from receiving a payment.

Both bills would provide $1,400 payments for individuals earning up to $75,000, single parents earning up to $112,500 and married couples with incomes up to $150,000. Gradually smaller payments would go to those earning more, declining as income levels rise and phasing out altogether for those above a certain income cap.

But while the House set the cap at $100,000 for individuals, $150,000 for single parents and $200,000 for couples, the Senate lowered those thresholds to placate moderates who wanted the payments to be more targeted.

Instead, the Senate bill would set the cap at $80,000 for individuals, $120,000 for single parents and $160,000 for couples, meaning those earning more than that would not receive checks.

Unemployment payments would remain at $300 per week, instead of increasing to $400.

The last stimulus package passed in December partly restored a federal unemployment payment that lapsed last summer, offering $300 per week and extending it through March 14. The House bill increased the benefit in line with Mr. Biden’s proposal, but the Senate, where moderates balked at raising the payment, left it the same.

The House version would provide a more generous benefit of $400 per week through Aug. 29. The Senate measure would provide $300 per week through Sept. 6.

The Senate bill would also exempt $10,200 in unemployment benefits received in 2020 from federal income taxes for households making less than $150,000.

Both the House and Senate also sought to help workers who lost their jobs keep their employer-provided health insurance coverage, but the Senate bill is more generous. The House measure would  cover 85 percent of premiums through a program called COBRA through September, while the Senate measure would cover the full cost of those premiums.

by Thomas Kaplan, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Will Budiaman

[ed. The usual suspects, Republicans and the filibuster (see: Divided Senate Passes Biden’s Pandemic Aid Plan (NYT). But, also this: Sen. Kyrsten Sinema complains criticism of her vote against $15 minimum wage hike is sexist (Salon); and Sinema Show: the First Bisexual Senator Screwed Every Man and Woman in America (Ghion Journal).]