Your TV is Too Good For You

Last fall, when Netflix hiked the cost of its top-tier Ultra HD plan by 15 percent, I had finally had enough: $22.99 a month just felt like too much for the ability to see Jaws in 4K video resolution. A couple of weeks later, I heard that Max was pushing up the fee of its own 4K streaming by 25 percent. Now I wasn’t just annoyed, but confused. Super-high-res televisions are firmly ensconced as the next standard for home viewing of TV and movies. And yet, super-high-res content seems to be receding ever further into a specialty consumer niche. What happened?

4K certainly is ubiquitous; you won’t find many sets with lower resolution for sale at Best Buy. In practice, though, the technology is rarely used. Cable signals are generally mere HD, as are the standard plans on most streaming services. And the fancy new displays, as they’re placed and viewed in people’s homes, may never end up looking any sharper than the old ones, no matter what Netflix plan you have. In short, the ultra-high-definition future for TV has turned out to be a lie.

A relentless narrative of progress brought us to this point, but it did not begin in 2012, when the first 4K televisions were brought to market at roughly the price of a Honda Accord. Rather it extends back into the early days of TV, with the idea that picture quality can and always will be improved: first with the introduction of color sets, then with bigger screens, then with added pixels. But sometimes progress ends. The peak of television-picture quality, as actually seen by TV viewers, was reached 15 years ago, and we’ve been coasting ever since. Forget the cable signals and the streaming plans. Most people just can’t sit close enough to today’s televisions to make full use of their picture.

Years ago, sitting too close was the problem. If you’re old enough to remember watching cathode-ray-tube sets, you may have been enjoined to give them space: Move back from the TV! The reasons were many. Cold War–addled viewers had developed the (somewhat justified) fear that televisions emitted radiation, for one. And the TV—still known as the “boob tube” because it might turn its viewers into idiots—was considered a dangerous lure. Its resolution was another problem: If you got close enough to the tube, you could see the color image break down into the red, blue, and green phosphor dots that composed its picture.

All of these factors helped affirm the TV’s appropriate positioning—best viewed at a middle distance—and thus its proper role within the home. A television was to be seen from across the room, and it could be used as much for ambience as for focused viewing. A soap opera or a news program or a cartoon might be on while people in the house read newspapers, balanced checkbooks, cooked meals, or vacuumed—the second-screen activities of the age before second screens. The media theorist Marshall McLuhan famously described television as a “cool” medium, one that provides somewhat meager sensory stimulation, as opposed to a “hot” medium such as cinema, which intensely targets the eyes and ears. (...)

But television technology pressed on. A 4K TV has four times the resolution of an HD set, which suggests that screens might get even hotter, even bigger than they’ve ever been before. In practice, though, these newer sets haven’t really changed the medium at all. If anything, all of those pixels have allowed too much; they’ve become decoupled from the normal scale of domestic life and home design. According to the many TV-size-to-distance calculators available online, when you’re sitting on a couch a dozen feet from your television, a 65-inch screen will look the same whether it’s HD or 4K. The latter has more pixels, but your eyes won’t pick them up. You’ll never know the difference. For the picture to look much better—for you to “see” the benefits of modern ultra-high resolution—you’d need to upgrade to a preposterously large screen, more than 100 inches in diagonal. 

by Ian Bogost, The Atlantic |  Read more:

Image: Brian Finke / Gallery Stock
[ed. I remember when having a large TV sitting prominently in the middle of your living room used to be considered kind of gauche; an indicator of a somewhat limited interior/cultural life. Man, have times changed. Even now 32 in. is still my max (and it's fine).]

This Bookshop is Paying People to Sit Down and Read Quietly

Fort Collins, Colo. — The reader-in-residence position at Perelandra Bookshop doesn’t make sense on paper. Unlike an artist-in-residence or a writer-in-residence program, which provide a stipend and studio space for creating new work, the reader-in-residence isn’t expected to produce anything.

The reader-in-residence doesn’t have to write an essay. They don’t have to host a book club or moderate a panel discussion. They don’t have to contribute to a blog or create sponsored content. They don’t have to do anything, except show up to the bookstore a couple of times per week and read.

“I think the residence paralleled my own personal concerns about the extent to which we focus ourselves on production,” said Joe Braun, principal book buyer at Perelandra, and the person who dreamed up the position. “In focusing on production, foregrounding content creation, what we do is necessarily create a consumer in the process. The idea is: produce, consume, produce, consume.”

Braun wanted to break that cycle. Is the residency replicable? Maybe. Is it scalable? Probably not. But that has never been the point. The point is to envision what a bookshop can do, not what it already is, Braun said.

“Having gone through undergrad and grad school — even though they were great experiences — there was that constant drive to show that you understand. To make something of your understanding. I’m like, you know what, we kind of just need understanding. We don’t always need proof of it,” he said.

The reader gets a small stipend for their three-month stint — $50 per month for books, and another $50 per month for coffee. They also have access to Perelandra’s wholesale book catalog. The overt goal of the residency is to foster a space for people to experience literature more thoughtfully. The underlying goal is to make them want to smash their phones with a sledgehammer.

“We do so much reading now, but it’s mostly reading for information at best. At best. At worst it’s like a pure little shot of dopamine before moving to the next post,” said Steven Shafer, Perelandra’s current reader-in-residence. “It is almost the exact opposite of what I’ve gotten to experience here.”

Shafer was selected the way all of Perelandra’s readers have been selected so far: Through word-of-mouth. The first book he read during his residency, which lasts through March, was “Brave New World” by Aldous Huxley. He had different takeaways this time around, almost 20 years since he first read the book.

“When you’re 18, you feel like ‘Yeah definitely, fight the man! Become a revolutionary!’ And then 20 years on it’s kind of like, ‘Eh, I’m definitely part of the system.’ I don’t know if I’d be the one necessarily to step up and try to burn it all down. I’d probably say, like, let’s take a breath, there’s a lot at stake here.”

That’s kind of the formula of the entire bookstore: A little bit of fight the man mixed with a little bit of let’s take a breath.

by Parker Yamasaki, The Colorado Sun |  Read more:

Image: Olivia Sun, The Colorado Sun via Report for America
[ed. See also: Bring Back the Big, Comfortable Bookstore Reading Chair (LitHub).]

Helen Units

A helen is a humorous unit of measurement based on the concept that Helen of Troy had a "face that launched a thousand ships". The helen is thus used to measure quantities of beauty in terms of the theoretical action that could be accomplished by the wielder of such beauty.

The classic reference to Helen's beauty is Marlowe's lines from the 1592 play The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus, "Was this the face that launch'd a thousand ships / And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?" In the tradition of humorous pseudounits, then, 1 millihelen is the amount of beauty needed to launch a single ship.

In his 1992 collection of jokes and limericks, Isaac Asimov claimed to have invented the term in the 1940s as a graduate student. In a 1958 letter to the New Scientist, R.C. Winton proposes the millihelen as the amount of beauty required to launch one ship. In response, P. Lockwood noted that the unit had been independently proposed by Edgar J. Westbury and extended by the pair to negative values, where −1 millihelen was the amount of ugliness required to sink a battleship.

The earliest known print citation is found in Punch magazine dated June 23 1954 and attributed to an unnamed "professor of natural philosophy".

by Wikipedia |  Read more:

Image:Helen leaving for Troy with Paris, as depicted by Guido Reni

[ed. My mom's name was Helen; it's my grandaughter's middle name, too.]

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The Fairy-Tale Promises of Montessori Parenting

Giving my 4-year-old a random food without explanation to see what he does,” an automated voice says at the start of a TikTok from the parenting influencer known as LauraLove. She hands her son, Carter, a container of ricotta cheese. He announces quickly: He’ll make stuffed shells.

Carter seems incredibly prepared, standing on a platform to reach the stove. He seasons the beef, cooks the pasta, mixes the filling, and stuffs the shells. Sure, his motions are clumsy and he goofs off while he works. But the end dish looks pretty good. Even more compelling, though, might be how Carter responds to his mistakes. When he drops a stuffed shell upside down, he makes a joke. When he splashes egg on himself, he doesn’t flinch. “I got a little wet,” he says. “But that’s fine. That happens when you’re cooking.”

The whole video—Carter’s demeanor, the equipment he stands on, even the choice of activity—is filled with the hallmarks of Montessori parenting. You might recognize the name Montessori from the group of schools known for prioritizing child autonomy and learning through play. Though the parenting approach is not officially affiliated with Montessori education, you can think of it as a sort of DIY descendant, in which people apply many of the same concepts in a new realm. Recently it’s become highly visible, in large part because of social media. (LauraLove, for instance, has nearly 8 million followers.) Now Montessori influences pervade the design of playrooms, popular toys, and even the general ethos of self-sufficiency that defines many modern child-rearing theories.

I was curious about the philosophy’s appeal, so I spoke with seven Montessori-parenting adherents. Some were stay-at-home parents; others had to balance caregiving with paid work. Many told me about being nervous first-time parents who just wanted a child-rearing style to rely on. Indeed, Mairin Augustine, a researcher who studies parenting, told me that applying Montessori educational ideas to raising kids can amount to good parenting. (Even if it is dressed up in impressive branding and comes with a whole lot of merch.) But while Montessori parenting can be rewarding, it can also be particularly expensive and labor-intensive.

Of course, TikToks like the one of Carter cooking leave a lot out. Clearly this wasn’t his first time in the kitchen. (LauraLove does have other videos where she teaches her sons to cook, and admitted in a comment that she gave Carter “a little help here & there,” but said he “remembered & did most of it on his own.”) As any parent will tell you, such videos just aren’t representative of what cooking with young kids is typically like.

“Make time for your child to do things in her own way and at her own pace,” the Association Montessori Internationale’s parenting website preaches. A lovely idea, but not exactly a practical one for many parents. When making muffins, for example, Nicole Kavanaugh, the creator of a Montessori-parenting blog and podcast, told me that she might be eager to dump the batter into the tin, “but my child might want to sit and whisk.” Waiting for a kid to finish can be logistically disruptive, but for Kavanaugh, the greater struggle was often mental. She described literally sitting on her hands to stop herself from intervening in one of her children’s tasks.

Depictions of Montessori parenting, particularly on social media, can make it seem like a prescription for idyllic family life—they suggest that your kid, too, could be cooking fancy Italian meals at age 4, and that tantrums could be easily defused by empathetic conversation, and that your home could also be effortlessly tidy, if you just adopted Montessori. But raising kids isn’t so simple, and even parents who are willing and able to invest the money, time, and emotional work in this method may find themselves disappointed when expectations butt up against reality. Ultimately, no one can escape the hard truth: No matter how hard you work to organize a playroom, you can’t eliminate chaos or uncertainty from parenting.

The montessori approach to parenting is rooted in a respected pedagogical system started in the early 20th century by the Italian educator Maria Montessori. She preached that kids were innately orderly, focused, and self-motivated, and should be given freedom to choose what they learn. She believed that play is educational, and she filled schoolrooms with what others saw as mere toys. She found value in housework, too, and had students do chores as part of their lessons. She lamented that the world was not built to be accessible to children—and she created a school that was. Its philosophy lives on in the many modern-day schools that bear her name.

When Simone Davies, the author of the popular book The Montessori Toddler, discovered the approach about 20 years ago, Montessori schools had already started to proliferate in the U.S. Yet Davies, who is based in Amsterdam, struggled to find any books that explained how to implement these principles at home. But over the past decade, Kavanaugh told me, platforms such as Instagram and YouTube have become a “breeding ground” for Montessori parenting. Those platforms are visual, and the philosophy lends itself well to striking aesthetics: The playrooms tend to be clean and minimalist; watching a 2-year-old chop vegetables is mesmerizing. “It was just this perfect storm,” Kavanaugh said. Add the tie to a prestigious educational brand, and it’s no wonder the approach has taken off.

But much of what is labeled Montessori today has little meaningful association with the original philosophy. Because the name was never trademarked, anyone can use it. (The Association Montessori Internationale, which Maria co-founded with her son, offers certifications to schools and teachers, but those are optional.) So-called Montessori toys abound: See, for example, the Pikler triangle—also billed as a “Montessori Climber,” despite having been created by a different pioneer in early education—a sort of glorified ladder that sells for as much as $299. The Montessori aesthetic has become so heavily marketed that if you mention Montessori on a parenting board, people may think you mean beige wooden blocks, not a radical pedagogical approach that centers children’s needs.

The actual parenting philosophy is adapted from Maria’s educational principles as well as comments she made about parents’ role in child development. At its core, Montessori parenting is defined by three main features. The first, and most important, Davies told me, is a gentle and respectful way of interacting with children that does away with traditional discipline and encourages independence. The second involves creating what is known as a “prepared space”: a well-organized area for kids to play in, with child-size furniture and objects that are all within the child’s reach. The final element is facilitating specialized activities depending on the kid’s age, which can be educational play or helping with chores—like cooking.

Psychologists generally agree that the ideal parenting style is “authoritative” and is characterized by high levels of warmth and control. That means “having consistent messages about what I want from you, but knowing that I love you,” Augustine told me. Many of Maria’s ideas fit nicely under that umbrella. Certain fringe Montessori beliefs are not evidence-backed. (For instance, Maria notoriously preached that cribs, the safest place for infants to sleep, were inhumane cages.) But the overall approach is largely aligned with that authoritative-parenting ideal. (...)

The parents I spoke with who answered that call weren’t necessarily expecting perfection, nor were they completely drawn in by social media’s illusions. Still, when Montessori didn’t work as expected, they tended to be disappointed. Many blamed themselves, but few criticized the philosophy itself. Indeed, Montessori has a principle that makes it customizable but also impossible to disprove: “Follow the child”—which roughly means Be responsive to your kid. So, for example, if a kid doesn’t like a Montessori-style activity a parent spent hours creating, that doesn’t mean something’s wrong with the activity; that means the parent didn’t understand their child’s needs. (...)

Montessori is remarkable for the extent to which it takes children seriously, involving innovations small (art hung at kids’ eye level in their own rooms) and large (putting play at the center of children’s education). The parenting style encourages kids to express themselves—and sometimes, for toddlers, that self-expression involves throwing fits. No amount of respect for your children’s emotional life can change that. The implication that Montessori would make parenting orderly and predictable was always doomed to fail. But the philosophy does give parents something to steady themselves while living through the havoc of helping someone else grow up.

by Kate Cray, The Atlantic |  Read more:

Image: Katie Martin

[ed. Just treat them like normal people, which means not being overly authoritative or protective (a necessity sometimes, but children know when it's needed), or talking down to them; mainly just being yourself and letting them see and interact with you as your own self, not just a parent. It provides a good baseline and context for their own growth (hopefully); and mutual respect. And don't forget to help and support them in finding their own interests and independence. See also: Protocols for Excellent Parenting & Improving Relationships of All Kinds (Huberman Lab):]

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[ed. At least he got an autograph.]

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Return of Anthony Kim

Golf’s great prodigy turned mysterious recluse is returning to the sport after 12 years. Anthony Kim joined LIV Golf and will play in the league’s event in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, this week as a wild card.

“After stepping away from the game years ago due to injury, I’m happy to officially announce my return to the world of professional golf,” Kim said in a news release Wednesday. “It’s been a long time coming, and I’m very grateful for all the highs, lows and lessons learned from the first part of my career.

“I want to compete with the best players in the world, and I’m on a mission to prove to myself that I can win again. The next step on that journey starts now, and I’m excited to give everything I’ve got this season on the LIV Golf League.”

Kim will compete in all remaining 2024 LIV Golf regular-season tournaments as a wild-card player aiming to accrue points in the league’s individual standings and earn a team place in 2025.

LIV commissioner Greg Norman teased Kim’s return in a video on social media Monday, and Kim’s presence on the driving range did not go unnoticed Tuesday. Sports Business Journal’s Josh Carpenter snapped a photo of a placard featuring Kim’s name, and then YouTube golfer Andy Carter posted a video of Kim’s range session on Instagram.

Kim, now 38, was once one of golf’s biggest rising stars who won two PGA Tour events and made a Ryder Cup team by 23 behind exciting talent and a big personality that reached sections of fans golf often struggled to reach before. Injuries then led to Kim stepping away from professional golf at 26 and never returning.

Kim has become a cult-like figure in the time since, in part because he was such a popular player with enormous potential, but also because of the mystery that has shrouded his absence. During his playing days, Kim was known as a partier who had a complicated relationship with how much he loved golf. So when his injuries led to him stepping away and reports surfaced of him living off an insurance policy worth somewhere between $10 and $20 million, it meant only more fascination with whether or not he actually couldn’t play anymore.

So when Golf.com reported in January that Kim was eyeing a return and was in negotiations with both the PGA Tour and LIV, the intrigue only skyrocketed. Now, Kim is finally returning and playing with LIV, a league backed by the Public Investment Fund of Saudi Arabia which can likely afford to give Kim a signing bonus to help with the insurance policy, in addition to massive purses at events. Kim is expected to play as a single this week and not part of LIV’s 13 teams.

The complicated element is what Kim’s return means and what to expect. Before Rory McIlroy and Jordan Spieth, Kim was golf’s great young prodigy, expected to take some portion of Tiger Woods’ place in golf’s limelight. The Los Angeles native played college golf at Oklahoma and played on a winning Walker Cup team before turning pro at 22. Kim won two PGA Tour events at Quail Hollow and TPC Potomac by his second full pro season and became the first golfer under 25 to win two tour events in the same season since Woods in 2000. By the end of that 2008 season, Kim was 23, No. 6 in the world and the top rising star in the sport.

With an extremely aggressive style of play and an outgoing personality, Kim immediately became a star in demographics golf didn’t always reach. He made the 2008 Ryder Cup team at 23 years old — young for a spot on that team at that time — and he famously dominated Sergio Garcia with a 5&4 drubbing as the U.S. won for the first time in nine years. That next spring, Kim went to the 2009 Masters and broke the tournament record with 11 birdies in the second round. That may have turned out to be his peak. (...)

But while his absence meant Kim didn’t get to become the star some hoped for, it also meant he didn’t have to go through the normal peaks and valleys of a career. The shine eventually comes off all young players, but being away meant being frozen in time as a beacon of potential.

by Brody Miller and Jenna West, The Athletic | Read more:
Image: Jon Ferrey/LIV Golf

Noksu: The Best of Tasting-Menu Culture Meets the Worst

At Noksu, dinner is served below the street, a few yards from the subway turnstiles. But the room and the food seem unmoored from any particular place.

I can’t remember the last New York restaurant that frustrated me as much as Noksu.

My frustration won’t be widely shared, given how few people can afford to eat there. Dinner is $225 for about 12 courses, before tax, tip or drinks. Drinks can be paired with each course for another $175 (with alcohol) or $100 (without).

It would be easier to dismiss Noksu if it weren’t for the cooking of its chef, Dae Kim. This is the first kitchen he has run and he’s full of talent, a star in the making. But his ideas need to be shaped and formed, and the setting he’s working in is so generic that it distracts from what’s distinctive in his cooking.

Most of what holds Noksu back are things it shares with, and may have copied from, other expensive tasting-menu restaurants. It tries so hard to fit in with Atomix, Kono, Chef’s Table at Brooklyn Fare and other places that it forgets to assert any identity of its own.

Noksu got some press early on because of its location, one flight below ground inside the 34th Street-Herald Square subway station. Apparently, the concept of $400 dinners a few yards from the turnstiles and tracks struck a lot of people as novel. I’m not sure why. Another generation would have called it slumming.

A few minutes before each of the two nightly services, a rolling gate clatters up to reveal a locked door with a keypad. To get inside, I punched in a six-digit code that had been texted to me several hours before. Behind the door was a heavy, floor-to-ceiling curtain. By this point, I was prepared to see anything behind it. A private sex club? Agent Cooper?

But there was nothing like that, just the usual tasting-menu layout, a counter of banded marble facing a stainless steel kitchen where half a dozen cooks in white jackets stood intently over rows of white porcelain bowls, heads bowed like monks.

They stayed in that position, making tiny adjustments to whatever was in those bowls, for about 10 minutes. I had time to settle in, ask for a drink and look around. Time to wonder whether Noksu’s secret door inside a subway station was supposed to remind me of the secret door at Brooklyn Fare (inside a supermarket near the jams and jellies) or the one at Frevo (behind one of the artworks hanging in a storefront gallery) or the one at the Office of Mr. Moto (opened by a code embedded in a cipher).

And I had time to ask why so many tasting-menu restaurants, no matter how they disguise their entrance, look the same inside: the long counter of polished stone or wood or steel; the upholstered stools so tall and heavy that servers need to help you get into and out of them, as if you were a small child getting into a highchair; the blank, windowless walls.

There are restaurants like this in almost every major city now, imitation pearls on a string that circles the world. Once the door closes, you could be anywhere, or nowhere. How did chefs who prize both originality and a sense of place decide that the most appropriate backdrop for their food would be copycat rooms done in a blank-faced global style?

Noksu’s design doesn’t do Mr. Kim any favors. Neither does the playlist, which runs through the most obvious megahits of the ’80s by Toto, Don Henley, even Huey Lewis and the News. It’s as if you’d accepted a dinner invitation from Patrick Bateman.

Mr. Kim has a collection of gifts that any young cook might covet: an eye for arranging dishes that invite you in by holding back a few secrets; an affinity for seafood, which is at the center of nearly every course; an impressive technical control that allows him to spherify truffle juice and spin fragile rye tuiles in Spirograph lattices.

Over and over, he pulled off complex dishes that would be tricky in a kitchen twice as big as Noksu’s. There was a miniature tart not much larger than a bottle cap, filled with firm raw fluke, maitake mushrooms glazed with Madeira, and crunchy threads of leek. Marinated rock shrimp were folded inside a slice of raw bluefin, scored for tenderness; this all-seafood wrap was surrounded by a dark and quietly spicy liquid that tasted of long-caramelized onions and carrots. (It would be delicious over prime rib, too, if this were that kind of restaurant.)

Sardines cured in plum vinegar were garnished with individual potato chips and wisps of radicchio in an uncannily smooth Caesar dressing. Many courses made my eyes go wide with something like wonder. There were filigrees of wildflowers, mysterious little tuna-belly creatures with mustard-seed eyes and microgreen antennae, and something that looked like a slice of black truffle but melted like butter.

I never doubted Mr. Kim’s skill, or patience, or readiness to spend a huge amount of labor on dishes that take less than a minute to eat. But what he is trying to say, I’m not quite sure. (...)

There were dishes so uncannily good they made me suspect Mr. Kim was receiving secret transmissions from another world, like the medium-rare slice of wild coho salmon with a pistachio-celery sauce on one side and a fluffy swoosh of yuzu hollandaise on the other. And I would not want to have missed the moment when, after the gentle Impressionist brushwork of the seafood courses, he suddenly goes Damien Hirst, serving a delicious and completely unadorned squab, its crisp skin lacquered with red vinegar and malt sugar like a duck in a Chinatown window and its deep-fried head cradled in the curled toes of its foot.

The boldness of that squab represented tasting-menu cuisine at its best. One night, though, it was followed by a venison dish served at room temperature; I could only pick at it.

Lukewarm food is so common in this style of cooking that somebody in the movie “The Menu” tells the autocratic chef, “Even your hot dishes are cold.” Some of the film’s dialogue turns up at Noksu almost verbatim, as when a server volunteered that one dish is “so beautiful I can’t eat it.” Each course was served with precise instructions on how to transport it from plate to mouth. Not that I blame the servers. When diners at restaurants like this aren’t given any instructions, they become so confused they’ll ask what “chef recommends.” Seeing a restaurant full of grown adults waiting for permission to eat with a spoon really makes you wonder how it is that humans haven’t died out yet.

How can the people behind Noksu not see what was obvious to the makers of “The Menu” — that the conventions of tasting menus have become laughable clichés? 

by Pete Wells, NY Times |  Read more:

Images: Rachel Vanni for The New York Times

Mel Parsons

[ed. Good news, my computer's fixed. Bad news, my Roku and TV aren't talking to each other now. Some bad little cloud hanging around lately [update: fixed!... just a broken cable]. See also: Slow Burn LIVE at LOHO.]

[ed. Uh, oh. Dead computer. Posts might be sporadic for a while. Sorry.]

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My Comments are in the Google Doc Linked in the Dropbox I Sent in the Slack

Thanks for sending this along. I left my comments in the Google Doc.

You don’t see my comments? You’re looking at the old document. I copied your Google Doc and made a new Google Doc called “Proposal v2 – Comments.” Once you have my comments, put everything together in “Proposal v3 FINAL.” Then, if you don’t mind copy-pasting your new document link into the spreadsheet where we keep track of all the document links, that would be perfect. And, of course, make sure you’re in the most current spreadsheet (Copy of Spreadsheet COPY_01).

You still don’t see the link? It’s right there on the bottom of the Slack thread from yesterday about which shared drive folders link to Dropbox folders that contain all the shared PDFs. Oh, my mistake; it’s actually at the bottom of a thread about what everyone had for lunch yesterday. Here I’ll send it to you again. I just replied to an email to Jeff with the link and asked him to forward it to you. The subject line is “Email.”

The document won’t open? I’m not sure how I could make this any easier. Okay, I reset the document permissions, but you’ll need to sign into the email document_view@busycompany.org via the password I texted you via iMessage. Once you sign into the email, it’ll ask you to create a Microsoft Teams account. You’ll find the link to the document in the Teams channel called “NO DOCUMENTS LINKS!!!” From there, you’ll find a link to a couple of WeTransfers of the current .docs. Every WeTransfer link is expired. To find the non-expired link, you’ll have to look through the email thread I forwarded you saying, “FYI.” It should be 110-120 emails deep in the thread.

Once you find a link, you’ll download the 17 GB PowerPoint file, which is password-protected. You’ll need the password from our company password document. This should be in the shared Z:// drive that was set up in 2002, and to open the Excel sheet, you’ll need to make sure your computer is running on Windows 98. From there, you’ll use the password to open the company’s orientation PowerPoint and find the link to the main Dropbox folder. The Dropbox contains all the links to the Box folders, which contain all the links to the Google Drive folders, which nobody can see, hear, or touch. This is where things get tricky. The Google Drive folder is, admittedly, a tad disorganized, so you’ll need to click on thirty-seven different documents with names that have nothing to do with what’s in the document. You’ll need to read most of the document to infer who wrote it and what year. You’re looking for the document I wrote yesterday. The comments should be right in there.

Jesus. Do you just want me to fax these things to you?! Look, to make things easier, I started a thirty-day free trial of Asana. I also set up trials of Monday, Airtable, Jira, Workday, Loom, Boom, Flunt, Pringo, Viver, Blabby, Tired, Burbble, Ü, and Bungle apps, and signed you up for each. Then I posted the document in the comments section of the posting for your job on Indeed.com. Just kidding, you’re not fired. But please do reapply by sending a résumé and cover letter to gain access to Google Drive.

You know what? Should I just walk over to your desk, and we can go through them out loud?

by Gwynna Forgham-Thrift, McSweeny's |  Read more:

Image: WikiHow/Fair Use

Shigeo Sekito

Nicola Jane Stratton Tyler, Pelargonium oil study

Eddie Martin

The Quest For a DNA Data Drive

How much thought do you give to where you keep your bits? Every day we produce more data, including emails, texts, photos, and social media posts. Though much of this content is forgettable, every day we implicitly decide not to get rid of that data. We keep it somewhere, be it in on a phone, on a computer’s hard drive, or in the cloud, where it is eventually archived, in most cases on magnetic tape. Consider further the many varied devices and sensors now streaming data onto the Web, and the cars, airplanes, and other vehicles that store trip data for later use. All those billions of things on the Internet of Things produce data, and all that information also needs to be stored somewhere.

Data is piling up exponentially, and the rate of information production is increasing faster than the storage density of tape, which will only be able to keep up with the deluge of data for a few more years. The research firm Gartner predicts that by 2030, the shortfall in enterprise storage capacity alone could amount to nearly two-thirds of demand, or about 20 million petabytes. If we continue down our current path, in coming decades we would need not only exponentially more magnetic tape, disk drives, and flash memory, but exponentially more factories to produce these storage media, and exponentially more data centers and warehouses to store them. Even if this is technically feasible, it’s economically implausible.

Fortunately, we have access to an information storage technology that is cheap, readily available, and stable at room temperature for millennia: DNA, the material of genes. In a few years your hard drive may be full of such squishy stuff.

Storing information in DNA is not a complicated concept. Decades ago, humans learned to sequence and synthesize DNA—that is, to read and write it. Each position in a single strand of DNA consists of one of four nucleic acids, known as bases and represented as A, T, G, and C. In principle, each position in the DNA strand could be used to store two bits (A could represent 00, T could be 01, and so on), but in practice, information is generally stored at an effective one bit—a 0 or a 1—per base.

Moreover, DNA exceeds by many times the storage density of magnetic tape or solid-state media. It has been calculated that all the information on the Internet—which one estimate puts at about 120 zettabytes—could be stored in a volume of DNA about the size of a sugar cube, or approximately a cubic centimeter. Achieving that density is theoretically possible, but we could get by with a much lower storage density. An effective storage density of “one Internet per 1,000 cubic meters” would still result in something considerably smaller than a single data center housing tape today.

Most examples of DNA data storage to date rely on chemically synthesizing short stretches of DNA, up to 200 or so bases. Standard chemical synthesis methods are adequate for demonstration projects, and perhaps early commercial efforts, that store modest amounts of music, images, text, and video, up to perhaps hundreds of gigabytes. However, as the technology matures, we will need to switch from chemical synthesis to a much more elegant, scalable, and sustainable solution: a semiconductor chip that uses enzymes to write these sequences.

After the data has been written into the DNA, the molecule must be kept safe somewhere. Published examples include drying small spots of DNA on glass or paper, encasing the DNA in sugar or silica particles, or just putting it in a test tube. Reading can be accomplished with any number of commercial sequencing technologies.

Organizations around the world are already taking the first steps toward building a DNA drive that can both write and read DNA data. I’ve participated in this effort via a collaboration between Microsoft and the Molecular Information Systems Lab of the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington. We’ve made considerable progress already, and we can see the way forward.

How bad is the data storage problem?

First, let’s look at the current state of storage. As mentioned, magnetic tape storage has a scaling problem. Making matters worse, tape degrades quickly compared to the time scale on which we want to store information. To last longer than a decade, tape must be carefully stored at cool temperatures and low humidity, which typically means the continuous use of energy for air conditioning. And even when stored carefully, tape needs to be replaced periodically, so we need more tape not just for all the new data but to replace the tape storing the old data.

To be sure, the storage density of magnetic tape has been increasing for decades, a trend that will help keep our heads above the data flood for a while longer. But current practices are building fragility into the storage ecosystem. Backward compatibility is often guaranteed for only a generation or two of the hardware used to read that media, which could be just a few years, requiring the active maintenance of aging hardware or ongoing data migration. So all the data we have already stored digitally is at risk of being lost to technological obsolescence.

How DNA data storage works

The discussion thus far has assumed that we’ll want to keep all the data we produce, and that we’ll pay to do so. We should entertain the counterhypothesis: that we will instead engage in systematic forgetting on a global scale. This voluntary amnesia might be accomplished by not collecting as much data about the world or by not saving all the data we collect, perhaps only keeping derivative calculations and conclusions. Or maybe not every person or organization will have the same access to storage. If it becomes a limited resource, data storage could become a strategic technology that enables a company, or a country, to capture and process all the data it desires, while competitors suffer a storage deficit. But as yet, there’s no sign that producers of data are willing to lose any of it.

If we are to avoid either accidental or intentional forgetting, we need to come up with a fundamentally different solution for storing data, one with the potential for exponential improvements far beyond those expected for tape. DNA is by far the most sophisticated, stable, and dense information-storage technology humans have ever come across or invented. Readable genomic DNA has been recovered after having been frozen in the tundra for 2 million years. DNA is an intrinsic part of life on this planet. As best we can tell, nucleic acid–based genetic information storage has persisted on Earth for at least 3 billion years, giving it an unassailable advantage as a backward- and forward-compatible data storage medium. (...)

There is global interest in creating a DNA drive. The members of the DNA Data Storage Alliance, founded in 2020, come from universities, companies of all sizes, and government labs from around the world. Funding agencies in the United States, Europe, and Asia are investing in the technology stack required to field commercially relevant devices. Potential customers as diverse as film studios, the U.S. National Archives, and Boeing have expressed interest in long-term data storage in DNA.

Archival storage might be the first market to emerge, given that it involves writing once with only infrequent reading, and yet also demands stability over many decades, if not centuries. Storing information in DNA for that time span is easily achievable. The challenging part is learning how to get the information into, and back out of, the molecule in an economically viable way. (...)

The University of Washington and Microsoft team, collaborating with the enzymatic synthesis company Ansa Biotechnologies, recently took the first step toward this device. Using our high-density chip, we successfully demonstrated electrochemical control of single-base enzymatic additions. The project is now paused while the team evaluates possible next steps. Nevertheless, even if this effort is not resumed, someone will make the technology work. The path is relatively clear; building a commercially relevant DNA drive is simply a matter of time and money.

by Rob Carlson, IEEE Spectrum |  Read more:

Images: Edmon De Haro; Chris Philpot

[ed. In other emerging and probably not too distant tech, see also: Smartphone Screens Are About to Become Speakers (IEEE).]

When Forgetting is Normal, and When It's Not

When is forgetting normal — and when is it worrisome? A neuroscientist weighs in (NPR)

Image:Bulat Silvia/iStock / Getty Images Plus
[ed. See also: I’m a Neuroscientist. We’re Thinking About Biden’s Memory and Age in the Wrong Way (NYT):]
"Mr. Biden is the same age as Harrison Ford, Paul McCartney and Martin Scorsese. He’s also a bit younger than Jane Fonda (86) and a lot younger than the Berkshire Hathaway C.E.O., Warren Buffett (93). All these individuals are considered to be at the top of their professions, and yet I would not be surprised if they are more forgetful and absent-minded than when they were younger. In other words, an individual’s age does not say anything definitive about the person’s cognitive status or where it will head in the near future."

100-year old TB Vaccine Could Be a New Weapon Against Alzheimer’s

Scientific discoveries can emerge from the strangest places. In early 1900s France, the doctor Albert Calmette and the veterinarian Camille Guérin aimed to discover how bovine tuberculosis was transmitted. To do so, they first had to find a way of cultivating the bacteria. Sliced potatoes – cooked with ox bile and glycerine – proved to be the perfect medium.

As the bacteria grew, however, Calmette and Guérin were surprised to find that each generation lost some of its virulence. Animals infected with the microbe (grown through many generations of their culture) no longer became sick but were protected from wild TB. In 1921, the pair tested this potential vaccine on their first human patient – a baby whose mother had just died of the disease. It worked, and the result was the Bacille Calmette-Guérin (BCG) vaccine that has saved millions of lives.

Calmette and Guérin could have never imagined that their research would inspire scientists investigating an entirely different kind of disease more than a century later. Yet that is exactly what is happening, with a string of intriguing studies suggesting that BCG can protect people from developing Alzheimer’s disease.

If these preliminary results bear out in clinical trials, it could be one of the cheapest and most effective weapons in our fight against dementia. (...)

The idea may sound far-fetched, but decades of research show that BCG can have surprising and wide-ranging benefits that go way beyond its original purpose. Besides protecting people from TB, it seems to reduce the risk of many other infections, for instance. In a recent clinical trial, BCG halved the odds of developing a respiratory infection over the following 12 months, compared with the people receiving a placebo.

BCG is also used as a standard treatment for forms of bladder cancer. Once the attenuated bacteria have been delivered to the organ, they trigger the immune system to remove the tumours, where previously they had passed below the radar. “It can result in remarkable disease-free recoveries,” says Prof Richard Lathe, a molecular biologist at Edinburgh University.

These remarkable effects are thought to emerge from a process called “trained immunity”. After an individual has received BCG, you can see changes in the expression of genes associated with the production of cytokines – small molecules that can kick our other defences, including white blood cells, into action. As a result, the body can respond more efficiently to a threat – be it a virus or bacteria entering the body, or a mutant cell that threatens to grow uncontrollably. “It can be likened to upgrading the security system of a building to be more responsive and efficient, not just against known threats but against any potential intruders,” says Weinberg.

There are good reasons to believe that trained immunity could reduce the risk of Alzheimer’s. By bolstering the body’s defences, it could help keep pathogens at bay before they reach the brain. It could also prompt the brain’s own immune cells to clear away the amyloid beta proteins more effectively, without causing friendly fire to healthy neural tissue. (...)

To find out, Ofer Gofrit of the Hadassah-Hebrew University Medical Centre in Jerusalem and his colleagues collected the data of 1,371 people who had or had not received BCG as part of their treatment for bladder cancer. They found that just 2.4% of the patients treated with BCG developed Alzheimer’s over the following eight years, compared with 8.9% of those not given the vaccine.

Since the results were published in 2019, other researchers have replicated the findings. Weinstein’s team, for instance, examined the records of about 6,500 bladder cancer patients in Massachusetts. Crucially, they ensured that the sample of those who had received BCG and those who hadn’t were carefully matched for age, gender, ethnicity and medical history. The people who had received the injection, it transpired, were considerably less likely to develop dementia.

The precise level of protection varies between studies, with a recent meta-analysis showing an average risk reduction of 45%. If this can be proven with further studies, the implications would be huge. “Simply delaying the development of Alzheimer’s by a couple of years would lead to tremendous savings – both in suffering and our money,” says Prof Charles Greenblatt of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, who was a co-author of Gofrit’s original paper. (...)

The clinching evidence would come from a randomised controlled trial in which patients are either assigned the active treatment or the placebo. Since dementia is very slow to develop, it will take years to collect enough data to prove that BCG – or any other vaccine – offers the expected protection from full-blown Alzheimer’s compared with a placebo.

In the meantime, scientists have started to examine certain biomarkers that show the early stages of disease. Until recently, this was extraordinarily difficult to do without expensive brain scans, but new experimental methods allow scientists to isolate and measure levels of amyloid beta proteins in blood plasma, which can predict a subsequent diagnosis with reasonable accuracy. (...)

Weinberg has his own grounds for optimism. Working with Dr Steven Arnold and Dr Denise Faustman, he has collected samples of the cerebrospinal fluid that washes around the central nervous system of people who have or have not received the vaccine. Their aim was to see whether the effects of trained immunity could reach the brain – and that is exactly what they found. “The response to pathogens is more robust in specific populations of these immune cells after BCG vaccination,” says Weinberg.

We can only hope that these early results will inspire further trials. For Weinberg, it’s simple. “The BCG vaccine is safe and globally accessible,” he says. It is also incredibly cheap compared with the other options, costing just a few pence a dose. Even if it confers just a tiny bit of protection, he says: “It wins the cost-effectiveness contest hands down.”

by David Robson, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: French veterinarian Camille Guérin and physician Albert Calmett. Photograph: Musée Pasteur

[ed. This is where the regulatory process loses me. If BCG is already being prescribed as a standard treatment for TB and bladder cancer, has saved millions of lives, and now seems to have some other off-label benefits, why do we need years of further clinical trials (and inevitable price increases) before it becomes generally available? The only other option appears to be an antibody treatment, lecanemab, except:]

"Lecanemab has already sparked debate. Antibody drugs are so costly they are beyond the means of many countries. Lecanemab itself is not easy to administer, unlike pills and capsules: patients are required to attend clinic for an intravenous infusion twice a month. And the side-effects call for extensive monitoring: patients on the trial had regular scans for brain swelling and haemorrhages, a service many hospitals cannot provide at scale.

More importantly, lecanemab might not work very well. From the data released so far, it is unclear what difference it could make to the devastating burden inflicted by Alzheimer’s. Some doctors warn that the benefits of the drug seem so small, patients may not even notice. But others counter that any effect on Alzheimer’s deserves celebration: it proves the disease can be beaten, or at least slowed down. It’s a start, a concrete foundation to build on."