The New Dirt on Dry Cleaners

by Ray A. Smith

You drop your most cherished clothes at the dry cleaner, and they're ticketed, thrown into a massive pile of garments and whisked away.

To most consumers, what takes place behind the counter, where imposing machines rumble and steam hisses, is a mystery. What exactly goes on back there? Other common questions: Why do women's shirts often cost more to clean than men's, and why do only some stains come out?

Adding to the confusion is a transition that is already shaking up the dry-cleaning industry. Many dry cleaners will be required to find new solvents to replace a widely used cleaning agent called perchloroethylene, or perc, by 2020. As a result, businesses are using a growing array of new methods to clean garments. Procter & Gamble Co. recently launched Tide Dry Cleaners, a chain of stores that use an alternative product, based on silicone and called GreenEarth.

The result, for many people, is uncertainty. "I find myself looking at tags more to see if I can wash it," says Alli Webb, the West Hollywood, Calif., co-founder of Drybar, a chain of blowout hair salons. She says she is nervous about chemicals and sometimes will drive farther to a cleaner that promotes itself as eco-friendly.

The shakeup is coming to an industry that has changed little for decades. While the Frenchman credited with inventing dry cleaning started with turpentine, perc has been used since the 1930s to clean clothes, and about 80% of cleaners still rely on it. Like turpentine—and benzene, kerosene and gasoline, which were also tried in the early years—perc is good at dissolving oil-based stains. It is pumped into a supersized washing machine to flush dirt from the clothes.

Stubborn stains from difficult-to-remove substances, such as ink, wine and mustard, are attacked by hand with chemicals that target particular substances. Bruce Barish, owner of New York City's Ernest Winzer Cleaners, cites balsamic vinaigrette as "very hard to get out." It's a mix of both water-based and oily stains with a dark dye that is hard to remove—especially since most customers accidentally rub it in.

The quality and service vary, in part because most dry cleaners are independently owned. There are 24,124 dry-cleaning and non-coin-operated laundry establishments in the U.S., according to the Census Bureau.

But certain things hold true across the industry. In a 2009 study that examined 50 randomly selected dry cleaners, New York-based Floyd Advisory LLC found that women paid an average of 73% more than men for laundered shirts. Dry cleaners surveyed say women's shirts don't fit in their industrial presses as well as men's and must be ironed by hand.

Last year, market-research firm Mintel International found that 75% of women who had gone clothes-shopping in the past 12 months said they avoided buying clothes that required dry cleaning.

Indeed, it is customers' low opinion of dry cleaning, in part, that sparked P&G's new venture, the company says. P&G research found that a large percentage of consumers were generally dissatisfied with their dry cleaning, says Ross H. Holthouse, a spokesman for the consumer-product maker's FutureWorks division. "They felt the stores were dark and that they walked into a black box and didn't know what was happening," he says.

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Zachary Flagg Baldus
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T. Rex

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Racing to the Bottom: Exploring the Deepest Point on Earth

by Nicholas Jackson

At the southern end of the Mariana Trench, a deep scar that cuts into the bottom of the ocean floor, there is a point known as Challenger Deep. Here, just outside of the Marianas or Ladrones, a series of 15 islands made up of volcanic mountains that peak just above the water line, a small slot-shaped valley plunges nearly seven miles down. At 35,797 feet, Challenger Deep is the deepest known point in the oceans. It is so deep that, if you were able to place Mount Everest inside of the valley, there would still be 6,811 feet of water separating it from the surface.

At just 7,000 feet down, about where the tallest mountain in the world would peak, the pressure becomes so great that whales rely on unique evolutionary traits when hunting for giant squid. Whales have lungs that can collapse safely under pressure and ribs bound by soft cartilage that allows the cage to shift and settle in extreme environments rather than snap. Without similar anatomical gifts, we don't know much about what happens below that level. Imagine what creatures might live at depths five times greater than where whales and giant squid battle in the pitch-black ocean.

We've been there once before, to the bottom of Challenger Deep. But we didn't see or learn much. On January 23, 1960, Jacques Piccard suited up, plopped down inside of Trieste, and sank to the ocean floor. The Swiss-designed, Italian-built, U.S. Navy-owned Trieste is an inelegant machine. The observation gondola, a sphere welded to the bottom of the ship's main flotation system, has walls that measure five inches thick and a tiny, cone-shaped Plexiglas window. 

Trieste

After spending nearly five hours sinking to the bottom of the ocean, Piccard and Don Walsh, a Navy Lieutenant that accompanied him, were only able to peer through the Plexiglas while shivering in the 45-degree capsule and munching on chocolate bars for sustenance. Surrounded by a cloud of sediment that Trieste had kicked up when it smacked into the ocean floor, Piccard and Walsh couldn't see a whole lot from their window, which had cracked on the way down. What they did see, though -- a variety of sole and flounder, two types of flatfish -- proves that at least some vertebrate life can handle the extreme pressure in one of the Earth's most extreme places. Twenty minutes later, Trieste dumped tons of magnetic iron pellets and spent three hours rising back to the surface.

Now, more than 50 years later, humans are nearly ready to return to Challenger Deep. This time, though, they're planning to stay a while, collecting samples, videotaping whatever might be down there, sending out small remotely operated underwater vehicles (ROVs) and then bringing home $10 million. Earlier this year, the X Prize Foundation made that prize money available to the first privately funded submersible to make two visits to Challenger Deep. This money, though, is little more than proof that humans are fascinated with the extreme: climbing Mount Everest, walking on the Moon, searching the floor of the ocean. Ten million dollars will only cover a fraction of the race to the bottom. And it is indeed a race; one with at least three competitors, each close to claiming the prize.

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Zork Revisited

[ed. I loved Zork and its predecessor Colossal Cave. Back in prehistoric times (early 80s) interactive games were just being born and Zork definitely had a big influence on my developing interest in computers.]

by Philip Bump

In my mind, the house is clapboard, with a black, precisely shingled roof and shutters in a bit of disrepair. The sky is always an intangible, faded blue, and the forest surrounding the clearing is dark green. In other words, it's always summer -- and hot, since I imagine the house surrounded by long, tan, untrampled grass.

The front door is boarded -- I pictured some plywood, though I didn't think about it much. There's the mailbox: a standard issue, gunmetal-gray, Quonset-shaped affair, slightly askew on its pole. And in the mailbox, of course, is a leaflet.

Zork was the first game I remember playing on my family's IBM PC, sometime in the early 1980s. It's hard to convey, for those who didn't go through a similar epiphany, what it was like to look into a screen empty but for a few lines of spare green text:

You are in an open field west of a big white house with a boarded front door. There is a small mailbox here.

For a kid that wasn't into fantasy books, I didn't approach it as an adventurer. I approached the game as me: I'm standing in front of a house, not unlike my own, a wrapped gift that you have to figure out how to unwrap. It was like a Choose Your Own Adventure in which no other pages were suggested. Here's where you are, kid. Now what?

What we forget, what was lost with the transition to visual games, is how literary the experience was. A quick catalog of words I learned from text adventures -- mostly from Infocom, the granddaddy of the genre: menhir, footpad, topiary, lapis lazuli. The games were written as much as they were designed; tantalizing adjectives to create a sense of the world, sometimes-obscure nouns to describe things which may not exist in real-life. They sampled from literature as well: one game, A Mind Forever Voyaging, used an excerpt from "The Raven" as an interlude.

Deep into the darkness, peering,
Long I stood there, wondering, fearing,
Doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal
Ever dared to dream before.

No English class ever inspired an appreciation for meter more than did those lines.

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Life on the Line

by Andrew Rice

El Paso and Ciudad Juárez lie together uncomfortably like an estranged couple, surrounded on all sides by mountains and desert. The cities are separated by the thin trickle of the Rio Grande, which flows through concrete channels, built to put an end to the river’s natural habit of changing course and muddying boundaries. One side is Texas; the other, Mexico. The border’s way of life — its business, legitimate and otherwise — has always relied upon the circumvention of this dividing line.

The cities are so close that you can sit on a park bench in El Paso and watch laundry wave behind a whitewashed house on a Juárez hillside. Thousands of commuters come across from Mexico every morning, waiting in a long line at the Paso del Norte bridge, snaking back up the seedy Avenida Juárez, past military checkpoints where hawkers wave tabloids full of tales of carnage. The recent war among various gangs and drug cartels has made Juárez one of the world’s most dangerous cities, while across the way, El Paso remains calm, even eerily prosperous. It consistently ranks as one of the safest cities in the United States. This grotesque disparity has, in some ways, torn the cities apart. Few El Pasoans venture across the bridge anymore, if they can help it, while much of Juárez’s middle and upper class has decamped to the other side of the border, taking their money, businesses, even their private schools with them, forming an affluent community in exile.

I spent a lot of time in El Paso this winter and spring as the Mexican Army mounted a fragmentary campaign against the cartels and as American politicians of both parties exploited the spectacle for their own purposes. In Washington and Austin, the capital of Texas, in the faraway realm that borderland residents call the interior, conservatives were raising the specter of “spillover violence,” while President Obama was boasting of an unprecedented border fortification. In reality, spillover was notable for its scarcity — when stray bullets from a Juárez gunfight improbably flew across the border and struck El Paso’s City Hall last year, it made international news. But that’s about the only physical damage the city has suffered. And the federal security buildup — symbolized by an 18-foot, rust-colored fence that runs along city streets and through backyards, part of a 650-mile, $2.8 billion border wall — was regarded around town as a threatening imposition. Some two million people are linked at this spot, by ties of blood and commerce, and its fluid social ecosystem still retains something unique and emblematic and perhaps worth saving. If scholars of globalization are right that we are moving toward a future in which all borders are profitably blurred, here is the starkest imaginable expression of that evolution, in all its heady promise and its perverse failings.

On a frigid morning in February, I met with Linda Arnold inside a small brick storefront in El Paso. “Unless you are right here, I don’t think you can get how intertwined this community is,” Arnold told me. A midwife with frosted blond hair who favors jangly jewelry, Arnold was running a small business called the Casa de Nacimiento, catering to a specific subset of border-straddlers. At that moment, sweating through labor, were three women who had come over the bridges from Juárez with legal visas. The distance, about a mile and a half from the Rio Grande, was geographically negligible but enormously consequential. Giving birth here would deliver their children a precious advantage: it would make them Americans.

Arnold isn’t an immigration zealot, or even an ideological liberal, despite the hippie-ish connotations of her profession. “We’re not going to sit around here and chant,” she said as we spoke in her office, which contained a sculpture of a womb and a portrait of her own son, a soldier in uniform. “This is a business, not a commune.” What Arnold was offering for sale at Casa de Nacimiento, for $695, was a future untroubled by the border’s impediments. Any child born at Arnold’s birth center would possess American citizenship, courtesy of the 14th Amendment, and with it the ability to cross freely back and forth.

It is El Paso’s way to make the most of the border’s inequities. Arnold moved to town in 1985 with an impassioned commitment to natural childbirth and an entrepreneur’s hunch about an untapped market. Mexican women had a long tradition of crossing the border to give birth, and Arnold soon made herself one of the busiest midwives in the state. Back when she started, getting over the border was as simple as wading across the Rio Grande or paying a ferryman a dollar for a tow on an inner tube. “They would come in with their jeans still wet,” she said.

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Schedule Your Emergency

[ed.  Here's something I kind of sensed intuitively but didn't have a number on: average wait time in emergency rooms is four and a half hours!]

by Patricia Yollin

UCSF patients with minor medical needs seeking treatment in the Emergency Department now can make an appointment to be seen – waiting at home rather in the hospital – via a new online check-in service called InQuickER.

UCSF Medical Center is now offering patients with mild medical emergencies a chance to reserve a time to be seen in the Emergency Department using a new online system.

UCSF Medical Center’s Emergency Department (ED) at Parnassus Heights is now offering InQuickER designed for patients with non-threatening minor medical needs.

UCSF patients can register online for a $4.99 fee and pick an open slot for an emergency room visit. The fee will be refunded if they’re not seen within 15 minutes.

In April, UCSF did a trial run with the online service, which 22 people used. UCSF Medical Center launched the system a few weeks ago.

“One thing we encountered during the trial was that a lot of patients were using it inappropriately,” said Jennifer Dearman, the Emergency Department’s patient care manager. “The online registration is screened by ED nurses and we have had to advise some patients to come directly to the ED. This service is for a fast-track kind of patient.”

“For example, a cancer patient on chemotherapy with a fever can have complicated issues and should be seen in the regular ED, so InQuickER is not appropriate for that person.”

Waiting at Home vs. Hospital

About 105 patients a day visit the emergency room at UCSF Medical Center on the Parnassus campus, Dearman said, and the average time between arrival and departure, for those not admitted to the hospital, is four-and-a-half hours.

That's in keeping with the average wait in 2009 for ER patients throughout California: four hours and 34 minutes – 27 minutes longer than the U.S. average, according to a 2010 report by health care consulting firm Press Ganey.

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Why News Sites Are Turning People Off

click to enlarge

[ed. Not to mention articles that are broken into multiple pages just to rack up mouse-clicks.]

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Norah Jones

Todd Hido, Houses
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Costa Dvorezky, Jump. Brothers.
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An Un-American Response

by Glenn Greenwald

Over the last decade, virtually every Terrorist plot aimed at the U.S. -- whether successful or failed -- has provoked greater security and surveillance measures.  Within a matter of mere weeks, the 9/11 attacks infamously spawned a vast new surveillance statute (the Patriot Act), a secretly implemented warrantless eavesdropping program in violation of the law, an explosion of domestic surveillance contracts, a vastly fortified secrecy regime, and endless wars in multiple countries.  As it turned out, that massive over-reaction was not a crisis-driven anomaly but rather the template for future actions.

The failed Christmas Day bombing over Detroit led to an erosion of Miranda rights and judge-free detentions as well as a due-process free assassination program aimed at an Muslim American preacher whose message allegedly "inspired" the attacker.  The failed Times Square bombing was repeatedly cited to justify reform-free extension of the Patriot Act along with a slew of measures to maximize government scrutiny of the Internet.  That failed plot, along with Nidal Hasan's shooting at Fort Hood, provoked McCarthyite Congressional hearings into American Muslims and helped sustain a shockingly broad interpretation of "material support for Terrorism" that criminalizes free speech.  In sum, every Terrorist plot is immediately exploited as a pretext for expanding America's Security State; the response to every plot: we need to sacrifice more liberties, increase secrecy, and further empower the government.

The reaction to the heinous Oslo attack by Norway's political class has been exactly the opposite: a steadfast refusal to succumb to hysteria and a security-über-alles mentality.  The day after the attack -- one which, per capita, was as significant for Norway as 9/11 was for the U.S. -- Oslo Mayor Fabian Stang, when asked whether greater security measures were needed, sternly rejected that notion:  "I don't think security can solve problems. We need to teach greater respect."  It is simply inconceivable that any significant U.S. politician -- the day after an attack of that magnitude -- would publicly reject calls for greater security measures.  Similarly inconceivable for American political discourse is the equally brave response of the country's Prime Minister, Jens Stoltenberg, whose office was the target of the bomb and whose Labour Party was the sponsor of the camp where dozens of teenagers were shot:

He called on his country to react by more tightly embracing, rather than abandoning, the culture of tolerance that Anders Behring Breivik said he was trying to destroy.

“The Norwegian response to violence is more democracy, more openness and greater political participation,” Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg insisted at a news conference. . . .

Stoltenberg strongly defended the right to speak freely -- even if it includes extremist views such as Breivik’s.

“We have to be very clear to distinguish between extreme views, opinions — that’s completely legal, legitimate to have. What is not legitimate is to try to implement those extreme views by using violence,” he said in English.

Stoltenberg’s promise in the face of twin attacks signaled a contrast to the U.S. response after the 9/11 attacks, when Washington gave more leeway to perform wiretaps and search records.

It reflects the difference between the two countries’ approaches to terrorism. The U.S. has been frustrated by what it considers Scandinavia’s lack of aggressive investigation and arrests.

Since the attacks, Stoltenberg and members of Norway’s royal family have underlined the country's openness by making public appearances with little visible security.

Norway's government understandably intends to investigate what happened and correct any needed gaps in security, such as slow police response; but what it refuses to do is transform itself into a closed, secret surveillance state.  About all of this, The New York Times today says that "Norway’s policy on public security seemed defined by a belief that bad things happen elsewhere."  No: it is defined by a belief that there are other values besides security that matter a great deal and that pursuing security above all other values, in a quest for absolute safety, is both self-destructive and futile.
...
What's most striking, and ironic, is that the Norwegian response to the Oslo attack is so glaringly un-American even though its core premise -- a brave refusal to sacrifice liberty and transparency in the name of fear and security -- was once the political value Americans boasted of exhibiting most.  What we now have instead is the instinctive exploitation by political elites of every threat -- real and imagined -- as a means of eroding liberties, privacy and openness, based in part on fear and in part on an opportunistic desire for greater power.  That's why Norway's courageous, principled response seems so foreign to American eyes and ears.

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The Edison of Silicon Valley

Steve Perlman, Silicon Valley’s self-styled Thomas Edison, has found a way to increase wireless capacity by a factor of 1,000

by Ashlee Vance

Lunchtime, Lytton Ave., Palo Alto, Calif.: It’s a bright, mild July afternoon, and khaki’d professionals meander past the boutiques and coffee shops, heading back to their digital workstations. One of the slower pedestrians, who gets more than a few curious glances from passersby, is a middle-aged guy in jeans and a green T-shirt, carefully rolling a utility cart down the sidewalk. The cart is one of those black, plastic, double-decker jobs you find at a home-improvement store. It’s laden with electronics and has white vinyl plumbing pipes that stick into the air from two corners. “It’s a very small group of people that actually turn the wheels around Silicon Valley,” says Stephen G. Perlman, the Silicon Valley inventor and entrepreneur who once sold a company to Microsoft (MSFT) for half a billion dollars, as he hunches over to keep the gear from jostling.

“What’s that?” asks an onlooker, a scruffy guy with gray hair and a beard to match. He looks like he’s been to a few too many Grateful Dead concerts.

Perlman patiently explains that he’s developing a new type of wireless technology that’s about 1,000 times faster than the current cell networks. It will, he says, end dropped calls and network congestion, and pump high-definition movies to any computing device anywhere.

“Huh. Cool,” says the guy, evidently deciding that Perlman is some sort of technological busker. He dumps a handful of acorns on Perlman’s cart and walks away. Perlman shrugs: “You get all kinds here.”

Now that he’s stopped in front of the Private Bank of the Peninsula, the demonstration is about to begin. It’s the first he’s ever given of his latest technology on the record. He points to the laptop on his cart. There’s a square with purple dots dancing around like television static. Perlman calls his office and tells an engineer to activate some software. Suddenly, the dots form a tight ball in the center of the screen. Perlman explains that the antennas, fastened to the ends of the plumbing pipes, have just picked up a radio signal sent from his office across the street. “It’s almost like magic,” he says.

A radio signal from point A to point B is hardly magic, but it isn’t just any signal his utility-cart contraption has picked up. This one reached B without encountering any hiccups or degradation of the sort familiar to anyone who tries to make a mobile call or watch a streaming video on a smartphone. The tight ball of dots represents what Perlman calls “the area of coherence,” and it means the device has found a pure signal.

Perlman named the technology DIDO, for distributed-input-distributed-output, a wireless technology that breaks from the time-tested techniques used for the past century. DIDO, he says, will forever change the way people communicate, watch movies, play games, and get information.

Perlman, who’s 50 and has been building companies and technology for 30 years, has earned a reputation as a showman. But, like a boastful 19th century explorer who has to raise money and excitement to launch his expeditions, Perlman really does discover new lands and species. Not long after graduating from college, he got a job at Apple (AAPL), where he helped create QuickTime, which let people play movies on their Macs. Then he started WebTV, one of the first services to link the Internet with TVs, and sold the company to Microsoft in 1997 for $503 million. Perlman has secured about 100 patents and has 100 more awaiting review. “We don’t really have a Thomas Edison or a Henry Ford pumping out inventions,” says Richard Doherty, who is director of the tech consulting firm Envisioneering and is familiar with Perlman’s DIDO system. “Steve is coming close, and he’s still a young man.”
...
DIDO, Perlman says, will right the wrongs of the wireless networks crumbling under the weight of iPhones, Android smartphones, and tablets—and create a platform for completely immersive digital experiences. He wants to build Mova facial-capture technology right into TVs and computer monitors, so people’s heads could replace those of characters in video games. “You can become Batman, and the other players in the game will see your expressions,” Perlman says. He’s also exploring virtual retinal technology. “It’s a new form of optics that allows you to see the world in 3D. It’s not just an image coming out of the TV screen. It’s viewing your entire surroundings in 3D and having them be totally virtual.” Perhaps wireless technology could be used to create standing fields, he says, so people could one day reach out and touch the virtual 3D objects. His description sounds a lot like a Holodeck, a room depicted in Star Trek where anything can appear as real. “We’re looking at creating entire virtual worlds,” Perlman says. “Eventually, we will get to the Holodeck. That’s where all these roads lead.”

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Visualizing U.S. Debt

[ed.  Excellent graphic depiction of U.S. Debt - from $100 to $15 Trillion]

One Billion Dollars
$1,000,000,000 - You will need some help when robbing the bank.
Now we are getting serious!

One Trillion Dollars
$1,000,000,000,000 - When the U.S government speaks about a 1.7 trillion deficit - this is the volumes of cash the U.S. Government borrowed in 2010 to run itself.

Keep in mind it is double stacked pallets of $100 million dollars each, full of $100 dollar bills. You are going to need a lot of trucks to freight this around.

If you spent $1 million a day since Jesus was born, you would have not spent $1 trillion by now...but ~$700 billion- same amount the banks got during bailout.

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Dress Codes in New York Clubs: Will This Get Me In?

by Douglas Quenqua

Gentlemen who prefer Ed Hardy shirts, those dragon-happy hallmarks of “Jersey Shore” chic, will not be getting into the Mulberry Project, the subterranean speakeasy cocktail lounge in Little Italy, any time soon. If you prefer your dress shirts colorful and boldly striped, don’t bother with the club Provocateur, in the meatpacking district. Baggy, low-slung jeans your style? Lots of East Village bars may be O.K. with that, but there will be no Continental for you tonight.

Dress codes have long been the secret language of New York City night life; fluency can mean the difference between an epic night out and a humiliating kick to the curb. “There’s nothing that dresses a room like a crowd,” said Ian Parms, an owner of the Mulberry Project. “The ambience of the experience is the people around you, so it’s important for us to keep those people fashion-forward and eclectic and interesting and engaging.”

Beyond being inherently snobbish, such selectivity has invited charges of racism. In December, the New York City Commission on Human Rights opened an investigation (still in progress) into the Continental, a sports bar in the East Village on Third Avenue, for its “no baggy jeans or bling” policy, which civil rights groups called a barely concealed ploy to keep out blacks. Trigger Smith, the owner of the Continental, denied that he was trying to exclude people of a certain race. “It just so happens that more minorities wear these” kinds of clothes, he told The New York Times in January. “There isn’t a racist bone in my body.” One reason some may have found the Continental’s policy hard to swallow is the bar’s otherwise obvious lack of interest in fashion. On a typical Saturday night, the Continental’s mixture of frat boys and barflies sports an unironic mélange of ripped blue jeans, grubby backpacks, baseball hats and sneakers. (And for what it’s worth, the crowd was about 30 percent black on a visit in April.)

But Mr. Smith’s defense illuminates a truth about dress codes at even the most exclusive velvet-roped clubs: they are frequently intended to keep out a certain type of person. The clothes themselves are secondary.

Michael Satsky, proprietor of Provocateur, at the Gansevoort Hotel (but now on a brief summer hiatus), admitted that he strived to keep his bar free of the randy bridge-and-tunnel boys who prowl the neighborhood on weekends. Luckily for him, they apparently self-identify through their shirts.

“We do not do plaid, and we don’t do stripes,” he said. The ideal Provocateur guest “doesn’t have to wear crazy stripes on his shirt to draw attention to himself.” (Plaid was just fine, however, at the closing night of Beige in the East Village a few months ago, where nearly every fashionable gay man who showed up seemed to be clad in a gingham shirt.)

Mr. Satsky suggests that his male patrons wear “a blazer, a solid button-down or a solid sweater.” For women, shoes are key. “Minimum five-inch heel,” he said. “Christians are our favorite,” he added, referring not to the faithful but to Christian Louboutin, the designer known for his red soles. Jimmy Choo and Christian Dior are also welcome. If the crowd in Provocateur on any given night is a gauge, being European, gorgeous and at least 5-foot-10 is good, too.

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Shit Robot

[Yeah...I know, but check it out. The videos are wild.

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