The Geek’s Chihuahua

Rather than thinking of the iPhone as a smartphone, like a Treo or a BlackBerry or, eventually, the Android devices that would mimic it, one would do better to think of the iPhone as a pet. It is the toy dog of mobile devices, a creature one holds gently and pets carefully, never sure whether it might nuzzle or bite. Like a Chihuahua, it rides along with you, in arm or in purse or in pocket, peering out to assert both your status as its owner and its mastery over you as empress. And like a toy dog, it reserves the right never to do the same thing a second time, even given the same triggers. Its foibles and eccentricities demand far greater effort than its more stoic smartphone cousins, but in so doing, it challenges you to make sense of it. (...)

At the start of 2015, fewer than eight short years since the first launch of the iPhone, Apple was worth more than seven hundred billion dollars—more than the gross national product of Switzerland. Despite its origins as a computer company, this is a fortune built from smartphones more than laptops. Before 2007, smartphones were a curiosity, mostly an affectation of would-be executives carting BlackBerries and Treos in unfashionable belt holsters. Not even a decade ago, they were wild and feral. Today, smartphones are fully domesticated. Tigers made kittens, which we now pet ceaselessly. More than two-thirds of Americans own them, and they have become the primary form of computing.

But along with that domestication comes the inescapability of docility. Have you not accepted your smartphone’s reign over you rather than lamenting it? Stroking our glass screens, Chihuahua-like, is just what we do now, even if it also feels sinful. The hope and promise of new computer technology have given way to the malaise of living with it. (...)

Technology moves fast, but its speed now slows us down. A torpor has descended, the weariness of having lived this change before—or one similar enough, anyway—and all too recently. The future isn’t even here yet, and it’s already exhausted us in advance.

It’s a far cry from “future shock,” Alvin Toffler’s 1970 term for the postindustrial sensation that too much change happens in too short a time. Where once the loss of familiar institutions and practices produced a shock, now it produces something more tepid and routine. The planned obsolescence that coaxes us to replace our iPhone 5 with an iPhone 6 is no longer disquieting but just expected. I have to have one has become Of course I’ll get one. The idea that we might willingly reinvent social practice around wristwatch computers less than a decade after reforming it for smart- phones is no longer surprising but predictable. We’ve heard this story before; we know how it ends.

Future shock is over. Apple Watch reveals that we suffer a new affliction: future ennui. The excitement of a novel technology (or anything, really) has been replaced—or at least dampened—by the anguish of knowing its future burden. This listlessness might yet prove even worse than blind boosterism or cynical naysaying. Where the trauma of future shock could at least light a fire under its sufferers, future ennui exudes the viscous languor of indifferent acceptance. It doesn’t really matter that the Apple Watch doesn’t seem necessary, no more than the iPhone once didn’t too. Increasingly, change is not revolutionary, to use a word Apple has made banal, but presaged.

Our lassitude will probably be great for the companies like Apple that have worn us down with the constancy of their pestering. The poet Charles Baudelaire called ennui the worst sin, the one that could “swallow the world in a yawn.” As Apple Watch leads the suppuration of a new era of wearables, who has energy left to object? Who has the leisure for revolution, as we keep up with our social media timelines and emails and home thermostats and heart monitors?

by Ian Bogost, Longreads | Read more:
Image: LWYang

Definition of Race Becoming Fluid

[ed. See also: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar: Let Rachel Dolezal be as black as she wants to be.]

Rachel Dolezal, born to white parents, self-identifies as black - a decision that illustrates how fluid identity can be in a diversifying America, as the rigid racial structures that have defined most of this country's history seem, for some, to be softening.

Dolezal resigned as the leader of the NAACP's Spokane, Washington, branch after questions surfaced about her racial identity. When asked directly on NBC's "Today" show Tuesday whether she is "an African-American woman," Dolezal replied, "I identify as black."

Her parents identified her as white with a trace of Native American heritage, and her mother, Ruthanne Dolezal, has said Rachel began to "disguise herself" as black after her parents adopted four black children more than a decade ago.

Dolezal isn't the first person to make this type of change. Millions of Americans changed racial or ethnic identities between the 2000 and 2010 censuses, even though their choices may have contradicted what their skin color appeared to be, or who their parents said they are.

"It forces us to really question whether or not this biological basis for identity is a smart path to continue down in the future," said Camille Gear Rich, a University of Southern California law and sociology professor who writes about elective race choices.

Americans have become comfortable with people self-identifying their race, Rich said, "but often that invocation of identity based on a biological claim isn't backed up by anything else after the claim is made."

In the United States, there is an expectation that people would have a biological connection to a racial or an ethnic identity they are claiming, said Nikki Khanna, a University of Vermont sociology professor. She co-authored a 2010 study that found increasing numbers of biracial adults were choosing to self-identify as multiracial or black instead of white.

"There really is no biological basis to race, but what I'm saying is that in our society the everyday person tends to think race must have some link to ancestry," Khanna said. "So we expect that when people self-identify with a particular group they must have some ancestral link to that group."

In the past, race was determined mostly by what other people thought a person was. For example, the Census Bureau's enumerators would determine on their own what a person's race was, and classify them as such. By the 1960s and 1970s, census officials were allowing people to self-identify.

Currently, the Census Bureau allows people to choose a racial category, or even multiple categories, to which they think they belong. The census identifies races as white; black or African-American; American Indian or Alaska Native; Asian; Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander; and "some other race" for those claiming more than one race. There is also a Hispanic ethnic category.

People have been using that freedom since the early 2000s to move back and forth. They switched between races, moved from multiple races to a single race or back, or decided to add or drop Hispanic ethnicity from their identifiers on census forms.

Last year, a study showed that 1 in 16 people - or approximately 9.8 million of 162 million - who responded to both the 2000 and 2010 censuses gave different answers when it came to race and ethnicity. In addition, in the 2010 census, more than 21.7 million - at least 1 in 14 - went beyond the standard labels and wrote in such terms as "Arab," "Haitian," "Mexican" and "multiracial."

by Jesse J. Holland, AP |  Read more:

Image:Dan Pelle/AP

Justin Plakas
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Chambers Bay

[ed. This is going to be great!]

Chambers Bay is unknown by most, unproven to many, and undeniably a strange concoction. Why is it positioned to set so many U.S. Open records? The players have yet to tee off, but the 2015 U.S. Open, the first in the Pacific Northwest, is already making history. A decade ago the course, as improbable and unconventional as they come, didn't exist. Now it's hosting the U.S. Open? Inconceivable.

If it hasn't happened before in an Open, it's probably happening June 18-21 at Chambers Bay.

It's the first U.S. Open to be contested in a sand box. Chambers Bay lies in an old sand and gravel pit on the western edge of the Tacoma, Wash., suburb of University Place. It's a tilted bowl, open on the west, with railroad tracks and gorgeous Puget Sound beyond. To the east is a high, long cliff. Atop its rim is Grandview Drive, where rubberneckers can stand with binoculars and scout for Rory, Phil & Co. some 80 feet below. (...)

This will not be the first U.S. Open played on sandy soil. Shinnecock Hills on Long Island has been an Open site as far back as 1896, as recently as 2004 and will host again in 2018. But Shinnecock consists of holes that were staked along tree-dotted sand hills, following lines of least resistance. Chambers Bay was dotted with piles of mining spoils, free to be sifted, shifted and molded to creative whims. A sand box, in which 1.5 million cubic yards were pushed around. (...)

It's the first all-fescue U.S. Open Course. The fescue turf, ideal in a maritime climate, is common on the links of Scotland, Ireland and the English coastline, but not on courses in America.

Today, everything could be mowed at greens height if desired. For the Open, the highly contoured greens will be mowed at .18 inches, which will translate to a Stimpmeter reading of 12, and there will be noticeable grain. There will be a belt of fescue rough at about three to four inches (narrowing some of the widest fairways to 40 or 50 yards), then taller stuff farther out.

"The beauty of fine fescue, besides needing less water and less fertilization than other grasses, is that it's the least tacky grass I know of," Davis says. "You get a wonderful bounce on it." (...)

It's the first U.S. Open course to have holes that will alternate par. For the Open, Davis will convert the fourth, normally a par 5, into a par 4, so the course will play as a par 70. "It's a much more interesting drive zone when you move the tee up," he says.

Total yardage will vary every day. The maximum length is 7,940 yards, but for the Open, yardage will range from 7,200 to 7,700, depending on weather, wind conditions and tee and hole locations.

For a time, Davis toyed with the idea of playing the course as a par 71 on certain days and par 70 for other rounds because he was undecided on whether to play the first and 18th holes as long par 5s each day (par 71), or one of them as a par 4 (par 70). Then it occurred to him, because the two holes are parallel in opposite directions, he could alternate the par each day and still retain the overall par of 70.

"When we play the first hole as a par 4, 18 will be a par 5, and vice versa," Davis says. "Both holes are so neat architecturally, both as par 4s and par 5s. It speaks volumes for the incredible flexibility of the design."

The straightaway par-4 first hole becomes a dogleg-left par 5 from a new back tee, with different fairway slopes in separate landing areas. The 604-yard, par-5 18th has completely different fairway bunkering when played as a 525-yard par 4.

"I don't know which rounds we'll switch them," Davis says. "Would I rather have 18 as a par 4 or a par 5 on the final day? I don't know. If it's a par 5, there's a possibility of making history, making eagle or birdie to win the Open. That's never happened.

"But part of me says, Hey, this is the U.S. Open. It ought to be set up so a hard-earned par 4 wins it all. I've chewed on that over and over. I suspect we'll look at what the wind conditions will be the last couple of days, and decide then."

In recent years, Davis added a last-minute bunker on the 17th at Olympic in 2012 and turned the famed par-4 fifth at Pinehurst No. 2 into a par 5 last year. For Chambers Bay, he directed that a deep bunker be installed in the middle of the fairway about 120 yards short of the 18th green.

"When playing 18 as a par 5, there needed to be something in the lay-up area," he says. "The fairway was 85 yards wide in that second landing area. A guy could be blindfolded and couldn't miss the fairway. I didn't want to bastardize the hole by bringing in rough. So we suggested sticking something in the middle, so they'd have to play around, or short, or left, or right." A crew dug the six-foot-deep diagonal bunker where Davis wanted it, but he wanted something so deep even a great player couldn't reach the green. So the crew dug some more. The bunker is now 10 feet deep. Curiously, though Davis defends its placement and depth, he doesn't think it will see any action. "If there is one, single, solitary player in the U.S. Open in that bunker, I'll be amazed," he says. "But they're going to have to think about it. And that's the whole idea." Alfred Hitchcock called that sort of device a MacGuffin. Local caddies call it the Chambers Basement.  [ed. I've also heard it called the "Whine Cellar".]

by Ron Whitten, Golf Digest |  Read more:

Images: Chambers Bay and Golf Club Atlas

Not All Equal When It Comes To Water

Drought or no drought, Steve Yuhas resents the idea that it is somehow shameful to be a water hog. If you can pay for it, he argues, you should get your water.

People “should not be forced to live on property with brown lawns, golf on brown courses or apologize for wanting their gardens to be beautiful,” Yuhas fumed recently on social media. “We pay significant property taxes based on where we live,” he added in an interview. “And, no, we’re not all equal when it comes to water.”

Yuhas lives in the ultra-wealthy enclave of Rancho Santa Fe, a bucolic Southern California hamlet of ranches, gated communities and country clubs that guzzles five times more water per capita than the statewide average. In April, after Gov. Jerry Brown (D) called for a 25 percent reduction in water use, consumption in Rancho Santa Fe went up by 9 percent.

But a moment of truth is at hand for Yuhas and his neighbors, and all of California will be watching: On July 1, for the first time in its 92-year history, Rancho Santa Fe will be subject to water rationing.

“It’s no longer a ‘You can only water on these days’ ” situation, said Jessica Parks, spokeswoman for the Santa Fe Irrigation District, which provides water service to Rancho Santa Fe and other parts of San Diego County. “It’s now more of a ‘This is the amount of water you get within this billing period. And if you go over that, there will be high penalties.’ ”

So far, the community’s 3,100 residents have not felt the wrath of the water police. Authorities have issued only three citations for violations of a first round of rather mild water restrictions announced last fall. In a place where the median income is $189,000, where PGA legend Phil Mickelson once requested a separate water meter for his chipping greens, where financier Ralph Whitworth last month paid the Rolling Stones $2 million to play at a local bar, the fine, at $100, was less than intimidating.

All that is about to change, however. Under the new rules, each household will be assigned an essential allotment for basic indoor needs. Any additional usage — sprinklers, fountains, swimming pools — must be slashed by nearly half for the district to meet state-mandated targets.

Residents who exceed their allotment could see their already sky-high water bills triple. And for ultra-wealthy customers undeterred by financial penalties, the district reserves the right to install flow restrictors — quarter-size disks that make it difficult to, say, shower and do a load of laundry at the same time. (...)

“I call it the war on suburbia,” said Brett Barbre, who lives in the Orange County community of Yorba City, another exceptionally wealthy Zip code.

Barbre sits on the 37-member board of directors of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, a huge water wholesaler serving 17 million customers. He is fond of referring to his watering hose with Charlton Heston’s famous quote about guns: “They’ll have to pry it from my cold, dead hands.”

“California used to be the land of opportunity and freedom,” Barbre said. “It’s slowly becoming the land of one group telling everybody else how they think everybody should live their lives.”

Jurgen Gramckow, a sod farmer north of Los Angeles in Ventura County, agrees. He likens the freedom to buy water to the freedom to buy gasoline.

“Some people have a Prius; others have a Suburban,” Gramckow said. “Once the water goes through the meter, it’s yours.”

by Rob Kuznia, Washington Post |  Read more:

Image: Sandy Huffaker

Run Rabbit Run

[ed. Probably the coolest thing I've seen this morning (which, on most mornings, isn't saying much).]

Virtual Reality Headsets Raise Very Real Concerns

[ed. If you think cell phones are obnoxious and isolating (and they are), just wait. VR is going to have a massive impact on society.]

Every Friday, a dozen or so people strap on virtual reality headsets, log on to the Internet and do something that would normally require driving to a local multiplex: watch a movie with a bunch of strangers.

Their avatars all sit in the seats of a virtual movie theater, staring at a screen playing a movie from Netflix. The sound from the theater is so accurate that if participants munch potato chips into their microphones, it sounds as though it is emanating from their avatars.

“When all of a sudden 10 avatars turn around and look at you, you know you should be quiet,” said Eric Romo, the chief executive of AltspaceVR, a Silicon Valley start-up that organizes the virtual movie gatherings and other virtual reality events.

The ability of virtual reality to transport people to locales both exotic and ordinary, is well known. Yet how the medium will fit into people’s online and offline lives is a new frontier. (...)

That makes the thousands of developers and early adopters, who already have prototype virtual reality headsets, effectively lab rats for these devices. They’re the ones figuring out how to navigate their real-life surroundings when their vision of the real world is shut out.

They’re learning which virtual reality experiences are fun, which are creepy and which might make people nauseated from motion sickness.

Etiquette around social forms of virtual reality is already taking shape since this technology has the potential to turn some of the more noxious forms of online behavior into something far more menacing.

by Nick Wingfield, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Ramin Talaie

Social Fabric

Midway through his documentary television series All in the Best Possible Taste, the artist Grayson Perry visits a show home in a new residential estate in southeast England. The house is a full-scale version of the other homes available for purchase in the estate, furnished and decorated to give prospective buyers a sense of the living environment that could be theirs. The woman guiding Perry around explains that the house encapsulated a lifestyle that she felt could suit her own—so much so that she decided to buy the show home itself, and all of its contents (even the crackers in the cupboards). “It was like moving into a hotel,” she tells Perry. “All I brought was my handbag. It was all done.”

The scene exemplifies the notion of an aspirational purchase—buying into a decidedly middle-class neighborhood—but receives special focus in the show for what it says about taste. The choice to buy the fully decorated house over its identical but undecorated neighbor precludes the need for future taste decisions. Rather than coming to reflect the owner’s taste, the show home becomes the owner’s taste: a middle-class palate bought ready-made.

Perry’s artistic interests coalesce around how taste is informed by class, and his TV show is a kind of anthropological safari through the landscapes of Britain’s three taste “tribes”: working class, middle class, and upper class. As research, he trains his binoculars on rituals: primping for a night out at the social club in postindustrial Sunderland, sipping rosé while perusing Jamie Oliver kitchenwares, selecting the appropriate pink trousers for an after-polo reception. He is particularly interested in default choices, those positions and judgments made unconsciously—from hosting dinner parties and purchasing cars to simply having curtains. He doesn’t come down heavily on either side of the tastes he explores, but does critique close-mindedness and occasionally ridicules stuffy behavior. Perry’s aim is to push society to reflect on the motivations or pressures that produce their decisions. As he explains in the interview that follows, “I’m trying to do therapy on the whole society, by saying, ‘Here’s what you’re like. If you like it, great. If you don’t, you can change it. But if you don’t know that’s what’s going on, you’re stuck with it. You’re a victim of it.’” (...)

Guernica: Where does taste begin?

Grayson Perry: Well, taste is a phenomenon. Most of taste is unconscious—it comes from your upbringing, from your family, from your society, your gender, your race; it’s a melange of all those things. The basic premise of taste, as Stephen Bayley, the cultural critic, said, is that taste is that which does not alienate your peers. Most people want to fit in with their tribe in some way or another, so they give off signals, whether it’s with their clothes, their behavior, their car, their whatever, and gain status. Every tribe has a hierarchy, and that’s what taste is: it’s an unconscious display of who you are, and where you want to be. (...)

Guernica: Looking at the three class taste tribes you trace in the TV program (working, middle, upper), it struck me that working-class taste and upper-class taste share certain qualities—namely, a sense of nostalgia and holding on to a past identity—while middle-class taste seems to not.

Grayson Perry: There’s a desperation in middle-class people to try to be individual. I think it’s an illusion on the whole, because curiously they all end up being an individual in the same way. Because not many people are creative, really. They’re kind of individualistic but within a very narrow bandwidth of what is acceptable at the time in fashion, or what they’ve seen in magazines. Genuine maverick taste is quite rare. Say someone chooses their tattoo, right, they have a tattoo. They’re a groovy person and they have a tattoo. The real decision they made was to have the tattoo. It’s not what the tattoo is. All tattoos are basically the same. But it’s having the tattoo. They all mean the same thing, the tattoo. What is on the design is bollocks. It’s squiggly blue lines that you have on your arm.

It’s always the default position I’m interested in, the things that people do without considering it. The fact that they’ve chosen to have curtains. Middle-class people, in Britain, anyway, tend to be the intelligentsia; they’re well educated, they’re very aspirational, they’re very anxious because they’re looking down thinking, “Am I going to go that way?” or they’re looking up saying, “Oh, I’d quite like a bit of that action.” They’re the most self-conscious about it, and best informed.

Guernica: How conscious are domestic choices?

Grayson Perry: Your bobos [bourgeois-bohemians], they all agonize over their kitchen work surfaces, which is one of the epicenters of taste in the middle-class home. One woman told me, very proudly, that her kitchen work surfaces were recycled chemistry benches. And I thought, “Wow. That’s a cliché and a half to deal with.” She could name the paint shades in all her rooms as well. And the most middle-class moment was when we went up into her bedroom and I looked at the curtains, and they were sort of off-white sheet material, and she said, “Oh, they’re not curtains. They were dust cloths I had made into curtains.” And I said, “Wow, that’s the most middle-class thing I’ve ever heard. Not only are you using dust cloths as curtains, you told me you’re using dust cloths as curtains.”

Guernica: You note how a lot of effort goes into making aesthetic choices appear individual and distinct, when they are actually studiously self-conscious.

Grayson Perry: Self-consciousness, I’m very interested in that. To be creative, you need to be unselfconscious. It’s like the sound barrier when you’re an art student. You have to reach the terminal velocity where you go through the sound barrier of self-consciousness, and then pop out the other side where you’re confident enough to handle it. A lot of people never make it through and that’s a real block to being creative. You’ve got to not give a shit.

Guernica: Moments in your show convey self-righteousness in taste. How do people use taste to demonstrate their morality?

Grayson Perry: Well, the British middle class particularly want to appear good people. In the past they would have gone to church, or they would have done good works for charity, or whatever. Now, you do organic, and you recycle. Mainly it’s lip service to green issues. Because the greenest thing you can do is nothing. The greenest things you can do are: a) not have children, and b) don’t go anywhere and don’t buy anything. Of course that will be an anathema to the middle classes. So it’s a sort of superficial morality on the whole, having an allotment full of vegetables that you probably never get round to eating because there’ll be too many all at once.

Guernica: You make a distinction between displaying cultural capital and being showy with your money, but isn’t it all about consumption, fundamentally?

Grayson Perry: It’s all about status. Cultural capital is something you accrue, and it’s a subtle thing. Middle-class people in particular are more aware of it. They want the culture they consume to sort of rub off on them somehow. A big part of culture is to be seen to be consuming it.

by Henry Peck, Guernica |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

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All About Fish Sauce

The anchovy is not a universally loved fish. In fact, that may be understating the matter. A lot of people hate the pungent, bottom-of-the-ocean flavor of anchovies, and they're very vocal about it. The very suggestion of anchovies on a pizza may make them dump the Italian take-out menu and switch to Chinese instead.

Of course, people who love anchovies are often just as passionately outspoken. The humble anchovy is food that divides a room. I find myself in the odd position of having crossed from one side to the other, and all because of a sauce. I used to hate anchovies, but I'm a convert, thanks to fish sauce.

Actually, my conversion started with Worcestershire sauce, that divine savory liquor of vinegar, tamarind, and, yes, anchovy. As a lad, I liked to put Worcestershire sauce on almost everything, from shepherd's pie to cheese on toast. I had no idea that it contained the hated anchovy, and my world almost fell apart when I discovered the terrible truth, cunningly hidden in plain sight on the ingredients on the back of the label.

I didn't give up Worcestershire sauce, but I also didn't rethink my position on anchovies. It was only when I tried to make my first Thai green curry that I really had to give the matter serious thought.

Thai cooking relies heavily on fish sauce, as do the cuisines of Vietnam, Indonesia and southern China. Called nam pla in Thai, fish sauce is the seasoning that provides much of the saltiness in Thai recipes. It also has a very short ingredients list. It's essentially just anchovies and salt. It can be made with other fish, but it's unusual. On a visit to my local Asian supermarket I saw bottles labeled with pictures of squid, crab, and whole cornucopias of aquatic life, but they all contained the same ingredients: anchovies and salt.

Nam pla is made by layering those two ingredients in big barrels and leaving it to ferment under the hot sun over the course of several months. The anchovies break down in their own juices, and the resulting liquid is extracted, filtered, sweetened with a little sugar, and bottled.

by Andrew Wheeler, Serious Eats |  Read more:

Image: Max Falkowitz

Georgetown Carnival (Seattle) June, 2015

[ed. What a great weekend, what a great beer-soaked party in Seattle's historic Georgetown District, next to the old Ranier brewery. I especially enjoyed the power tool races with hacked-up skill and band saws racing side by side down two narrow tracks, the loser getting bashed by one of two large mallets at the finish line. Five music stages. Belly dancers. Gymnasts. Lowriders. Food and vendors. Much more. A wonderful time had by all.]
photos: markk

Machine Dreams

There is a shrine inside Hewlett-Packard’s headquarters in Palo Alto, in the heart of Silicon Valley. At one edge of HP’s research building, two interconnected rooms with worn midcentury furniture, vacant for decades, are carefully preserved. From these offices, William Hewlett and David Packard led HP’s engineers to invent breakthrough products, like the 40-pound, typewriter-size programmable calculator launched in 1968.

In today’s era of smartphones and cloud computing, HP’s core products could also look antiquated before long. Revenue and profit have slid significantly in recent years, pitching the company into crisis. HP is sustained mostly by sales of servers, printers, and ink (its PCs and laptops contribute less than one-fifth of total profits). But businesses have less need for servers now that they can turn to cloud services run by companies like Amazon—which buy their hardware from cheaper suppliers than HP. Consumers and businesses rely much less on printers than they once did and don’t expect to pay much for them.

HP has shed over 40,000 jobs since 2012, and it will split into two smaller but similarly troubled companies later this year (an operation that will itself cost almost $2 billion). HP Inc. will sell printers and PCs; Hewlett Packard Enterprise will offer servers and information technology services to corporations. That latter company will depend largely on a division whose annual revenue dropped by more than 6 percent between 2012 and 2014. Earnings shrank even faster, by over 20 percent. IBM, HP’s closest rival, sold off its server business to China’s Lenovo last year under similar pressures.

And yet, in the midst of this potentially existential crisis, HP Enterprise is working on a risky research project in hopes of driving a remarkable comeback. Nearly three-quarters of the people in HP’s research division are now dedicated to a single project: a powerful new kind of computer known as “the Machine.” It would fundamentally redesign the way computers function, making them simpler and more powerful. If it works, the project could dramatically upgrade everything from servers to smartphones—and save HP itself.

“People are going to be able to solve problems they can’t solve today,” says Martin Fink, HP’s chief technology officer and the instigator of the project. The Machine would give companies the power to tackle data sets many times larger and more complex than those they can handle today, he says, and perform existing analyses perhaps hundreds of times faster. That could lead to leaps forward in all kinds of areas where analyzing information is important, such as genomic medicine, where faster gene-sequencing machines are producing a glut of new data. The Machine will require far less electricity than existing computers, says Fink, making it possible to slash the large energy bills run up by the warehouses of computers behind Internet services. HP’s new model for computing is also intended to apply to smaller gadgets, letting laptops and phones last much longer on a single charge.

It would be surprising for any company to reinvent the basic design of computers, but especially for HP to do it. It cut research jobs as part of downsizing efforts a decade ago and spends much less on research and development than its competitors: $3.4 billion in 2014, 3 percent of revenue. In comparison, IBM spent $5.4 billion—6 percent of revenue—and has a much longer tradition of the kind of basic research in physics and computer science that creating the new type of computer will require. For Fink’s Machine dream to be fully realized, HP’s engineers need to create systems of lasers that fit inside -fingertip-size computer chips, invent a new kind of operating system, and perfect an electronic device for storing data that has never before been used in computers.

Pulling it off would be a virtuoso feat of both computer and corporate engineering.

by Tom Simonite, MIT Technology Review |  Read more:

Image: Leo Espinosa

Bold in Business

Just as an asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs that ruled the Earth and made way for small furry mammals, a new wave of planetary disruptions is about to occur. The new asteroid is called “exponential technology.” It is going to wipe out industries in a similar manner to the rock which fell on Earth during the Cretaceous Period.

That is the premise of a new book by Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler, Bold: How to Go Big, Create Wealth and Impact the World. It makes bold predictions and teaches entrepreneurs how to thrive in the same way as our mammalian ancestors: by being nimble and resilient.

In their previous book, Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think, Diamandis and Kotler discussed how advancing technologies are making it possible to solve problems that have long plagued humanity, such as disease, hunger, and shortages of energy. The authors analyzed the exponential progress of fields such as computing, medicine, 3D printing, robotics, and artificial intelligence and postulated that shortages of material goods and knowledge would soon be a thing of the past; that humanity is heading into an amazing era of abundance.

As most people still are, I used to be pessimistic about the future. I feared overpopulation; worldwide shortages of food, water, and energy; pandemics and disease; and a bankruptcy of our health care and social welfare systems. Then, about three years ago, I joined the faculty of what is effectively an “abundance think-tank,” Singularity University, which had been founded by Diamandis and legendary futurist Ray Kurzweil. I learned that the future that Diamandis described in Abundance is actually coming true — and doing so faster than we would expect.

But I have also come to fear that Singularity University’s futurists are overlooking some of the risks in exponential technologies, particularly the legal and ethical dilemmas they are creating. As well, automation and industry disruption will have many negative social consequences — such as the elimination of the vast majority of jobs. Humans may have their physical needs met and live healthier and longer lives, but what about their social and professional needs? This is what I would criticize Bold for: it looks only on the bright side. But I know that in their hearts Diamandis and my futurist colleagues believe that mankind will rise to the occasion and better itself; that it will avert the catastrophes.

I am counting on their being right.

The key premise of Bold –that entrepreneurs can solve global-scale problems — is based on a framework called the “six Ds of exponentials:” digitalization, deception, disruption, demonetization, dematerialization, and democratization. These are a chain reaction of technological progress, the path that technology takes, to create the upheaval — and the opportunity.

by Vivek Wadhwa, Washington Post | Read more:
Image: Simon & Schuster

photo: markk

Brenda Cablayan, Up Alakea
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Let's Get It On: The Race for the World's Best Condom

Brendan Weinhold and Christina Pederson began experimenting with new kinds of condoms four years ago, when they saw an ad on Craigslist for couples to test contraceptives for cold hard cash.

Get paid to have sex? How could you say no?

“If anything was difficult, it was having to schedule sex,” Brendan says. “You know: ‘Ugh, we have to do it now.’ Filling in a calendar was bothersome.”

After sex, they had to fill in paperwork, recording all sorts of details for the California Family Health Council (CFHC), America’s top testing facility for experimental condoms: whether they were both sober, which partner put the condom on, what positions they took, if the condom made any noise, if pubic hair snagged, how long they lasted, if either had an orgasm (and how many), if anyone felt pain. Plus the obvious: how far the condom came down the penis. “It was a bit strange writing down the amount of time we had sex for. ‘Are we good at having sex or bad at having sex?’” Christina says. Was the paperwork a mood-killer? “Somewhat, but it’s not the worst mood-killer we’ve encountered,” Brendan says.

Christina and Brendan, both 33, live in a house share in LA: she is an as-yet unpublished novelist, he is trying to make it as an actor. Christina had previously volunteered as a subject in a medical study that required her to lie in a hospital bed, donating blood, receiving intravenous drugs. “That made me feel like much more of a lab rat,” she says. “This time I felt as if I was actually doing something. It felt as if our opinions actually mattered.”

Brendan and Christina are part of an accelerating race for better 21st-century contraception, perhaps among the closest to understanding what future safe sex might look and feel like. The bottom line is, there are problems with the condom: while it is 98% effective when used correctly, it is hugely unpopular – worn by an estimated 5% of men worldwide. This is a fatal flaw in developing countries, where an HIV diagnosis remains a death sentence, due to the high cost of antiretroviral drugs. Condom design, almost unchanged in 120 years, is ripe for a makeover.

In 2013, Bill and Melinda Gates announced that their Foundation was making condom innovation a priority (alongside toilets, vaccines and neonatal care): they offered a $100,000 grant to any team with a strong proposal for a “next generation condom that significantly preserves or enhances pleasure, in order to improve uptake and regular use”.

The Foundation received more than 800 submissions, which in 2013 they narrowed down to 11 winners, announcing a further 11 winners of the grant in 2014. The successful proposals ranged from those using Nobel prizewinning materials (graphene) to those with built-in applicators or lubricant. The Gates Foundation also gave money to simple behavioural studies, and to a shrink-to-fit condom dreamed up by the CFHC. Those proposals are now able to apply for phase two funding of up to $1m each – the winners will be announced later this year, with only a handful likely to be successful.

Meanwhile many of them are in the testing phase.

by Zoe Cormier, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: Steve Schofield

See and Be Seen

More intimate than underpants precisely because they are plain for all to see, eyeglasses are no mere detail of costume. Acting as a mask that fuses with the features, glasses serve as a spotlight or a proscenium arch or a stage for the soul in the theater of everyday life. The bespectacled face asks the world to see it a certain way by telling the world something about how it is seen.

Practical people, choosing the unassuming oblong frames that are the plain vanilla of this realm, declare their contentment with presenting the illusion of a neutral perspective. But glasses have steadily evolved from strict practicality to become spectacles in themselves. The dominant models of the day are “library glasses,” with big lenses mounted in bold plastic frames made of cellulose acetate. On the face of a fashion executive about town, such glasses dare party photographers to ignore galactic glances designed to be seen. In postgame interviews, basketball stars flash frames that, whether fitted with prescription lenses or nonprescription lenses or no lenses at all, broadcast an eagerness to discuss strategy.

There is a generational swing in this motion away from the understated titanium frames — light and strong, hypoallergenic and uncorroding — that let baby boomers feel they were aging gracefully into reading fine print that had grown fuzzy. The low-key futurism of titanium, with its promise of better living through metallurgy, is out of step with the future that has arrived, where this foundational piece of wearable technology is styled to evoke a plastic past of indistinct vintage. People who wear large lenses are announcing that they do not share the cast of mind suggested by small lenses that pierce and finely peer. The little rimless numbers of the sort once favored by Steve Jobs are precision tools conspicuous only in the elegance with which they reject excess. The new glasses — outsize and omnivorous — reject that rejection.

Glasses have long been understood as signs of seriousness; this holds true for squarish metal rims bespeaking Midwestern plain-dealing and round owlish ones telegraphing bankerly diligence. The subgenre of seriousness now in vogue seems interrogatory to a combative degree. The assertive new glasses pre-empt the gibe of “four eyes” by saying, I know I am, but what are you? (...)

If we had to choose one moment when eyeglasses entered the gravitational field of fashion, it would be the day, early in the 1930s, that a Manhattan window dresser named Altina Sanders was bored by the dreary sameness of the wares displayed by a neighboring optician. When she filed a patent for a “new, original, ornamental design for a spectacle frame” that swept up at the corners, she had a harlequin mask in mind. The term “cat’s eye” caught on. The woman wearing them was never entirely without a smile.

When I visited the New York headquarters of the mostly online eyewear store Warby Parker, one of its founders showed me an old photo of Charlotte Rampling that served as the company’s muse and in-house icon. Behind lenses as large as coasters, grinning with a wholesome sense of mischief, the actress is glancing down a shoulder and out of the frame, warm with expectation. Warby Parker presents this picture to indicate not merely an ideal of design but also an incarnation of brand essence. The buzzwords are “approachable” and “accessible,” and the demeanor is a major mode of today’s eyeglasses: open and guileless and actively inquisitive, adventuresome as a critter out of Japanese animation.

The opposite face of the going style wears a glamorous glower. These glasses train a hard glare of sophistication, and they proudly invite admiring countersurveillance, and en masse they can be a bit much to bear. A nearsighted friend of mine has begun setting his acetate frames aside in self-contempt, not wanting to be part of a demographic that would have him as a member. But he wears them when coaching his son’s Little League team, an obligation that brings him into contact with adults from other cultural niches. They’ve got him pegged on the basis of his specs. Imagine a rival coach who has emerged from the white shell of an S.U.V. and a long gestation in an old school of machismo, and who says, with a socially acceptable jeer: “You know who you look like? Elvis Costello.” It’s certainly a more elegant formulation than “Die, yuppie scum.”

by Troy Patterson, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Marilyn Monroe, 20th Century Fox

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