Typefacing The World Together

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Font nerds, rejoice: the Universal Typeface Experiment, launched by the pen company BIC, collects data around the world for “a constantly evolving, algorithmically produced font created by averaging hundreds of thousands of handwriting samples”:

Anyone with a touchscreen can help shape the Universal Typeface by linking their phone or tablet to the website and writing directly on the touchscreen – the lettering is quickly transferred to the Universal Typeface algorithm. As of this writing, more than 400,000 samples have been collected from around the world, and the resulting alphabet is … well, sort of boring. It turns out that averaging thousands of authentic expressions of individuality yields something that looks like a grade school writing sample. Contrasting the left-handed average with the right-handed average and gender averages and comparing industry averages—what’s a broker’s “B” look like compared to an artist’s?—reveals disappointingly similar results.

If there’s a lesson here, it’s that we’re not so different after all. That said, the collected samples allow for some fun comparisons. A more dramatic variance can be seen, for example, when the averages are broken down by nationality, because there are many fewer samples per country. It’s interesting to see the narrow “B” of Saudi Arabia versus the wide, curvy “B” of Romania.

(Image via Smithsonian and BIC)

When Your Heart Goes Out

Kirsten Weir looks at the very real phenomenon of deadly grief:

Studies from around the world have confirmed that people have an increased risk of dying in the weeks and months after their spouses pass away. In 2011, researchers from Harvard University and the University of Yamanashi, Tokyo pooled the results of 15 different studies, with data on more than 2.2 million people. They estimated a 41 percent increase in the risk of death in the first six months after losing a spouse.

The effect didn’t just apply to the elderly. People under 65 were as likely to die in the months following a spouse’s death as those over 65. The magnitude of the “widowhood effect” was much stronger for men than it was for women. … While women might be more resilient to losing a spouse, however, they aren’t immune to the deadly effects of grief. A 2013 study of more than 69,000 women in the United States found that a mother’s risk of dying increased 133 percent in the two years following the death of a child.

Weir goes on to describe “broken heart syndrome,” also known as stress-induced cardiomyopathy:

It appears to be brought on by a sudden surge in stress hormones including epinephrine (more commonly known as adrenaline) and its chemical cousin norepinephrine. That rush of hormones is a normal, healthy response to extreme stress. It fuels the body’s famed “fight or flight” response that prepares you for dealing with major threats. But in some cases the sudden flood of hormones essentially shocks the heart, preventing it from pumping normally. On an X-ray or ultrasound, the heart’s left ventricle appears enlarged and misshapen. The unusual shape is said to resemble a Japanese octopus trap called a tako-tsubo, hence the syndrome’s other alias: Takotsubo cardiomyopathy. The syndrome doesn’t permanently damage the heart’s muscle tissue, and patients often make a full recovery. …  Still, the condition can be deadly if the misshapen heart can’t pump enough blood to the rest of the body.

Earlier this year, a study identified over 20,000 cases of the syndrome across the US. The results found that they were most common in areas affected by natural disasters:

Missouri and Vermont possessed the highest number of reported cases, and the latter, with 380 cases per million residents, had more than double most other states. The data came from the same year Hurricane Irene wreaked the worst havoc Vermont had seen in decades. Similarly, the “cluster” in Missouri occurred near the site of 2011’s massive Joplin tornado. And while there might have been a number of other factors affecting these results, the general research takeaway suggests natural disasters can strongly contribute to cardiomyopathy.

A Deep Sea Delicacy

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Food trendsetters, Franz Lidz observes, are looking past sea urchins’ spiny exterior:

In the brave new world of fine dining, the roe of the humble urchin—a shellfish once cursed as a pest to lobstermen, mocked as “whore’s eggs” and routinely smashed with hammers or tossed overboard as unsalable “bycatch”—is a prized and slurpily lascivious delicacy. Unlike caviar, which is the eggs of fish, the roe of the urchin is its wobbly gonads. Every year more than 100,000 tons of them slide down discerning throats, mainly in France and Japan, where the chunks of salty, grainy custard are known as uni and believed to be an uplifting tonic, if not an aphrodisiac. The Japanese exchange urchins as gifts during New Year celebrations.

Lidz profiles Roderick Sloan, who harvests the creatures off the coast of Norway. According to one chef, Sloan’s plunder tastes “like you’re making out with the sea.” Updates from several readers:

My wife eats sea urchins every year when we go to Greece.  Her uncle collects them from the ocean in front of her father’s house there.  Just a little lemon and olive oil goes into the sea urchin and then you scoop it out with fresh bread.

But my sea urchin story has nothing to do with eating them.  My wife used to have warts on the bottom of her foot.

She didn’t deal with them quickly and picked at them (which you are not supposed to do) and when she finally did nothing worked to get rid of them.  She tried the acid pads, she greecewent to the doctor and got them frozen she even tried something where they infected her foot with yeast.  I wanted her to deal with it because I got them a couple of time on my foot from her.  (I dealt with them quickly using the acid pads from the drug store and got rid of them).  Her doctor told her that surgery would be the only way to get rid of them and that she would be on crutches for months they were in so deep.

Well, one day in Greece she stepped on a sea urchin.  Like I said, they live in the ocean right below the house in Greece where we swim in the afternoons.  It was painful and many a spike had to be tweezed out of her foot. Still, we couldn’t get all of them out (they break off when you try to pull them out with the tweezers). A month later she noticed that the warts were gone.  She told her doctor who was equally amazed. I don’t know how or why but stepping on a sea urchin killed off the warts on her foot!

The attached photo is of the cove were we swim in the afternoons where my wife stepped on the sea urchin.  Look for the house that is closest to where I took the photo – a white blob with a red door facing the camera – then look to the left and slightly up the hill: that’s my father-in-law’s house.  It’s our P-town.

A less happy story:

Years ago I spent six months in Cairo, Egypt, having been hired by an Egyptian family to help with the rehabilitation of their brain-injured son. We spent the hot month of August  at a villa on the Mediterranean coast just west of Alexandria. They knew my fondness for seafood (I’m from North Carolina), so one morning they brought me a tray of freshly caught sea urchins with some cut lemons. After they showed me which part of the strange interior to eat, I consumed the entire tray.

Almost exactly one month later, I came down with a raging case of hepatitis A and spent the next month in bed. My employer (my Egyptian patient’s father) told me that I must have eaten some bad street food in Cairo. I quickly thought back and remembered the sea urchins. I later learned that raw sewage was being released into the sea at Alexandria. I never told the family that in their effort to give me a treat, they had unwittingly fed me the contaminated urchins and nearly destroyed my liver!

Meanwhile, another recommends for stepping on urchins:

Have someone urinate on the wound. No really. It softens the spines and allows you to pull them out. I guess you can use vinegar if you’re not into golden showers, but on a beach far from civilization, it might be the only option.

(Top photo of sea urchin served at the Hungry Cat, a restaurant in Santa Barbara, via Roger Braunstein)

Employed At The Hip

Kate Losse worries about what lurks behind the cool amenities of Silicon Valley workplaces, like cafeterias, craft beer on tap, log cabin-style offices, and more:

Of course, the remaking of the contemporary tech office into a mixed work-cum-leisure space is not actually meant to promote leisure. Instead, the work/leisure mixing that takes place in the office mirrors what happens across digital, social and professional spaces. Work has seeped into our leisure hours, making the two tough to distinguish.

And so, the white-collar work-life blend reaches its logical conclusion with the transformation of modern luxury spaces such as airport lounges into spaces that look much like the offices from which the technocrat has arrived. Perhaps to secure the business of the new moneyed tech class, the design of the new Centurion Lounge for American Express card members draws from the same design palette as today’s tech office: reclaimed-wood panels, tree-stump stools, copious couches and a cafeteria serving kale salad on bespoke ceramic plates. In these lounges, the blurring of recreation and work becomes doubly disconcerting for the tech employee. Is one headed out on vacation or still at the office – and is there a difference?

Let Them Sip Lattes

Anna North challenges the myth of a latte-drinking elite:

Kyla Wazana Tompkins, a professor of English and gender and women’s studies who’s a former food journalist and the author of “Racial Indigestion: Eating Bodies in the 19th Century,” told Op-Talk that “the latte, while it may be attached on a certain level to too much upper-class food knowledge and pretension, it really is no longer an upper-class drink.” She explained: “No matter how many kale salads Starbucks puts in their case, Starbucks is a fast-food purveyor.” The latte, she argued, “is a high-calorie food that’s being pushed in an industrialized way largely to working-class people.” And, she added, “it’s important to think about the explosion of all of these industrialized lattes, all these frozen lattes, all the Frappuccinos, as links to a larger problem of creating cheap, high-calorie, low-nutrition food for working-class people.”

Making latte seem upper class, though, may be to its purveyors’ advantage: “The more that the latte can be attached to expressing a kind of elite class or race or gendered identity, the more profitable it is, no matter how many billions of them get sold by Tim Hortons or at your local gas station.”

The Secrets Of Extreme Longevity

… are well-kept. Researchers are still trying to figure out what supercentenarians, or people over 110 years old, have in common:

Supercentenarians come from diverse occupations and social backgrounds. Some drink and smoke, while others abstain from the partying lifestyle; some are religious, others atheists; some have rich networks of family and friends, others are virtually on their own. While centenarians tend to cluster in Sardinia, Italy, and Okinawa, Japan, supercentenarians, on the other hand, have no significant association with any particular geographic area. … But as both [Gerontology Research Group co-founder L. Stephen] Coles’ and [professor Thomas] Perls’ studies on supercentenarians confirm, the one thing that nearly all supercentenarians do have in common is that they have a history of long-lived close relatives. Unlike average longevity, extreme longevity, it seems, largely comes down to genes. “Aging,” Perls says, “is an incredibly heterogeneous trait.”

As he explains, things like diet, exercise, lifestyle and healthcare seem to play a huge role in whether or not someone makes it to their 80s, but by the time they reach their 90s and beyond, those factors become less important. “About 70 percent of average aging is in your hands with health-related behaviors,” Perls says. “But if you get beyond 100, the tables turn and it’s more like 70 percent genetic and 30 percent behaviors.” Women, too, have an obvious edge in this process—female supercentenarians outnumber males about ten-to-one—although scientists have not figured out just why this is so.

The Gerontology Research Group maintains Table E, an online database of supercentenarians, here.

The Best Of The Dish This Weekend

Germany Fans Watch 2014 FIFA World Cup Final

What Netanyahu really thinks:

“I think the Israeli people understand now what I always say: that there cannot be a situation, under any agreement, in which we relinquish security control of the territory west of the River Jordan.”

David Horovitz spells out what this means:

Not relinquishing security control west of the Jordan, it should be emphasized, means not giving a Palestinian entity full sovereignty there. It means not acceding to Mahmoud Abbas’s demands, to Barack Obama’s demands, to the international community’s demands. This is not merely demanding a demilitarized Palestine; it is insisting upon ongoing Israeli security oversight inside and at the borders of the West Bank. That sentence, quite simply, spells the end to the notion of Netanyahu consenting to the establishment of a Palestinian state. A less-than-sovereign entity? Maybe, though this will never satisfy the Palestinians or the international community. A fully sovereign Palestine? Out of the question.

The “peace-process” is and always was a sham. Greater Israel, if Netanyahu and his supporters have their way, will exist for ever. It seems to me that this is a fact that American policy should not have to absorb.

It was a shockingly beautiful weekend up here on Cape Cod – and I spent much of it playing with my dogs. The Dish was in a very upbeat mood as well: from Linklater’s remarkable new meditation on time and life to the truly promising possibilities of cognitive behavioral therapy; from Oliver Sacks’s LSD joys to Christopher Isherwood’s epiphany of awareness; from a celebration of the beauty and depth of the Latin Mass to two poems in awe of the English countryside in the summer.

Two more: the Christian-Buddhist meditations of Rowan Williams; and the deeper atheism of Friedrich Nietzsche.

The most popular post of the weekend was The Revenge Doctrine, Ctd, followed by Psyched About CBT.

See you in the morning.

(Photo: German fans celebrate as they watch the 2014 FIFA World Cup Finals at a nightclub on July 13, 2014 in Palma de Mallorca, Spain. By David Ramos/Getty Images.)

Quote For The Day II

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“My first words of my impression of being on the surface of the Moon that just came to my mind was ‘Magnificent desolation.’ The magnificence of human beings, humanity, Planet Earth, maturing the technologies, imagination and courage to expand our capabilities beyond the next ocean, to dream about being on the Moon, and then taking advantage of increases in technology and carrying out that dream – achieving that is magnificent testimony to humanity. But it is also desolate – there is no place on earth as desolate as what I was viewing in those first moments on the Lunar Surface.

Because I realized what I was looking at, towards the horizon and in every direction, had not changed in hundreds, thousands of years. Beyond me I could see the moon curving away – no atmosphere, black sky. Cold. Colder than anyone could experience on Earth when the sun is up- but when the sun is up for 14 days, it gets very, very hot. No sign of life whatsoever.

That is desolate. More desolate than any place on Earth,” – Buzz Aldrin, responding to a Redditor in an AMA this week.

(Image of lunar panorama via NASA/GSFC)

Birth Of A Damnation

Surveying the history of ideas about Hell, Kathryn Gin Lum looks back to a time when Americans seemed especially prone to question its existence:

By the time of the American Revolution in the late 18th century, colonists were arguing not just over the wisdom of waging war against England, but also over the justness of eternal punishment. Attracted by Enlightenment ideas, some members of the founding generation critiqued the British monarchy and the Calvinist God as tyrannical dictators both. As Jefferson put it: ‘It would be more pardonable to believe in no god at all, than to blaspheme him by the atrocious attributes of Calvin.’ Some freethinkers departed from the concept of hell as literal and eternal fire and brimstone in favour of a temporary hell where individuals would be punished in proportion to their crimes before being admitted to heaven. Others abandoned hell entirely, arguing that a loving and merciful God would save all of creation for heavenly bliss.

Why belief in Hell endured – and still remains the majority belief in the United States:

[I]n the new, monarchless US, defenders of hell argued that the threat of eternal punishment was necessary to ensure the morality of citizens. Even a temporary hell, they claimed, would give humans leave to commit socially harmful transgressions, from lying to cheating to murder, since they would still eventually end up in heaven after paying for their crimes. Indeed, the social argument in favour of eternal hell anticipated the arguments we hear today in favour of the death penalty. Both are supposed to serve as ultimate deterrents against crime.

Recent Dish on Hell here and here.

Watching The End Times In Primetime

Matthew Paul Turner unpacks the peculiar theology informing the new HBO show The Leftovers, which is premised on the sudden disappearance of 2% of the world’s population:

Believe it or not, the Rapture, as many evangelicals understand it today, is an idea that’s less than 200 years old, one part of an eschatology invented in the 1830s by John Nelson Darby, a British Bible teacher and devout member of the Plymouth Brethren. As a theologian, Darby constructed an entire Biblical interpretation known as Dispensationalism, an evangelical futurist expounding that, among other things, suggested that God’s relationship with humanity varied according to dispensations, or periods in history.

According to Darby, God’s epic timetable—from Adam and Eve to the apocalyptic end—is split up into seven non-uniform eras. For instance, Darby’s first era—the dispensation of innocence—started with Adam and Eve and lasted only as long as the first biblical pair lived in the Garden of Eden. The second era—the dispensation of conscience—began right after God evicted Adam and Eve from the Garden and ended when  Cain murdered Abel. Darby said the sixth era—the dispensation of grace—started with the crucifixion of Jesus and would not end until Jesus rescued all Christians from earth, making the way clear for the Great Tribulation—seven years of torment and pestilence—to begin.

After watching the pilot episode, however, Brandon Ambrosino picks up on the nuances of the story being told:

[A]s [series creator Tom] Perrotta has insisted, his rapture isn’t the Christian one. Yes, he said, people will use the word “rapture” because it’s the one they’re familiar with when it comes to explaining mass disappearances. But he hopes Leftovers is able to “disconnect [the rapture] from its religious context,” which he thinks is too “purposeful and clear,” and lacking in “nuance and grief.”

After watching the pilot, I can see that Perrotta was true to his word: his series is not about the rapture that Christians have been obsessing over for a century or two. For that matter, The Leftovers isn’t even a show about a rapture — it’s a show about loss. Which is to say, it’s not a show about an event, but a show about the people left in the wake of that event. As Perrotta explained to the Times, that is a universal theme that should resonate with both religious and non-religious viewers: “We’re always being left behind, we’re always living in a world where there are these spaces where people we knew and loved used to be.”

Still, the religious — and, in my opinion, deeply biblical — influence of the narrative is still lurking throughout the show. In some moments, this influence is blatant, in other moments it’s merely winked at.