Month: September 2010

by Zoe Pollock

"Reality" can be a precarious thing these days, but it doesn't stop us from looking for it on television, even in the darkest of settings. In an appreciated blast from the past, Lapham's Quarterly excerpts a voice in time – Edward Jurist, television writer and producer on various TV quiz shows, including Quiz Kids and $64,000 Challenge, testifying in Washington on rigged games:

Mr. Lishman: Were the contestants given the questions and answers in advance of the program?

Mr. Jurist: Not to my knowledge.

Mr. Lishman: What type of assistance was given?

Mr. Jurist: May I start from a beginning point?

Mr. Lishman: Yes sir.

Mr. Jurist: Every effort was made to control the shows.

Mr. Lishman: What do you mean by “control”?

Mr. Jurist: Everything that happened on the show happened according to the desires of the producer. That was the aim. It mostly succeeded. Sometimes it failed. Primary procedure was to find out what people knew and frame questions accordingly.

The second procedure, to “inculcate,” is a word I like to use, the people with information you thought they ought to have in such a way that they ideally were not aware you were doing it. That would be, I would say, the extent on those other shows.

by Zoe Pollock

Jessa Crispin wants to live the romantic European city life, but can't deny her crazy Kansas genes and the pressures to radically go off the grid. Two books help her find the middle ground:

Real life is glacial. But it does actually require you to start somewhere. I took comfort in The Urban Homestead by Kelly Coyne and Erik Knutzen because it actually tells you how to start. They should sell these books packaged together. Once Radical Homemakers makes you suicidal, The Urban Homestead will show you what to do to put down the razor blades. It knows you probably don't have parents who own a farm you can go live on. It is more excited, less political. Like, look at all this fun stuff you can do: Build a garden, even in your window. Or go solar, or keep worms under your sink to help compost your food and make your potted herbs stop hating you so much. And it offers you this life in the city. Where they have opera. But you need both books. You need that deep unsettling, that panicked response, that moment when you say aloud to the book "Oh go fuck yourself," because otherwise it's not going to take.

I have my to-do list. It now involves worms. And maybe moving out of my apartment, now that I know having a place to at least grow a couple of food plants is important to me. It's going to be a long road, but halfway between here and that Kansan place.

As someone who used to keep a worm bin in the corner after my urban farming brother mailed them to me for Hanukkah, I can relate to Crispin's love of both worlds and trying to keep a foot in each. My boyfriend insisted we give the worms up at the new apartment, but alas, not before I got worm juice poured down my leg while transporting them to the new home of a friend. But still, worms are cool! They produced the most beautiful dirt I've ever seen in my life.

 

Image: John Glenn, Mercury – February 1962

by Zoe Pollock

NASA has added over 50 years of photos to Flickr's public photography archive, The Commons. Elsewhere around the universe, Wired is featuring a pretty sharp collection of Saturn pictures from this summer.

(Hat tip: Laughing Squid)

by Zoe Pollock

Evan Andrews catalogs the top 10 lost technologies, from the Roman birth control herb Silphium to that "je ne sais quoi" sound of a Stradivari violin.

(Hat tip: Kottke)

by Conor Friedersdorf

A reader writes:

I'm a bankruptcy and debtor/creditor rights lawyer, concentrating primarily on the debtor side, specifically consumer and small business debtors.  And I've never been busier. In 2008 and 2009, I joked, in a gallows humor sort of way, that despite being a liberal Democrat,  I was one of the few people in America to benefit from the economic policies of George Bush.

I'm not joking anymore, and I'm not sparing Obama my anger.  I am sick of seeing people in their 70's and 80's having to file bankruptcy. I am sick of seeing people trying to make sense of the awful clusterfuck that is the HAMP program, a program that was billed as a way for people to save their houses but has not worked, mostly because it was designed not to work. I am sick of the fact that this administration could have pushed for cramdown of residential mortgages, allowing modification of some of these awful loans in bankruptcy court, but had no political will to do so. (And let's not even talk about BAPCPA, the bankruptcy "reform" act of 2005, a bill pushed by our now vice-president, Joe Biden, which made my job needlessly more complex and increased the costs to consumers who are, you know, broke and filing bankruptcy.)

I don't mean to give too gloomy a patina to my job. I like being able to take the burden off a struggling individual or couple's shoulders.  And by and large the bankruptcy bar where I practice (Central and Eastern PA) consists of pretty congenial, reasonable folk.  But the last few years have radicalized me, and angered me, and I don't see things–or me–getting calmer any time soon.

by Conor Friedersdorf

A reader writes:

One of the things I find fascinating now that I'm part of it, is how unaware people are of the fields of Remote Sensing and Geography. You see photos like NASA's of Pakistan before and after the flood and don't really think about where those come from. It wasn't a happy coincidence that provided those photos, or NASA having to turn on the camera deliberately and flying the Satellite over to take a look at things. The fact is there's a fairly substantial number of satellites whipping around the Earth right now continuously taking pictures of it and cataloging the data. The larger problem for the NASA people would be sorting through all that data to find a pictures relatively free of clouds and hopefully from the same sensor at comparable angles, and figuring out how to adjust it into a normal color image. Basically all the effort involved would be going towards making it look good. I just find this interesting in the context of all the paranoia that you hear being tossed around these days, because we quite literally are watching you.

Some mitigating factors: getting a pixel size of about 3 feet square along the ground is considered pretty high resolution in the scientific field, and the pixels can in fact get a big as a square half a mile to a side. We are really much more interested in precisely measuring the spectrum of light being reflected rather than trying to write computer algorithms that can tell us if we're looking at a tree or a house based off it's shape, or worse, actually having to look at the pictures ourselves, so it's not like we're going to catch you nude sunbathing in your back yard. What we might be able to do is tell you whether you've been watering your yard enough though if we put in the time and effort to actually find your house.

You might wonder why we're doing this. My personal answer, and there may be others in my field who disagree, is that when it comes to any of the sciences involving things on the scale of the Earth, it's impossible really to do experiments in the classical sense. If you think you've found a link for instance between say Valley Fever and unused lots that would kick up a bunch of dust and the associated fungus spores in it, then without us you're limited to either tracking down individual cases, and doing the detective work and digging through files to figure out what the local environment was like before the person came down with it, or waiting until new data comes in and
going into the field to assess the situation first hand. While there is work involved in identifying unused dusty lots from space, being able to classify things well using computer algorithms is an
established if also still growing field. We might not be able to be 100% precise, but compensate by having a much richer catalog of data than is possible in any other way., spanning the globe and 30 years of history. So when people have questions about valley fever, or how land use in a city has changed, or if the local vegetation is changing either in what plants are there or some aspect of their health, or if there's really less water in the lake, or where could we expect fires this year or if things are in fact heating up and where, or even how bad really is the flooding in Pakistan, they have data to try and build the maps they need, and try to find links between these world
events.

For some reason though despite being of use to a number of other fields and answering a lot of questions, we ourselves are sort of a hidden field. If you ask the average person what's going in the
Geography department of their local university, they'd probably answer by asking why anyone would ever need a Geography department. After all, maps are just maps, falling someplace below History in terms of usefulness. Historians can at least uncover new and interesting facts,
or tell us something about how we got where we are. What is a Geographer going to do? Find that the Nile River is actually 20 feet of the left of where we actually thought it was?

And yet you can make maps of so many things, and gain so much information about the world through them, and asking the right questions. Remote sensing is just a small part of it. I read an
interesting paper the other day of someone trying to make a map of Law Enforcement. After all, you can't arrest everyone for every minor infraction. So where are the police, and what are they doing, and how does this relate to other aspects of the city? Do they mostly patrol safer areas, or high risk areas? If they're in the high risk areas are they making arrests that correspond to the crime statistics in the area, or are they doing the "Broken Window" thing there?

by Zoe Pollock

In time for the U.S. Open, Tom Perotta reports in the new Atlantic issue on the professional athlete’s psychological choke:

To hit a 120-mph serve, a player must allow the body to do what it has been trained to do. Thinking mid-serve causes “paralysis by analysis,” an attack on performance by the prefrontal cortex, which, in an attempt to control closely synchronized neural activities and muscle twitches, instead sabotages them. “We all know how to shuffle down the stairs,” [Psychologist Sian] Beilock told me. “But if I ask you to think about how your knee is bending while you do it, there’s a good chance you’ll fall on your face.”

Meanwhile Reeves Wiedeman has a roundup of tennis’ trickiest shots, including a great shot from this week’s open, a backwards and through-the-legs point by Federer.

(Photo by Harold Edgerton)

by Conor Friedersdorf

A reader writes:

I'm a management consultant.   In particular, I help companies grow and find new business opportunities and launch them. Consultants are reviled in the business community, in the media, in movies, and often in the businesses we've been hired to help.  We're seen as highly-paid professional hit-men who come in and snidely boss around people who know their businesses best, and who are we to tell them what to do?  Worse than that, there are companies who are laying people off, but still hiring us to come in and do our work.  So naturally there is resentment within the businesses themselves, "Why did you lay off my friend and hire these consultants?"  I get it.

But what so many don't get is that there is no way on God's green earth that the vast majority of our clients can do for their own business what we can do.  They don't have it in them.  They are focused on working on the same thing for years at a time, so for them to stick their necks out on proposing a bold new business?  Not. Gonna. Happen.  I've seen it time-and-time again.  Sure, the Apples & Googles of the world know how to launch new products, but the great majority of companies do not. These companies do not have the internal ability to innovate and then bring something new to market with the same people who are stuck doing business-as-usual.

I get the question all the time: why would a company hire you to help launch a new business when they can just do it themselves?  Dirty secret of the business world: because they can't do it themselves.

by Zoe Pollock

From "A Place for the Bees" from Virgil's Georgics, by David Ferry:

And there should be a limpid spring nearby,
Or a moss-edged pool, or else a little brook,
Almost unseen, making its way through the grass,
And a big palm tree or oleaster shading
The vestibule of the place where the bees have settled,
So when the kings of the hive lead the swarm forth
In the welcoming season, and glad to be free at last,
The youthful bees are capering and playing,
There'll be a stream bank or a pond bank there,
Where they can escape the unaccustomed heat
And where the leaves of a tree can shelter them.

You can read the full poem and hear the author read it in English and in the original Latin version here.

(Image by Flickr user Cuba Gallery)