Month: January 2011

by Patrick Appel

A writer at the blog Games With Words counters Philip Babcock:

[T]here seems to be very little evidence to support Babcock's conclusion that study time has decreased even at selective schools by 10 hours from the 1960s to modern day. That is, he has a survey from 1961 in which students studied 25 hrs/week, two surveys in the 1980s in which students studied 17 hours/week, and two surveys in the 2000s in which students studied 14-15 hrs/week, but these surveys are all based on different types of students at different schools, so it's hard to make any strong conclusions. If I compared the weight of football [players] from Oberlin in 1930 and Ohio State in 2005, I'd find a great increase in weight, but in fact the weight of football players at Oberlin probably has not increased much over that time period.

by Chris Bodenner

A reader sends in a stirring montage of scenes from Egypt (though it could do without the singing):

by Patrick Appel

Upon learning that Taco Bell's "beef" is only about a third beef, I had the same reaction as Amanda Marcotte:

I’m sorry that America learned today that you learned you actually like the taste of soy products.  I know how traumatic that can be.  I’ve seen small children, greedily eating a food they claimed to dislike but that has been served to them in disguise, only to be told what it was, which required spitting it out and saying, “Gross!” We, as a nation, are this small child, or at least that’s how it seems from the breathless coverage this scandal has been given in the news.  We can’t see ourselves as people who eat soy.  It’s gross.  No matter how much we like it. 

And a reader kills Balk's Taco Bell joke:

Just wanted to point out that Zoe quotes Alex Balk's criticism of the Taco Bell lawsuit — that people are "trying to make a buck out of that obvious crap's obvious crapness" — but he didn't mention that the lawsuit does not seek monetary damages. Instead the suit seeks only "that they stop saying that they are selling beef." I don't know why anyone would be against this – if only to see how Taco Bell decides to rename its "seasoned beef" when/if it loses the case.

by Patrick Appel

A reader writes:

Walter Murch on the 3D debate is mistaken.  Beyond about 20 feet our eyes are essentially parallel and so there is very little change in convergence between 50 feet and infinity.  Stereopsis in movies can work very well because of this.  It might be a problem with home 3D, but in my dissertation work I used a distance of about 6 feet, and it worked fine.

Another reader goes into more detail:

Here's Murch's argument stated more concisely. For any light entering your eye (or your camera lens) to be a focused image then your eye lens has to be focused to the distance the light came from. Since all light comes from the scattering screen in a movie your eye must focus there. But steroscopic 3D relies on the eyes converging to different depths to see the apparent source of the light. Murch's claim is that we evolved in a world where the convergence point and focal point are always the same. Ergo we can't learn to like stereo 3D.

Sounds good but it's wrong, not just for one reason but two.

First, he's wrong about the focus. What he says is true only if your eyes had infinitely large and perfect lenses. For finite sized lenses the hyper focal effect dominates. What this means is that as long as the smeared out size of a defocused point source is smaller than the resolution limit of your vision (i.e. the blur circle of a perfectly focused spot) then the point is effectively in focus. In practice this happens for any object located far from you. For human eyes in a darkened room this might be something like 20 feet. If you are that far from the screen then, when your eyes focus on the convergence zone behind the screen, the screen itself is effectively still in focus. Thus 3D works for everyone who is not in the very front row.

Second, it's patently obvious that stereo-scopic vision does give a great 3D look. If you ever looked in one of those old view-master stereoscope you can see that not only was the object 3D but it was in focus as well. How does this Jibe with Murch then? Well Murch is mistaking two different things called a convergence zone. Your eye balls don't do the 3D processing, your brain does. It compares the two slightly different images to infer the 3D. It is your brain that is inventing the concept of a convergence zone not the eyeballs. Now for objects very very close to you, your brain will also notice that your eyeball muscle are pointing the eyes in a non-parallel way. And your brain may use this info as well. This is the physical eyeball sight line convergence that Murch is worried about, not the one that comes from the brain processing. And again for any object farther away than 10 times the distance between your eyes then your eyes are pointing nearly parallel and there is no sightline convergence info for the brain to consider. All that remains is the cognitive inference of depth and that works fine because that is EXACTLY how your brain was built to work.

Thus to the extent that Murch has a point it is these two: 1) don't sit in the front row. 2) film makers should not project the 3D objects out of the plane any closer than 10 feet from my nose for long periods of time. Other than that Murch is wrong.

by Conor Friedersdorf

Internet hero Cory Doctorow:

Belgium's much-reviled phone company Mobistar was elaborately pranked by a program on VRT Belgium; the pranksters hid themselves in a steel container, which they had dropped directly in front of the gates of a large Mobistar office at 5AM.

The container had a prominent customer service number printed on the side of it — a number which rang the pranksters inside the container — that was promptly called by a series of Mobistar employees who wanted to get the container moved off before 2,000 Mobistar employees reported for work and found the parking lot blocked off.

The pranksters proceed to put the Mobistar employees through a high-art comedic phone hell, disconnecting them, subjecting them to terrible hold music (performed live from within the container on a little synthesizer), gradually ratcheting the misery up in a Dante-worthy re-enactment of every terrible, awful mobile phone company experience. The program was a huge hit in Belgium (be sure to watch it all the way through for the killer punchline), and has been captioned in English for those of us in the anglosphere to enjoy.

Video here.

by Zoe Pollock

Susan Johnston reports on a new model for keeping up your regimen:

Gym-Pact offers what [co-creator Yifan] Zhang calls motivational fees — customers agree to pay more if they miss their scheduled workouts, literally buying into a financial penalty if they don’t stick to their fitness plans. The concept arose from Zhang’s behavioral economics class at Harvard, where professor Sendhil Mullainathan taught that people are more motivated by immediate consequences than by future possibilities.

Zhang and Oberhofer translated that principle to workout motivation. If missing a workout cost people money, they’d be more motivated to stick with it, they thought.

by Zoe Pollock

Paul Moses sets the record straight:

by Conor Friedersdorf

This is a remarkable story from a reader:

You’re absolutely right about eyes and teeth being critical body parts. And it gets worse than just tooth pain – as you may remember, in 2007 a 12 year old boy named Deamonte Driver died of a brain infection caused by an untreated tooth infection.

I’ve had my own struggles with the dental health care system, though nowhere near as dire or heartbreaking. In 2006, at age 26 and just out of school, I was diagnosed with a rare jaw tumor called ameloblastoma. I had health insurance at the time, but because the tumor happened to be in my jaw, most of my treatment was considered dental rather than medical. A few months later I found myself with tens of thousands of dollars of debt, and a surgeon who stopped providing follow-up care (or returning my calls) when I was unable to pay her.

I spent the next few years trying to find a way to obtain the tooth implants I needed to replace the teeth I’d lost and, more importantly, secure my bone graft. I spent hundreds of hours making phone calls and chasing down leads, none of which worked out. Along the way, I even picked up dental insurance – but it considered the work I needed to be medical in nature, just like my medical insurance considered it to be dental in nature. Finally, in 2009, my bone graft had degraded to the extent that I needed to have a third one done to augment the remaining bone – so, thanks to an insurance policy loophole stating that they wouldn’t disclose my coverage for the procedure until after it had been done, and a masterful doctor, I was able to have both the bone graft and the implant bases taken care of in a single, six-hour surgery. It was an enormous relief. However, it also added several thousand more dollars to my debt.

And I still needed the teeth themselves – without them, I’d lose the top teeth on my left side as well before too long. So it was off for another year and a half of fruitless calling, haggling, sweet-talking, chasing, and begging. Then in July of 2010, my grandfather died. I received a small inheritance from him, enough to cover two things: my teeth, and a bankruptcy attorney. I’m scheduled to have the teeth affixed on February 11.

For want of a 50% deposit of $3500 in February 2007, as of February 11, 2011, I will have received approximately $41,000 worth of care from the health care system. That’s not counting the tens of thousands of dollars of tumor-generated debt prior to that date. Much of that will be liquidated in bankruptcy — I’ve been waiting to declare bankruptcy for over four years, but it would have been highly unwise to do so prior to the completion of my oral reconstruction. Before too long, if all goes well, I will finally be able to marry the extraordinary, amazing man who’s been by my side through this whole thing, ever since I was diagnosed with ameloblastoma a mere month after we’d moved in together.

To reiterate: I’ve had health insurance this whole time. I’ve had dental insurance since January 2009. But because the systems are split, they each get to point at each other and say “Not my job – theirs.”

I’m wondering – are there any readers out there who have had similar experiences? Has anybody found themselves falling through the bizarre, seemingly arbitrary cracks of our eye care system?

Egyptian plainclothes officers arrest a demonstrator demanding the ouster of President Hosni Mubarak during a protest in Cairo on January 26, 2011. By Mohammed Abed/AFP/Getty Images.

by Chris Bodenner

A reader writes:

I call bullshit on the musician who thinks iTunes contributed to the death of the album.  That trend started once music studios figured out that they only needed to have three good songs on an album; once they realized that they could get 2-3 albums out of an act and then hire someone else sing the same style of music at a lower rate of pay; when CDs in stores were more than 2x the price of movie tickets.   The timeline he picks pretty much predates the wide use of MP3s.  

If anything, I listen to MORE albums now that I did before.

Because iTunes allows me to purchase the thing piecemeal and listen to samples, I don't get buyer's remorse and have become more diverse in my choices.  The "complete the album" function on iTunes is genius.  The fact that Amazon often sells albums for $5 is also genius – I've purchased a band's entire catalogue because they were all on sale.  Buying a physical album is not a nostalgic thing for me – seeing that piece of crap CD that I wasted $15 on is frustrating, not romantic.  The joy of music is about discovering new sounds that you love.  iTunes divorces the money from the discovery process, which makes it better for music lovers.

Like I said, pop music has almost always been a been an industry driven by singles.  Yes, you can point to specific albums that everyone owns, but usually, most people have artist/genre preferences that are fairly specific and influenced by top 40 radio.  I may like one song by an artist, but I am never going to buy the entire album.  With iTunes, I might click through the rest, might by a second track, or might buy the whole thing.  It increased the probability that I can experience the tone of the rest of the album and allows me to judge whether or not it is for me.

The album argument seems more about the artist than the listener.  Nothing stops a listener from downloading the whole thing if they want to.  I can see how it can be ego-damaging for an artist to see how many people don't want to download everything they do.

Another writes:

I must politely disagree with your reader. While I love my iPod, I listen to everything in playlists. I spend hours carefully arranging, curating, testing how one song flows into the next, how the mood starts joyful and carefree and gently slows into casual, then mellow, and finally heartbreak – all from one singer or band.

"Ten songs in a row from one artist" is a challenge? I have 35 in my Billy Joel playlist, 46 in Josh Groban, and 89 in Elton John. I have all three Lord of the Rings soundtracks, in order, in one playlist. Sure, I'll mix it up with "Eighties music," "Dance," "Classic Rock," or "a cappella," and I have two playlists for parties which are meant to be played on shuffle, but for me, the relationship between one song and the next is as important as putting together a menu for a dinner party.

Another:

This hagiography of the history of pop music in 20th Century America overlooks one very important and critical point: the reason albums came to exist in the first place. Back in the late '40s through early '60s, the main retail delivery mechanism of pop music wasn't the album, or the EP – it was the 45. Yes, two songs, one single and a B-side, not 10 or 15 or 20 songs stitched together and forced upon the consumer.

It wasn't until the success of bands like the Beatles (and the introduction of viable LP vinyl) that record companies realized they could take advantage of their rent-seeking, incredibly restrictive ownership model of the intellectual property surrounding music to force consumers to buy something they didn't want. Instead of having the choice to buy only the songs you want at a reasonable price (a 45 cost about $3 in inflation-adjusted terms in the '50s), as both my parents and most likely the parents of your reader did, as we're approximately the same age, now the ONLY way to purchase a song that you liked was to pay 3 to 10 times as much to also buy a bunch of songs you weren't at all interested in.

Sure, there are many great albums that were written and released in the '60s through the '90s. But let's not kid ourselves – this wasn't because it was what the majority of music consumers wanted, but rather the result a craven ploy by the music industry to maximize revenue and profit at the expense of consumer (and artist) choice. All the mp3 and its successors have done is to open the model back up so consumers have the choice to buy what they want. And guess what? They don't want albums.