Month: September 2011

Giles Harvey reflects on beauty in sports:

Earlier this year I became particularly obsessed with the famous moment during the 1970 World Cup semi-final between Brazil and Uruguay when Pelé, charging to meet a bespoke through ball from Tostão, outfoxes the approaching Uruguayan keeper by doing nothing at all. Pelé simply allows the pass to run on—to the goalie’s left—as he swerves the other way and then circles back to collect the ball. Of course, he ends up missing—it’s the greatest goal never scored—but that hardly matters. If anything, the fact that he misses seems to intensify the aesthetic quality of the move. (As though Pelé were interested in something as utilitarian as scoring goals!) The moment seemed to me to represent a summit not just of sporting prowess but of human civilization itself. Watching it, I felt what might be described as species pride: look what we’re able to do!

William Bostwick gets a whiff:

Besides their dance, bees communicate through chemicals. The queen excretes one imaginatively called the "queen substance" that keeps all other female bees from developing ovaries. Queen substance is 9-oxo-2-decenoic acid. Isopentyl acetate is the defense pheromone—what you smell when you disturb a hive, the burglar alarm—and it smells like bananas.

A video survey:

Yes, they got Steve Zirnkilton, the voice of "Law and Order," to narrate. What was the first finding?

Most terrorists are white, American citizens.

Jamie Frevele examines how 3D has raised revenues for theaters:

But here’s the catch to that: since 3D tickets cost more, the higher revenues were not a result of people buying more tickets, it was just less people buying more expensive tickets. Because those "higher revenues" were higher by less than one percent. The summer of 2011 marked the worst summer for theaters since 1997, with the second lowest number of tickets sold in 14 years.

Ryan Bonneville stays optimistic:

Theaters aren’t fundamentally failing to provide a product that people want to buy; they are responding to the fact that people have a lot of options and are choosing to exercise more of them. For some people, staying at home to watch a movie using Netflix’s instant streaming service is worth more than a night at the movies. … The theaters, in turn, are responding to that dynamic by increasing the options they are uniquely situated to provide (things like 3D and IMAX and, apparently, 400-pound tubs of popcorn) – and they are making more money with fewer customers. Everybody is winning! This doesn’t seem like the death of a culture to me. Just the opposite, frankly.

Claude Brodesser-Akner further deflates the 3D balloon and explores one film that's promoting 2D. Greg Tran takes 3D to the next level with "Digital 3D … a fascinating, if highly theoretical, exploration of the future of augmented reality."

The Daily What delivers:

Tom "Wax Audio" Compagnoni (previously) returns to show the rest how it's done with his latest unexpectedly melodious mashup, "Sad But Superstitious (Stevie Wonder vs Metallica)."

Professor Helen Vendler makes the perennial plea:

As it is, our students now read effortfully and slowly, and with only imperfect comprehension of what they have seen. They limp into the texts of the humanities (as well as the texts of other realms of learning). I dream of children who have become true readers, who like to sing together, to act together, to read aloud together, and to be read to. After that mastery of reading, the encounter with science textbooks and lab manuals will not daunt them. … They will be the next humanists—but only if we make them so. And I see no way to do that aside from devoting the first four years of their education, all day, every day (except for a period of mathematics) to reading in all its forms.

(Hat tip: Josh Rothman; Photo: Pie de Amigo (Foot of Friend) by Miler Lagos "an arc of stacked architecture books with one pencil placed in the leaves of each book that, if removed, would cause the whole piece to tumble.")

His name is Barry Duncan and he creates them constantly. Gregory Kornbluh profiles the guy:

One way that [Duncan] categorizes [palindromes] is by length. Those of one hundred or more characters are labeled simply "long." Palindromes of one hundred or more words he calls "epic." And palindromes of one thousand or more characters are called "mega." …

One cardinal rule to which he always returns involves "doubling in the middle," which he calls a "near-fatal error" and the mark of an inexperienced palindromist. As he explained in our first conversation about palindromes, "If I say to you, ‘straw,’ and you thought, well, ‘straw warts,’ that’s a palindrome, but the w is doubled, so it only calls attention to the palindrome. What you want is for some letter to be the reversible hinge. So if you said to me, ‘straw,’ I would think, ‘straw arts.’ And then that w is removable, and it could be ‘strap arts,’ ‘stray arts.’"

Adam Rawnsley reports on Lieutenant Colonel Dan Ward's paper (pdf) using the Death Star as a metaphor for the poor state of DoD acquisition practices:

It’s embarrassing enough that the galaxy’s supposedly most fearsome weapon was felled by crappy duct work. But it was entirely predictable. A project so big and complex, Ward writes, will invariably stretch the oversight capabilities of acquisition staff. In this case, it led to manufacturing delays and prevented the Empire from realizing that one of its thermal exhaust ports was a de-facto self-destruct button. Moreover, for all the expense poured into it – $15.6 septillion and 94 cents, to be precise — the Death Star is destroyed twice and in its two iterations only ever manages to get off a single shot…Star Wars holds lessons about what to buy as well as what not to. Ward contends that the humble droid mechs represent a better acquisition path than Death Stars.

Apparently, this is a hot topic.

Gregory Currie questions the capacity of literature to produce insight about psychology:

One thing that psychological research these days does systematically is reduce the flow of meaning on which so much literature depends. Take that staple of literary psychology: character; character explanations are top predators in the hunt for meaning: show that someone’s action flows, not just from their wishes but from their character, and you have the best example there is, short of invoking the deity, of behaviour found to be meaningful. But a lot of evidence suggests that character plays a surprisingly insignificant role in human behaviour, which is highly sensitive to small, even trivial changes in circumstances. Certainly, our own ordinary treatment of the notion of character is close to paradoxical. We put down our own failings to circumstance, and those of others to bad character – an error as crazy as thinking that wherever I happen to be marks the centre of the universe.

Violence marketed to children goes back to the Good Ol' Days:

Long before Itchy & Scratchy, the deceptively peaceable-seeming Road Runner was, in essence, a murderous character, constantly contriving to have Wile E. Coyote plunge off a cliff, shoot out of a cannon and into a wall, etc. Still earlier, the stars of Merrie Melodies were constantly being blown up, or having 1000-lb. anvils collapsing onto their hapless heads. Yosemite Sam seemed to spend half his pint-sized, furious existence covered in post-explosion soot. These abstract, violent and yet harmless deaths are perhaps the precursors of game murders, pleasantly refined so that the player is the one doing the ultraviolence.

(Skeletal Wile E. Coyote and Road Runner by Hyung Koo Lee)