Month: March 2012

And more insight gleaned from a 35-year-old guy who retook the SAT:

[I]n the end, I scored 200 points better on the verbal section than I did back in 1993. I was 20 points worse on the math section. This makes sense, at least from my personal example. You never stop reading, particularly in the Internet age. I read all the time. Granted, everything I read is written in LOLCATS language, but still. If you read and write every day as I do, you'll stay relatively sharp. But I'll be goddamned if I can remember the last time I had to figure out how many sides a covered polygon has. That shit is useless. Unless you engineer planes or something.

"On Death, without Exaggeration" by Wislawa Szymborska:

Oh, it has its triumphs,
but look at its countless defeats,
missed blows,
and repeat attempts!

Sometimes it isn't strong enough
to swat a fly from the air.
Many are the caterpillars
that have outcrawled it.

All those bulbs, pods,
tentacles, fins, tracheae,
nuptial plumage, and winter fur
show that it has fallen behind
with its halfhearted work.

Ill will won't help
and even our lending a hand with wars and coups d'etat
is so far not enough.

Hearts beat inside eggs.
Babies' skeletons grow.
Seeds, hard at work, sprout their first tiny pair of leaves
and sometimes even tall trees fall away.

Whoever claims that it's omnipotent
is himself living proof
that it's not.

Continued here.

(Video: Anna Franz injected ink into the yolk sac artery of a 72 hour-old chick embryo to visualize the beating heart and the vasculature, winning the Nikon Small World contest this year. She described the video, "This image/movie gives the viewer the opportunity to observe a biological process as it is happening and gives an overview of how the blood system works. The films also demonstrates beauty in simplicity; what could be more simple than an egg?")

Katie Hosmer marvels at the work of Alaskan photographer and commercial fisherman Corey Arnold:

[He] really knows how to find unique light in his photographs. Sunrays burst through birds’ wings, fish fins reflect off of the water, and firey light sits atop a mountain in Wolf Tide, a solo show at Richard Heller Gallery in Santa Monica that records the lifestyle of a commercial fisherman. The show is filled with images that allow viewers to experience the magnificence of being swept out into the depths of the sea and the raw emotion of looking directly into the eye of a recently captured fish.

(Photo courtesy of Arnold)

Just when you thought the Internet had everything, a new tumblr comes along.

Timothy Noah summarizes a new study by economist Craig Garthwaite on how the Oprah Book Club didn't make for a new generation of readers:

Although Winfrey was remarkably successful in getting people to buy the books she touted (and also, to some extent, other books written by the same authors), she did not make readers out of non-readers. Rather, she provoked what's known in the marketing world as brand-switching. Instead of reading crap, Oprah's viewers were goaded into reading tonier stuff–mostly literary fiction. In many instances this amounted to reading more demanding crap, but it still represented a step up in literacy. That's the good news.

The bad news is that the profits that help support publication of less lucrative, more high-minded books depend on the sale of a lot of crap. And at least when it came to fiction, Garthwaite found that the net result of Oprah's endorsements was to reduce aggregate sales. 

On the areas hurt most:

While sales of titles selected by Oprah spiked an average of 400 percent in the first week alone, and other books by those authors also enjoyed what Garthwaite termed an "economically significant" boost, readers' newfound interest in those authors came at the expense of other writers, titles and entire genres, he said. In the 12 weeks following each of Oprah's Book Club endorsements, sales in the adult fiction category decreased by an average of 2.5 percent, with romance, mystery and action categories showing the largest drop-off.

One reason why:

Garthwaite looked at the average difficulty of Oprah's reading suggestions using measures such as the Gunning Fog Index, which measures sentence length and word complexity. He found that the talkshow maven's picks were, on average, 1.5 grade levels tougher than the median overall best seller. The classics she recommended were four grade levels more advanced. Her choices also tended to be tens of thousands of words longer than other best sellers. … All of this also seems to say something about the incentives for the book industry as a whole. That is, it's probably not in publishers' interests to turn difficult, long novels into best sellers. 

It started with MJ:

According to Jordan’s official NBA biography, when he made his way into the NBA, he wanted to keep his college experience close, so he wore his North Carolina shorts under his NBA ones. This decision, per the NBA’s website, had an interesting side effect: Michael Jordan’s UNC short shorts wouldn’t fit under his Chicago Bulls short shorts, so he had to wear baggy, knee-length Bulls shorts instead, as seen here. In doing so, he broke the mold set forth by players before him.

Ari Kohen finds them wanting:

There’s something freeing, to be sure, about being able to say anything you want. You can engage in unfounded name-calling, or intentionally hurt someone’s feelings, or just generally behave like a twelve year old. And no one will know it’s you. And that’s why I don’t read many blogs that are written by people who prefer to remain anonymous or who write under pseudonyms when there isn’t really any reason for them to do so. In fact, I don’t think there are any blogs I read on a daily basis whose authors are anonymous. The anonymous or pseudonymous blogs are often just filled with cruelty, name-calling, and bad arguments. Indeed, there are a great many people who choose to write under an assumed name because they want to harrass or offend others. 

But there are others who produce great stuff. Pseudonyms have a long history in political discourse, and I think they have their place. If they launch ad hominems, they're cowardly and will lose readers. But if they're a way to think out loud without any consequences in your other, say, professional life, I tend to agree with the wonderfully named Luke Simulacrum:

We’ve created a space where you can actually think and be different, be free of the norms, hierarchies and prohibitions of the “real” world, and be able to imagine alternative horizons of possibility. If you would really be willing to undo all of that just to prevent people from calling each other names on a comment board, you should really take a look at your priorities.

Question? askandrew@thedailybeast.com Video archive here.

Why iced coffee costs more:

The cold [coffee] will cost anywhere from a quarter to a dollar more. But the café will hardly claim the entire difference as profit. Like the hot stuff, cold-brewing involves mixing pulverized beans with water, but the latter process requires about twice as much ground coffee. Those grounds infuse filtered water for 12 to 24 hours, creating iced-coffee concentrate. That liquid is cut with water to taste, at a ratio of about one to one. Yet even after all this dilution, a cup of cold-brewed joe can include 62 cents worth of ground coffee. A hot cup might include 35 cents’ worth of beans.