Month: April 2013

Olympic swimmer Ryan Lochte is the subject of a new reality show “that presents [him] as a professional public dummy.” Linda Holmes wonders if others will follow his example:

Ryan Lochte told The Hollywood Reporter this month that he has a role model, and her name is Kim Kardashian.

Now, this is in part a guy simply playing to his strengths. … But it’s hard not to wonder whether he’s also responding to what a giant drag it is to be a professional public hero when you can make just as much money being a dummy. When you’re a hero, your path is almost inevitably one that will at some point lead you to a mundane show of frailty that will be massively blown out of proportion until you offer a lame apology no one really believes you mean and many don’t believe you actually owe — and that’s if you’re lucky. If you’re not lucky, you’ll be doggedly followed until you really screw up, and then you get to do the full-on weepy apology tour while everyone blames you for the fact that kids don’t say “sir” and “ma’am” anymore. Why bother, right? Perhaps the people who would have been (rightly or wrongly) built up in order to be knocked down now realize that it’s just as easy to skip the rise and the fall and go straight to the reality show.

“George W. Bush’s flaws are greatly overshadowed by his virtues, starting with his moral clarity,” – Karl Rove on the first president in US history to authorize the torture of captured prisoners.

Peter Nonacs wrote an “insanely hard” test for his UCLA Behavioral Ecology class, but told them they could “cheat,” collaborating and using whatever resources they could find. He explains the reasoning behind this unconventional move:

Once the shock wore off, they got sophisticated. In discussion section, they speculated, organized, and plotted. What would be the test’s payoff matrix? Would cooperation be rewarded or counter-productive? Would a large group work better, or smaller subgroups with specified tasks? What about “scroungers” who didn’t study but were planning to parasitize everyone else’s hard work? How much reciprocity would be demanded in order to share benefits? Was the test going to play out like a dog-eat-dog Hunger Games? In short, the students spent the entire week living Game Theory. It transformed a class where many did not even speak to each other into a coherent whole focused on a single task—beating their crazy professor’s nefarious scheme.

Ian Steadman considers the copyright implications of 3-D printed food:

Imagine yourself in twenty years sitting down in your kitchen and wanting a glass of cola and a hamburger. You could download Coca-Cola’s classic recipe to go with a McDonald’s Big Mac, but you could also download that extra-caffeinated cola someone’s hacked onto the server along with a Big Mac with a particularly smoky ketchup in place of the banal, “official” version. Or you could knock something new up yourself, a drink that’s sugar- and caffeine-free and with an extra shot of vitamin B and a burger bun that’s gluten-free.

[Open-source soda brand] Open Cola can be [seen as] a first, extremely crude example of this change, in this case. Once the infrastructure for 3D printing is in place — the cultural expectation of being able to get home, slot a cartridge into the machine, and print out anything you want — then the food industry is going to struggle to keep its secrets safe.

The Dish has previously looked at 3-D printed meat and 3-D printed Christmas cookies.

Reviewing Nicholas Roe’s new biography of John Keats, Michael Dirda emphasizes the artistic impact of the poet’s tumultuous childhood:

Roe stresses, in particular, the emotional turmoil resulting from the death, while riding, of Keats’s 31-year-old father, Thomas, when John was just 8 years old. This was followed by the sudden remarriage of Keats’s mother, Frances, two months later to a man “aged twenty, with no income of his own.” Roe even raises the possibility that Frances, known to be lively and “passionately fond of amusement,” may have been carrying on a clandestine affair before her first husband’s death. When she died at just 35 from tuberculosis, her children—John, George, Tom, and Fanny—found themselves thrust upon various relatives, or sent away to school. Financial wrangling within the extended family dragged on for years.

Roe sees aspects of these family tragedies, and possible suspicions about his mother, reemerging throughout Keats’s poetry—as well as being a possible cause of his self-confessed “morbidity” and Hamlet-like melancholy.

Vanessa Veselka hitchhiked 15,000 miles when she was fifteen. Looking back, she wonders why we have “no female counterpart in our culture to Ishmael or Huck Finn”:

During my travels I had literally thousands of interactions with people’s ideas about what I was doing with my life, but almost none of them allowed for the possibility of exploration, enlightenment, or destiny. Fate, yes. Destiny, no. I was either “lucky to be alive” or so abysmally stupid for hitchhiking in the first place that I deserved to be dead. And, while I may have been abysmally stupid, my choice to leave home and hitchhike was certainly no stupider or more dangerous than signing onto a whaling ship in the 1850s, “stealing” a slave and taking him across state lines, burning through relationships following some sketchy dude around the U.S., or accepting rides from drunk people while on hallucinogens. These tales are fictions, yes, but they deeply affect how we see people on the road. And the shadow cast by these narratives—one that valorizes existential curiosity, adventure, individuality, and surliness—does not fall over women. In a country with the richest road narratives in the modern world, women have none.

She connects this to the likelihood of rape and death for women on the road:

A man on the road is solitary. A woman on the road is alone.

It won’t take long:

The first espresso machines — rather steampunk-y brass fixtures — were built for turn-of-the-century hotel bars [in Italy] to accelerate the process of preparing coffee for clientele, mostly visitors from more prosperous European nations who were enjoying Belle Époque mercantilism and mobility. Acceleration was the watchword of early 20th-century Italy, only recently unified as a nation and rocked by a second industrial revolution. Like trains, automobiles, and the thrusting designs of Futurist artists (some of the recipes in the Futurist Cookbook even use espresso as an ingredient), the initial sex appeal of espresso was in speed and efficiency…. [I]n most Italian coffee bars, the small cups of caffé were sipped standing up at a counter, a posture that permitted conversation but no lingering. Customers had to drink up and move out, making room for more customers, and workers had to get back on the clock.