Month: April 2013

The Lexicon Of Hip-Hop

by Brendan James

Artist Tahir Hemphill plugged American hip hop records into a database that tracks the words spawned by rap and how they evolve:

“Murk,” which means “to murder,” or “to defeat,” didn’t start out meaning that. It first appears in 1994, ambiguously, in “Real Circus,” by Saafir, in Oakland: “I submerged like a / Murk on the Mental.” It then appears in New York, conventionally, in 1998, in “Treat$,” by the Beatnuts, from Queens: “They try to prosecute me but I murk they only witness.” It also appears in 2005, in “Gangsta Shit,” by Lil Eazy-E, who is from Compton, in Los Angeles: “Fiends need another fix so they chirped again / Keep a murk in him.”

Hemphill sees the Hip Hop Word Count as a resource for settling arguments. “There’s a lot of disputes in rap—who influenced whom—who came first,” he said. “Everybody is always asking, ‘Who is the GOAT rapper, the greatest of all time?’ Mostly, it’s settled by who has the loudest voice in the room, but now people will be able to put some metrics to it.

Book-Buying 2.0

by Patrick Appel

Jordan Weissmann makes sense of Amazon’s purchase of Goodreads. He points out that “just 19 percent of Americans do 79 percent of all our (non-required) book readin'” and that personal recommendations are increasingly driving book sales:

Amazon has just bought the ecosystem where many of America’s most influential readers choose their books. How exactly they’ll use it isn’t entirely clear yet. Some have suggested they’ll integrate Goodreads into the Kindle experience. Others think that, given the problems Amazon has had with writers buying friendly reviews, they might use the site as an a big cache of trustworthy opinions. As David Vinjamuri put it at Forbes, “Goodreads offers Amazon the ability to transmit the recommendations of prolific readers to the average reader.” In any event, there’s plenty of value for Amazon to unlock. Assuming, of course, they don’t do anything to muck up their new purchase

That Broken Leg, Ctd

by Doug Allen

Responding to David Sirota’s fear that Ware’s injury would cause him to lose his scholarship, a reader writes:

In the case of a career-ending injury, the NCAA allows the school to continue financial aid to the injured player “off the books” (i.e. without it counting against the limit the NCAA imposes in each sport). It is a remarkable bit of common sense on the part of an organization that doesn’t show it very often.

Additionally, Louisville has made it clear that Ware will pay no out-of-pocket expenses for his medical treatment. Meanwhile, the injury has renewed the debate over the relationship between universities and their “student-athletes.” Anna North calculates the worker’s compensation for which Ware would be eligible if he were a paid employee:

Workers’ compensation [PDF] in Kentucky is based on the employee’s average weekly wage. Ware doesn’t make a wage, per se — that’s another feature of being a student-athlete. But researchers at Drexel University estimated [PDF] the fair market value of college players, based on how much they could make professionally; they estimated a University of Louisville basketball player’s market value for 2011-2012 at $1,632,103. An employee making that much in Kentucky would run up against worker’s comp maximums, which are pegged to the state’s average weekly wage. If that employee were totally disabled for a year from an on-the-job injury, he or she would get $39,139.88.

Jon Green thinks the “student-athlete” is a myth:

[L]et’s not kid ourselves; especially on powerhouse teams, collegiate rosters are filled out by athlete-students, not the other way around. From one-and-done recruits to softball courses specifically for varsity athletes to outright grade-changes, the idea that players are really on campus for the sake of going to college, and only play sports on the side, is laughable. They are on campus to win games and make money for their respective universities, though ticket sales, ad revenue and licensing rights. It is time they were paid accordingly.

While this may be true for athletes in the higher-profile sports like basketball and football, which always garner a lot of attention, it’s not the case for all student-athletes, even at very competitive Division 1 schools. Some of my good friends from college were student-athletes, in the very best sense of the word: they managed to balance their athletic and academic responsibilities and move on to successful careers after graduation.

I think that this ongoing debate about compensation for student-athletes (see previous Dish coverage here, here, here, here and here) often ignores a key point: the experience of playing a game that you love at a high level.

While in college, I was an athlete on a club sports team that traveled all over the country to play in tournaments. I did not receive a scholarship, and nearly all of my expenses for equipment, travel, and medical care for the injuries I sustained were out-of-pocket. There was never any hope of making money as a professional athlete after school, yet I wouldn’t trade that experience for anything.

The relationship between schools and athletes could certainly be improved. Previous readers have pointed to the prohibition on endorsements as particularly problematic, and I agree. Maybe colleges should be encouraged to think more long-term about their student-athletes, setting up safety nets for students like Ware who are injured while representing their school, to ensure that such injuries don’t threaten their ability to complete their education should they choose to. But I think the image of the poor, burdened, college athlete who suffers endlessly to line the pockets of their athletic department is a bit overdone.

How A Whale Sees

by Patrick Appel

Whale Eye

Alexis goes into detail:

Whales, unlike nocturnal rodents or ourselves, see the world in monochrome. Leo Peichl at the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research co-authored a paper with the nearly tragic title, “For whales and seals the ocean is not blue.” Indeed, the first thing that we can know for sure about how whales see the world is that it exists only in shades of gray. The water we see as blue they would see as black. “They do want to see the background. They want to see animals on the background. And the animals on the background are reflecting light that’s not blue,” Johnsen explained. If we try to imagine what that might look like, Johnsen said perhaps we could picture a grayscale photograph of people wearing fluorescent clothes under a black light.

(Photo by Flickr user Charlie Stinchcomb)

Why Take His Name? Ctd

by Chris Bodenner

A reader writes:

As a woman in a long-term relationship with another woman in a state where gay marriage is constitutionally banned, and having just had a child, I am reading the thread about women changing their names with great interest. It’s not that the topic is new to me; I’ve had the discussion with many of my straight female friends. But I haven’t seen the experience of same-sex couples reflected your reader’s comments.

For two women (or men, I imagine) who would like to get married and/or start a family, this discussion takes place on a different plane. My partner and I can’t get married, but one of us could change her name. In many states, doing so would require going to court, and in some of those states, a judge can refuse the name change just because he doesn’t agree with the same-sex relationship. For many same-sex couples, going through the stress, financial costs, and potential heartache of getting a name change is an important aspect in declaring their relationship to the public so that they seem “legit.” So this is yet another arena where DOMA and other laws regulating same-sex marriage affect those couples in a way that most straight couples don’t even think about.

My partner and I have retained our respective “maiden” names, but when my son was born three months ago we gave him a hyphenated last name. Admittedly, it isn’t a very elegant name and it is a mouthful, but it was important to us that he be official “ours,” even though right now my partner has no legal ties to him, since I am the birth mother. I’ve read (though not confirmed myself) that in many states, law dictates the last name that is put on the birth certificate, and same-sex parents would not have that option.

The Original Project Glass

by Zoe Pollock

Steve Mann

Steve Mann has created computerized eyewear for over 35 years:

I have found these systems to be enormously empowering. For example, when a car’s headlights shine directly into my eyes at night, I can still make out the driver’s face clearly. That’s because the computerized system combines multiple images taken with different exposures before displaying the results to me. I’ve built dozens of these systems, which improve my vision in multiple ways.

Some versions can even take in other spectral bands. If the equipment includes a camera that is sensitive to long-wavelength infrared, for example, I can detect subtle heat signatures, allowing me to see which seats in a lecture hall had just been vacated, or which cars in a parking lot most recently had their engines switched off. Other versions enhance text, making it easy to read signs that would otherwise be too far away to discern or that are printed in languages I don’t know.

Believe me, after you’ve used such eyewear for a while, you don’t want to give up all it offers.

Update from a reader:

I have fond memories of Steven Mann from my undergraduate days at MIT. You’d see him walking around campus occasionally with like 40 pounds of electronics strapped to his back and a massive camera/screen system on his glasses. At first it was quite jarring to see, because you don’t really see stuff like that every day. But after a while I stopped thinking of him as an oddity … one of the occupational hazards of getting educated at MIT that it no longer becomes weird to see a guy with a pentium lashed to his forehead. Just one of the many interesting visionary characters that I was privileged to spy on during my time at the ‘tute, kinda like the guy who ran my freshman physics lab that turned out to have a Nobel prize.. Anyways, thanks for the trip down memory lane.

(Image: “Self-portraits of Mann with ‘Digital Eye Glass’ (wearable computer and Augmediated Reality systems) from 1980s to 2000s” from Wikimedia Commons)

Small Government Theocons?

by Brendan James

Ed Kilgore doesn’t buy the idea that the Christian right is turning libertarian at the expense of its puritan strain:

[O]ne of the most distinctive features of the Tea Party faith has been the divinization of such [libertarian] views, often via idolatry aimed at the Declaration of Independence, thought to reflect a theocratic charter for America making pervasive property rights, strictly limited government and the “rights of the unborn” and “traditional marriage” the only legitimate governing tenets for the country. Libertarians, of course, share some if not all of this agenda. So a growing warmth for libertarianism within the Christian Right is not a problem for its leaders, and does not necessarily mean a growing warmth for any kind of cultural liberalism.

If that last line is true, then what should we make of the data from PRRI/Brookings last week, showing a slim majority (51%) of young white evangelicals now in favor of legalizing gay marriage? (Not to mention the 75% of young Catholics.) Doesn’t that libertarian bent pose a challenge to Christianists’ agenda? And what about the recent signs that these young religious types are less interested in waging the culture wars and more interested in the environment? What’s more, if this growing contradiction is some liberal-media myth, religious conservatives have been fooled: lately they can’t stop talking about it.

While it might be possible to argue for theocon policy on libertarian grounds, as Kilgore suggests, that’s not the route young believers appear to be taking.

The Obama Coalition

by Patrick Appel

Chait assesses it:

 The old Democratic coalition was ideologically diffuse, and depended on overwhelming support among white Southern conservatives who elected reactionaries to Congress and frequently defected on the presidential ballot. The current Democratic advantage represents a smaller but more stable ideological plurality. … Something could happen to dissolve the new Democratic majority just as race and the sixties dissolved the last one. Even if it doesn’t, it won’t last forever. The Republicans will adapt to the new political climate, or else they’ll simply bore more deeply into the political institutions, discovering and expanding ways to exercise power without appealing to a majority of America. But the changing contours of America really do seem to have swept aside the old conservative majority, and there’s no foreseeable event to bring it back.

Eric Schickler thinks the GOP will have to remake itself to become competitive again:

[T]he challenge for Republicans is perhaps more difficult than just changing position on a handful of issues: it is to foster an identity that young voters find consistent with their own self-image. Given the demographics of this next generation of voters – including the growing share made up of Latinos – this may well require a substantial “reboot” of the GOP’s approach.

The Sound Of Unoriginality

by Brendan James

Ian Crouch complains that so many contemporary trailers make use of the loud, droning sound popularized by Inception:

Today’s action movies—with pretensions to deep-thinking, and filled with rueful and angry superheroes or geopolitical conflicts that attempt to mirror the fragmented realities of the War on Terror world—demand a more serious treatment, and those thunderous musical cues seem handed down to remind us that even frivolous popcorn movies aren’t supposed to merely be fun anymore. The trailer has been elevated to a minor art form unto itself, and the auteurs behind them seem to have little patience for the gimmicks of the past. Yet one day, hopefully soon, the “duhhhhn” will be gone, abandoned for the next trailer innovation, and will be remembered as a kind of dated sonic cheese.