Month: June 2013

Roger Ailes is pissed off at Jonathan Alter.

Adam Johnson pens a fascinating profile of the man who fetched caviar, cognac and Big Macs for Kim Jong-il before becoming an intelligence asset for Japan:

The chef’s name, an alias, is Kenji Fujimoto, and for eleven years he was Kim Jong-il’s personal chef, court jester, and sidekick. He had seen the palaces, ridden the white stallions, smoked the Cuban cigars, and watched as, one by one, the people around him disappeared. …

When he finally escaped, Fujimoto became, according to a high-level cable released by WikiLeaks, the Japanese intelligence community’s single greatest asset on the Kim family, rulers of a nation about which stubbornly little is known. We don’t know how many people live there. (Best guess: around 23 million.) It’s uncertain how many people starved to death during the famine of the late ’90s. (Maybe 2 million.) Also mysterious is the number of citizens currently toiling their way toward death in labor camps, places people are sent without trial or sentence or appeal. (Perhaps 200,000.) We didn’t even know the age of the current leader, Kim Jong-un, until Kenji Fujimoto revealed his birth date. (January 8, 1983.)

Lil Kim was apparently a bit of a frat boy as well:

Kim Jong-il invited the singer with the bobbed hair to perform for Fujimoto. Her name was Om Jong-yo. …  Soon they were singing a duet of “The Bride of Seto” on their wedding day, an event at which Kim Jong-il enforced heavy drinking, causing Fujimoto to black out. As a wedding prank, Kim Jong-il had the unconscious Fujimoto’s pubic hair shaved off.

Alex Mayyasi finds little reason for charities to be involved with used cars:

An IRS loophole has lead to a quirky situation where charities are in the business of acquiring and selling used cars. Charities can make some money from car donations and often outsource selling donated cars and other aspects of fundraising. By doing so, they can focus on their programming: running after school programs, sending care packages to soldiers overseas, or running awareness and outreach events for terminal illnesses.

But car donation drives, along with other forms of commercial fundraising like telemarketing and canvassing, seem to be an inefficient means of supporting charitable work. Less than half of the proceeds accrue to charities, with private companies retaining the rest, and fees eat up over half of the value of the donations. This not only means that people support charities less than they intend, it also cheats the US government of revenue.

A recent study from Scandinavia makes the case for recruiting Rudolph in the fight against climate change:

Turns out where we let reindeer dine [has] a big impact on the energy balance of the planet. That’s because reindeer (aka caribou) prune dark-colored Arctic vegetation, minimizing solar heat absorption. The study was done by Finnish researchers using satellite data to compare tundra in Norway, where reindeer aren’t allowed to graze in summer, with similar tundra in Finland, where they are. As you might expect, vegetation is shorter and sparser on the Finnish side. In contrast, the taller trees and shrubs of the ungrazed Norwegian side absorb more sunlight—which promotes an earlier snowmelt, increases solar absorption, and accelerates warming. …

[C]arefully managed, reindeer could be used to do what they do best: geoengineer the landscape. Selective summer grazing could be used to delay snowmelt, increase the surface albedo, and reduce ground heating. If wetlands and poorly growing forests could be brought back so that the forests were left sparse and the wetlands returned to a natural state, it would significantly cool the atmosphere,” says [study co-author Lauri] Oksanen.

(Photo: Reindeer (Rangifer tarandus) eating grass on the Svalbard islands in Norway. By DEA/C.SAPPA/De Agostini/Getty Images)

Business Insider featured Joshua Katz’s research about regional accents in the United States under the headline “22 Maps That Show How Americans Speak English Totally Differently From Each Other,” emphasizing the extraordinary divergences among speakers of American English. Sam Goldman calls this “misleading” and draws a different conclusion:

Far from showing “how Americans speak totally differently from each other”, the maps indicate a remarkable linguistic homogeneity. As far as I can tell, none of the differences that they record poses a serious challenge to understanding speakers from another region. Most regional and even international variations in English are humorous rather than obstacles to communication.

This fundamental consistency is among the strengths of English and the countries that speak it. Although each has a standard version used for official purposes, languages like Chinese, Arabic, Hindi, and even German are really families of dialects so distinct that they are not always mutually intelligible. That has important consequences, namely a much stronger sense of regional and ethnic identity. It may not be coincidental that societies in these language groups have been characterized by counterbalancing tendencies to balkanization and to strong central states that hold the various regions and peoples together by force.

Gaia Vince suggests that as we enter the Anthropocene – the age that marks humanity’s geological influence – we will increasingly look to greener and more vertical architecture:

Cities will need to incorporate the natural world in new and innovative ways. Parks and green spaces will be multiplied from ground level upwards, attracting birds and wildlife to sky-gardens, tens of floors up. In Singapore, for example, the Marina Bay Sands hotel features a skypark on the 56th floor, with trees, leisure facilities including a pool, and far-reaching views. It’s an example of how specific elements found in the natural world, such as a mountaintop view, a lake and palm trees, have been cherry picked and combined to provide an easy, entirely artificial landscape for the city.

Vertical farms are also being planted in Anthropocene cities, although the energy involved in irrigating and maintaining such farms makes them impractical for food production on a larger scale. However, growing food in the urban environment on regular multi-storey plots is likely to increase as hobby farmers, beekeepers and specialist growers take advantage of cleaner air, water and soils of Anthropocene cities, and vacant sites are used more effectively. In Berlin, rooftop fishfarms have been started, with the waste going to feed agricultural plots in the city. Creative growers are already converting industrial spaces, street corners and rooftops to micro-wildernesses or manicured into formal gardens. A disused raised railway in New York City has become a popular park, self-styled “guerilla gardeners” are planting flowers and trees in plots among the tarmac and traffic of London’s highways, and once-polluted industrial wastelands now chirp with birdsong, rivers swim with fish and populations of animals that have become rare in the countryside are thriving in urban niches.

(Photo: Guests of the Marina Bay Sands hotel in Singapore look over the city-state’s financial district from a rooftop swimming pool on May 13, 2013.  By Rosland Rahman/AFP/Getty Images)

It should be available soon:

The world’s largest coal mining company – Coal India – is looking to innovative solution to reduce its own energy bills: it’s installing solar energy. The company, which is listed but government controlled, and which accounts for more than 80 per cent of coal production in India, is installing a 2MW plant at its Sampalbur coal plant in Odisha. It plans to install solar at its operations across the country, including at its mining research arm, the Central Mine Planning and Design Institut. …

[T]he most striking aspect of the decision is the company’s own recognition that fossil fuels are depleting, and that solar is approaching grid parity. “India has an abundance of sunshine and the trend of depletion of fossil fuels is compelling energy planners to examine the feasibility of using renewable sources of energy like solar, wind, and so on,” Coal India’s bid document said.

The move makes sense to Ryan Koronowski:

This is a remarkable statement from the largest coal company in the world. Coal India produces 90 percent of India’s coal, and not only is it turning to solar as an efficient business practice, it understands India cannot power itself by coal. In fact, a coal-based electricity system is not reliable: solar energy is. And solar may be the only hope for much of rural India to become electrified after decades of failed grid expansion plans. With so much potential solar capacity across the country … there is little wonder that even fossil fuel companies are looking to get in on the game.