Author: Zoe

The Novelization Of TV

by Zoe Pollock

Andy Greenwald praises the consistent pacing of Game Of Thrones:

Binge-watchers care little for how their meal is coursed out; all they want is to dig in. And Game of Thrones is particularly delicious when devoured in bulk. There’s little tonal variance between the hourly installments; everything is equally good. In fact, it’s the rare show that’s probably better served by such gluttony: Less time away makes it harder to mistake your Sansas from your Sandors, your Lothars from your Lorases. Game of Thrones is proof that more and more people are coming around to David Simon’s way of thinking: The drug war is a racist and failed institution Individual episodes aren’t works unto themselves but rather chapters in a carefully crafted novel. More than sex pirates and smoke babies, imp slaps or jokes about Littlefingers, this may be Game of Thrones‘s most enduring legacy. What we thought was an exercise in transforming a book into television may actually have helped turn television into a book.

Previous Dish on the series here and here.

Why Don’t Conservatives Shame The Divorced?

by Zoe Pollock

Mark Oppenheimer asks for constancy from marriage equality opponents:

Maybe same-sex marriage is, as they like to say, “the last straw” in this sexual revolution. But rights for the most marginalized people will always be the last straw in social revolutions. The marginal people will always get everything last. If you’re honest and ethical, you have to go after the elites who started the revolution, not the marginalized who later said, “Me too! Please, me too!” And you can’t just pay it lip service, like, “Oh, straight people are culpable, too, since they began divorcing at higher rates in the 1970s…”—you have to actually try to shame straight divorcés more than you are trying to shame gay people for wanting to marry, because the straights started it.

If you aren’t horrified by Rush Limbaugh being married four times—if you didn’t see Ronald Reagan as a less fit leader because of his divorce—then you simply have to shut the hell up about gay people marrying. You can’t ethically go after the marginalized people who try to eat the fruits of a revolution. You have to go after the revolutionaries.

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)

Making Pet Food Palatable

by Zoe Pollock

It’s a multi-part process:

To meet nutritional requirements, pet food manufacturers blend animal fats and meals with soy and wheat grains and vitamins and minerals. This yields a cheap, nutritious pellet that no one wants to eat. Cats and dogs are not grain eaters by choice, [AFB International vice president Pat] Moeller is saying. “So our task is to find ways to entice them to eat enough for it to be nutritionally sufficient.”

This is where “palatants” enter the scene. AFB designs powdered flavor coatings for the edible extruded shapes. Moeller came to AFB from Frito-Lay, where his job was to design, well, powdered flavor coatings for edible extruded shapes. “There are,” he says, “a lot of parallels.” Cheetos without the powdered coating have almost no flavor. Likewise, the sauces in processed convenience meals are basically palatants for humans. The cooking process for the chicken in a microwaveable entrée imparts a mild to nonexistent flavor. The flavor comes almost entirely from the sauce—by design. Says Moeller, “You want a common base that you can put two or three or more different sauces on and have a full product line.”

(Hat tip: Dave Pell)

Map Of The Day

by Zoe Pollock

Mark Graham mapped “the percentage of local edits to [Wikipedia] articles about places” in order to measure “the percentage of edits about any country that come from people with strong associations to that country”:

Unsurprisingly, they show that in predominantly English-speaking countries most edits tend to be local. That is, we see that most Wikipedia articles (85%) about the US tend to be written from America, and most articles about the UK are likewise written from the UK (78%). The Philippines (68%) and India (65%) score well in this regard, likely because of role that English plays as an official language in both countries. But why then do we see relatively low numbers is other countries that also have English as an official language, such as Nigeria (16%) or Kenya (9%)?

His takeaway:

Some parts of the world are represented on one of the world’s most-used websites predominantly by local people, while others are almost exclusively created by foreigners, something to bear in mind next time you read a Wikipedia article.

On Holiday With Hyperinflation

By Zoe Pollock

Graeme Wood ventured out to the Iranian resort island of Kish to understand the effect of American sanctions on Iran’s economy:

The Iranian rial trades semi-openly, and as this magazine went to press, its value was hovering under 40,000 to one U.S. dollar, weaker by nearly half compared with six months earlier. Authorities tried to ban currency trading for a few weeks in October, when the inflation rate peaked, but they failed. Finally they just asked money changers not to advertise the depressing new rates in their windows.

Wood’s First Rule of Budget Travel applies here: where there is runaway inflation, there are great deals for travelers with hard cash. … The first sign of rising prices was the hotel rate card. I had agreed over the phone to pay 370 dirhams, or about $100, for a night at a five-star hotel, including breakfast and lunch. (I had originally been told that the hotel had no vacancies, but when I asked again in English, with the implication of payment in foreign currency, a room materialized.) The rates for Iranians were quoted in Iranian rials, and to me—I had not been in Iran in more than three years—they looked not high but simply wrong. A zero in Persian writing is represented by a dot, and here I saw dots leading far off to the right, as if someone had left an ellipsis on the rate card instead of the full price. The Iranian price was 1.8 million rials.

Max Fisher has mixed feelings about taking a hyperinflation vacation:

Imagine the money in your wallet suddenly increasing value by a factor of four and a half — your nightly hotel budget rising from $70 to the equivalent of $340 — and you can see the appeal of a hyperinflation vacation.

Still, it feels a little weird to profit off of someone else’s pain. In this case, that someone is the entire Iranian middle and lower class. (Something Wood is very aware of and discusses with great care in his article.) The Post’s Jason Rezaian has reported from Tehran on the pain that ordinary Iranians feel from inflation, with everything from food to medicine becoming tougher to afford. And Wood points out that wealthy Iranians — those more likely to be affiliated with the regime, and thus desired targets of the economic sanctions driving so much of the inflation — are actually able to profit off of the inflation, for example with well-timed imports or by taking out the fixed-interest loans available only to those with political connections.

(Chart of the official Iranian rial-U.S. dollar exchange rate and the black market rates diverging by Steve H. Hanke of CATO)

Tending The Family Tree

by Zoe Pollock

Plant

As spring takes root, Dahlia Lithwick contemplates her mother’s green thumb:

I don’t shiver in anticipation at the thought of splitting tubers or transplanting peonies, as my mother does. She reminds me what it is to be of the earth and to fight for the Earth, not by way of bumper stickers and committee meetings and petitions, but by just planting and tending and weeding and never giving up on even a broken bit of spider plant. I see that in my son now, too—happy with dirt in his green rubber boots and a watering can and a watermelon seed. When I go to visit my parents, my first stop is my mother’s garden. When his lonely plant goes yellow at the edges, my son asks to put in a call to his grandparents. The earth and the garden have rooted us all to one another when nobody was looking. We cultivate our garden and let life take it from there.

(Photo: From the series Flora by Egill Bjarki via Amanda Gorence)

Sexy Sneezing

by Zoe Pollock

Romantic thoughts or actions can trigger a sneeze:

[N]ot all sneezes are actually triggered through the nose. In fact, there appear to be multiple pathways involved. [Mahmood Bhutta, a Research Fellow at the University of Oxford who published a paper in 2008 titled “Sneezing induced by sexual ideation or orgasm: an under-reported phenomenon”] makes a pretty strong case for the parasympathetic nervous system as a common variable among the more bizarre sneezing triggers: photic sensitivity (sneezing when exposed to light, otherwise known as ACHOO syndrome); an exceptionally full stomach (otherwise known as snatiation, a portmanteau of “sneeze” and “satiation,” also an acronym among smug jerks in the medical community that stands for “Sneezing Noncontrollably At a Tune of Indulgence of the Appetite — a Trait Inherited and Ordained to be Named”); and, of course, sexy thoughts.

Essentially, the autonomic nervous system is so old and lizard-brain-like that it functions without our input. It formed before just about everything else in our bodies did, and because it’s so basic, certain pathways never really separated as our bodies developed.

Related Searches

by Zoe Pollock

Christopher Jobson spotlights a mesmerizing work of art:

I’m Google is an ongoing digital art project by Baltimore artist Dina Kelberman that documents digital patterns through non-artistic photography found on Google Image Search. When I first started scrolling through her Tumblr I wasn’t quite sure what I was looking at: frame after frame of airplanes pouring orange fire retardant on fires which slowly morphed into an orange kayak and then an orange bridge and on and on until I realized every single image shared a slight visual characteristic with the image before it. … I cannot urge you strongly enough to spend a few minutes scrolling through this impeccably curated collection of seemingly mundane photography that collectively creates something visually transcendent.

“Do The Time Or Snitch”

by Zoe Pollock

Rob Walker recounts the heartbreaking story of 46-year-old fast-food employee John Horner, who was caught by a police informant for selling painkillers. Under Florida law, Horner would be sentenced to 25 years unless he became an informant:

Horner says the problem for him, as someone with no previous drug arrests, was finding drug dealers to inform on.

“You start running the streets. You go to the places where drug dealers go, trying to find drugs. “I had gotten to the point at the end, I was desperate, I didn’t care who went to jail. I would have taken anybody down, just so I could be with my family,” says Horner.

[Law professor Alexandra Natapoff] says this is the danger the informant system poses. “We’ve created thousands of little criminal entrepreneurs running around looking for other people to snitch on,” she says. “And when they don’t have information we’ve created a massive incentive for them to create it.”

Horner is serving the full 25 years because he never found anyone to snitch on:

“What snitching does is it rewards the informed, so the lower you are on the totem pole of criminal activity, the less useful you are to the government,” says Natapoff. “The higher up in the hierarchy you are, the more you have to offer.”