The Dish

Red Hot Alternative Energy

Scientists who accidentally struck magma while drilling in Krafla, Iceland discovered a way to harness its energy:

“Drilling into magma is a very rare occurrence, and this is only the second known instance anywhere in the world,“ [researcher Wilfred] Elders said. The IDDP [Icelandic Deep Drilling Project] and Iceland’s National Power Company, which operates the Krafla geothermal power plant nearby, decided to make a substantial investment to investigate the hole further.

This meant cementing a steel casing into the well, leaving a perforated section at the bottom closest to the magma. Heat was allowed to slowly build in the borehole, and eventually superheated steam flowed up through the well for the next two years. Elders said that the success of the drilling was “amazing, to say the least”, adding: “This could lead to a revolution in the energy efficiency of high-temperature geothermal projects in the future.” …

The magma-heated steam was measured to be capable of generating 36MW of electrical power. While relatively modest compared to a typical 660MW coal-fired power station, this is considerably more than the 1-3MW of an average wind turbine, and more than half of the Krafla plant’s current 60MW output.

See the awesome power of lava engulfing cans of cola in the above video. Just imagine throwing Mentos in the mix.

Will Discrimination Rise With The Sharing Economy?

Matt Breunig worries it will:

Because successful firms have long tenures and many employees, it is easier to subject them to anti-discrimination laws. You can more easily prove that they are being discriminatory because you can present evidence of long-running patterns. They also have the organizational capacity to adopt and enforce anti-discriminatory policies internally.

All of this goes away in a sharing economy world where everyone is essentially an individual contractor selling directly to a consumer. The present slate of anti-discrimination employment laws do not reach Airbnb consumers or any consumer for that matter. They only really bind employers hiring employees into traditional firms. But more than that, it’s not obvious to me how you could practically restructure the law to reach people who directly purchase things through the sharing economy. What are you supposed to do: track their purchases and see how often they buy from sellers of a given race?

Previous Dish on the sharing economy here, here, here, and here.

Working Yourself Into The Ground

Literally:

The graph … shows the relationship between working hours and “potential years of life lost” (PYLL), both of which were taken from the OECD. PYLL is a measure of premature mortality, which estimates the average number of years a person would have lived if they had not died prematurely. It gives more weight to deaths among younger people and may therefore be a better measure of mortality. The higher the value of PYLL, the worse. …

Longer working hours seem to lead to higher premature mortality. (For stats nerds: the strength of the relationship is significant, with an r-squared of 0.2). The implication that over-work is bad for you chimes with lots of research (such as here, here and here) which links long working hours with poor health. Stress, for example, can contribute to range of problems like heart disease and depression. That was, indeed, what the philosopher Bertrand Russell argued back in the 1930s. Overwork, said Russell, led to “frayed nerves, weariness, and dyspepsia”.

Texting With Many Tongues

Cellphone users in India must confront the challenges of texting legibly in a country with 22 official languages:

The narrow range of communication for Indians on the mobile Web has largely been ignored because, for years, India’s online population, nearly two hundred million people, has mostly overlapped with its English-speaking demographic. But the general prediction is that many of the next two hundred million Internet users, who will go online almost exclusively through smartphones, will not comfortably understand English. Phone manufacturers, eyeing this vast new market, have begun incorporating Hindi scripts into handsets like [48-year-old Bangalorean] Birsingh’s. However, since Hindi has twice as many vowels as English, and a wealth of consonants and character combinations, cheap phone hardware with traditional keypads still pose challenges. Reverie [Language Technologies]’s software platform, which underpins [texting app] Plustxt, aims to give local scripts the flexibility of English, providing text input for all twenty-two official Indian languages on phones, tablets, and TV top boxes. To demonstrate, [company director Arvind] Pani showed me one of Reverie’s newest products, an address book. At first, the names appeared in English. Then, with one click, they were rendered in the loop-the-loop characters of Malayalam, the language of Kerala, a south-Indian state.

Debating Woody Allen On Super Bowl Sunday

The only thing I can infer with absolute certainty from the anguished letter Dylan Farrow has written to the New York Times is that she is expressing incandescent rage. I cannot know from a distance what exactly is the reason for that rage, but she hates her former ~~step-father~~ adoptive father, Woody Allen, with an intensity completely compatible with child abuse, and hard to explain away entirely without it. You can see how truly she hates him from her opening and closing lines. These are sentences designed to do as much harm to Allen as he allegedly did to her – to pin the crime of child-rape onto every movie he has ever made, to obliterate his legacy as an artist by insisting that his entire oeuvre be viewed through the prism of his monstrousness. I can fully understand the impulse. Can’t you?

At first you think this is melodrama, but then you realize she is simply wielding the most lethal weapon she has:

What’s your favorite Woody Allen movie? Before you answer, you should know: when I was seven years old, Woody Allen took me by the hand and led me into a dim, closet-like attic on the second floor of our house. He told me to lay on my stomach and play with my brother’s electric train set. Then he sexually assaulted me. He talked to me while he did it, whispering that I was a good girl, that this was our secret, promising that we’d go to Paris and I’d be a star in his movies. I remember staring at that toy train, focusing on it as it traveled in its circle around the attic. To this day, I find it difficult to look at toy trains.

I’m not sure how, especially after reviewing the evidence Maureen Orth collected over twenty years ago, you manage not to believe Dylan Farrow – even though in every hugely dysfunctional family, there is more than one side. But the fact that Mia Farrow may be a few sandwiches short of a picnic doesn’t prove that Woody Allen isn’t a monster. And Farrow’s anguished yet vicious letter makes a lot of emotional sense coming after the Golden Globes’ celebration of Allen’s lifetime of achievement. Then there’s what we already know of Farrow’s behavior as a child:

Several times … while Woody was visiting in Connecticut, Dylan locked herself in the bathroom, refusing to come out for hours. Once, one of the baby-sitters had to use a coat hanger to pick the lock. Dylan often complained of stomachaches and headaches when Woody visited: she would have to lie down. When he left, the symptoms would disappear. At times Dylan became so withdrawn when her father was around that she would not speak normally, but would pretend to be an animal.

These are classic indicators of abuse – along with plenty of other eye-witnesses to Allen’s creepy behavior around the girl.

And yet Dylan Farrow will, I’m afraid, fail in this case.

Not entirely. Re-reading that Orth piece and absorbing that letter definitely impacts my view of Allen as a whole. It reminds me again of who this man is. Like when we’re watching a Polanski or a Gibson movie, there will always be, for most of us, a tinge of guilt, even distant complicity, in admiring the craft of a man whose predilection for relationships was with women utterly under his totalitarian control. But the brutal truth is: we will move on. His art and his craft is so extraordinary in its range and scope and creative integrity that it escapes the twisted psyche that gave birth to it. It does things for us as viewers and as human beings that can eclipse the reality Dylan Farrow wants smack-dab in front of our eyes.

In some ways, I wish this weren’t so. It would be a less fallen and compromised world. But the human mind can, alas, live quite fully in places where the practical moral conscience seems irrelevant. And so it is essential to understand Heidegger’s foul complicity in the Third Reich but impossible to reduce his world-historical genius to it. That T.S Eliot was a rancid anti-Semite does not, frustratingly, dilute the perfection of the Four Quartets, nor does Philip Larkin’s racism alter the triumph of Aubade. Jefferson’s thought and career, for that matter, will always elude the facts of his ownership of human beings and intercourse with some of them. Perhaps with less essential talents, the sins may more adequately define the artist. But that, in many ways, only makes the injustice worse. Those with the greatest gifts can get away with the greatest crimes.

We can and should rail against this, while surely also be realistically resigned to it. It struck me, for example, rather apposite that as the blogosphere is debating whether to boycott Woody Allen’s films in the future because of this horrifying story, exponentially more people are tuning into the Super Bowl to watch a game we now know will render many of its players mentally incapacitated in their middle ages and beyond. We know that this spectacle is based on the premise of brain damage for many of its participants, but we watch anyway. Reforms in the game that might change the number of concussions are resisted by the fans as ferociously as by the owners. And in the excitement of the game, such things are so easy to obliterate from our minds. We forget that this massive industry knew full well what they were doing and yet subjected human beings to this fate for years. They abused people’s bodies and minds for money – and now we are required to celebrate their entire cult en masse for one night.

I imagine the family of a former football player whose brain was turned into swiss cheese by this organization might find it as painful to watch the Super Bowl as Dylan Farrow did to witness the Golden Globes. But we will watch anyway.

Humankind cannot bear very much reality. Or only so much. And only so often.

(Photo: Director Woody Allen is seen on February 1, 2014 in New York City. By NCP/Star Max/GC Images via Getty.)

Quote For The Day II

“I heard that Eastwood is saying that this will be his last film as an actor. There’s part of me that feels that way during almost every movie. On ‘Synecdoche,’ I paid a price. I went to the office and punched my card in, and I thought about a lot of things, and some of them involved losing myself. You try to be artful for the film, but it’s hard. I’d finish a scene, walk right off the set, go in the bathroom, close the door and just take some breaths to regain my composure. In the end, I’m grateful to feel something so deeply, and I’m also grateful that it’s over … And that’s my life,” – Philip Seymour Hoffman. RIP.

Faith On The Football Field

Jerry A. Coyne passes along the above chart:

This graph summarizes the data, with “average Americans” in tan, football fans in maroon, and other fans in olive. Now since the survey methodology reports a survey of 1,011 adults—not just sports fans—I assume that the data below represent a subset of those Americans who follow sports. But, according to the data, that is 89% of all Americans (I’m one of the other 11%). Yes, exactly half of the fans (and 55% of football fans) see supernatural influences in sports.

In an interview, Gregg Easterbrook is asked, “Does God participate in the National Football League?” Part of his answer:

To the extent that people believe that God controls outcomes—and I am a churchgoing Christian who does not believe that—then football games present you with a fast-moving morality play. The good guys should beat the bad guys; the virtuous athletes should succeed over the cheating athletes. If you believe that God controls outcomes, daily life is full of little morality plays—but most of them are hard to discern, whereas a football game is right on TV. You know what’s happening, you know who wins, you know which players you like and which players you don’t like. Athletics gives you a type of morality play for the presence of God’s active control in life.

Easterbrook also recently cautioned that it’s mostly not pro players who suffer the effects of game-related concussions:

What about high school concussions? Steven Broglio of the University of Illinois estimates prep football players sustain 43,200 to 67,200 concussions annually. That’s versus 80 to 100 concussions annually in the NFL, where the attention focuses. In high school there is usually no certified athletic trainer on scene (fitness trainers are nice but often unskilled in medical matters), nor ready access to neurologists. The only health insurance many high school players have is Medicaid, which is stingy about specialists; their parents or guardians may avoid doctors, fearing co-pays. The result is a head-injury double whammy: High-school concussions are far more frequent than NFL concussions, plus more likely to be mistreated (if treated at all).

Which Beer Is The Coldest?

The one in the fridge:

How cold a beer is has nothing to do with how it’s brewed and packaged and everything to do with whether and how long the consumer refrigerates it before drinking it. No thinking person would ever claim to like Beer Brand A more than Beer Brand B because Beer Brand A is colder. But beer advertisements aren’t geared toward thinking people—they’re geared toward thirsty people. Commercials that brag about beer’s coldness are a wildly unsubtle attempt to circumvent viewers’ rationality by appealing to their baser instincts. Whatever your level of media literacy, a bottle of beer that sheds fragments of ice as it’s slammed down on a countertop in slow motion looks pretty darn refreshing.

The Politics Of Pigskin

Ryan O’Hanlon suggests that politics inevitably play a role in the Super Bowl:

For better or worse, the Super Bowl is America. More than twice as many people watched last year’s Super Bowl delay than watched the Oscars, the most-viewed non-football event of 2013. And in 2012, the only thing more people chose to do than watch the Giants/Patriots Super Bowl was vote. It’s impossible to remove politics from an event so big and widespread, which makes you wonder why we even try and if we really should. Creating some kind of boundary between sports and politics—or maybe more accurately, imagining that there’s no connection between the two—seems, if anything, just incorrect.

That’s not to say that if Richard Sherman intercepts Peyton Manning in overtime on Sunday and runs the ball back for a game-winning touchdown that it’s some metaphor for liberals wresting control of the racial-politics conversation from their conservative foes. Rather, it’s to acknowledge that, even on Sundays, the conversation exists—and that the guy screaming into your television is right in the middle of it.

Albert R. Hunt objects to painting the contest “with racial (white versus black) or political (red state versus blue state) overtones”:

This is inane. The majority of players for both the Broncos and the Seahawks are black; that’s true with about every National Football League team. Colorado and Washington state, the respective homes of this year’s Super Bowl contenders, both voted Democratic in the most recent presidential election, as did New Jersey, the site of Sunday’s game. So much for any political connotations.

Who Watches The Super Bowl?

Americans, by and large. One reason why it has a far smaller international audience than other, similar sporting events? Scheduling:

In 2010, European soccer’s governing body moved the Champions League final from its traditional Wednesday night time slot to Saturday night. That makes it much easier for audiences in populous and soccer-obsessed South America and Asia to tune in, Alvay says. “People in Asia have got a greater capacity to be up at the middle of the night when it’s on a weekend and they don’t have to work the next day,” he says. …

Contrast this with the Super Bowl, which is scheduled to maximize U.S. viewership; audiences peak during the showbiz-heavy halftime show. That makes it problematic for international audiences outside the Americas. It allows for daytime viewing in Asia, but this is where American football has its smallest following. In Europe, where the league has been focusing its recent international expansion efforts (the NFL has hosted a game in London annually since 2007), the timing couldn’t be worse: Kickoff is at 6:30 pm in New York, which is 11:30 pm in London and 12:30 am in Western Europe. And games typically last for three hours.