How Hokusai’s ‘The Great Wave’ Went Viral

Thursday, March 19th, 2015

Hokusai’s “The Great Wave” — formally titled “Under the Wave off Kanagawa” from the woodblock series “Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji” — is about the size of a piece of legal paper and wasn’t originally held in especially high regard in its home country:

The image is a mix of east and west — a blending of techniques that Hokusai picked up from Japanese artists and his own knowledge of European prints. The woodblock depicts Mount Fuji, a hallowed place in Japan, but pushes the peak deep into the distance using western perspective. The wave was printed on Japanese mulberry paper but marked by a color new to Japan — a vibrant Prussian blue created from synthetic dye in Germany.

Hokusai's The Great Wave

“The prints were a popular art, they were not something intellectual connoisseurs really admired at the fine-art level,” said Ms. Thompson. “They were discovered by the Europeans before the Japanese.”

Ms. Guth hypothesizes in her book that a devastating tsunami in Japan in 1896 helped give the woodcut its international renown. Hokusai’s print was becoming more familiar just as the word tsunami was working its way into the English language, she wrote, and the word and image soon became linked.

The print, which does not depict a tsunami, shows fishermen rowing frantically across a stormy Tokyo Bay after delivering their cargo to the city. Fingers of sea foam curl over their heads. It’s unclear if they’re going to make it home alive, though some scholars believe the presence of the sacred Mount Fuji works in their favor.

Roughly 100 impressions of “The Great Wave” exist today from an original print run estimated by some experts at more than 5,000.

Stopping Crimes Before They Start

Thursday, March 19th, 2015

“Would-be criminals tend to rethink their nefarious plans when there’s an airship hovering overhead”:

Gotham Police Airships

They aren’t talking about Gotham, but Los Angeles, and they’re not talking about actual airships, but helicopters — and they’re not really talking about stopping crimes before they start in some kind of precog sense, either, just patrolling hotspots:

The Los Angeles Police Department began exploring the deterrent approach a few years ago with a new model called predictive policing that deployed officers and patrol cars to areas where data suggested crime was more likely to occur.

Criminologists say the use of helicopters is a natural, if highly unusual, expansion of that policing strategy.

So far, LAPD officials say, the stats show the strategy is having a positive effect. Months of data show that the number of serious crimes reported in the LAPD’s Newton Division in South L.A. fell during weeks when the helicopters conducted more flights.

Why Adults Are More Likely To Be Hit Hard By The Measles Than Children

Thursday, March 19th, 2015

Dr. John Swartzberg, a clinical professor at the Berkeley School of Public Health, answered a few questions about childhood diseases, like, Why are adults more likely to get hit hard by measles?

He believes that these viruses and humans could be examples of “host-parasite interaction,” and that we have “adapted to each other,” over long periods of time. Those adaptations are dependent on us contracting diseases at a specific time of life.

This isn’t as odd as it sounds. Although we think of our bodies as fighting invading viruses, the relationship isn’t adversarial. The measles virus isn’t “trying” to kill us any more than the polio virus was trying to kill us.

The polio virus came to be known as a fearsome killer of children. That, according to Swartzberg, was because no one understood the virus’s own, very skinny, U-shaped curve. Polio, when contracted by very young children, isn’t nearly the killer we think it is. The polio virus is spread through infected fecal matter. When the public water supply consisted of rivers, lakes, wells, and pumps, infected fecal matter and drinking water mixed regularly. Infants were exposed to the virus early. When the government cleaned up drinking water — saving infants and adults from many other diseases — young children no longer came into contact with the polio virus. It was only later in childhood, when they went swimming in pools and streams, that kids contracted the virus. The parasite and the host no longer had matching adaptations. The disease that, for the most part, had been mild, became devastating.

That being said, even a disease that is “for the most part” mild can have terrible consequences, and there’s no comfort in being in the shallow part of the U, if you’re below the mortality line. In 2013, there were 145,700 deaths due to the measles. Before the measles vaccine became widely available, there were 2.6 million measles deaths per year. Some of those deaths were of children who got measles at the “right” age, when the effects of the disease were supposed to be mild. Some of those deaths were of people at the wrong age, who caught measles from children at the right age.

Theatre gave birth to democracy in ancient Greece.

Wednesday, March 18th, 2015

Theatre gave birth to democracy in ancient Greece:

In 534 BCE, Pisistratus, tired of the divisions among his fellow citizens, invented the annual theatre festival. With this stroke of genius, all theatre activity came together at a single place and time. All four tribes came into a common space and shared a common experience.

The result was nothing short of revolutionary. Athenian consciousness changed. Within a generation, in 508 BCE, democracy began.

It began when Cleisthenes, an aristocrat, reformed the Athenian constitution, which had institutionalized the four tribes’ power in a way that led to tyranny in the first place. Instead, Cleisthenes created a new system that “redistricted” the city-state and instituted a legislature where the members were chosen by lottery, instead of by clan or heredity. “Demo” in “democratic” means “common people.”

The next 104 years were the “golden age” of Athens. Democracy flourished, and so did the theatre — Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides all wrote their plays during this period, and competed with each other at the annual festival.

Sophocles and Euripides both died in 406 BC. The 27-year-long Peloponnesian War ended in 404 BC with Athens’ defeat at the hands of Sparta. The great age of theatre was over. And as Athens crumbled under Spartan rule, so was Athenian democracy.

(Hat tip to Anomaly UK.)

Someone Else’s Acid Trip

Wednesday, March 18th, 2015

Kevin Kelly — “senior maverick” at Wired — is living the dream:

I spend most of my day reading. I read magazines, and books, and then I try and write a little about what I learned. Of course, I also write emails. Then I take a hike or a bike, and I also try to take one photograph a day. So I mostly spend my time reading.

Kelly dropped out of college after studying geology for one year and instead “awarded [him]self a graduate degree in Asian studies”:

I spent almost a decade traveling in Asia with very little money, and that transformed my life and it gave me insights into how things are actually done. And I also caught a really bad case of optimism there because I saw with my own eyes nations bootstrapping themselves from poverty into prosperity.

His own kids went to college:

I think you don’t need college if you have a project that you want to throw yourself into, if you have the gumption and the discipline, if you have a really good alternative. And I’ve told my kids if you don’t have that, then you’ve got to go to college.

Kelly and his circle of digital revolutionaries were hippies, which many people today don’t realize:

They don’t, and that is actually one of the untold stories. Actually, it was told by the New York Times technology writer, John Markoff, who wrote a kind of overlooked book called What the Dormouse Said, which was telling the hippie origins of the personal computer and how basically from Doug Engelbart and Steve Jobs and Stewart Brand, they were all dropping acid; they were trying to augment human cognition, not trying to make a new industry. And a lot of the earliest entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley in the computer world were former hippies who were living on communes and learned some small business skills making candles or macramé, or whatever it was, and transferred that into this ethic of the entrepreneur, which is now kind of all fancy and hip. And that is definitely a thread of Silicon Valley that’s not widely appreciated.

Kelly was one of the “weird” hippies who didn’t drop acid — until his 50th birthday. “There’s nothing more boring than hearing someone’s acid trip,” he notes:

It was a positive experience. And I did a lot of research on trying to find out how you do this well, and it turns out that that was actually kind of hard to find, but you do it with a guide and in the right setting. So I did it outdoors. I had a very experienced person who was sitting by me, and taking care of me and leading me through. And I also had a source for the drug that was very pure. However, I have to say that I was given four tabs and I threw the last one into the ocean when I was done saying, you know, I don’t need to do that again.

His father sounds interesting, too:

My father actually worked for Time-Life. He was not in the editorial side. He was in something that was called operations research at the time, that we would now call, like, I.T. He was one of the people who brought computers to the magazine world. And then later on he was involved in this really kind of weird startup that you might have heard of, called HBO. And so he was involved with the guys who were taking cable TV and trying to put it on a satellite.

What has he spent “too much” on, but does not regret?

My library. I have a two-story library filled with lots of books. You know, I’ve read, maybe two-thirds of them. So there’s lots of books that I haven’t read. They take up a lot of space, but I just love it. I just would not give it up for anything.

Amen.

His favorite book is Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, by the way. I may have to check that out.

Designing Private Cities, Open to All

Tuesday, March 17th, 2015

Alex Tabarrok and Shruti Rajagopalan argue for private cities, open to all:

Gurgaon was a small town 25 years ago, but today it’s a city of some two million people filled with skyscrapers, luxury apartment towers, golf courses, five-star hotels and shopping malls. Often called “the Singapore of India,” Gurgaon is home to offices for nearly half the Fortune 500 firms.

Gurgaon, however, grew not by plan but in a fit of absence of mind. After the state of Haryana streamlined the licensing process, it left developers in Gurgaon to their own devices with little intervention from any national, state or local government. As a result, almost everything that works in Gurgaon today is private. Security, for example, is privately provided for almost all housing, shopping and technology complexes. Over all, about 35,000 private security guards protect Gurgaon, compared with just 4,000 public officers. Gurgaon also has India’s only private fire department, filling an important gap, because it must be capable of reaching Gurgaon’s tallest skyscrapers.

Continue reading the main storyContinue reading the main storyContinue reading the main story

But not all is well. No developer in Gurgaon was large enough to plan for citywide services for sewage, water or electricity. For a price, private companies provide these, but in inefficient ways. Sewage doesn’t flow to a central treatment plant but is often collected in trucks and then dumped on public land. Tap water is often delivered by private trucks or from illegally pumped groundwater. Reliable electricity is available 24 hours a day, but often using highly polluting diesel generators.

Compared with the rest of India, Gurgaon fares well but its functioning is far from ideal. Is there a middle ground between China’s ghost cities and the anarchy of Gurgaon? Surprisingly, privately planned cities may be an answer. And one of the oldest is in India.

Jamshedpur was founded by Tata Steel, as a company town, in 1908. It has landscaped parks, paved roads and even a lake, but it’s no playground for the rich. It’s a working town. Nevertheless, it is the only city in the state of Jharkhand with a sewage treatment plant, and it’s one of the few cities in all of India where residents enjoy reasonably priced, reliable electricity and safe tap water. In a survey by the marketing research company Nielsen, residents ranked the city among the best in India for its cheap and reliable provision of sewage, water, electricity, public sanitation and roads.

Jamshedpur works because Tata owned enough land so that it had the right incentives to plan and invest in citywide infrastructure. Tata has also had to maintain good services in order to attract workers. In Gurgaon, private developers built lots of infrastructure, but only up to the property line. By extending the property line to city-scale, the incentives to build large-scale infrastructure like sewage, water and electricity plants are also extended.

A Robot Sculpting Metal Pottery

Tuesday, March 17th, 2015

It’s like a robot sculpting metal pottery:

Released last year, DMG Mori’s Lasertec 65 3D, uses two interchangeable heads to print then perfect metal parts. The first head makes 3D shapes by shooting metal dust onto a print surface and liquifying it with a laser. The machine then switches midstream to a 5-axis mill bit to smooth and perfect the part.

The company says their metal 3D printing method is significantly faster than competing methods. And by working mid-process, the machine can mill sections that are not reachable once the part is finished.

In short, the machine combines the flexibility of 3D printing with the precision of a milling machine to allow “additive manufacturing in milling quality.”

How Missile Tracking Cameras Are Remaking The NBA

Tuesday, March 17th, 2015

You could call SportVU the new Moneyball, but that would sell it short:

The technology was originally developed to track missiles. Now, SportVU systems hang from the catwalks of 10 NBA arenas, tiny webcams that silently track each player as they shoot, pass, and run across the court, recording each and every move 25 times a second. SportVU can tell you not just Kevin Durant’s shooting average, but his shooting average after dribbling one vs. two times, or his shooting average with a defender three feet away vs. five feet away. SportVU can actually consider both factors at once, plus take into account who passed him the ball, how many minutes he’d been on the court, and how many miles he’d run that game already.

For instance, here are “heat maps” of Kevin Durant’s closely guarded attempts versus the shots he actually makes:

kevin-durant-closely-guarded-attempts

kevin-durant-closely-guarded-makes

Sinews of War

Monday, March 16th, 2015

Endless money forms the sinews of war, Cicero noted, but lately, things have got ridiculous:

A Tomahawk cruise missile costs about $1.5m, and even the Hellfire, an air-to-ground rocket that weighs a mere 50kg, is $115,000 a pop. In exchange for, say, an enemy tank, that is probably a fair price to pay. To knock out a pick-up truck crewed by a few lightly armed guerrillas, however, it seems a little expensive, and using its shoulder-fired cousin the Javelin ($147,000) to kill individual soldiers in foxholes, as is often the case in Afghanistan, is positively profligate. Clearly, something has to change. And changing it is.

An early sign of this change came in March, with the deployment in Afghanistan of the APKWS II (Advanced Precision Kill Weapons System) made by BAE Systems. The APKWS II is a smart version of the old-fashioned 70mm (2.75-inch) rocket, which has been used by America’s armed forces since 1948. It is also cheap, as guided missiles go, costing $28,000 a shot.

The APKWS II is loaded and fired in the same way as its unguided predecessors, from the same 19-round pods, making its use straightforward. The difference is that it can strike with an accuracy of one metre because it has been fitted with a laser-seeking head which follows a beam pointed at the target by the missile’s operators. This controls a set of fins that can steer the missile to its destination.

Standard practice with unguided 70mm missiles is to use as many as two pods’ worth (ie, 38 rockets, at $1,000 a round) to blanket a target. That means the APKWS II comes in at three-quarters of the cost per kill. It also means that many more targets can be attacked on a single mission.

The Cost of Relativism

Monday, March 16th, 2015

David Brooks reviews Robert Putnam’s Our Kids and examines the cost of relativism:

Roughly 10 percent of the children born to college grads grow up in single-parent households. Nearly 70 percent of children born to high school grads do. There are a bunch of charts that look like open scissors. In the 1960s or 1970s, college-educated and noncollege-educated families behaved roughly the same. But since then, behavior patterns have ever more sharply diverged. High-school-educated parents dine with their children less than college-educated parents, read to them less, talk to them less, take them to church less, encourage them less and spend less time engaging in developmental activity.

Interspersed with these statistics, Putnam and his research team profile some of the representative figures from each social class. The profiles from high-school-educated America are familiar but horrific.

David’s mother was basically absent. “All her boyfriends have been nuts,” he said. “I never really got to see my mom that much.” His dad dropped out of school, dated several woman with drug problems and is now in prison. David went to seven different elementary schools. He ended up under house arrest, got a girl pregnant before she left him for a drug addict.

Kayla’s mom married an abusive man but lost custody of their kids to him when they split. Her dad married a woman with a child but left her after it turned out the child was fathered by her abusive stepfather. Kayla grew up as one of five half-siblings from three relationships until her parents split again and coupled with others.

Elijah grew up in a violent neighborhood and saw a girl killed in a drive-by shooting when he was 4. He burned down a lady’s house when he was 13. He goes through periods marked by drugs, clubbing and sex but also dreams of being a preacher. “I just love beating up somebody,” he told a member of Putnam’s team, “and making they nose bleed and just hurting them and just beating them on the ground.”

The first response to these stats and to these profiles should be intense sympathy. We now have multiple generations of people caught in recurring feedback loops of economic stress and family breakdown, often leading to something approaching an anarchy of the intimate life.

But it’s increasingly clear that sympathy is not enough. It’s not only money and better policy that are missing in these circles; it’s norms. The health of society is primarily determined by the habits and virtues of its citizens. In many parts of America there are no minimally agreed upon standards for what it means to be a father. There are no basic codes and rules woven into daily life, which people can absorb unconsciously and follow automatically.

Reintroducing norms will require, first, a moral vocabulary. These norms weren’t destroyed because of people with bad values. They were destroyed by a plague of nonjudgmentalism, which refused to assert that one way of behaving was better than another. People got out of the habit of setting standards or understanding how they were set.

Next it will require holding people responsible. People born into the most chaotic situations can still be asked the same questions: Are you living for short-term pleasure or long-term good? Are you living for yourself or for your children? Do you have the freedom of self-control or are you in bondage to your desires?

Does neural crest development drive domestication syndrome?

Monday, March 16th, 2015

Altered neural crest development could be the reason mammals change in oddly consistent ways during domestication:

As first noted by Darwin more than 140 years ago, domestic mammals tend to share certain characteristics—a suite of traits called the domestication syndrome.

The syndrome includes increased docility and tameness, coat color changes, reductions in tooth size, changes in craniofacial morphology, alterations in ear and tail form, more frequent and nonseasonal estrus cycles, alterations in hormone levels, changed concentrations of neurotransmitters, prolonged juvenile behavior, and reduced forebrain size.

Wilkins and Wrangham set about listing these mysterious marks of domestication and trying to match them to tissues affected by the neural crest. Within half an hour they decided that neural crest changes could plausibly account for most of the syndrome’s traits.

The neural crest hypothesis builds on observations from the long-running fox domestication experiments started in 1959 in Novosibirsk, Siberia, by Dmitri Belyaev:

After generations of selection purely for tameness, Novosibirsk foxes today show not only a friendly, people-loving disposition reminiscent of dogs, but also seemingly unrelated traits like curly tails, floppier ears and patches of white fur.

One of the many changes seen in the tame foxes was reduced size and function of their adrenal glands, which release stress hormones during the “fight-or-flight” response. This dampened adrenal function may lie at the heart of the behavioral changes observed in domestication syndrome. Wilkins et al. argue that one way to end up with smaller adrenal glands is via mild deficits of the neural crest.

The neural crest is a cell population that pinches off from the edge of the developing neural tube duing early embryogenesis. These cells migrate to many parts of the body and form the precursors of a plethora of tissue types, including pigment cells, parts of the skull, larynx, ears, teeth, sympathetic nervous system, and, of course, parts of the adrenal glands. So subtle changes in neural crest cell numbers, migration, or proliferation would lead to widespread phenotypic effects.

Neural Crest Domestication Syndrome Schematic

Wilkins et al. argue that their ideas dovetail with certain effects of human neural crest cell disorders, like the patches of depigmented skin and hair seen in Waardenburg syndrome or the jaw, ear and teeth phenotypes of Treacher Collins syndrome.

And even though neural crest cells don’t directly develop into the central nervous system, they could still partly explain why many domestic mammals have smaller forebrains than their wild ancestors. Experiments in chick embryos suggest that signals from neural crest cells play a crucial role in forebrain development. At this stage, not every component of the domestication syndrome can be firmly tied into the hypothesis. For example, the curly tails of dogs, pigs, and domestic foxes don’t have an obvious connection to neural crest deficits. Nonetheless, the authors believe enough links exist to warrant experimental tests of their predictions.

Utopian Film

Sunday, March 15th, 2015

Watching films has become so profoundly familiar that we’ve lost sight of just how consequential this activity truly is:

We have come to take cinema so for granted, we don’t wonder how we might use it to benefit our lives in a properly profound way. Ideally, we would get more ambitious about the role of cinema in the world. We would try to pin down more accurately what films can actually do for us, then make sure we’re reliably making, and finding our way to seeing, the best (that is, the most useful) kinds of films: the films that really do help us with our struggles and pains. We would, ideally, learn that film – like all the other art forms – best reveals its power when we conceive of it as a kind of therapy.

This idea isn’t new. It comes from the Ancient Greeks who brought maturity to the predecessor of cinema: theatre. Fascinatingly, they didn’t just file going to the theatre under ‘entertainment’ and leave it at that. They thought very deeply about what the point of sitting in a theatre might be and concluded that it should be a therapeía, a resource to help us grow into better, wiser, more mature kinds of people. It belonged, together with religion and philosophy, to the forces that could develop our souls. Aristotle proposed that watching tragedies was highly useful in shaking us free of self-righteousness. Seeing how easily a hero might make a small error and then pay a huge price for it could induce fear and pity in the audience, leaving us readier to forgive others and better able to examine our own consciences.

[...]

Film has an enormous power to glamourise. It can put in front of our eyes delightful images many metres in size, shot in extraordinary colours, vivid and immediate. Because so many films glamourise the wrong things, we’re used to thinking that an element of alienation and corruption is a generic rather than an incidental danger of cinema.

But in fact, film is well able to show us the less obvious but real charms of everyday life. Whereas the worst sort of films eject us back into our lives full of longing and disenchantment, the best ones leave us ready to re-engage with circumstances with which we had unfairly grown bored. Cinema can help us love and appreciate what we already have.

Alluring Beauty of Ruins

Sunday, March 15th, 2015

Lewis Dartnell (The Knowledge) shares some examples of the alluring beauty of ruins:

FranceRailroad

Czestochowa

SandSnow

Kenmare

Pripyat

Aromatase Inhibitors

Saturday, March 14th, 2015

P.D. Mangan smashed his own chronic fatigue — through diet, exercise, sleep, vitamins and minerals — and expanded his view on health and fitness. When he looked into testosterone replacement therapy (TRT), his (carefully selected) doctor recommended an aromatase inhibitor instead:

Aromatase inhibitors work to boost T by decreasing the production of estrogens, especially estradiol, the most potent estrogen. Since estradiol feeds back on natural T production, inhibiting it, lowering estradiol levels results in an increase in T. My estradiol level at the last reading had been 70, higher than the upper limit of normal for men. Why that was I don’t know, but estradiol levels increase with age in men, so maybe that was all there was to it.

So my doctor prescribed me anastrozole, the most commonly used aromatase inhibitor. Anastrozole, also known by the trade name of Arimidex, is generic and cheap: I pay about twelve dollars for a three month supply. The dosage is one-half milligram twice a week, which is quite low. Estradiol is necessary even in men, with things like bone composition depending on it, so you don’t want to drive it too low or abolish it altogether.

I noticed a difference shortly after starting to take it. For one thing, my exercise recovery appears a lot better. I used to need a solid three days off between weight sessions in order to recover fully; now I need only two. I haven’t gained any weight, but I’d say my body composition is better: a bit leaner, a bit more muscle. (I can’t seem to gain weight to save my life at this point.) And, yes, my sex drive increased noticeably.

Last time my T level was measured, it had increased to 700, a modest increase of about 20%. In some studies, using higher doses of anastrozole and in low T men, T levels have increased as much as 50%, and free T levels even more. Probably my modest but noticeable results came about because I use a low dose and wasn’t low T to begin with.

However, my estradiol level decreased to 40, well within the normal range of a young man. This may also account for what I consider a successful result of the treatment.

Guided Smart Shells

Saturday, March 14th, 2015

Raytheon’s 155mm M982 Excalibur extended-range guided artillery shell is a modern marvel:

It can be hurtled out of a howitzer barrel under immense G loads, then once it reaches the top of its trajectory, it begins its guided glide path via pop-out canard control fins, which greatly enhances the shell’s range over a standard 155mm round. Because it is guided, it can also hit nearly any target at near vertical angles, allowing it to strike the enemy in the shadow of steep mountains or in urban environments that traditional ballistic artillery could not engage safely.

Raytheon 155mm M982 Excalibur Shell

Introduced onto the battlefield in Iraq in 2007, the rounds gave Howitzer units so much added flexibility due to the Excalibur’s increased range, non-ballistic trajectory and almost perfect accuracy that the Army immediately upped the round’s production from 18 units a month to 150. Since then, thousands more M982 shells have been built and nearly a thousand of them have been fired in combat.

Now they’re shrinking it down for the Navy’s five-inch Mk45 deck guns.