On the plains of New Mexico, a band of elite marathoners tests a controversial theory of evolution: that humans can outrun the fastest animals on earth.

Between two and three million years ago, when our australo­pithecine ancestors ventured out of the forests and onto the protein-rich African savanna, they were prey more often than hunter. They gathered plant-based foods, just as their primate brethren did. Then something changed. They began running after game with long, steady strides. Evolutionary biologists like Harvard’s Dan Lieberman think the uniquely human capacity for endurance running is a distant remnant of prehistoric persistence hunting.

We can run all day, the theory goes, because there was once a caloric advantage to it. Our two human legs, packed as they are with long slow-twitch muscle fibers, make us better runners over long distances than most quad­rupeds. And our three million sweat glands give us the ability to cool our bodies with perspiration. An antelope, by contrast, sprints—for up to 15 minutes—while wearing a fur coat and relies on respiration (panting) to release the heat that builds up with exertion. Add to the mix our ability to organize and strategize and, well, you can see how persistence hunting might actually work. (…)

There’s no hard archaeological evidence of persistence hunting, but half a dozen tribes are known to have pursued game this way in the past century: the Aborigines in Australia, the Navajo in the American Southwest, the Seri and Tarahumara Indians in Mexico. Of the tribes thought to practice it, though, only the Bushmen of the Kalahari Desert have been seen chasing antelope in recent decades. In the 1980s, South African mathematician Louis Liebenberg joined a successful Bushman persistence hunt for kudu in 107-degree heat.

{ Outside | Continue reading }

related { Does sexual intercourse hinder subsequent athletic performance? }

Whether in Greek theaters or Roman courts, buying people to clap for you was once common practice. In fourth century BC Athens, for example, comic playwright Philemon defeated his contemporary Menander in theatrical competitions, not because he was better (he wasn’t) but because of hired hands that swayed the judges. The Roman emperor Nero went further, establishing an entire school of applause and keeping in his train a claque of five thousand; all soldiers, they would sing Nero’s praises before subjecting the citizenry to His Majesty’s stagecraft.

The claque was revived in sixteenth-century France, when poet Jean Daurat bought tickets to his own plays and gave them to people on the condition that they like it loudly. By the early 1800s, the claque racket in Paris had reached boutique proportions: one could shop for rieurs (to laugh), pleureurs (to cry), or commissaires (to nudge neighboring audience members about upcoming good scenes).

{ Laphams Quarterly | Continue reading }

…SCVNGR, a $100-million company that makes location-based apps to rival Foursquare and Groupon. (…)

Priebatsch is 22 years old. He’s also worth millions. And not just because he’s had a “Projects” folder on a hard drive since he was 8, made tens of thousands of dollars every month on a startup when he was 16, and dropped out of college after freshman year. He’s the man in charge because he sensed something three years ago that most of the rest of us did not: that a generation raised on video games would want to keep playing a game in real life. “I found out that basically the real world was essentially the same game as Civilization [an old computer game], just with slightly better graphics, maybe, and slightly slower.”

The story of SCVNGR begins with the story of Priebatsch and that game of Sid Meier’s Civilization. His aunt gave it to him when he was a kid, and its premise was simple: Build an ancient civilization strong enough to take over the world. Priebatsch, the son of a biotech entrepreneur and Morgan Stanley VP, was forbidden from watching TV, but could play on the computer. Spending hours with the game, he quickly became addicted not to conquering the world but conquering the game. “The fact that the game was designed by someone always made me think that someone had built it with their own biases,” he says, “I would essentially mine the game into a series of algorithms and know exactly what to do at any given time.”

Priebatsch, like an undergrad reading Marx for the first time, started to look at everything through this new worldview. “I have a much broader definition of game than most other people,” he says, explaining that games are just systems of challenges, rewards, and biases. After years of playing games, Priebatsch felt ready to actually build one.

{ Fortune | Continue reading | Thanks Tim }

“I’ve never felt threatened by Facebook. (…) Facebook has the most to lose because it has a history of altering its privacy policies and not doing the most to protect the privacy of its users,” said Priebatsch. “Facebook will be like Google, Microsoft and IBM before them – they’ve been dominant for maybe a year and I’d give them maybe four more years.”

{ Guardian | Continue reading }

related { 18 months ago, Groupon didn’t exist. Today, it has over 70 million users in 500-odd different markets, is making more than a billion dollars a year, has dozens if not hundreds of copycat rivals, and is said to be worth as much as $25 billion. What’s going on here? | Reuters | full story }

The widely publicized hack of Sony’s computer networks is worse than previously thought, also affecting 24.6 million Sony Online Entertainment network accounts. (…)

Add this to the 77 million accounts that may have been compromised last week, and Sony is responsible for one of the largest recorded data breaches.

{ Computer World | Continue reading }

Remember, after the recent earthquake and tsunami in Japan, those stories about wallets filled with money being found and turned-in to the authorities, still stuffed with cash? That’s one positive aspect of Japanese culture, but does it also make them too trusting? (…)

“For whatever reason (low crime rate, maybe?),” my reader says, “the Japanese cannot seem to get their heads around the fact that unencrypted cardholder data sitting on servers in unsecured areas and being transmitted across public networks is a bit of a risk. Every other country in Asia has grasped this easy concept, but not Japan. (…)

I can’t imagine such exposed servers having not been repeatedly explored by bad guys over the past two years.  That information isn’t just vulnerable, it is gone.

{ Robert X. Cringely | Continue reading }

Let’s consider the butterfly. One of the most taxing movements in sports, the butterfly requires greater energy than bicycling at 14 miles per hour, running a 10-minute mile, playing competitive basketball or carrying furniture upstairs. It burns more calories, demands larger doses of oxygen and elicits more fatigue than those other activities, meaning that over time it should increase a swimmer’s endurance and contribute to weight control.

So is the butterfly the best single exercise that there is? Well, no. The butterfly “would probably get my vote for the worst” exercise, said Greg Whyte, a professor of sport and exercise science. (…)

Ask a dozen physiologists which exercise is best, and you’ll get a dozen wildly divergent replies. (…)

Sticking with an exercise is key, even if you don’t spend a lot of time working out. The majority of the mortality-related benefits from exercising are due to the first 30 minutes of exercise. A recent meta-analysis of studies about exercise and mortality showed that, in general, a sedentary person’s risk of dying prematurely from any cause plummeted by nearly 20 percent if he or she began brisk walking (or the equivalent) for 30 minutes five times a week. If he or she tripled that amount, for instance, to 90 minutes of exercise four or five times a week, his or her risk of premature death dropped by only another 4 percent. So the one indisputable aspect of the single best exercise is that it be sustainable. From there, though, the debate grows heated.

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

photo { Indlekofer and Knoepfel }

Sony’s huge PlayStation Network (PSN) has been down for a week now following the theft of ID and credit card data on some or all of the gaming and video entertainment network’s 77 million customer accounts. Readers have been asking for comment but I stay out of these things unless I have something new to contribute. That something finally comes a week into the crisis as gamers begin to wonder why the network is still not back in operation and speculate on what this all means to Sony? It’s a huge loss of face, of course, but beyond that the damage to Sony is minimal. And the upside for PSN members, including those involved in the many emerging class action lawsuits, is likely to be bupkes. Nothing.

Recent history suggests Sony’s likely gift to users as an apology for losing their personal data will be some period of free credit monitoring and a free month of PSN service.

{ Robert X. Cringely | Continue reading }

{ Leo Fitzmaurice, Base (Baseball Ball Removed), 2010 }

{ Poker Bots Invade Online Gambling }

Mario is basically the most famous video game character ever. (…) His entire existence is focused on saving the incredibly helpless and abduction-prone Princess Peach, who has been kidnapped by Bowser so many times she keeps a toothbrush at his place. (…)

In Super Mario Bros. 2, you can switch among four characters at any time, and every single one of them is better than Mario. In fact, there’s no reason to ever pick anyone but the Princess, because she, like Tails, can fucking fly.

For short distances, anyway. (…) And years later she shows up in her own DS game, still with the ability to fly…

…and oh by the way she can freaking surround herself with a ball of psychic hellfire.

That game is the only one that gets the logic right: It’s Mario who gets kidnapped, and she has to go save his ass. Not only does this make more sense considering her arsenal, but we can’t figure out how she ever allows herself to get kidnapped in the first place.

{ Cracked | Continue reading }

photo { Victor Cobo }

On May 11, 1997, chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov resigns after 19 moves in a game against Deep Blue, a chess-playing computer developed by scientists at IBM. This was the sixth and final game of their match, which Kasparov lost two games to one, with three draws.

Kasparov, a chess prodigy from Azerbaijan, was a skillful chess player from childhood. At 21, Kasparov played Anatoly Karpov for the world title, but the 49-game match ended indecisively. The next year, Kasparov beat Karpov to become the youngest world champion in history. With a FIDE (Federation International des Echecs) score of 2800, and a streak of 12 world chess titles in a row, Kasparov was considered the greatest chess player in history going into his match with Deep Blue. (…)

Kasparov first played Deep Blue in 1996. The grandmaster was known for his unpredictable play, and he was able to defeat the computer by switching strategies mid-game. In 1997, Kasparov abandoned his swashbuckling style, taking more of a wait-and-see approach; this played in the computer’s favor and is commonly pointed to as the reason for his defeat.

{ History | Continue reading | IBM archive of Kasparov vs Deep Blue }

Jeff Koons, the creator of sculptures based on the image of a balloon dog, recently sent a cease-and-desist letter to a company selling bookends that represent a balloon dog and to the manufacturer of said dogs. It is doubtful Koons could win this one in court. We have all watched at a street fair as somebody twists long balloons into dogs or other animals. So what can Koons say is really his? The man has made his reputation as an appropriator—as an artist who borrows images and styles and ideas more or less wholesale from other more or less creative spirits. He himself has been sued for copyright violation four times, which may help to explain his eagerness to establish some legal precedent for appropriation as a form of creation. It is easy to make fun of Koons. But to the collectors, dealers, curators, critics, and historians who have invested time and in many cases considerable sums of money in his work and that of Warhol and other appropriators, the originality of the death of originality cannot be taken lightly. I think there is some concern that the artists will not finally escape what Sir Joshua Reynolds, in speaking about artists’ appropriations from other artists to the students at the Royal Academy in 1774, referred to as “the servility of plagiarism.” (…)

Jeff Koons, when accused of copyright infringement, tends to settle out of court. One has the impression that he prefers writing a check to actually discovering what a judge or a jury might have to say. But in his heart of hearts Koons probably feels that if Poussin became Poussin by stealing from Titian and Raphael, why on earth is he being bothered by questions of copyright and fair use?

{ The New Republic | Continue reading }

Balloon dogs everywhere can breathe a sigh of relief: SF’s Park Life store/gallery announced that artist Jeff Koons has dropped legal action against the sale of its balloon dog-shaped bookends.

{ Bay Citizen | Continue reading | Thanks JJ }

related { How to Make a Balloon Dog }

bonus:

Over break I went out with a buddy of mine and played some darts. This got me to thinking, where exactly should someone aim in order to get the largest expected number of points? (…)

Well, something that I didn’t quite realize before I started this adventure is that while the double bullseye in the center is worth 50 points, the triple 20 is worth more: 60 points.

For the uninitiated, in games like 501 you score points based on where the dart falls. The center is the bullseye, where the inner most circle is worth 50 and the ring around it is worth 25, after that you score depending on which of the pie slice things you fall in, the points being the number on the slice. The little ring around the outside is worth double points, and the little ring at about half the board radius is worth triple points.

So perhaps the triple 20 is where you should be aiming all the time.

In order to answer a question like that, we need to develop a model for dart throwing. In this case, I thought it was safe to assume that dart throws are normally distributed about the place you aim, with some sigma determined by your skill level.

{ Ask-a-Physicist | Continue reading }

artwork { Jasper Johns, Target with Four Faces , 1955 }

Vaginal steam baths, called chai-yok, are said to reduce stress, fight infections, clear hemorrhoids, regulate menstrual cycles and aid infertility, among many other health benefits. In Korea, many women steam regularly after their monthly periods.

There is folk wisdom — and even some logic — to support the idea that the carefully targeted steam may provide some physiological benefits for women. But there are no studies to document its effectiveness, and few American doctors have even heard of it.

Niki Han Schwarz believes it worked for her. After five steams, she found she had fewer body aches and more energy. She also became pregnant eight months ago at the age of 45 after attempting to conceive for three years.

Han Schwarz and her husband, orthopedic surgeon Charles Schwarz, are determined to introduce vaginal steam baths to Southern California women. Their Santa Monica spa, Tikkun Holistic Spa, offers a 30-minute V-Steam treatment for $50. (…)

Across the country, chai-yok treatments are not easy to find. (…) The flashy Juvenex Spa in Manhattan offers its 30-minute Gyno Spa Cure for $75.

{ LA Times | Continue reading }

photo { Man Ray }

By most all accounts a brilliant mind, Fischer was perhaps the most visionary chess player since José Raul Capablanca, a Cuban who held the world title for six years in the 1920s. Fischer’s innovative, daring play — at age 13, he defeated senior master (and former U.S. Open champion) Donald Byrne in what is sometimes called “The Game of the Century” — made him a hero figure to millions in the United States and throughout the world. In 1957, Fischer became the youngest winner of the U.S. chess championship — he was just 14 — before going on to beat Spassky for the world title in 1972.

But Fischer forfeited that title just three years later, refusing to defend his crown under rules proposed by the World Chess Federation, and he played virtually no competitive chess in ensuing decades, retreating, instead, into isolation and seeming paranoia. Because of a series of rankly anti-Semitic public utterances and his praise, on radio, for the Sept. 11, 2001 attack on the World Trade Center, at his death, Fischer was seen by much of the world as spoiled, arrogant and mean-spirited.

In recent years, however, researchers have come to understand that Bobby Fischer was psychologically troubled from early childhood. Careful examination of his life and family shows that he likely suffered with mental illness that may never have been properly diagnosed or treated.

{ Miller-McCune | Continue reading | Donald Byrne vs Robert James Fischer, “The Game of the Century,” 1956 | select Java Viewer and press set }

Turbulence, a film by Prof. Nitzan Ben Shaul of Tel Aviv University, uses complicated video coding procedures that allow the viewer to change the course of a movie in mid-plot. In theory, that means each new theater audience can see its very own version of a film. Turbulence recently won a prize at the Berkeley Video and Film Festival for its technological innovation.

{ AFTAU | Continue reading }

Gamers, as video-game players are known, thrill to “the pull,” that mysterious ability that good games have of making you want to play them, and keep playing them.

Miyamoto’s games are widely considered to be among the greatest. He has been called the father of modern video games. The best known, and most influential, is Super Mario Bros., which débuted a quarter of a century ago and, depending on your point of view, created an industry or resuscitated a comatose one. It spawned dozens of sequels and spinoffs. Miyamoto has designed or overseen the development of many other blockbusters, among them the Legend of Zelda series, Star Fox, and Pikmin. Their success, in both commercial and cultural terms, suggests that he has a peerless feel for the pull, that he is a master of play—of its components and poetics—in the way that Walt Disney, to whom he is often compared, was of sentiment and wonder. (…)

What he hasn’t created is a company in his own name, or a vast fortune to go along with it. He is a salaryman. Miyamoto’s business card says that he is the senior managing director and the general manager of the entertainment-analysis and -development division at Nintendo Company Ltd., the video-game giant. What it does not say is that he is Nintendo’s guiding spirit, its meal ticket, and its playful public face. Miyamoto has said that his main job at Nintendo is ningen kougaku—human engineering. He has been at the company since 1977 and has worked for no other.

{ The New Yorker | Continue reading }

In 2005, the French city of Lyon introduced a shared bicycle system called Velo’v that has since inspired numerous other schemes around the world.

Velo’v differed from earlier schemes in its innovative technology, such as electronic locks, onboard computers and access via smart cards. The system now offers some 4000 bikes at almost 350 stations around the city. (…)

Since its introduction, the system has kept track of the start and finishing location plus travel time of every journey. Today, we get a detailed analysis of this data. (…)

Some of what they found is unsurprising. Over an average trip, cyclists travel 2.49 km in 14.7 minutes so their average speed is about 10 km/h. (…) During the rush hour, however, the average speed rises to almost 15 km/h, a speed which outstrips the average car speed. (…)

Curiously, the Wednesday morning speeds are systematically higher than on other days, even though there is no change in other factors such as the number of cars. This, say Jensen and co, is probably because women tend to stay at home and look after their children on a Wednesday in France. So the higher proportion of men pushes up the average speed.

{ The Physics arXiv Blog | Continue reading }

{ The Parrot AR.Drone was definitely one of the highlights of our day. How can you top a quadricopter that can fight with another using augmented reality, is easy to fly, and only needs an iPhone to control it? | Engadget | more photos + video }