The Prime Minister of Japan recently stated that his nation was facing its worst crisis since World War II. While most of the world is focused on tragic images of floodwater and rubble, and fixated on radiation levels, there is a bigger picture to be examined – one that also includes  energy, coal and the Strait of Hormuz.

The geography of the Persian Gulf is extraordinary. It is a narrow body of water opening into a narrow channel through the Strait of Hormuz. Any diminution of the flow from any source in the region, let alone the complete closure of the Strait of Hormuz, would have profound implications for the global economy.

For Japan it could mean more than higher prices. It could mean being unable to secure the amount of oil needed at any price. The movement of tankers, the limits on port facilities and long-term contracts that commit oil to other places could make it impossible for Japan to physically secure the oil it needs to run its industrial plant. On an extended basis, this would draw down reserves and constrain Japan’s economy dramatically. And, obviously, when the world’s third-largest industrial plant drastically slows, the impact on the global supply chain is both dramatic and complex.

{ George Friedman | Continue reading }

Nuclear plants in France, Germany, and the U.S. are far more automated than in Japan, where more controls are based on manual decisions, switches, and reactions, says Roger Gale, a nuclear industry consultant and former official at the U.S. Department of Energy who served as a consultant to Tepco for 20 years. He thinks U.S. utilities would have acted more quickly in a similar disaster. “[Tepco] probably reacted more slowly in the initial case than they needed to.”

Gale says a culture of complacency within Tepco may also have contributed to the crisis. Tepco has massive cash flows and a reputation for hiring the best and brightest engineers in Japan. However, Gale says, an array of management problems–a lack of transparency, problems with record keeping, relying on manual rather than automatic controls, and being slow on the draw when making decisions—plague the organization.

{ Fast Company | Continue reading }

At this point in the Japanese nuclear emergency it is coming down to the simple proposition of how do you drop enough water on the stricken reactors, and especially the spent fuel ponds, to keep further damage from happening?

{ Robert X. Cringely | Continue reading | And: Japan Takes Extraordinary Measures to Cool Nuclear Plant }

related { CNN/Money jumps on the fear bandwagon with this interactive graphic }

{ Rinsed It }

Disaster and rebirth is an old story in this part of the country. I know. My family has lived that cycle for generations deep in the Mississippi Delta—in Plaquemines Parish, a name that since the British Petroleum (BP) oil spill has become a cultural marker, the equal, after Katrina, of “the Lower Ninth Ward.” But the oil spill? Will it prove one too many disasters for the return of the Plaquemines Parish my family once knew? Or will it, like Hurricane Katrina, be a dangerous opportunity for changes long overdue?


As much of America suddenly knows, the mouth of the Mississippi River and the surrounding marshlands of Plaquemines Parish nurture the foodstuffs that grace the tables of New Orleans’s world-famous restaurants and provide much of the seafood—25 to 30 percent of it—that Americans eat. Over two centuries the region’s diverse, amphibious Delta culture—Alsatian, Croatian, Isleño, African American, Italian, and Native American—also nurtured my family’s culinary roots that flowered into the Ruth’s Chris Steak House restaurant empire.

{ Randy Fertel/Gastronomica | Continue reading }

photo { Jessica Craig-Martin }

The US military is developing software that will let it secretly manipulate social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter by using fake online personas to influence internet conversations and spread pro-American propaganda.

A Californian corporation has been awarded a contract with United States Central Command (Centcom), which oversees US armed operations in the Middle East and Central Asia, to develop what is described as an “online persona management service” that will allow one US serviceman or woman to control up to 10 separate identities based all over the world.

{ Guardian | Continue reading }

painting { Jean Leon Gerome }

Three new lines will be added to the New York City subway system next fall, giving residents of Chelsea and the Meatpacking District direct transit service down to Soho and up to the Upper East Side.

Plans call for two rapid transit subway lines and one ultra-slow line: The BB, the K, and the RL–which respectively stand for Boone Boone, Koons, and Roy Lichtenstein. The three lines are expected to open October 15, 2011 in unison.

M.T.A. awarded the construction contract to Manhattan-based company Imp Kerr & Associates, NYC. Other projects the firm currently works on include the eradication of Science Limited, the maintenance of a jellyfish farm, and private lectures on Spinoza. Imp Kerr will serve as executive supervisor.

{ Text | Images and maps }

Among 20th-century artists, few can compare for sheer cinematic drama with the Italian painter and sculptor Amedeo Modigliani, “probably the most mythologized modern artist since Van Gogh,” according to the art historian Kenneth Silver. Scenes from the life of Modigliani might include “Modi” hobnobbing with Picasso in Montmartre, having a torrid affair with the married Russian poet Anna Akhmatova, and ending his long relationship with the English journalist Beatrice Hastings when her new lover drew a gun on him at a drunken party attended by Picasso, Matisse, and Juan Gris.

Modigliani drank heavily, used cocaine and hashish, and, a gorgeous hunk of a man despite his modest height of 5 feet 3 inches, fathered an indeterminate number of illegitimate children. (…)

“Sometimes, when drunk, he would begin undressing,” a friend reported in a typical account of Modigliani misbehaving, “under the eager eyes of the faded English and American girls who frequented the canteen … then display himself quite naked, slim and white, his torso arched.” When his life was cut short by tuberculosis at the age of 35, his final lover, Jeanne, eight months pregnant with their second child, threw herself out of a window.

{ Slate | Continue reading | More: Loving Modigliani thanks to Daniel }

artwork { Modigliani, Femme nue, 1916 }

If you’re looking for the latest in home exercise equipment, you may want to consider a dog.

Several studies now show that dogs can be powerful motivators to get people moving. Not only are dog owners more likely to take regular walks, but new research shows that dog walkers are more active over all than people who don’t have dogs.

One study even found that older people are more likely to take regular walks if the walking companion is canine rather than human.

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

photo { Brandon Mitchell }

{ No one knows exactly why the international prototype of the kilogram, as pampered a hunk of platinum and iridium as ever existed, appears to weigh less than it did when it was manufactured in the late 19th century. The kilogram — the universal standard against which all other kilograms are measured — in Sèvres, France, in controlled conditions set out in 1889, in an underground vault that can be opened only with three different keys possessed by three different people. The kilogram is the last base unit of measurement to be expressed in terms of a manufactured artifact. (Its cousin, the international prototype of the meter, was retired from active duty in 1960, when scientists redefined the meter. | NY Times | full story }

Dr Principe wants to rehabilitate alchemy. He believes that most alchemists were respectable seekers after knowledge and that they were working with well constructed (if ultimately misguided) theories. The reputation of the alchemists, he reckons, was deliberately undermined by gentleman amateurs who were trying to give the emerging science of chemistry the social respectability it needed to sit at the academic high table.

The work of Dr Principe, though, also serves as a useful reminder to modern scientists that even the most cherished theories need to be treated with constant scepticism. This is because, as the alchemists found out, it can be all too easy to see in your results what you want to see, rather than what is actually there.

Alchemy’s roots lie in Hellenistic Egypt. It was compounded from a mixture of practical knowledge of things like metallurgy, pharmacy and glassmaking with the Greek practice of analysing and theorising about the world that is known as philosophy. These Hermetic ideas (Hermes was the legendary founder of alchemy) were picked up and developed by Arab scholars when Egypt fell to the armies of Islam in the seventh century, and then transmitted to Europe during the scholastic renaissance of the 12th century.

For the next five centuries, Dr Principe thinks, alchemists were the “northern chemists” of Europe.

{ Economist | Continue reading }

At 2:27 p.m. on March 30, 1981, President Ronald Reagan (Secret Service code name: Rawhide) walked out of a Washington hotel and was shot by John Hinckley Jr. In the confused moments that followed, no one was sure exactly what had happened—or if Mr. Reagan had even been hurt. In this excerpt from the forthcoming book “Rawhide Down,” a detailed account of the attempted assassination, Secret Service agent Jerry Parr has just shoved Mr. Reagan into his car after hearing the gunshots.

{ Del Quentin Wilber/WSJ | Continue reading | More }

Molecular surprises are sometimes right in front of us, if only we’d do the math.

Some new molecules are simply astounding. We have learned that xenon, a so-called noble gas, is far from inert, forming bonds with halogens, oxygen and carbon. But I never imagined a bond between two relatively unreactive elements, gold (Au) and xenon (Xe), and, to boot, with a pretty naked xenon acting as a ligand—which is usually an ion or a molecule that binds to a central metal atom by donating one of its electron pairs. But that’s what Stefan Seidel and Konrad Seppelt of the Free University of Berlin made in 2000 in the square-planar AuXe₄²⁺ ion.

{ American Scientist | Continue reading }

installation { Phoebe Washburn }

There is a curious text, of an author who, I don’t know why, isn’t read anymore. A psychiatrist, son of an abominable historian of philosophy of the 19th century. He was called Pierre Janet. He used to be very well-known. He was more or less contemporary to Freud, his career is quite parallel to Freud’s. And neither of them understood the other. It’s very curious, there were endeavors to get them in touch but they didn’t get along. Their starting points were the same, it was hysteria; Janet initiated a very important conception of hysteria and he did a quite curious psychology which he proposed to name “Psychology of the Conduct,” even before Americans propounded the “Behavior Psychology.”

Roughly the method was: a psychological determination given, look for the type of conduct it represents. It was very interesting; he said: memory. The memory. Well it bears no interest, it doesn’t mean anything to me. I ask myself: what is the type of conduct one can hold when one remembers? And his answer was: the narration.

Hence, the famous definition of Janet: the memory is a conduct of narration. The emotion, he said, the emotion, one can’t feel if one can’t set down. You see, he used the conduct as a system of coordinates for all things. Everything was conduct.

I have a childhood memory which has impressed me forever. We all have childhood memories like this. It was during the holidays, my father used to give me Mathematics lessons. I was panic-stricken and it was all settled. That is to say, up to a point, I suspect we both did it already resigned, since we knew what was going to happen. In any case, I knew, I knew what was going to happen beforehand, because it was all settled, regular as clockwork. My father for that matter knew not much of Mathematics but he thought he had, above all, a natural gift for enunciating clearly. So he started, he held the pedagogical conduct, the pedagogical conduct. I was doing it willingly because it was no kidding subject at all; and I held the taught conduct. I showed every signs of interest, of maximal understanding, but all very soberly, and very fast there came a derailment. This derailment consisted in this: five minutes later, my father was yelling, set to beat me and I found myself in tears, I have to say, I was really small, and weeping. What was it? It is clear, there were two emotions. My deep grief, his deep anger. What did they respond to? Two failures. He has failed in his pedagogical conduct, he didn’t manage to explain at all. Of course he didn’t, he wanted to explain it to me with algebra, as he always said, because it was simpler and clearer this way. Then if I protested… and there it derailed. I protested arguing the teacher would never let me do algebra because when a six-year-old is given a problem, he hasn’t got the right, he is not supposed to do algebra. So the other was maintaining that it was the only clear way. Well, therefore, we both got into a tizzy. Misfire in the pedagogical conduct: anger; misfire in the taught conduct: tears.

All right. It was a failure. Janet said: emotion, it’s very simple, it’s a failure of conduct. You are upset when there is, when you hold a conduct and this conduct fails; then there is emotion.

{ Gilles Deleuze, Courses at Vincennes, 1980 | Continue reading }

A dragonfly doji pattern is a relatively difficult chart pattern to find, but when it is found within a defined trend it is often deemed to be a reliable signal indecision among traders and that the trend is about to change direction.

The pattern is formed when the stock’s opening and closing prices are equal and occur at the high of the day. The long lower shadow suggests that the forces of supply and demand are nearing a balance and that the direction of the trend may be nearing a major turning point.

{ Investopedia | Continue reading }

Speed dating was built on the principle that you can learn A LOT about someone in the first few minutes of meeting them. This is true. Even within 30 seconds we are pretty good at picking out the broad stuff, like if someone is extraverted or curious. This tells us if someone is a possible dating prospect.

In theory adding choice or variety to that process should lead to a better selection. When you meet a bunch of people you can raise your standards on what is important and you end up with a better choice. It doesn’t happen this way.

Allison Lenton and Marco Francesconi just published a paper looking at how choice impacts our ability to select a prospective partner.  They looked at 84 speed dating events where single men and women meet a bunch of prospective partners during a series of short mini-dates. At the end of the evening each person gets to pick out who they would like to exchange numbers with, and if both agree then they get each other’s contact information.

Lenton and Francesconi found that having a lot of choice, and a lot of variety within your choices, leads you to making a worse decision, or even no decision at all.  People who had greater variety in their choices (i.e., range in age, height, occupation, etc.) selected fewer people to meet and were less likely to want to meet the best prospect . The authors conclude that too much choice makes us confused and we end up doing nothing.

{ eHarmoy Labs | Continue reading }

photos { Melvin Sokolsky, Harper’s Bazaar “Fly” Spring Collection, 1965 }

Is narrative in cinema really dead?

Try this experiment: Pick a famous movie—Casablanca, say—and summarize the plot in one sentence. Is that plot you just described the thing you remember most about it? Doubtful. Narrative is a necessary cement, but it disappears from memory.

{ Interview with Peter Greenaway | Continue reading | via Fette }

painting { Chechu Alava, The Romanov, Summer, 2010 }

The writer was in despair. For a year and a half, he had been trying to write a script that he owed to a studio, and had been unable to produce anything. Finally, he started seeing a therapist. The therapist, Barry Michels, told him to close his eyes and focus on the things he was grateful for. The first time he did this, in the therapist’s office, there was a long silence. “What about your dog?” Michels asked. “O.K. I’m grateful for my dog,” the writer said after a while. “The sun?” “Fine, the sun,” the writer said. “I’m grateful for sun. Sometimes.”

Michels also told the writer to get an egg timer. Following Michels’s instructions, every day he set it for one minute, knelt in front of his computer in a posture of prayer, and begged the universe to help him write the worst sentence ever written. When the timer dinged, he would start typing. He told Michels that the exercise was stupid, pointless, and embarrassing, and it didn’t work. Michels told him to keep doing it.

A few weeks later, the writer was startled from his sleep by a voice: it sounded like a woman talking at a dinner party. He went to his computer, which was on a folding table in a corner of the room, and began to write a scene. Six weeks later, he had a hundred-and-sixty-five-page script. Six months after that, the script was shot, and when the movie came out the writer won an Academy Award.

Michels, in the words of a former patient, is an “open secret” in Hollywood. Using esoteric precepts adapted from Jungian psychology, he and Phil Stutz, a psychiatrist who is his mentor, have developed a program designed to access the creative power of the unconscious and address complaints common among their clientele: writer’s block, stagefright, insecurity, the vagaries of the entertainment industry. (…)

By far the most common problem afflicting the writers in Michels’s practice is procrastination, which he understands in terms of Jung’s Father archetype. “They procrastinate because they have no external authority figure demanding that they write,” he says. “Often I explain to the patient that there is an authority figure he’s answerable to, but it’s not human. It’s Time itself that’s passing inexorably. That’s why they call it Father Time. Every time you procrastinate or waste time, you’re defying this authority figure.” Procrastination, he says, is a “spurious form of immortality,” the ego’s way of claiming that it has all the time in the world; writing, by extension, is a kind of death.

{ Dana Goodyear/New Yorker | Continue reading }

Even if there was a highly advanced and intelligent alien species out there and it was starved of resources after tens of millions of years of existence in one form or another, we wouldn’t be a likely destination for invasion. We’d probably be too far away and too expensive to attack for a pretty minor payoff.

Everything aliens could find on our planet could be found in greater abundance and higher densities in asteroid belts and comet-rich clouds left over from solar system formation.

{ Weird things | Continue reading }

Every time some human attribute is said to be unique, whether tool-making or language or warfare, biologists soon find some plausible precursor in animals that makes the ability less distinctive.

Still, humans are vastly different from other animals, however hard the difference may be to define. A cascade of events, some the work of natural selection, some just plain accidents, propelled the human lineage far from the destiny of being just another ape, down an unexpected evolutionary path to become perhaps the strangest blossom on the ample tree of life.

And what was the prime mover, the dislodged stone that set this eventful cascade in motion? It was, perhaps, the invention of weapons — an event that let human ancestors escape the brutal tyranny of the alpha male that dominated ape societies.

Biologists have little hesitation in linking humans’ success to their sociality. The ability to cooperate, to make individuals subordinate their strong sense of self-interest to the needs of the group, lies at the root of human achievement.

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

photo { Lynn Davis }

The Ides of March is the name of 15 March in the Roman calendar, probably referring to the day of the full moon.

The term ides was used for the 15th day of the months of March, May, July, and October, and the 13th day of the other months.

In modern times, the term Ides of March is best known as the date that Julius Caesar was killed in 44 B.C. Julius Caesar was stabbed (23 times) to death in the Roman Senate led by Marcus Junius Brutus, Gaius Cassius Longinus and 60 other co-conspirators.

{ Wikipedia | Continue reading | More: Assassination of Julius Caesar }

related { Each of the suspects stabbed Ratchett once, so that no one could know who delivered the fatal blow. }

painting { Vincenzo Camuccini, Morte di Giulio Cesare (Death of Julius Caesar), 1798 }