Only after 18 years as a barista in New York did his boss, the cafe’s owner, feel qualified to return home to show off his coffee-making skills. Now, at Bear Pond’s main branch, he stops making espressos at an early hour each day, claiming that the spike on the power grid after that time precludes drawing the voltage required for optimal pressure.

Such obsessive—some might say insane—pursuit of perfection, in coffee and cuisine, clothes and comforts, isn’t unusual in Japan. (…)

Japan has become the most culturally cosmopolitan country on Earth, a place where you can lunch at a bistro that serves 22 types of delicious and thoroughly Gallic terrines, shop for Ivy League–style menswear at a store that puts to shame the old-school shops of Cambridge, Massachusetts, and spend the evening sipping rare single malts in a serene space that boasts a collection of 12,000 jazz, blues and soul albums. The best of everything can be found here, and is now often made here: American-style fashion, haute French cuisine, classic cocktails, modern luxury hotels. It might seem perverse for a traveler to Tokyo to skip sukiyaki in favor of Neapolitan pizza, but just wait until he tastes that crust.

{ WSJ | Continue reading }

related { Researchers: Major Earthquake Likely To Strike Tokyo By 2016 }

I missed a great story circulated by my first New York roommates about how our scuzzball landlord is now embroiled in a legal fracas for renting a 1.5 million Tribeca apartment to a guy who runs a basement sex loft out of it offering “flaming massages.” The neighbors are so mad they keep smearing dog feces on the door. I could have lived without this news, but I’m happier now that I have it.

(…)

The messages Facebook hides in an obscure folder labeled “Other.”

{ Slate | Continue reading }

“I only remember meeting him once,” she said. “Fred had some of the guys over, and Joe Sims was sitting right here. He was interested in all the Sinatra stuff. Then when he was leaving, he said something to me. He said, ‘The one problem with that collection is that Frank Sinatra can’t sing.’ I said, ‘Excuse me?’ He looked me right in the eye and said, ‘Frank Sinatra can’t sing.’ The hackles on my neck stood up. Literally. I mean it. When Fred came back, I said, ‘He’s bad news, Fred. I can tell you right now, he’s bad news.’ But Fred pooh-poohed it. He said something like, ‘Ah, you don’t know what you’re talking about.’”

It is the central mystery of the case. (…) By all accounts, Fred Thomas had lived an exemplary life of loyalty and leadership, with a devoted wife, a son nearby, a secure pension income, and a dream home to show for it. Joe Sims (…) was a man of unsavory associations and catastrophic divorces, a man who when he tells the truth, tells it slant, a man who stands accused of raping his stepdaughter in a house with her old swing set still planted in the backyard.

{ GQ | Continue reading }

{ A landlocked country is a country entirely enclosed by land, or whose only coastlines lie on closed seas. There are 48 landlocked countries in the world, including partially recognized states. | Wikipedia | Continue reading }

{ On the campaign trail with Mitt Romney. And Bad Lip Reading. | thanks joshua }

{ L’Inconnue de la Seine (French for the unknown woman of the Seine) was an unidentified young woman whose death mask became a popular fixture on the walls of artists’ homes after 1900. Her body was pulled out of the Seine River in Paris around the late 1880s. A pathologist at the Paris morgue was so taken by her beauty that he had a molder make a plaster cast death mask of her face. The mask was used for the head of the first aid mannequin Rescue Annie, created by Peter Safar and Asmund Laerdal in 1958 and used in numerous CPR courses. Her face has been called by some “the most kissed face” of all time. | Wikipedia | Continue reading }

Ira Glass OK, I am holding a new iPhone 4S in my hand. This is the one that you can talk to, and it talks back. It’s a program called Siri. So let’s try this. I’m just going to hold it up to the microphone here and push a button. Siri, where do you come from?

Siri Software I, Siri, was designed by Apple in California.

Ira Glass Where were you manufactured?

Siri Software I’m not allowed to say.

Ira Glass Why?

Siri Software Good question. Anything else I can do for you?

(…)

Ira Glass Flip over the phone– right here on the back it’s printed, assembled in China.

(…)

Mike Daisey We think our crap comes from China, right? Kind of a generalized way. China. But it doesn’t come from China. It comes from Shenzhen. It’s a city. It’s a place. (…) We get out to the edge of the core of Shenzhen and we come to the gates. Because 31 years ago, when Deng Xiaoping carved this area off from the rest of China with a big red pen, he said, this will be the special economic zone. And he made a deal with the corporations. He said listen, use our people. Do whatever you want to our people. Just give us a modern China. And the corporations took that deal, and they squeezed and they squeezed. And what they got was the Shenzhen we find today.

And on the other side of the gates it’s the factory zone. And whew, it’s like going from the Eloi to the Morlocks, everything changes. I’ve never seen anything like it. Everything is under construction. Every road has a bypass. Every bypass has a bypass. It’s bypasses all the way down. (…)

We are in a taxi right now in the factory zone. We are driving on our way to Foxconn. Foxconn, a single company, makes a staggering amount of the electronics you use every day. They make electronics for Apple, Dell, Nokia, Panasonic, HP, Samsung, Sony, Lenovo, a third of all of it. That’s Foxconn. And at this plant they make all kinds of things, including MacBook Pros and iPhones and iPads. (…)

The Foxconn plant in Shenzhen has 430,000 workers. That can be a difficult number to conceptualize. I find it’s useful to instead think about how there are more than 20 cafeterias at the plant. And then you just have to understand that workers told me that these cafeterias can hold up to 10,000 people. So now you just need to visualize a cafeteria that seats 10,000 people (…)

I talked to more than 100 people. I met five or six who were underage.

{ WBEZ/This American Life | Continue reading }

{ The True Story Of How A Ferrari Ended Up Buried In Someone’s Yard }

photo { Thomas Lélu }

Names of countries in foreign languages (exonyms) often bear no relationship to the names of the same countries in their own official language or languages (endonyms). Such differences are generally accepted without complaint; the fact that English speakers refer to Deutschland as Germany and Nihon as Japan is not a problem for the governments or the people of those countries.

Occasionally, however, diplomats from a given country request that other governments change its name. (…)

Over the past several years, Georgia has been trying to convince a number of countries to call it “Georgia,” even though the Georgian name for the country is Sakart’velo.

{ GeoCurrents | Continue reading }

The present-day fate of New England goes back to an argument at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the ’50s about that material from which semiconductors, well understood locally from wartime work on radar, were to be manufactured in the years ahead. Dogma held that it would be germanium; silicon crystals would be too difficult to purify to the required degree.  Robert Noyce, an MIT-trained physicist, thought otherwise.

When MIT declined to tenure him, Noyce decamped, first to Philadelphia, then to the Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory, in Mountain View, California. Silicon leadership went with him – to Fairchild Semiconductor and Intel, each of which he co-founded, and eventually to Silicon Valley, centered around San Jose, which the two firms spawned. New England never developed a vigorous industry in silicon chips. By the end of the ’70s, savvy venture capitalists had begun migrating to Palo Alto’s Sand Hill Road.

Similarly, when Bill Gates dropped out of Harvard College, in 1975, to found a little software company called Microsoft, he repaired first to Albuquerque, N.M., then to his native Seattle. Plenty of entrepreneurial software development was going on in Cambridge, including the first spreadsheets, but proximity to microprocessor developers in California, Intel in particular, gave Microsoft a decisive edge.  Microsoft networking software eventually swallowed whole Massachusetts’ minicomputer industry.

{ Economic Principals | Continue reading }

Robotics is a game-changer in national security. We now find military robots in just about every environment: land, sea, air, and even outer space. They have a full range of form-factors from tiny robots that look like insects to aerial drones with wingspans greater than a Boeing 737 airliner. Some are fixed onto battleships, while others patrol borders in Israel and South Korea; these have fully-auto modes and can make their own targeting and attack decisions. There’s interesting work going on now with micro robots, swarm robots, humanoids, chemical bots, and biological-machine integrations. As you’d expect, military robots have fierce names like: TALON SWORDS, Crusher, BEAR, Big Dog, Predator, Reaper, Harpy, Raven, Global Hawk, Vulture, Switchblade, and so on. But not all are weapons–for instance, BEAR is designed to retrieve wounded soldiers on an active battlefield.

{ The Atlantic | Continue reading }

The question confronting us today is: who owns the Geosynchronous Orbit?

In recent years, “parking spots” in the geosynchronous orbit have become an increasingly hot commodity. According to the NASA, since the launch of the first television satellite into a geosynchronous orbit in 1964, the number of objects in Earth’s orbit has steadily increased to over 200 new additions per year. This increase was initially fueled by the Cold War, during which space was a prime area of competition between the United States and the Soviet Union. Yet over two decades after the end of the US-Soviet space race, even the global financial crisis that began in 2007 does not seem to have diminished the demand for telecommunications satellites positioned in GSO. This ongoing scramble to place satellites in GSO prompted some developing equatorial countries to assert sovereignty over the outer space “above” their territorial borders, presumably with the hope of extracting rent from the developed countries that circulate their technologies overhead. So far, the international community has rejected this notion, but the legal status of the GSO remains in limbo.

{ SSRN | Continue reading }

photo { Roman Signer }

Apple has lost control of the iPad trademark in China. (…) ProView Technologies, the Taiwanese company that presently controls the iPad trademark, was near bankruptcy until yesterday. Apple has $80 billion in cash.

Do we really think Cupertino will let go of an important trademark in what will eventually be the largest IT market in the world?

{ Robert X. Cringely | Continue reading }

Over the last three decades, large cities like Pittsburgh, Detroit, Cleveland, Buffalo, and Toledo have seen their populations shrink, while areas like Houston, Atlanta, Dallas, Tampa, and Phoenix have seen their populations grow rapidly. Examining the policy differences between high-growth and low-growth areas can provide evidence that may help declining cities reverse their fortunes.

In 1980, Austin, Texas, and Syracuse, New York, were roughly the same size. The Austin metro area had a population of about 590,000, and the Syracuse metro area had about 643,000 residents. By 2007, Austin’s population had increased by more than 1 million while Syracuse’s population had been stagnant. That same disparity exists when one examines the growth of employment and real personal income. Another disparity between the two areas is the tax burden. State and local taxes accounted for nearly 13 percent of personal income in Syracuse but only about 9 percent in Austin. Although there are numerous factors that can influence the growth of individual economies, one finds a consistent relationship between low taxes and high economic growth in metropolitan areas, in states, and in nations.

This article details that relationship between taxes and growth for the 100 largest U.S. metropolitan areas.

{ Dean Stansel/Cato Journal | Continue reading | PDF }

Just when it seemed that things couldn’t get worse, it appears that they have. Even some of the ostensibly “responsible” members of the eurozone are facing higher interest rates. Economists on both sides of the Atlantic are now discussing not just whether the euro will survive, but how to ensure that its demise causes the least turmoil possible. (…)

Public-sector cutbacks today do not solve the problem of yesterday’s profligacy; they simply push economies into deeper recessions. Europe’s leaders know this. They know that growth is needed. But, rather than deal with today’s problems and find a formula for growth, they prefer to deliver homilies about what some previous government should have done. This may be satisfying for the sermonizer, but it won’t solve Europe’s problems – and it won’t save the euro. 

{ Joseph E. Stiglitz/Project Syndicate | Continue reading }

The strong countries of Europe are being asked to foot the bill for the profligate countries and that is not a sustainable policy. The weak countries are de facto bankrupt, should face that fact, and default, if necessary, on their debt. This will force them into balancing their budgets, becoming more disciplined, and to live within their means. Investors will return if these actions are credible, as investors are remarkably forgiving, buoyed by hope that stability and growth will return. Default is not the end of the world but a means to restore government balance sheets that are in effective negative equity. And the US is by no means immune to the consequences of having engaged in unsustainable excesses both public and private.

{ Vernon Smith/Truman Factor | Continue reading }

If someone asked you to describe the psychological aspects of personhood, what would you say? Chances are, you’d describe things like thought, memory, problem-solving, reasoning, maybe emotion. In other words, you probably list the major headings of a cognitive psychology text-book. In cognitive psychology, we seem to take it for granted that these are, objectively, the primary components of “the mind.” (…)

In fact, this conception of the mind is heavily influenced by a particular (Western) cultural background. Other cultures assign different characteristics and abilities to the psychological aspects of personhood. (…)

Cross-linguistic research shows that, generally speaking, every culture has a folk model of a person consisting of visible and invisible (psychological) aspects. While there is agreement that the visible part of the person refers to the body, there is considerable variation in how different cultures think about the invisible (psychological) part. In the West, and, specifically, in the English-speaking West, the psychological aspect of personhood is closely related to the concept of “the mind” and the modern view of cognition. (…)

In Korean, the concept “maum” replaces the concept “mind.” “Maum” has no English counterpart, but is sometimes translated as “heart”. Apparently, “maum” is the “seat of emotions, motivation, and “goodness” in a human being.” (…)

The Japanese have yet another concept for the invisible part of the person — “kokoro.” “Kokoro” is a “seat of emotion, and also, a source of culturally valued attention to, and empathy with, other people.”

{ Notes from Two Scientific Psychologists | Continue reading }

painting { Eugène Delacroix, Orphan Girl at the Cemetery, 1824 }

{ The Geography of Stuck | The Atlantic }

{ Camp Bonifas is home to the United Nations Command Security Battalion - Joint Security Area, whose primary mission is to monitor and enforce the Armistice Agreement of 1953 between North and South Korea. There is a par 3 one-hole “golf course” at the camp which includes an Astroturf green and is surrounded on three sides by minefields. | Wikipedia }

Is it true Thanksgiving was invented by the editor of Harper’s Bazaar?

Right idea, wrong magazine. Thanksgiving as we know it today — at least on the scale we know it — is largely the creation of Mrs. Sarah Josepha Hale, editor of Godey’s Lady’s Book, one of the first women’s magazines. Mrs. Hale spent 36 years browbeating public officials high and low before finally getting Thanksgiving declared a national holiday in 1863.

{ The Straight Dope | Continue reading }