Just across the river from Detroit, Lakeshore is where barrels of Canadian Club whiskey age in blocky, windowless warehouses. Scott, who had recently completed his PhD in mycology at the University of Toronto, had launched a business called Sporometrics. Run out of his apartment, it was a sort of consulting detective agency for companies that needed help dealing with weird fungal infestations. The first call he got after putting up his website was from a director of research at Hiram Walker Distillery named David Doyle.

Doyle had a problem. In the neighborhood surrounding his Lakeshore warehouses, homeowners were complaining about a mysterious black mold coating their houses. And the residents, following their noses, blamed the whiskey. Doyle wanted to know what the mold was and whether it was the company’s fault. Scott headed up to Lakeshore to take a look.

When he arrived at the warehouse, the first thing he noticed (after “the beautiful, sweet, mellow smell of aging Canadian whiskey,” he says) was the black stuff. It was everywhere—on the walls of buildings, on chain-link fences, on metal street signs, as if a battalion of Dickensian chimney sweeps had careened through town. “In the back of the property, there was an old stainless steel fermenter tank,” Scott says. “It was lying on its side, and it had this fungus growing all over it. Stainless steel!” The whole point of stainless steel is that things don’t grow on it.

Standing at a black-stained fence, Doyle explained that the distillery had been trying to solve the mystery for more than a decade. Mycologists at the University of Windsor were stumped. A team from the Scotch Whisky Association’s Research Institute had taken samples and concluded it was just a thick layer of normal environmental fungi: Aspergillus, Exophiala, stuff like that. Ubiquitous and—maybe most important—in no way the distillery’s fault.

Scott shook his head. “David,” he said, “that’s not what it is. It’s something completely different.”

Leave fruit juice on its own for a few days or weeks and yeast—a type of fungus—will appear as if by magic. In one of nature’s great miracles, yeast eats sugar and excretes carbon dioxide and ethanol, the chemical that makes booze boozy. That’s fermentation.

If fermentation is a miracle of nature, then distillation is a miracle of science. Heat a fermented liquid and the lighter, more volatile chemical components—alcohols, ketones, esters, and so on—evaporate and separate from the heavier ones (like water). That vapor, cooled and condensed into a liquid, is a spirit. Do it to wine, you get brandy; beer, you get whiskey. Distill anything enough times and you get vodka. When it’s executed right, the process concentrates a remarkable array of aromatic and flavorful chemicals.

{ Wired | Continue reading }

What goes on in stock markets appears quite different when viewed on different timescales. Look at a whole day’s trading, and market participants can usually tell you a plausible story about how the arrival of news has changed traders’ perceptions of the prospects for a company or the entire economy and pushed share prices up or down. Look at trading activity on a scale of milliseconds, however, and things seem quite different.

When two American financial economists, Joel Hasbrouck and Gideon Saar, did this a couple of years ago, they found strange periodicities and spasms. The most striking periodicity involves large peaks of activity separated by almost exactly 1000 milliseconds: they occur 10-30 milliseconds after the ‘tick’ of each second. The spasms, in contrast, seem to be governed not directly by clock time but by an event: the execution of a buy or sell order, the cancellation of an order, or the arrival of a new order. Average activity levels in the first millisecond after such an event are around 300 times higher than normal. There are lengthy periods – lengthy, that’s to say, on a scale measured in milliseconds – in which little or nothing happens, punctuated by spasms of thousands of orders for a corporation’s shares and cancellations of orders. These spasms seem to begin abruptly, last a minute or two, then end just as abruptly.

Little of this has to do directly with human action. None of us can react to an event in a millisecond: the fastest we can achieve is around 140 milliseconds, and that’s only for the simplest stimulus, a sudden sound. The periodicities and spasms found by Hasbrouck and Saar are the traces of an epochal shift.

As recently as 20 years ago, the heart of most financial markets was a trading floor on which human beings did deals with each other face to face. (…) The deals that used to be struck on trading floors now take place via ‘matching engines’, computer systems that process buy and sell orders and execute a trade if they find a buy order and a sell order that match. The matching engines of the New York Stock Exchange, for example, aren’t in the exchange’s century-old Broad Street headquarters with its Corinthian columns and sculptures, but in a giant new 400,000-square-foot plain-brick data centre in Mahwah, New Jersey, 30 miles from downtown Manhattan. Nobody minds you taking photos of the Broad Street building’s striking neoclassical façade, but try photographing the Mahwah data centre and you’ll find the police quickly taking an interest: it’s classed as part of the critical infrastructure of the United States.

{ London Review of Books | Continue reading }

In his book, Schwartz uses the terms “maximizer” and “satisficer” to describe how people make decisions. Maximizers will settle for nothing but the best. They endlessly research options and often second-guess the choices they make. Satisificers are content with selecting the good-enough option. Though they may research their options like maximizers, they eventually make a decision without worrying excessively about what better options might have been right around the corner. The problem with being a maximizer is that there is always a potentially better option that exists, and thinking about these other possibilities can be frustrating and nonproductive.

{ Mind Meditations | Continue reading | Thanks Tim }

Swallowing is a complex maneuver designed to pass food and drink safely into the stomach without the bolus taking an abberrant path into the adjacent airway. (…)

Fortunately for most of us, several safety mechanisms exist to prevent pretzels, and other detritus, from entering the airway, but given the open proximity of our airway to our food pathway, the risk of aspiration, albeit a subtle one, always exists. Ever notice that you’re unable to breath while swallowing? This is because the vocal folds adduct, closing and protecting the airway during the act of swallowing. This is but one safety feature when swallowing, but it demonstrates that respiration and swallowing must act in a coordinated fashion to prevent aspiration.

There is evidence that what we eat, how much we eat at a time and how fast we eat it affects our respiration, which in turn affects how the swallow is executed.

{ Slowdog | Continue reading }

Don’t worry about me; I’ll land on my feet. I don’t regret coming here, even though I’ve been laid off now. In fact, my only regret is that you haven’t come to visit the Beacon Journal. I would have loved to piss on your shoes.

{ What fired or resigned journalists wrote to their bosses on the way out. | Slate | Continue reading }

Urolagnia is a paraphilia in which sexual excitement is associated with the sight or thought of urine or urination. The term has origins in the Greek Language (from ouron, urine, and lagneia, lust).

As a paraphilia, urine may be consumed or the person may bathe in it.

Urolagnia is sometimes associated with omorashi. Omorashi is a fetish subculture recognized predominantly in Japan, in which participants experience arousal from having a full bladder or a sexual attraction to someone else experiencing the feeling of a full urinary bladder.

In the hanky code, urolagnia is symbolized by a yellow bandana in the right or left pants pocket.

{ Wikipedia | Continue reading }

{ The newest Las Vegas Strip attraction isn’t another mega-resort or Cirque du Soleil show. Rather, it is a heavy equipment playground that lets visitors operate life-size Tonka toys. “Dig This” is a construction theme park developed by New Zealand-born Ed Mumm, who stumbled upon the idea while using a rented excavator to build his home in Steamboat Springs, Colo. After a couple of days of digging, he realized that operating machinery was a blast. | Engeenering News-Record | full story }

This study investigated experiences with partners during the time interval immediately following sexual intercourse. (…)

We believe that the Post-Coital Time Interval (PCTI), the time in which couples spend together after sexual intercourse before one partner leaves or falls asleep, is an important component of sexual relationships. Specifically, we argue that sex differences in PCTI experiences reflect divergence in the evolved reproductive strategies of men and women. We also predict that individual variation in PCTI experiences within each sex is related to other psychological aspects of variation in life history strategy, particularly tendencies towards engaging in committed long-term monogamous relationships. (…)

Halpern and Sherman (1979) believe that the potential for bonding and sharing may be at its peak in the post-coital period, and satisfaction with this experience is the most important aspect of a sexual relationship. Despite women’s efforts in screening and selecting partners prior to first sexual intercourse, women’s feelings of uncertainty in the future of the relationship are likely due to the differential costs and benefits for commitment described above. Women’s desires for expressions or signals of relationship bonding and commitment by one’s partner may be particularly salient in the PCTI.

{ Journal of Social, Evolutionary, and Cultural Psychology | Continue reading | PDF }

photo { Robert Whitman }

Mr. Kim belongs to an elite cadre of “puzzle masters” who spend their days building logical mazes and brain teasers. In more than 20 years as a professional puzzle designer, Mr. Kim has worked on everything from word, number and logic puzzles to toys. (…)

Mr. Kim defines puzzles as “problems that are fun to solve and have a right answer,” as opposed to everyday problems like traffic, which, he noted, “are not very well-designed puzzles.”
(…)

He likes changing locations frequently throughout the day, moving from his office to the kitchen table, then to the library or a coffee shop. Each time he changes surroundings, he tackles the problem anew. “I often find that the amount of progress I make is proportional to the number of times I start,” he said. He’s constantly doodling and carries a 3-by-5-inch notebook to record ideas, notes and images.

He borrows ideas for puzzles from architecture, music, science and art (favorite designers include Milton Glaser and Charles and Ray Eames). Occasionally, he gets ideas from dreams. After he dreamed he was surfing on waves of color, Mr. Kim had an idea for a computer game whose goal is to stay on the red wave. (…)

He defines a good puzzle as one that gets people to look at the problem in a new or counterintuitive way.

{ WSJ | Continue reading }

Forever 21 began in 1984 as a single store called Fashion 21 in Los Angeles. After expanding locally, it spread to malls beginning in 1989, but it has only truly proliferated in the last decade. It now has 477 stores in fifteen countries, and projected revenue of more than $2.3 billion in 2010. The worldwide success of Forever 21 and the other even more prominent fast-fashion outlets, like H&M (2,200 stores in thirty-eight countries), Uniqlo (760 stores in six countries), and Zara (more than 4,900 stores in seventy-seven countries) epitomize how the protocols of new capitalism—flexibility, globalization, technology-enabled logistical micromanaging, consumer co-creation—have reshaped the retail world and with it the material culture of consumer societies. (…)

Unlike earlier generations of mass-market retailers, like the Gap’s family of brands (which includes, in ascending order of class cachet, Old Navy, Gap, and Banana Republic), companies like Zara and Forever 21 make no effort to stratify their offerings into class-signifying labels. They also don’t adopt branding strategies to affiliate with particular luxe or ironic lifestyles, à la Urban Outfitters or Abercrombie & Fitch. Instead they flatter consumers in a different way, immersing them in potential trends on a near weekly basis and trusting them to assemble styles in their own images.

{ n+1 | Continue reading }

He’s the mutual fund manager with the best record in the past quarter-century, and he correctly predicted the last two stock market crashes–first with Internet stocks in the 1990s, and then with the financial crisis of 2008. So why aren’t people listening when Bob Rodriguez says another calamity is looming?

{ Fortune | Continue reading }

photo { April Renae }

People who had the most positive relationship feelings and who were most motivated to be responsive to the partner’s needs made bigger promises than did other people but were not any better at keeping them.

{ Only because I love you: Why people make and why they break promises in romantic relationships | abstract | via Overcoming bias | Continue reading }

photo { Hannah Modigh }

Paying attention to something and being aware of it seem like the same thing -they both involve somehow knowing the thing is there. However, a new study, which will be published in an upcoming issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, finds that these are actually separate; your brain can pay attention to something without you being aware that it’s there. (…)

Hsieh suggests that this could have evolved as a survival mechanism. It might have been useful for an early human to be able to notice and process something unusual on the savanna without even being aware of it, for example. “We need to be able to direct attention to objects of potential interest even before we have become aware of those objects,” he says.

{ APS | Continue reading }

photos { Jane Fulton Alt }

In May 1846, a year and a half before gold was discovered at Sutter’s Mill, several extended families and quite a few unattached males headed with their caravans from Illinois to California. Due to poor organization, some bad advice, and a huge dose of bad luck, by November the group had foundered in the deep snows of the Sierra Nevada. They came to a halt at what is now known as Donner Pass, and, in an iconic if unpleasant moment in California’s history, they sat out winter in makeshift tents buried in snow, the group dwindling as survivors resorted to cannibalism to avert starvation.

From an evolutionary point of view, what makes the story interesting is not the cannibalism — which, in the annals of anthropology, is relatively banal — but who survived and who did not. Of the 87 pioneers, only 46 came over the pass alive in February and March of the next year. Their story, then, represents a case study of what might be termed catastrophic natural selection. It turns out that, contrary to lay Darwinist expectations, it was not the virile young but those who were embedded in families who had the best odds of survival. The unattached young men, presumably fuller of vigor and capable of withstanding more physical hardship than the others, fared worst, worse even than the older folk and the children. (…)

We are the descendants of those who had a competitive edge. The intricacies of intra-species cooperation (which can itself be exquisitely competitive) — of managing family and other ties — are a large part of the game. Indeed, they may be the largest part of the game in fostering survival, in nurturing the young, and in allowing us to out-compete other primates. This is where not only kin networks but social networks enter the picture.

Our big brains — in particular our species’ inordinately large neocortex — evolved, Dunbar argues, in lockstep with our ability to manage increasingly large social groups: to read motives, to keep track of who is doing what with whom, of who is a reliable sharer, who a likely freeloader, and so on. Many evolutionary biologists have made this point over the years, of course. Where Dunbar is unique is in having assigned a definite number to what constitutes a stable human group or community. The “Dunbar’s number” of his title is (drum roll…) 150. Extrapolating from the estimated size of Neolithic villages, of Amish and other communities, of companies in most armies, and other such data, Dunbar argues that this number is, more or less, the limit of stable social networks because it represents the limit, more or less, of our cognitive capacities.

The number is highly debatable, but it turns out that, Facebook aside, the average person has about 150 friends — people he or she might actually recognize and be recognized by at a random airport, 150 people he or she might feel comfortable borrowing five dollars from. As for how many friends we have evolved to “need” in a more intimate sense, that is a different matter. According to Dunbar, most of us have, on average, about 3-5 intimate friends whom we speak to at least weekly, and about 10-15 more friends whose deaths would greatly distress us.

{ LA Review of Books | Continue reading | previously }

For all their noble antiquity, jellyfish have long been ignored or misunderstood by mainstream science, dismissed as so much mindless protoplasm with a mouth. Now, in a series of new studies, researchers have found that there is far more complexity and nuance to a jellyfish than meets the eye — or eyes. In the May 10 issue of the journal Current Biology, Dr. Garm and his colleagues describe the astonishing visual system of the box jellyfish, in which an interactive matrix of 24 eyes of four distinct types — two of them very similar to our own eyes — allow the jellies to navigate like seasoned sailors through the mangrove swamps they inhabit.

{ NY Times | Continue reading | previously }

I found myself staring at a publication titled Horseshit. The cover featured a crisp illustration of a man with a face wrapped in barbed wire. It recalled Winston Smith’s cover of the Dead Kennedys’ Give Me Convenience or Give Me Death. Clearly, I thought, this was a punk zine I’d never heard of. What was it doing here? I opened it and immediately discerned three things:

1) The magazine predated punk by at least ten years.
2) It was full of extremely arousing drawings of nude women.
3) It was also full of disturbing antimilitary propaganda.

(…)

“Excuse me,” I said as I lifted the magazine. “How much for this?”

“That’s NOT for sale.”

(…)

Later I scouted for clues about Horseshit online, but there weren’t many. I learned from one website that the magazine was published by two brothers, Thomas and Robert Dunker (Thomas, a paraplegic, died in 2003). In 1968, Horseshit was responsible (along with Zap, Snatch, and the SCUM Manifesto) for the arrest of Berkeley bookseller Moe Moskowitz on charges of selling pornography. A year later, Frank Zappa referenced the magazine in his track “German Lunch.” Beyond those two intriguing historical morsels, Horseshit occupies a void. A few online booksellers offered complete sets of the magazine—all four issues for $150.

{ Vice | Continue reading }

{ Thanks Tim }

On the other side of a mirror there’s an inverse world, where the insane go sane; where bones climb out of the earth and recede to the first slime of love.

And in the evening the sun is just rising.

Lovers cry because they are a day younger, and soon childhood robs them of their pleasure.

In such a world there is much sadness which, of course, is joy…

{ Russell Edson, Antimatter from The Childhood of an Equestrian, 1973 | Thanks James! }

The Internet has long promised a more efficient and greener world. We save on paper and mailing by sending an email. We can telecommute instead of driving to work. We can have a meeting by teleconference instead of flying to another city.

Ironically, despite the web’s green promise, this explosion of data has turned the Internet into one of the planet’s fastest-growing sources of carbon emissions. The Internet now consumes two to three per cent of the world’s electricity.

{ The Vancouver Sun | Continue reading }

{ screenshot from Naked Ambition An R-Rated Look at an X-Rated Industry, 2009 }

related:

Why Groupon is Worth $25 Billion

Admittedly, Groupon is a work in progress. They continue to spend insane amounts of money to acquire customers and merchants to try to extend their dual-sided network effect with consumers and merchants. Many people see this as unsustainable, some adamant it’s all just a Ponzi scheme. 

But these naysayers who are fixated on the current “daily deal” economics as long-term unsustainable are completely missing the point. The real innovation Groupon brought to the table wasn’t in advertising deals per se, it was their ability to profit off of closing the attribution loop in online-to-offline commerce. And this is a huge land grab that others had completely missed. 

Google never had success (monetarily) with online to offline search, because you can’t go to a search box and carry that discovery process to your offline environment. Yes, you can absolutely use a search query to find a place to go, but when you get there no one knows that you found it on Google.

{ Steve Cheney | Continue reading }