…while politicians occasionally use poker terms when discussing strategy, more of them–and more journalists—put on their game faces with terms from chess.
You would think that people would use that terminology the way chess players use it. Most of the time, however, they’re using the terms colloquially, even though they are using them in a strategic context. While that usage isn’t wrong, it’s not as precise as it could (or should) be. (…)
In chess, a “gambit” is an opening move, one that almost always sacrifices a piece, usually a “pawn.” But its more common use, one sanctioned by most dictionaries, refers to any risky or surprising strategic move: “Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s gambit to include a government-run insurance option in health care legislation has given a fresh tailwind to the idea despite opposition from conservatives,” one news report said.
{ Having become a father, Spielberg was more sensitive about the scene where gun-wielding federal agents threaten Elliott and his escaping friends; he digitally replaced the guns with walkie-talkies. | E.T. 20th anniversary version }
Donatella Versace, tiny, sculpted and forever blonde, was standing backstage after her menswear show at the Teatro Versace in Milan in June, receiving polite congratulations from a handful of editors and friends. The scene was positively dead compared with Versace shows a decade ago: no celebrities posing with Donatella for paparazzi, no bodyguards holding back the throngs, and no pals swilling champagne. Donatella’s brother Santo, in his usual charcoal suit with black turtleneck, came back for a few minutes to shake some hands. Her husband, American-born Paul Beck, tall and tan, stood alone in the corner; no one even noticed him. It all felt feeble, pathetic—a sad, soulless charade to promote something that no longer exists.
The nonscene is a reflection of how far the Italian fashion house has fallen since its founder’s death. When Gianni Versace was murdered on the front steps of his Miami mansion in 1997, the company immediately announced that his strong-minded sister, Donatella, would take over as creative director and his brother, Santo, would be CEO. The decision made sense at the time. The luxury fashion business was soaring, thanks to the new wealth of the Internet boom, and Gianni Versace was a favorite of the bling set, with his flashy designs, celebrity friends, and lavish lifestyle. The company was poised to become a luxury megabrand like Gucci, Giorgio Armani, and Louis Vuitton.
Instead, Donatella plunged into profound drug addiction and made erratic business and creative decisions. While competing fashion brands turned into global powers, Versace has watched its sales plummet from $1 billion in 1996 to less than half that today. Major retailers such as Neiman Marcus and Bergdorf Goodman have dropped the line. The company has lost both its prestige and design influence.
Starting in 2003, after what Santo described as “seven years of woes,” the Versace siblings acknowledged they couldn’t run the company by themselves and hired a string of outside managers to straighten out the mess. But the outsiders failed too—in large part, Versace sources say, due to Donatella’s and Santo’s resistance to change.
{ Among the CIA’s many tricks during the Cold War, it turns out, was some actual magic. A now-declassified manual by magician John Mulholland taught American spies the arts of deceit. | Boston Globe | more }
Does every large country make its own cars?
Well, no. I mean, it depends on what you mean by large country. Cars are made all over the place. Most of them are made in China, Japan, Germany, the US—although less so in the US these days—and then Brazil and Spain and the UK, Mexico, Russia. Those are all places that make, oh, I don’t know, a million or more cars every year. And some places you wouldn’t think of, like Iran makes nearly a million cars. India makes nearly two million cars.
Who makes the most cars?
Right now the most cars are made in Japan, just about 10 million. As of 2008 China made 6.8 million; Germany, 5.5 million; the US, 3.8 million. What else is big? Brazil, 2.5 million. India, 1.8 million. (…)
What’s the reality of the car-making that goes on for example in the United States? To what extent is it American? To what extent is it Japanese? Where cars are made is a function of how governments are helping companies come in and how cheap land is and those kind of things, as opposed to, “We’re gonna have an American-made car.” (…)
And the interesting thing about China is by law any foreign company doing business in China, building cars in China, has to be fifty percent owned by the Chinese. So you end up with companies like GM building Buicks in China, but it’s actually a joint venture with the Chinese.
{ The New York Times, Feb. 10, 1935 | The legend of alligators in the sewers — discarded pets that have grown large in the bowels of the city, the story goes — leans heavily on a widely cited three-page section of the book. (The city and the state no longer allow alligators or their near-relatives to be kept as pets.) | NY Times | Continue reading }
On June 21, reporter Maziar Bahari was rousted out of bed and taken to Tehran’s notorious Evin prison—accused of being a spy for the CIA, MI6, Mossad…and NEWSWEEK. This is the story of his captivity.
10 bad messages from good movies. Unconventional creative play is very, very wrong (from Toy Story). No matter how appallingly bad conditions on Earth get, so long as there is one tiny plant on the planet, it can still be restored to its former beauty and sustainability (from WALL-E).
Clients from hell. I present the following exchange with ‘Mike The Client’ without comment. It’s long but impossible to excerpt because he has a knack for throwing out a curveball just when you think you know where he’s going.
{ Ellsworth Kelly, Sculpture for a Large Wall, 1957 | 104 anodixed aluminum panels | MoMA }
In 1956, when he was 34 years old, Ellsworth Kelly was invited to create a sculpture for the lobby of Philadelphia’s Transportation Building which housed the old Greyhound Bus Terminal. The piece he made, Sculpture for a Large Wall, was the largest work of his career to that point.
The Ellsworth Kelly “Sculpture for a Large Wall” was sold by Ronald Rubin for about $100,000. Then Matthew Marks turned around and sold it to the Lauder’s for about $1,000,000. The piece was later donated to MoMA by Carole and Ronald Lauder.
It was Kelly’s first sculpture, first commission and one of the first uses of anodized aluminum in fine art in America. The fact that no one complained when this unique masterpiece left Philadelphia while they raised $200,000 to retain Isiah Zagar’s kitschery makes Sid Sachs (director of the Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery at the University of the Arts) a very sad man. And the quality of the work and its importance is attested by the fact that MOMA used it every chance it could in ads and bus stop kiosks.
When Jeremy Wolfe of Harvard Medical School (…) wanted to illustrate how the brain sees the world and how often it fumbles the job, he flashed a slide of Ellsworth Kelly’s “Study for Colors for a Large Wall” on the screen, and the audience couldn’t help but perk to attention.
One of the most incredible things about the human mind is its resilience. Let’s face it, life can be pretty depressing at times, and yet people generally push on much the same as they always have, sometimes even with a spring in their step and a smile on their face.
How come one day it seems like the world is going to end and the next there’s hope? And how come our bad moods lift so unexpectedly, like a brick sprouting wings and disappearing into the clear blue sky?
The reason is that we all have a secret weapon against bad moods: a psychological immune system. When we experience events that send us into an emotional tailspin it kicks in to try and protect us from the worst of it.
Consumers who stand on carpeted flooring feel comforted, but they judge products close to them to be less comforting, according to a new study in the Journal of Consumer Research.
A 17-year-old boy, caught sending text messages in class, was recently sent to the vice principal’s office at Millwood High School in Halifax, Nova Scotia.
The vice principal, Steve Gallagher, told the boy he needed to focus on the teacher, not his cellphone. The boy listened politely and nodded, and that’s when Mr. Gallagher noticed the student’s fingers moving on his lap.
He was texting while being reprimanded for texting.
“It was a subconscious act,” says Mr. Gallagher, who took the phone away. “Young people today are connected socially from the moment they open their eyes in the morning until they close their eyes at night. It’s compulsive.”
Because so many people in their teens and early 20s are in this constant whir of socializing—accessible to each other every minute of the day via cellphone, instant messaging and social-networking Web sites—there are a host of new questions that need to be addressed in schools, in the workplace and at home. Chief among them: How much work can “hyper-socializing” students or employees really accomplish if they are holding multiple conversations with friends via text-messaging, or are obsessively checking Facebook? (…)
While their older colleagues waste time holding meetings or engaging in long phone conversations, young people have an ability to sum things up in one-sentence text messages, Mr. Bajarin says. “They know how to optimize and prioritize. They will call or set up a meeting if it’s needed. If not, they text.” And given their vast network of online acquaintances, they discover people who can become true friends or valued business colleagues—people they wouldn’t have been able to find in the pre-Internet era.
In this era of media bombardment, the ability to multitask has been seen as an asset. But people who commonly have simultaneous input from several types of media—surfing the Web while texting and listening to music, for instance—may in fact find it harder to filter out extraneous information. “We embarked on the research thinking that people who multitasked must be good at it,” says Clifford Nass, a psychologist at Stanford University who studies human-computer interaction. “So we were enormously surprised.”
…some advice to help prevent you from offing yourself prematurely. Here goes.
1. Drive the biggest vehicle you can afford to drive. Your greatest risk of death comes from a motor vehicle accident. Despite all the data from the government on crash test safety, I can say unequivocally that in a 2-car accident, the person in the larger car always fairs better. (…)
4. Do not fly a plane or helicopter unless you are a full-time professional pilot. If you are a doctor, lawyer, actor, athlete, stockbroker or other well-to-do professional do not get a pilot’s license. Expertise in one area of life does not transfer to piloting, often with fatal results.
5. If you are walking down a sidewalk and are approaching a group of loud and apparently intoxicated males, cross to the other side of the street immediately. If anyone tries to start a fight with you, the first step should be “choke them with heel dust.” (…)
8. Never get on a ladder to clean your gutters, or on your roof to hang Christmas lights. Do not cut down trees with a chainsaw. I have seen too many middle age males die from these activities. In general, any house or lawn work that you can hire for an amount equal to or less than your own hourly wage is money well spent.
When it comes to creativity, it’s easy to imagine that more is better. Creativity lies at the heart of science. It solves problems and drives innovation. Then there’s the small matter of art and literature. Humanity’s self expression and aesthetic explorations are born of our creative drive.
And yet creativity has its downsides too, say Stefan Leijnen and Liane Gabora at the University of British Columbia in Canada. Creative solutions can only spread if they are adopted by other individuals. These imitators play an important role in society. They act as a kind of memory, storing the results of successful creative strategies for future generations. But the time that individuals spend creating means less time imitating. Clearly we cannot all be creators all the time but neither can we all be imitators.
That raises an interesting question, say Leijnen and Gabora. How much creativity does a society need to optimize the evolution of ideas?
To find out, they built a computational model that simulates the way ideas are created, how they spread and how they evolve in a society.
There are 46 days left in 2009, which means it is just about time to commence the beloved and enduring parlor game known as “Name That Decade.”
You know the rules — coin a pithy, reductive phrase that somehow encapsulates the multitude of events, trends, triumphs and calamities of the past 10 years. If you can also rope in some of the big personalities and consumer obsessions, that’s a bonus.
For the ’00s, it seems the trick will be finding a small package sturdy and flexible enough to capture so much upheaval and change. And worry — although in hindsight, it sure seems like we kept worrying about the wrong menace.
The decade began with a frenzy of fear about the Y2k millennium bug, which many technology experts said would sunder computers, crash jets and wreak havoc in every corner of the globe. As that non-emergency passed, a genuine threat quietly gathered in the form of a plot to fell the twin towers.
Later, we scoured Iraq for weapons of mass destruction, which we did not find. As we searched, we built weapons of financial chaos right here at home, with home mortgages, leverage and something called Collateralized Debt Obligations.
Fortunes and a staggering number of jobs have vanished, inflicting misery in this country and others on a scale that would surely have exceeded the most garish of Saddam’s fantasies.
{ What if you saw the world with your ears? Gameplay footage from Devil’s Tuning Fork, a game created by the DePaul Game Elites team at DePaul University’s College of Computing & Digital Media in Chicago. | Continue reading }
Laboratory experiments in psychology find that media violence increases aggression in the short run. We analyze whether media violence affects violent crime in the field.
We exploit variation in the violence of blockbuster movies from 1995 to 2004, and study the effect on same-day assaults.
We find that violent crime decreases on days with larger theater audiences for violent movies. The effect is partly due to voluntary incapacitation: between 6PM and 12AM, a one million increase in the audience for violent movies reduces violent crime by 1.1 to 1.3 percent. After exposure to the movie, between 12AM and 6AM, violent crime is reduced by an even larger percent. This finding is explained by the self-selection of violent individuals into violent movie attendance, leading to a substitution away from more volatile activities. In particular, movie attendance appears to reduce alcohol consumption. (…)
Exposure to violent movies has three main effects on violent crime: (i) it reduces significantly violent crime in the evening on the day of exposure; (ii) by an even larger percent, it reduces violent crime during the night hours following exposure; (iii) it has no significant impact in the days and weeks following the exposure.
{ Does movie violence increase violent crime?, Gordon Dahl and Stefano DellaVigna, 2008 |PDF | Continue reading }
How would you fancy a holiday to Greece or Thailand? Would you like to buy an iPhone or a new pair of shoes? Would you be keen to accept that enticing job offer? Our lives are riddled with choices that force us to imagine our future state of mind. The decisions we make hinge upon this act of time travel and a new study suggests that our mental simulations of our future happiness are strongly affected by the chemical dopamine.
Dopamine is a neurotransmitter, a chemical that carries signals within the brain. Among its many duties is a crucial role in signalling the feelings of enjoyment we get out of life’s pleasures. We need it to learn which experiences are rewarding and to actively seek them out. And it seems that we also depend on it when we imagine the future.
Tali Sharot from University College London found that if volunteers had more dopamine in their brains as they thought about events in their future, they would imagine those events to be more gratifying. It’s the first direct evidence that dopamine influences how happy we expect ourselves to be.
When we learn about new experiences, neurons that secrete dopamine seem to record the difference between the rewards we expect and the ones we actually receive. In encoding the gap between hope and experience, these neurons help us to repeat rewarding actions.
