Got Your Sealegs?
For years, we’ve been making cars that turn into boats when we should have been making boats that turn into cars.
It’s the Sealegs amphibous vehicle.
It is, in fact
my blog, yes. Highly focused on a million different things.
Quick Note on Occupy
Like many, I find the Occupy encampments incredibly interesting—if perplexing at times—and I think there’s a lot of merit in the larger “We are the 99 Percent” concept, which will surely last longer than the occupations. I think both efforts have done much to highlight questions of economic inequality, political corruption and collusion, and state power. There’s a good argument that the Occupy message is lately drifting to one of state power at the expense of the economic argument. But I think these messages are all of a piece. After all, it highlights the government’s enforcement priorities (it’s easier to arrest a bunch of tangible protesters standing in a street than a bunch of financial wizards practicing monetary alchemy) as well as a more metaphorical theme of how powerful interests will scramble to retain a status quo that maintains and consolidates their own power.
By resisting or subverting conventional tactics and rules the movement displayed a kind of strategic brilliance. A few examples:
- It highlights immediate economic problems like the housing crisis and homelessness (they’re living in tents!), spiraling prices (particularly the University of California protests), and, especially, joblessness. After all, who else would have the time for this kind of effort?
- It is grounded in the concept of the peaceful sit-in, which harkens back to the American civil rights movement and, even before that, Gandhi. So it has that sheen of righteousness, particularly when that sheen is a coating of pepper spray.
- It promotes overt creativity in the face of opposition, whether symbolic (Cal’s balloon-borne tents; the 99% bat signal) or practical (the people’s mic, which started as a way to get around a prohibition on megaphones in Zucotti Park; the choice of Zucotti itself, whose confusing public-private legal status they exploited to great effect for almost two months)
- It makes a mockery of the current political system by highlighting how that system has made a mockery of democracy. I’d argue this is the overarching message that encompasses the Wall Street gripes, the fairness issues, the democracy rhetoric, the tension between order and the rights of speech and assembly, etc. And it’s not even a new idea, really.
As the major occupations seem to be winding down and the movement (possibly) reaches a turning point, it’s that last bullet point that I think of when I hear exasperated observers say this movement is not legitimate until it starts organizing phone banks to call congressman, starts letter writing-campaigns and the like. Those are fine things to do, and if done smartly (targeting the rare undecided, open-minded politician), still have potential. But set aside the occasional Occupier’s rhetoric about starting a true revolution and a new kind of government; by staying outside of conventional political tactics, they sidestep the lobbyists and special interests and the politicians themselves. A lot of commentators says Occupy needs to grow up and get overtly political. It’s the classic “reform from the inside” argument used to justify political expedience. But if the political system is rigged to disenfranchise citizens, as the occupiers convincingly argue, then they’d just be setting themselves up for failure.
Tearful Lawmakers Pass Korea-US Free Trade Agreement
Happened yesterday, when the ruling party rammed the legislation through the National Assembly. Not exactly tears of joy; an opposition lawmaker set off a teargas canister:
More Korean Political Fisticuffs
As an addendum to the previous post, I discovered that the Seoul city council had a brawl of their own over the very school lunches that triggered the latest political turmoil in the country:
And a bonus example of politicians behaving badly from 2009 when opposition were upset at the GNP’s relaxing media ownership rules:
Could Lunch Derail the Korea-US Free Trade Agreement?
Probably not, but a controversy over mid-day meals makes it a little more complicated for Korea.
Earlier this month, the president of South Korea visited the United States. Remember that? They went to a General Motors plant. They had a state dinner featuring Texas rib eye. Harold (of Harold and Kumar) sat across from Barack Obama.
Busting out the tuxes with my dad - going to state dinner at white house. Unreal.
@JohnTheCho
John Cho
Just before Lee arrived, Congress had ratified the Korean-US Free Trade Agreement, considered the largest such agreement in the US since NAFTA. Korea has not yet approved it and when a Korean reporter asked Obama if he was concerned given the political opposition in Korea, Obama said he had President Lee Myung Bak’s assurances that it would be passed by the National Assembly. (They don’t call Mb “the bulldozer” for nothing.)
The agreement was set in motion by Lee’s predecessor, but Lee has had his eye on this deal for years. His decision to lift South Korea’s ban on American beef (sparked by the discovery of mad cow disease in the US beef supply five years earlier) is believed to have been a strategic move to make the prospects of a trade agreement more appealing to the US. It also led to the great Seoul beef protests of 2008 and the ensuing political and civil rights fallout. You get a sense of the scale of these protests in the photo of candle-carrying demonstrators below (image from WBUR).
But still, the fractured opposition parties, along with labor, environmental, farming, and other groups are steadfastly opposed to the FTA in its current form. And while Lee’s Grand National Party will almost certainly be able to ram the agreement through parliament over their objections, if need be, they might be a little leery of such a move at this moment.
This is where the lunches come in. School lunches, more precisely.
This summer, Seoul was in the grip of a political firestorm over whether or not the city should provide children with free lunches. On one side was the city council and liberal politicians, who had passed a free lunch program to cover every one of the more than 800,000 primary and middle school students in the city. On the other side was Mayor Oh Se Hoon, a member of the conservative Grand National Party (like President Lee), who argued only the neediest students should qualify. It was an issue that played on concerns over class, economics, and social welfare. Mayor Oh tearfully staked his career on the issue, pledging to resign if voters rejected an August referendum to block the larger plan. They rejected it. He resigned.
Seoul contains about a fifth of the entire population of Korea, so running the city is an influential position. Before he was president, Lee was the mayor of Seoul.
The political gamesmanship in the runup to the election centered mainly on three contenders: Na Kyung Won, the Grand National Party and establishment candiate (who would have been Seoul’s first female mayor); Park Won Soon, an independent, liberal candidate who is a civil rights lawyer and community activist; and Ahn Cheol Soo, an MD/PhD physiologist-turned-software tycoon-turned-professor who is basically every Korean parent’s (or aspiring youth’s) dream-vision of professional achievement. Among his 11 books is one titled “My Mother, Who Fostered My Ability.” He would likely have been the leading mayoral candidate and is considered a viable presidential candidate.
But he didn’t run, and instead threw his support behind Park, who then won last Wednesday’s special election. (The main opposition party failed to muster a candidate of its own, suggesting just how fractured and shambolic the non-GNP political spectrum is, and making the Park victory that much more impressive.) The fallout has been interesting. Mayor Oh obviously hurt his chances for higher office due to his miscalculation. Na, the GNP mayoral candidate, had won the endorsement of Park Geun Hye, a politician and daughter of an assassinated president; Na’s loss is viewed as hurting Park’s chances in the 2012 presidential election. The results are viewed as an expression of disapproval of Lee’s current government (Korean presidents only get a single five-year term). The opposition is feeling emboldened. And Ahn’s own status has obviously been boosted even higher for backing the winner. As the JoongAng Daily notes, it has GNP politicians worried:
The Grand National Party’s defeat in the Seoul mayoral by-election has scared the party off from pushing through the Korea-U.S. free trade agreement, and its ratification is more imperiled now than ever.
It’s not clear just how imperiled it is (probably not very much). The opposition itself isn’t new; these groups have been unhappy at the prospects for years, though Park’s victory is a reason to feel recharged. The consensus—among the media, at least—is that passing the FTA is going be a real brawl. Not in some metaphorical way. We’re talking fists, furniture, maybe even fire extinguishers and hammers.
The JoongAng explains:
In Korea, the minority in the assembly resorts to physical brawls when the majority party tries to railroad through bills, using violence as a kind of filibuster. But the brawls are unpopular with the public, which blames the majority party for not trying hard enough to compromise with the opposition.
After losing the mayoral by-election this week, GNP lawmakers are much too fearful of losing their seats in next April’s general election to be seen in a brawl over the FTA.
Reporters are positively rubbing their hands in anticipation. As the lede of a Wall Street Journal blog post says, “The Korean-U.S. free trade agreement started with brawls and protests in the streets in 2006. And it now appears certain it will end with brawls and protests in the National Assembly next week.”
So what does Korea’s physical politics look like? A good example comes from 2008, when the GNP worked on FTA details behind closed doors. Closed doors that they then blocked with furniture:
So we’ll see if any viral video comes out of next week’s Korean National Assembly. As for those school lunches, Mayor Park signed free-lunch funding into law on his first day. And President Lee probably never knew that his visit to America coincided with our own National School Lunch Week.
[Bonus: I just found some old video of Seoul's city council members pushing each other around over school lunches! I've embedded it in the next post, along with video of 2009's notorious (but unrelated) parliamentary media-law brawl.]
Even I’m writing something about Jack Shafer
I’ve been reading a lot of good things about Jack Shafer. Most, it seems, can be written in fewer than 140 characters. Nothing wrong with that! Among the people I follow on Twitter, a perhaps unsurprising number of accomplished journalists have worked with—and owe significant aspects of their career to— Jack.
I haven’t worked with Jack. I barely know him. We’ve met twice, both times at an investigative journalism conference, where people hover around him in ever-tightening orbits until they get to talk with him, and I skulk around with the other young journalists waiting for our openings. I enjoyed meeting him; he’s a nice guy. It’s an odd feeling referring to him as “Jack” in a public setting like this, because that makes it sound like we’re buddies. We do follow each other on Twitter, which might have sounded like weird nonsense a few years ago, but which now means something. (I consider it a badge of honor, no matter how easy it is to hit the “follow” button; as far as I know, Jack is careful about whom he follows.)
Four people were laid off at Slate yesterday, and Jack Shafer was one of them. Shafer is good at Twitter, and the news is still bouncing around over there. It’s gotten a lot of attention among the chattering classes.
While we’re talking about layoffs, also yesterday, 20 people lost their jobs at newspapers around St Louis, and the Bay Area News Group announced 120 would be cut during an upcoming consolidation. Media is a tricky business these days.
What might might explain the widespread public reaction to the Slate layoffs are that these are journalists with a national audience whose personalities came through in their work. Mass layoffs at newspapers can still feel anonymous (unless, of course, you’re the laid-off or in their circle of friends and family). But guys like Noah and Shafer, who I’ve been reading since college more than a decade ago, bring the concept of professional instability back into sharp relief.
They’ve had an opportunity many other journalists would love to have, and I’d say they earned it. Juliette Lapidos is a sharp, efficient observer; check out her recent piece on the politics of Parks and Recreation, one of those I-wish-I’d-written-that articles. I happen to follow June Thomas on Twitter, where she has an offbeat kind of charm and seems to watch a lot of television. It was Tim Noah who got me hooked on Slate. His forthcoming book on inequality in America will surely be required reading. Though he ranges widely and seems to have had a much different background than me, reading him on topics like class and status was to be reminded of where I came from (or don’t come from). And if any one writer kept me coming back to Slate as an avid reader, it was Shafer.
Shafer has written about this sort of thing in the past. Earlier this summer, he even collected two columns‘ worth of notes from journalists who’d been fired! A couple years ago, he wrote about the wave of buyouts across media, which is now uncomfortably resonant:
The “retirement” of the buyout brigade has the added benefit of loosening the ugly stranglehold the boomers have over the press. I may be risking self-extermination by advocating wholesale boomer expulsion, but there are just too many of us—especially the older variety—in top slots for journalism’s good. The sheer weight of our presence blocks the promotion of the next generation of talented journalists to the most desirable beats.
We like our nice salaries, we enjoy our benefits and vacation time, we dig our place in the pecking order, and we expect to live forever. So why should we leave? Our intransigence not only gives our product a rancid boomer tang—who can blame nonboomers for being repulsed?—it tends to stifle innovation.
Ouch! But Classic Jack. Shafer didn’t fall into that professional groove (nor his colleagues), and his point is as easily applied to tenured professors or others who ease into a late-mid-career doldrum. I don’t think anyone, young or old, begrudged his role at Slate, except maybe Rupert Murdoch, if Murdoch deigned to notice. And as the American Journalism Review profile published yesterday points out, he writes like a much younger writer. (Aside: a favorite part of that piece is the sullen-sounding contribution from Tom Goldstein, dean of the journalism school I attended despite carefully reading Shafer’s thoughtful evaluation of j-schools.)
So I figure Jack Shafer will land on his feet. It might take some time, as these things do. He’s gotten more positive recommendations and fantasy job offers in the last day than I’ve gotten my whole life. If I had the right publication and a budget, I’d hire him. (Fantasy job offer.) Wouldn’t you? Look at the tweets where people imagine Jack’s reaction to the outpouring of online adoration, or how he should be the one to cover it, or where he should go next. It’s like people have a Jack Shafer Platonic Ideal and finally have a reason to spill it all over Twitter. I smell a fan-fiction opportunity here. Jack, capitalize on this.
And so, for whatever it’s worth, even though last night Jim Cramer tweeted the following,
I muddle on somehow and continue to refer to Shafer in the present tense.
**********************
Wait! I do have something specific to thank Jack Shafer for:
Last Sunday, as Tripoli was overrun with rebel fighters, I ruminated:
Curious what will they do with Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, the convicted Lockerbie bomber returned to Gaddafi's benevolent embrace.
@telesle
Tim Lesle
Which Jack then re-tweeted (technically modify-tweeted, if you wondered what the MT meant):
MT @telesle: What will they do with Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, the convicted Lockerbie bomber returned to Gaddafi's benevolent embrace.
@jackshafer
Jack Shafer
And that was then retweeted by someone on Twitter called @morgfair:
Who turns out to be Morgan Fairchild. And then she followed me. Welcome aboard, Morgan! I’m not sure how to describe what I’m feeling,* but I appreciate the follow.
And we still don’t know what will happen with al-Megrahi.
Good luck, Jack!
*Update: It’s cool! In retrospect, I think I’m just humble-bragging.
Priceless?
A couple weeks back, I compiled a little infographic for Longshot Magazine. And they took it! Thus the badge embedded here.
I put together a chart of examples through history of the price tag we’ve put on human life. The chart isn’t online, but you can see it if you buy the magazine, formatted with that digital-looking font you see on receipts. The published version is shortened and formatted for the magazine, but if you’re curious about the rough version I turned in, you can see it below.
Not wanting to leave well enough alone, I also got in touch with David Friedman. Friedman is a professor at Santa Clara University’s law school and a self-described “anarchist-anachronist-economist.” He teaches this class that looks incredibly interesting called Legal Systems Very Different From Ours. A section of it is on ancient Iceland, and his 1978 paper on Iceland’s legal and political institutions during the saga era was the source for one of the weregild figures in the chart.
We’re constantly making decisions that value life, whether we realize it or not. That’s an inherent aspect of the risks we take on a daily basis, whether it’s jaywalking (value of time saved vs risk of getting hit by a bus) or digging into that second slice of pie. What’s more, we’re constantly applying values to the lives of others, such as in the cost-benefit analyses of safety and regulations.
“People are often uncomfortable with the idea of giving life a finite value,” says Friedman, “But if they really believed the value of their own live was infinite they would weigh less, drive more carefully, adjust their behavior in lots of ways that give up other values in order to reduce the risk of dying.”
And he argues that price isn’t, by definition, infinite: “If you imagine someone trying to buy all of your life now–your heart for transplant, say–it seems unlikely that you would sell. But the reason is not that your life is infinitely valuable but that the money you would be paid with is worthless to a corpse, which is what you will be after selling your life.”
You really can’t take it with you.
Not that others can’t use it after you’re gone. Friedman added an interesting point about how we calculate awards in death lawsuits: when somebody’s survivors are awarded money after a death, the figure fails to include the value of the life to the person who died.
How much would somebody have to pay you for your own life? It may not be infinite, but it would certainly be substantial, right?
“Modern law gets it strikingly wrong by ignoring the largest part of the value of most lives–their value to the person whose life it is,” he says. “Under traditional common law, that value could not be sued for because the claim died with the claimant. Modern survivor statutes allow other people, such as the victim’s family, to sue for the cost to them of his death, but still leave out the cost to him of his death. Well, that’s the figure that’s left out, the value that’s lost, in a settlement.”
Whatever Happened to the Paperless Office?
Over at Slate, Jack Shafer wrote about reading the news online versus on paper. After publicly swearing off of the NYT’s print edition, Shafer admitted that he’s back on print, and loving it (or, at least, accepting it). It’s a nicely considered piece, as he talks about how print offers certain advantages, such as how it’s easier to remember what he’d read about, and easier to avoid distractions and make it to the end.
In one respect, what he’s describing are affordances, inherent traits of an object that enable you to do something. The concept of affordance comes up a lot in research on how we choose what we use, such as reading print or reading online. Paper has certain affordances (permanence, easier to control, you can scrawl in the margins, etc), while digital has its own (Shafer points out that you can search easily and read news from far away). It gets really interesting when one technology starts to borrow affordances from another, such as the Kindle’s enabling readers to make notes or highlight text.
Anyway, Jack’s piece is worth a read. And it reminded me of a short piece that Wired commissioned me to write for the Future That Never Happened package last year (but which, sadly, was bumped for space). Lucky for you, I’ve dredged it up.
Whatever Happened to the Paperless Office?
As businesses started adopting word-processing systems in the late ‘70s, everything about the office was predicted to change. Within just a couple of decades, the modern office would be a paperless one.Or, as futurist Alvin Toffler put it after composing some of his 1980 book The Third Wave on a new computer: “…making paper copies of anything is a primitive use of such machines and violates their very spirit.”
Of course, Toffler copped to printing out his drafts. And we’d all go on to violate the spirits of our desktop helpers on a daily basis as paper consumption rose year after year. (Probably didn’t help that as we bought all those computers, we were also picking up printers.)
The real problem with the paperless office was that the notion was flawed to begin with. Paper can be inefficient at times, but there are reasons we keep coming back.
As the researchers Abigail Sellen and Richard Harper describe it in their 2002 study The Myth of the Paperless Office, paper has some special “affordances.” That is, it isn’t just a container for text, but can be touched, marked, repurposed, displayed, skimmed, and can cling urgently in the form of little yellow sticky notes on the edges of your monitor. While digital has key strengths like storage and distribution, paper has proven useful in other contexts, like collaborating with co-workers.
True, our consumption of uncoated free sheet——what we feed our printers——has started to decrease in recent years, suggesting more of our paper work really is becoming bits in the cloud. But we still bought almost 10 million tons of the hard stuff last year. It’s going to take a long time to shake the habit.
Temps Perdu
There are a lot of books I look forward to reading, and even a few I look forward to re-reading. Among that smaller, second set is Swann’s Way, the first book of Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu, The Search for Lost Time, better known but perhaps worse translated as A Remembrance of Things Past. (The six following volumes in that opus are on the aforementioned looking-forward-to-reading list.)
Perhaps the greatest legacy of Proust’s work in the popular imagination comes in the opening pages, as he describes the experience of involuntary memory triggered by the taste of a little madeleine.
And suddenly the memory returns. The taste was that of the little crumb of madeleine which on Sunday mornings at Combray (because on those mornings I did not go out before church-time), when I went to say good day to her her in her bedroom , my aunt Léonie used to give me, dipping it first in her own cup of real or of lime-flower tea. . . . And once I had recognized the taste of the crumb of madeleine soaked in her decoction of lime-flowers which my aunt used to give me (although I did not yet know and must long postpone the discovery of why this memory made me so happy) immediately the old grey house upon the street, where her room was, rose up like the scenery of a theatre to attach itself to the little pavilion, opening on to the garden, which had been built out behind it for my parents (the isolated panel which until that moment had been all that I could see); and with the house the town, from morning to night and in all weathers, the Square where I was sent before luncheon, the streets along which I used to run errands, the country roads we took when it was fine. And just as the Japanese amuse themselves by filling a porcelain bowl with water and steeping in it little crumbs of paper which until then are without character or form, but, the moment they become wet, stretch themselves and bend, take on colour and distinctive shape, become flowers or houses or people, permanent and recognisable, so in that moment all the flowers in our garden and in M. Swann’s park, and the water-lilies on the Vivonne and the good folk of the village and their little dwelling and the parish church and the whole of Combray and of its surroundings, taking their proper shapes and growing solid, spring into being, town and gardens alike, from my cup of tea.
from Overture, translated by C.K. Moncrieff
Anyway, what was it that got me thinking of Proust? What was the trigger?
*Belgian film poster for The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, effects by Ray Harryhausen. Happy 91st, Ray. Image via Jesse Marinoff Reyes Design.
Steamboat Willie
Behold.
“Steamboat Willie” was the first Mickey Mouse cartoon. [First distributed in theaters, not first produced —Ed.] It premiered November 18, 1928, at the Colony Theater in New York City. It was also the first cartoon to have synchronized sound.
If you watch the whole thing, which I had never done until last year, you’ll see it’s also a catalog of animal abuse that would not pass muster today.
Since I mention abuse: About halfway through, the song “Turkey in the Straw” starts playing. I never gave much though to the single verse of lyrics that my brother and I learned for this song as kids. (I also never learned that version asking if your ears hang low.) A quick look at Wikipedia suggests that they were from a variation sung by George Gobel on television in the ’50s. Ours went a little like this:
Oh, I had a little chicken and she wouldn’t lay an egg,
So I poured hot water up and down her leg,
Oh, the little chicken hollered and the little chicken begged,
And that darn little chicken laid a hard-boiled egg.
Ouch! Poor little chicken.
Like folk music in general, this song has undergone all kinds of tweaking and transformations. In fact, one of the earliest versions had the unfortunate title “Zip Coon,” a minstrelsy reference to an African-American who was sharply dressed, urban, and free. Or, to use another more subtly charged word that is still around: uppity.
Maybe that earlier song variation could makes sense in the Steamboat Willie context, given the criticism of Mickey Mouse as minstrel.
Fortunately, we were spared the blatant racial mockery when we learned our lyrics. Though if you want to insist on some social subtext, I suppose there was some gender silliness: the hard-boiled-egg-laying chicken’s sex was variable in our singing. Sometimes we poured hot water up and down his leg.
In an Earthquake, Outside
Some jarring footage out of Lorca, Spain, from the 11th of May:
One of the persistent scenarios that has come up when talking about earthquakes is what to do if you happen to be walking down a sidewalk and surrounded by buildings. If you’re inside a building, you should take cover under a sturdy desk or table and wait it out. But if you’re strolling downtown after lunch, what about the falling glass or bricks or cornices? Remember this scene from Yokohama during the Japanese earthquake in March?
Large chunks of the building or signage came crashing to the ground. (This is just a screenshot as I haven’t found a video I can embed, but you should definitely watch the clip on the BBC’s site.)
It’s hard to know what the best advice is for any given situation. I remember asking one expert about the outside/near buildings scenario, but all he could really suggest was to get away from buildings. That’s probably as all-purpose as anyone can get. It’s also the advice that comes from FEMA and the Southern California Earthquake Center, for example.
There are so many factors at work in a situation like this—what kind of building, how close are you, can you get inside, is the street blocked— and only a moment to react. There is surely some element of chance involved.
Closed-circuit TV footage from February’s destructive Christchurch, New Zealand, quake showed the exterior of a building essentially peeling off. Still, at the moment of shaking, who would expect that so much brick would fall from the building, and so far—that the physics would be just so? In the footage, a passerby can be seen running toward the building and taking shelter in an alcove. It works, the bricks fall just beyond him and he walks away apparently unscathed. The person who provided the footage says he did the right thing by staying out of the street.
Addendum, 23 August 2011: After today’s Viriginia earthquake, somebody pointed out that FEMA also has a page that says, more directly:
If outdoors
-Stay there.
-Move away from buildings, streetlights, and utility wires.
-Once in the open, stay there until the shaking stops. The greatest danger exists directly outside buildings, at exits and alongside exterior walls. Many of the 120 fatalities from the 1933 Long Beach earthquake occurred when people ran outside of buildings only to be killed by falling debris from collapsing walls. Ground movement during an earthquake is seldom the direct cause of death or injury. Most earthquake-related casualties result from collapsing walls, flying glass, and falling objects.
[Image at top: A statue of scientist Louis Agassiz at Stanford University after the 1906 earthquake. Via USGS Photographic Library.]
