Alexis C. Madrigal

We know that railroads once changed people's perception of speed. Historians record that humans had to learn to look at the landscape, instead of trying to focus on the foreground. Atlantic co-founder, Ralph Waldo Emerson, once wrote, "What new thoughts are suggested by seeing a face of country quiet familiar in the rapid movement of the railroad car." In that very big way, new technological experience forced people to recalibrate their minds. But it's happening in smaller ways, and with smaller objects, all the time.

I read Harper's August 2010 cover story, "Happiness Is a Worn Gun," with this in mind. Author Dan Baum, a long-time gun enthusiast, begins carrying a concealed weapon. The story comes to be about how carrying that very special gadget, the gun, changes your consciousness of where you are.

First, he introduces into the quiet useful hierarchy of consciousness used in concealed weapon training courses.

Condition White is total oblivion to one's surroundings -- sleeping, being drunk or stoned, losing oneself in conversation while walking on city streets, texting while listening to an iPod. Condition Yellow is being aware of, and taking an interest in, one's surroundings--essentially, the mental state we are encouraged to achieve when we are driving: keeping our eyes moving, checking the mirrors, being careful not to let the radio drown out the sounds around us.

When he's packing heat, "there's no way to lapse into Condition White." Instead, "the revolver's weight and pressure keep me constantly aware of how quickly and utterly my world could change."

The way Baum sees it, there's nothing quite wrong with the vigilance his dangerous gun induces, but he does conclude that a society full of people with guns would be a different society indeed. "Condition White may make us sheep, but it's also where art happens. It's where we daydream, reminisce, and hear music in our heads," he writes. "Hardcore gun carriers want no part of that, and the zeal for getting everybody to carry a gun may be as much an anti-Condition White movement as anything else."

Perhaps the gun makes this experience seem exotic, but I don't think it is. Consider my recent experience with a new camera, the Canon G11. If a concealed weapon induces Condition Yellow, a great, lightweight digital camera turns on your Condition White switch. It slows me down, keeps me looking at things in hopes of finding something spectacular to capture. I  pay a lot more attention to the good light out there, too.

So, for all the sharpness Baum says the concealed weapon gives you, I'll take the G11. 

Image: auraelius/flickr

Facebook's social algorithms can create some awkward situations. A friend once joked that the "People You May Know" box should be labeled, "People You Know, But Don't Really Like."

But, Jenna Wortham reports, some of the site's automatic suggestions may create much more emotionally fraught situations.
 

Tamu Townsend, a 37-year-old technical writer in Montreal, said she regularly received prompts to connect with acquaintances and friends who had died. "Sometimes it's quite comforting when their faces show up," Ms. Townsend said. "But at some point it doesn't become comforting to see that. The service is telling you to reconnect with someone you can't. If it's someone that has passed away recently enough, it smarts."

And actuarially speaking, with more older people joining the network, the once rare ghost-in-the-machine problem will soon be much more common.

Via Steve Silberman

A few days ago, an 11-year-old posted a video of herself responding to online critics with a foul-mouthed piece of little girl bravado. She was so profane and mildly amusing that she became, in Gawker's words, a "microcelebrity among Internet tween scenesters."

People posted her name and address to 4chan, a site known for rather extreme pranks (update: and/or ebaumsworld, as a commenter notes -- it's a little murky). Soon, she was being harassed not just online, but in real life. Call girls and pizza deliveries began to show up at their home from the great electronic beyond.

Today, her father got involved. In some room with wall-to-wall carpeting, in some house near a mall, this father tried to protect his daughter from the pain the world can inflict. As she sat crying in the foreground, he kneeled behind her and roared into a webcam at the nameless, faceless forces who had reduced his daughter to tears.

She was scared, and he had to do something.

"This is from her father. You bunch of lying, no-good punks, and I know who it's coming from because I've backtraced it and I know who is emailing and doing it and you'll be reported to the cyber police and state police, so you better not write one more thing or screw with my computer again," he screams. "You'll be arrested. End of conversation. FROM. HER. FATHER. And if you come near my daughter, guess what, consequences will never be the same."

People are mocking his lack of understanding of the Internet ("I've backtraced it"), his invocation of the cyberpolice, etc.
 
But you know, there was a time when these kinds of threats worked, and maybe it was a good thing. Words like that from a dad just might put a scare into some cruel 13-year-olds on a mission to ruin some kid's life for fun. In the old days, dads could handle harassment of their little girls. They'd pick up the phone line and yell at prank callers. They'd show up at schools and tell some kids to back off.

Parents want to protect their children, but a precondition of that is being able to know what or who the threat is. Father and daughter alike are now living inside one of those nightmares where the thing that's out to get you remains perpetually just out of sight and reach.

FROM. HER. FATHER. Those words used to mean something. Mostly it meant, "I'm a full-grown man and I'm willing to use physical force to stop you from hurting my kid, you punk kid." But who is the man in this video going to scare? Everyone knows his threats are empty, that he's bluffing and helpless. And he does, too, which must make it all the more enraging.

What a sad portrait of parenting in this particular technological age. You can just imagine them sitting around an oak dinner table quietly a few minutes after the video and wondering, "What the hell are we going to do?"

Shortly after I posted this article, a friend wrote in to say, roughly, "Where was her father during the time when she had unfettered, unsupervised Internet access?" I stipulate to her lack of adult supervision. But who didn't have some hours to himself as a kid? With computers as ubiquitous as they -- and kids as good at using them as their parents -- policing (i.e. cyberpolicing) children's online activities isn't simple.   

Update 4:20 PM EST: Reader Xclamation makes a terrific point in the comments.

The real shame is that after all of this happened, her parents apparently couldn't summon up the wisdom to help their daughter deal with the aftermath of her actions. Instead, they've apparently taught her that the correct reaction is to further engage and antagonize people.
I get the point that there used to be something protective about a father yelling at the kids who are harassing his child used to be a motivator for those kids to knock off their behavior, but you know what, I'm not convinced that it was ever a good idea for a grown adult to threaten and scream and children. It just leaves a bad taste in my mouth."  

And also, on further consideration, and a prod from Twitter user, @quietriot_girl, I've removed the video embed. As she put it, "It's all part of the same voyeurism. Reminds me of Haneke's Cache." Point taken.

Not every basic astronomy question is easy to answer, not even ones about the most important object in the sky, our sun.

In a deep feature, Alex Witze explores a controversy that's bubbled up among the people who study the sun, aka the heliophysics community. It turns out that scientists aren't exactly sure what the sun's made of. In the 1980s, people made some guesses that have been presumed to be accurate until recently. Now, new simulations of the sun's behavior indicate that there might be substantially less of the heavier elements like oxygen than we thought.

Why does that matter? Astronomers often use the sun, the easiest-to-study star, as a kind of standard measure for other astronomical objects. Change the facts about the sun, and it's like changing the length of an inch.

"And because the sun is the yardstick by which many other astronomical phenomena are measured, if scientists change their ideas about solar chemistry, they must also modify their thoughts about the chemical composition of sunlike stars," Witze writes. "Those changes, in turn, affect ideas about how galaxies evolve, such as the rate at which stars form over time, synthesizing and ejecting heavier elements out into the universe."

There's another reason to check out Witze's story, too. The latter half delves into how the scientific sausage is made. At a time when contentious debates in politically charged topics like climate science threaten to warp the perception of science, it's important to remember that most scientists don't work in high-profile fields. And researchers like these, who are outside the mainstream media spotlight, can serve as a standard measure for normal behavior in scientific discourse.

Image: A coronal hole on the sun. SDO/NASA.

In a New York Times Magazine feature on two young State Department Twitterers, one of them praised the Secretary of State for her role in opening up the agency in the Internet age.

To hear [Alec] Ross and [Jared] Cohen tell it, even last year, in this age of rampant peer-to-peer connectivity, the State Department was still boxed into the world of communiqués, diplomatic cables and slow government-to-government negotiations, what Ross likes to call "white guys with white shirts and red ties talking to other white guys with white shirts and red ties, with flags in the background, determining the relationships." And then Hillary Clinton arrived. "The secretary is the one who unleashed us," Ross says. "She's the godmother of 21st-century statecraft."

The piece's author, Jesse Lichtenstein, caught some great details, and he spared no "dude" in transcribing Ross and Cohen's quotes. But he's telling a deeper narrative, too, about how governments can -- or cannot -- control information in our time.

You might recognize some of the debate from the on-going sharp exchange between Georgetown's Evgeny Morozov and NYU's Clay Shirky about the relationship of the Internet and political freedom. Our own James Fallows has also been watching these issues closely and has written and moderated panels about them. In June, he spoke with Ross, Google's Eric Schmidt, and Timothy Wu of Columbia Law School and Slate about whether the Internet favors dictators or dissenters. It's embedded below.
 

Take heart, iPhone 4 early adopters: you get a free case for your phone courtesy of Steve Jobs, even as Apple's chief denied that there was anything wrong with the phone inside.

The decision came in response to mounting pressure over what has been portrayed as a flaw in the phone's antenna. Free cases aside, Apple denied that its latest iPhone had any problems or hardware glitches that fall outside the realm of what we can expect from smartphones.

Apple may not have copped to problems with the phone -- in fact, Jobs mounted a spirited defense of its excellence -- but the company did note that smartphones, as a category, have problems as devices for making phone calls.

"This is life in the smartphone world," Steve Jobs reportedly said at a small conference in Cupertino. "Phones aren't perfect."

Boy, they sure aren't. While quantitative data is difficult to find, it certainly seems like making a phone is harder than it was in 2007, as if we've passed the point of Peak Voice Connectivity. 

To be fair, it hasn't always been clear that smartphones needed to make calls well. It might sound ridiculous, but texting, web-browsing, Twittering, and gaming had come to define devices formerly used exclusively for one-to-one voice communication. Voice calls had been relegated to secondary importance for consumers, or so it seemed.

But the outcry over the antenna issue -- and the mushroom cloud of discontent it stirred up as people voiced concerns over persistent problems of dropped calls and poor reception -- may have revealed something important about what consumers want. We're witnessing the social reshaping of a technology.

Yes, people want the bells and whistles and good battery life and a bright screen. And maybe they don't want a big telescoping antenna popping out of the top of their phones. But they are tired of not being able to make phone calls with a device that nominally was built for that purpose.

Maybe it's time to direct Apple's (and RIM's and Nokia's...) considerable R&D and engineering resources to restoring basic voice communication service. Maybe people actually want their phones to be phones.

"Form follows failure." That's Duke University engineer Henry Petroski's quick summation of the history of technology. "The form of made things is always subject to change in response to their real or perceived shortcomings, their failures to function properly," Petroski wrote in The Evolution of Useful Things. 

Apple's press conference today was both a defense of its particular phone and an admission that smartphones, as a category, have a problem. Jobs illustrated the point by showing several other smartphones losing reception when held in particular ways. What that said to me was that the industry, in trying to make the sleekest, most beautiful product, had decided to sacrifice some reception performance.

Up until recently, most grumbling about the iPhones' problems making calls was directed at Apple's exclusive wireless carrier AT&T. What Antennagate revealed was that perhaps Apple was not optimizing its products for the best possible reception. Perhaps it was a choice to drive down the cost of the device or increase battery life or any number of trade-offs. It may have even seemed reasonable, given the trends in how their customers were using the phones.

But now that the gadget world's attention is focused on Apple's apparent antenna failure, and that noise is loud enough to drive Apple's stock price down, perhaps more corporate energy will be directed at making iPhones the standard for reception.

At least, that's the way Petroski would expect the technological development to go, as it has for everything from forks and paperclips to nuclear plants. Bad breeds good, and certainly this week has been bad for Apple.

"Almost everything about technology, to me, is a response to a negative. Something isn't working right. Something doesn't look right. Something doesn't perform right," Petroski told me. "And you try to remove that negative quality and that change is presumably an improvement. But then you release the new and improved product and people find faults with it. Because nothing is perfect. You always have competing constraints."

So, don't be surprised if Apple starts to privilege reliable callmaking. Maybe phone calls are coming back.

UPDATE 8:45 PM EST: Almost right on cue, Nokia came out with a statement implying that Apple may have favored the form of its phones over their antennas' performance. And Nokia, by contrast, does not. "Nokia has invested thousands of man hours in studying human behavior, including how people hold their phones for calls, music playing, web browsing and so on," the company said. "As you would expect from a company focused on connecting people, we prioritize antenna performance over physical design if they are ever in conflict."

Amazon made its first sale 15 years ago today.

Esquire is marking this anniversary with a funny look back at other great websites that haven't made it to Amazon's hoary old age. In San Francisco, even in 2004, everyone had a personal story about how they almost made it big with startup X or website Y. Hell, even cab drivers would tell you about how they used to hang out with dotcom millionaires, who would pay them extravagantly to stay up all night waiting to drive a gaggle of 20-year-old coders to Denny's. Oh, what a time.

In any case, here's Esquire's list, which brings all kinds of warm memories flooding back to me:

1. Online retailers that promised to deliver to your door: Kozmo, Webvan, Urbanfetch
2. File-sharing site Audiogalaxy
3. Tone-setting magazines: Feed, Suck
4. Internet TV network Pseudo
5. Foursquare-predecessor Dodgeball
6. Social network Six Degrees
7. Online, text-based multiplayer games known as MUDs and MUSHs
8. Voyeurism feeding teen girl site JenniCam
9. Online currency play Beenz
10. Web host Geocities 
11. Prodigy
12. The Internet Yellow Pages
    

A new form of punctuation is infecting the Internet, writes Conor Dillon in an intriguing post on the "jumper colon."

A new colon is on the march. For now let's call it the "jumper colon".

For grammarians, it's a dependent clause + colon + just about anything, incorporating any and all elements of the other four colons, yet differing crucially in that its pre-colon segment is always a dependent clause.

(Yikes.)

For everyone else: its usefulness lies in that it lifts you up and into a sentence you never thought you'd be reading by giving you a compact little nugget of information prior to the colon and leaving you on the hook for whatever comes thereafter, often rambling on until the reader has exhausted his/her theoretical lung capacity and can continue to read no longer.

It's a fun and lively riff on punctuation in the digital age. But of course punctuation would have to "be viral," and spread socially. How else could we come to a common understanding about what punctuation means? I'm reminded of the lovely GOOD piece on the very long history of emoticons, written by Oberlin English professor, Anne Trubek. It provides a pre-facto riposte to Dillon's post.

So is it okay to invent punctuation marks? Absolutely. At first, writing had no punctuation at all. Usually, authors dictated their words to scribes, and were meant to be recordings of speech. The scribes were simply transcribers, and had no license to add anything not heard by the speaker. Also, no one read silently. All writing was read aloud. A space is a punctuation mark, remember, so in those days, everyone used a script called scripta continua, which, as you may guessed, meant therewerenospacesbetweenwords. As more people began reading, itbecamehardertoreadthedamnedmanuscripts, and punctuation marks were invented to ease reading aloud. The earliest marks indicated how a speaker's voice should adjust to reflect the tone of the words. Punctus interrogativus is a precursor to today's question mark, and it indicates that the reader should raise his voice to indicate inquisitiveness. Tone and voice were literal in those days: Punctuation told the speaker how to express the words he was reading out loud to his audience, or to himself. A question mark, [Ed: a jumper colon], a comma, a space between two words: These are symbols that denote written tone and voice for a primarily literate--as opposed to oral--culture. There is no significant difference between them and a modern emoticon.

BP successfully stopped the flow of oil from its blown-out Macondo well for the first time yesterday, but whether that augurs a long-term fix is still unclear.

Remember that the key measurement engineers were and are tracking is the pressure in the well. If the leak that was capped is the only or primary leak, capping it would force pressure to build up as oil tries to push out. High-pressure is a good thing, though. The alternative is that the well acts like a crude hydra: you cap one leak, and others spring up.

"Retired Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen, the national incident commander, has said that a pressure reading of 8,000 or 9,000 pounds per square inch would be ideal, while a reading below 6,000 psi might indicate leakage," The Washington Post's Joel Achenbach writes this morning.

So, what is the pressure, then? Unfortunately, it falls within the ambiguous middle range between 6,000 and 8,000, at least so far.

"[BP vice president Kent] Wells reported that the pressure was at 6,700 psi on Friday, about the same level as it was on Thursday, according to Tom Hunter, a member of the federal scientific team that is overseeing the test."

Hunter went on to say that it was "premature" to make a determination about whether the oil monster has just one head or many.

Check out our recent update on how the oil spill changed the country.

Now that BP has at least temporarily stopped oil from flowing into the Gulf of Mexico for the first time since April 20, we want to take a step back and take stock of the situation.

First, the well blowout has been a disaster for the Gulf of Mexico, BP, and the Obama Administration. Even if the early good news about the new well cap turns out to be a harbinger of resolution, much damage has already been done. To review, here are five key stories for understanding what really happened -- and what still might.

"The Spill, The Scandal, and the President" by Tim Dickinson in Rolling Stone
Key Quote:
"Instead of cracking down on MMS, as he had vowed to do even before taking office, Obama left in place many of the top officials who oversaw the agency's culture of corruption. He permitted it to rubber-stamp dangerous drilling operations by BP - a firm with the worst safety record of any oil company - with virtually no environmental safeguards, using industry-friendly regulations drafted during the Bush years. He calibrated his response to the Gulf spill based on flawed and misleading estimates from BP - and then deployed his top aides to lowball the flow rate at a laughable 5,000 barrels a day, long after the best science made clear this catastrophe would eclipse the Exxon Valdez."

"Gulf Oil Spill: Could It Change Obama's Energy Policy" by Bryan Walsh in TIME
Key Quote:
"If the oil spill should influence energy policy going forward, comprehensive climate and energy legislation -- already a dim hope -- might end up as one more casualty of the accident."

"Historian: It's too soon to expect large-scale responses to the Gulf leak" an interview with eminent environmental historian Adam Rome in Grist
Key Quote:
"The Santa Barbara oil spill happened in January 1969. Right away, people were appalled. In Santa Barbara itself, the spill brought together people who had never been allied before -- countercultural students and very wealthy Republicans alike were shocked. But still, it took a long time for it to lead to something more than just "we might need more regulation on offshore oil," and more than just preventing that one specific thing from occurring again."

"Legacy of an Oil Spill: 20 Years After Exxon Valdez" a PDF report by the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill Trustee Council
Key Quote:
"Visitors to Prince William Sound and the North Gulf Coast of Alaska today again experience spectacular scenery and abundant wildlife and see little evidence of the spill. Yet the area has not fully recovered. In some areas, Exxon Valdez oil still remains and is toxic. Some injured species have yet to recover to pre-spill levels. This long-term damage was not expected at the time of the spill and was only just starting to be recognized in 1999, at the 10th anniversary."


"Photos BP Doesn't Want You to See" by Julie Dermansky on The Atlantic
Key Quote:

To view more images from the Energy Effects exhibition, check out our slideshow.

Across the street from the Museum of Contemporary Art in Denver in a normally dusty parking lot, there's a car suspended vertically on its nose in a glorified puddle, tail shooting high into the air. For a moment, it seems to defy science. Where's the respect for the law of gravity?

But the longer you stare, the more you're struck by the engineering feat it represents. The piece becomes a paean to technology rather than a refutation of its power.

The installation, a recreation of a photograph by Gonzalo Lebrija Entre la vida y la muerte, is the stunning appetizer for the museum's technically ambitious and entirely successful new exhibition, Energy Effects: Art and Artifacts From the Landscape of Glorious Excess.

The show draws its impact both from the kinds of objects in it -- a Saturn IV rocket engine, a particle accelerator, an intricate miniature video installation -- and from the observation, embedded in the idea of the show itself, that museums need excess energy. Without more than enough energy to go around, it would be very difficult to maintain cultural institutions devoted to exploring the aesthetic life. While we might implore our countrymen to be more sustainable, every single American is swimming in a vast ocean of consumption, far beyond the levels even imaginable before the middle of the 20^th century. And antimodernists aside, we're better off for it.

Shaped by the MCA's imaginative head Adam Lerner, the exhibition is playfully oblique, pairing a monster image of the Large Hadron Collider atom smasher with furiously kinetic photos from mosh pits. The third object in that room is a crazy filmmaking machine, which is suspended on the wall next to a large LCD screen. It makes a movie called "Cliff Hanger" over and over, using smart software and a tiny miniature house. The house has no windows, so you can't see in. It resonates with the idea of the LHC, which at its heart is a massive three-dimensional camera. We can only know both the subatomic world and the narrative world of Cliff Hanger through our technology and our screens.

The whole show is fun and transgressive, unlike nearly every other project I've seen about energy or science. It doesn't directly confront the dire issues like fossil fuel addiction, atmospheric carbon loading, or collateral environmental damage embedded in our energy systems. Instead, it works at a level deeper, trying to expose and change the underlying ideas that shape the way we think about energy. The artists in the show toy with themes of scale and scientific progress, the value of mobility, epistemology, and different definitions of power: mathematical, physical, aesthetic. Most importantly, the objects in the show are gorgeous, both those found and those made.

Energy Effects will remain up at MCA through September. Here, we present a slideshow of pieces from the show.

[Full disclosure: I am giving a talk at the Denver MCA in August about compressed air, which is how I found my way to the museum for this show.]

Image: Alexis Madrigal/The Atlantic.

A West Virginia project may show how serious the Obama administration is about rolling back the environmental policies of its predecessor.

The Spruce 1 mountaintop-removal mining project has been hotly disputed for years, and now there are signs that Obama's Environmental Protection Agency may tilt the scales against the approval of the project.

"The Army Corps of Engineers approved a permit in 2007 to blast 400 feet off the hilltops here to expose the rich coal seams, disposing of the debris in the upper reaches of six valleys, including Pigeonroost Hollow," reports Erik Eckholm in The New York Times. "But the Environmental Protection Agency under the Obama administration, in a break with President George W. Bush's more coal-friendly approach, has threatened to halt or sharply scale back the project known as Spruce 1. The agency asserts that the project would irrevocably damage streams and wildlife and violate the Clean Water Act." If Spruce 1 is stopped, it would come as a welcome move for environmentalists, who have been waiting for Obama to push back on former President Bush's policies.

In a 2009 study of Appalachian coal mining, Colorado State political scientists Charles Davis and Robert Duffy found that the Bush administration "effectively achieved his energy production goals by combining the use of discretionary authority with staff controls, executive orders, and regulatory initiatives to lessen industry compliance costs with environmental regulatory requirements."

Image: Mary Workman, who waged a long fight against Hanna Coal Company, and was photographed during the EPA's photo archival project, Documerica. Erik Calonius/National Archives and Records Administration

The films of Andrei Tarkovsky, the man Ingmar Bergman described as the greatest director, "the one who invented a new language, true to the nature of film, as it captures life as a reflection, life as a dream," may find new and wider audiences now.

FilmAnnex.com has digitized all of his feature films, and is offering them up for watching and embedding all over the Internet. The Russian Film and Culture Archive also has some great interviews with and about Tarkovsky. In fact, that embed up there is his film Nostalghia, which is largely in Italian with English subtitles. From my casual browsing, the quality of the prints and digitization is good, if not exactly HD.

It used to be that to get films like this you had to go to some highbrow and out of the way video store, where the clerks all thought they were the next Quentin Tarantino, but with better hair and funnier.

Via Marginal Revolution

Perhaps you've encountered this scenario. You hop onto a parent's computer to check your email or do a little work. But, to your dismay, the only browser available is Internet Explorer and (for whatever reason) you don't like Internet Explorer. You download Firefox (or Chrome), then install and launch it. And that's when the drama begins. This confronts you:

Vaseline's latest marketing campaign, largely targeted at south Asia but accessible globally, will probably make you uncomfortable. It's a Facebook application that whitens the skin of photos that users upload of themselves. 

On May 6, the Dow Jones Industrial average was puttering along, trading in a range between 10,600 and 10,800 for most of the day. Then, suddenly around 2:30 pm, the index suddenly dropped 1,000 points in just a few minutes. Panic dulled, and the index perked right back up. But for a few minutes there, half a trillion dollars worth of value had been erased. The incident became known as "the flash crash.". 

Slate's Nathan Heller has written a gorgeous and generous piece of literary criticism. About two Twitter feeds. 

Enter the comments section of almost any newspaper, and you begin to believe Hobbes' assertion that absent government, human lives would be "nasty, brutish, and short." Small-mindedness, nastiness, racism, sexism, and a host of other -nesses and -isms run rampant. Comments on news stories are, in a sense, our new civic space, but minus all the social rules that generally govern face-to-face interactions between real human beings.