Apology of the Year

Runner-Up:

The Sun (U.K.):

In an article on Saturday headlined ‘Flying saucers over British Scientology HQ’, we stated “two flat silver discs” were seen “above the Church of Scientology HQ”. Following a letter from lawyers for the Church, we apologise to any alien lifeforms for linking them to Scientologists.

Kevin Slavin and Kenyatta Cheese argue that people have “a fundamental feeling of wanting to be in sync with each other.”

There are no rules in skateboarding. Gou’s part from Heroin’s Video Nasty is one of a kind.

Ignore the vinyl-only bs, but the rest of what they have to say rings very true.

Robin Hanson in Overcoming Bias:

Urban economics studies the spatial distribution of activity. In most urban econ models, the reason that cities aren’t taller is that, per square meter of useable space, taller buildings cost more to physically make. (Supporting quotes below.) According to this usual theory, buildings only get taller when something else compensates for these costs, like a scarce ocean view, or higher status or land prices.

Knowing this, and wondering how tall future cities might get, I went looking for data on just how fast building cost rises with height. And I was surprised to learn: within most of the usual range, taller buildings cost less per square meter to build. For example, for office buildings across 26 US cities, 11-20 stories tend to be cheaper than 5-10 stories, which are cheaper than 2-4 stories (quote below)

The existence of female competition may seem obvious to anyone who has been in a high-school cafeteria or a singles bar, but analyzing it has been difficult because it tends be more subtle and indirect (and a lot less violent) than the male variety. Now that researchers have been looking more closely, they say that this “intrasexual competition” is the most important factor explaining the pressures that young women feel to meet standards of sexual conduct and physical appearance.

Watched “How to Die in Oregon” last night. Terribly flawed documentary, which I don’t recommend, but pretty brutal, and very convincing. We put cats and dogs down to avoid their unneeded suffering. Why not our parents?

Scott Adams on his blog:

My father, age 86, is on the final approach to the long dirt nap (to use his own phrase). His mind is 98% gone, and all he has left is hours or possibly months of hideous unpleasantness in a hospital bed. I’ll spare you the details, but it’s as close to a living Hell as you can get.

If my dad were a cat, we would have put him to sleep long ago. And not once would we have looked back and thought too soon.

See also this great news story: French couple, 86, slam ‘cruel’ law in suicide note

The couple, together since their teens, checked into the world-famous Hotel Lutetia on Thursday night and at some point in the night, they took medication designed to induce a painless death, according to Le Parisien. The couple also ordered breakfast to be delivered to their room in the morning to ensure they would be found quickly.

Georgette and Bernard were discovered dead, hand-in-hand, in their bed on Friday morning by a member of staff. Two letters were left by their bedside.

On Monday it was revealed that one of them contained a scathing attack on France’s prohibition of euthanasia.

“We need alcohol to function, that’s the disadvantage of chronic alcoholism,” said the 45-year-old, somewhat fatalistically.

For lunch, the team returns to the shed where they get two beers and a warm meal, before heading off again for the afternoon shift.

The working day ends with a final beer at around 3:30 pm.

“You have to see things like this: everyone benefits,” said Gerrie.

“They’re no longer in the park, they drink less, they eat better and they have something to keep them busy during the day.”

For many, a trip to Disney is the holiday of a lifetime, but what if you decided to spend your lifetime at Disney?

There is a select group of people for whom this idea is no fantasyland, but a reality.

The Walt Disney Company has created a gated community known as Golden Oak - named after the company’s California ranch.

Joshua Davis in Wired:

Access to a world of infinite information has changed how we communicate, process information, and think. Decentralized systems have proven to be more productive and agile than rigid, top-down ones. Innovation, creativity, and independent thinking are increasingly crucial to the global economy.

And yet the dominant model of public education is still fundamentally rooted in the industrial revolution that spawned it, when workplaces valued punctuality, regularity, attention, and silence above all else. (In 1899, William T. Harris, the US commissioner of education, celebrated the fact that US schools had developed the “appearance of a machine,” one that teaches the student “to behave in an orderly manner, to stay in his own place, and not get in the way of others.”) We don’t openly profess those values nowadays, but our educational system—which routinely tests kids on their ability to recall information and demonstrate mastery of a narrow set of skills—doubles down on the view that students are material to be processed, programmed, and quality-tested.

Light Iron takes you step by step through the progressive data management and color pipeline of Ender’s Game.

Not a fan of the creative, but the tech is cool.

Brains are strange:

Fascinating work by Forrest Wickman in Slate:

Toward the beginning of the 2012 comedy 21 Jump Street, Officer Jenko (Channing Tatum), a onetime cool kid, gives his partner some advice as they prepare to infiltrate the ranks of the cool kids at Sagan High. “You gotta one-strap it,” Jenko chides Officer Schmidt (Jonah Hill). Schmidt, a onetime nerd, is two-strapping—wearing his backpack over both shoulders. That is not, warns Jenko, what cool kids do.

This advice may sound obvious to all cool kids of a certain age, but when the officers make their debut at school, times have changed. Jenko’s attitude—“I don’t care about anything,” he announces—has gone out of style. The cool kids are into diversity, environmentalism, and, worst of all, trying. And symbolizing this generational sea change: “Everybody’s two-strapping it,” notes Schmidt.

When I first watched this scene, I thought: Funny bit, but is it right? I, like everyone cool (or trying to be cool) in my high school, one-strapped all the way. It was a foundational tenet of cool—you might argue about what kind of music was cool, or what clothes, or what hairstyles, but it was a given that one-strapping was the only way to wear a backpack. Is one-strapping really not cool anymore? And if so, how could something once so cool become so not? My search for the answer sent me on a quest in which I’d consult pediatric orthopedic surgeons, re-examine decades of pop culture, and track down the one consummately cool high-schooler from East Amherst, N.Y., who might have the answer.

“The Most Quoted Man in News” tells the story of Greg Packer, an average joe with an uncanny skill at making media appearances.

Jeff Himmelman in the NYT:

Ayungin Shoal lies 105 nautical miles from the Philippines. There’s little to commend the spot, apart from its plentiful fish and safe harbor — except that Ayungin sits at the southwestern edge of an area called Reed Bank, which is rumored to contain vast reserves of oil and natural gas. And also that it is home to a World War II-era ship called the Sierra Madre, which the Philippine government ran aground on the reef in 1999 and has since maintained as a kind of post-apocalyptic military garrison, the small detachment of Filipino troops stationed there struggling to survive extreme mental and physical desolation. Of all places, the scorched shell of the Sierra Madre has become an unlikely battleground in a geopolitical struggle that will shape the future of the South China Sea and, to some extent, the rest of the world.

And at some point it comes to an end. After all, Berghain is a club and not an after-party location. You go to the cloakroom and hand over your cloakroom tag, which—just one indication of the attention paid to every last detail—is not a ticket with a number, like everywhere else, but a metal tag on a string which you can wear around your neck or tie on somewhere else. Whatever state you might be in at the end of the night, you will definitely get your coat back. They think these things through here. Which is important when no one is in the soundest frame of mind.

Then you stumble out of the door and into the light. You nod goodbye to the doormen—not that you know them, but because you feel in some way indebted to them. Somehow you have to give the night some symbolic closure. You look around, feel the fresh air on your skin, notice how much you’ve actually been sweating. You hear the faint ringing in your ears mixed with the twittering of the birds, the chatter of people sitting around having another beer, and the soft rattle of the sound system emanating from the building.

Now you can go home. Or stop by Bar 25 again.