Chinese New Year, a time where the Chinese traditionally return home for family reunions, is a massive annual holiday that lasts for 40 days in mainland China. This time it kicks off from end January, and Baidu, the Chinese equivalent of Google, has introduced an online heat map that that updates every four to eight hours and shows the movements of these Chinese travelers by gathering location-based smartphone data from its 200 million or so registered users. Now that is a lot of migratory humans, albeit temporarily.
Nintendo has been a family business. After the company's former president Hiroshi Yamauchi died last fall, he left his stake in the company to his four children. And now, Bloomberg reports, they're looking to sell stock.
The songs played in this session are:
1. 'Glory Days' (Bruce Springsteen)
2. 'Wonderful (The Way I Feel)' (My Morning Jacket)
3. 'Paris Or Amsterdam' (Basia Bulat)
This graph summarizes the data, with “average Americans” in tan, football fans in maroon, and other fans in olive. Now since the survey methodology reports a survey of 1,011 adults—not just sports fans—I assume that the data below represent a subset of those Americans who follow sports. But, according to the data, that is 89% of all Americans (I’m one of the other 11%). Yes, exactly half of the fans (and 55% of football fans) see supernatural influences in sports.
In an interview, Gregg Easterbrook is asked, “Does God participate in the National Football League?” Part of his answer:
To the extent that people believe that God controls outcomes—and I am a churchgoing Christian who does not believe that—then football games present you with a fast-moving morality play. The good guys should beat the bad guys; the virtuous athletes should succeed over the cheating athletes. If you believe that God controls outcomes, daily life is full of little morality plays—but most of them are hard to discern, whereas a football game is right on TV. You know what’s happening, you know who wins, you know which players you like and which players you don’t like. Athletics gives you a type of morality play for the presence of God’s active control in life.
Easterbrook also recently cautioned that it’s mostly not pro players who suffer the effects of game-related concussions:
What about high school concussions? Steven Broglio of the University of Illinois estimates prep football players sustain 43,200 to 67,200 concussions annually. That’s versus 80 to 100 concussions annually in the NFL, where the attention focuses. In high school there is usually no certified athletic trainer on scene (fitness trainers are nice but often unskilled in medical matters), nor ready access to neurologists. The only health insurance many high school players have is Medicaid, which is stingy about specialists; their parents or guardians may avoid doctors, fearing co-pays. The result is a head-injury double whammy: High-school concussions are far more frequent than NFL concussions, plus more likely to be mistreated (if treated at all).
Cellphone users in India must confront the challenges of texting legibly in a country with 22 official languages:
The narrow range of communication for Indians on the mobile Web has largely been ignored because, for years, India’s online population, nearly two hundred million people, has mostly overlapped with its English-speaking demographic. But the general prediction is that many of the next two hundred million Internet users, who will go online almost exclusively through smartphones, will not comfortably understand English. Phone manufacturers, eyeing this vast new market, have begun incorporating Hindi scripts into handsets like [48-year-old Bangalorean] Birsingh’s. However, since Hindi has twice as many vowels as English, and a wealth of consonants and character combinations, cheap phone hardware with traditional keypads still pose challenges. Reverie [Language Technologies]’s software platform, which underpins [texting app] Plustxt, aims to give local scripts the flexibility of English, providing text input for all twenty-two official Indian languages on phones, tablets, and TV top boxes. To demonstrate, [company director Arvind] Pani showed me one of Reverie’s newest products, an address book. At first, the names appeared in English. Then, with one click, they were rendered in the loop-the-loop characters of Malayalam, the language of Kerala, a south-Indian state.
Alexander the Great, Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copanhagan, Denmark
In the January issue of the journal Clinical Toxicology, investigators at the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand and the University of Birmingham, United Kingdom offer yet another theory as to the cause of the untimely death of Alexander the Great just prior to his 33rd birthday. Their article has generated considerable chatter over the internet. In it, they propose that Alexander was poisoned by wine laced with an extract of Veratrum album (white hellebore). They base their theory on the fact that of all of the poisons proposed to date as Alexander’s killer, none is as likely as white hellebore to produce the symptoms Alexander is purported to have manifested during his 11-day terminal illness –“sudden epigastric and substernal pain accompanied by nausea and vomiting, followed by bradycardia and hypotension with severe muscular weakness.”
Poisoning, in fact, was one of the earliest explanations for Alexander’s sudden demise. Of the possible assassins, Antipater had, perhaps, the most to gain from the king’s murder and thus, was an early suspect. He had consolidated a position as regent of Macedonia during Alexander’s absence in the East and likely feared for his own safety given the scores of officials who had lost their posts and their heads on Alexander’s return from India. According to the poison theory, Antipater was assisted in the murder by Aristotle, who feared for his own life after his nephew, Calisthenes, had been implicated in an earlier assassination plot. The poison was reputed to have been so toxic that it had to be transported to Babylon in the hoof of an ass. Antipater’s son, Cassander, was said to have conveyed it to the king’s court, where it was administered to Alexander by his taster, Iolaus, at a banquet hosted by Medius.
Although both Arrian and Plutarch were skeptical of the poison theory, it deserves consideration, if for no other reason than many, like Antipater, would have welcomed Alexander’s death in 323 B.C. Alexander had offended many of his fellow Macedonians by adopting the dress and customs of the vanquished Persians. His plans for yet another campaign around the horn of Arabia and along the coast of North Africa must have been greeted with alarm by his exhausted army. By the time of his death, he had become neurotically suspicious of independent achievement. Moreover, his claim to be the son of Zeus-Amon was abhorrent to the Macedonians, not just because of the absurdity of his pretension of divine status, but also because it was an insult to the memory of Philip, their former king. And perhaps most important, Alexander was surrounded by an extremely able and ambitious staff, each eager for his own share of the empire. Thus, the possibility that Alexander was murdered, poisoned in fact, cannot be dismissed easily.
Unfortunately, the historical record contains varying descriptions of Alexander’s signs and symptoms during his terminal illness. Plutarch, for example, maintained that Alexander had no abdominal pain, as others had written, positing instead that the symptom had been added to the clinical record for the purpose of rendering the king’s death as tragic and as moving as possible. In those accounts in which abdominal pain is mentioned, its precise location is not given. Therefore, we cannot be certain that Alexander had the “epigastric and substernal pain” that is characteristic of poisoning with white hellebore. Likewise, neither nausea nor vomiting is mentioned in any of the accounts, and, of course, although Alexander’s physicians likely monitored his pulse, their records contained no observations that might enable us to recognize “bradycardia and hypotension” as a feature of the king’s final illness. In fact, fever is the only feature of the illness that is consistent throughout the historical record. Fever was one of Alexander’s earliest complaints. The first day of the illness it was severe enough that Alexander retreated to his bath house for relief and spent the night there. The next day, the fever seemed to subside only to return that evening and then increased steadily throughout the illness.
Fever is not a cardinal feature of arsenic poisoning, hellebore poisoning or any of the other poisons that Alexander’s associates might have used to kill him. Although there is no way to know for certain what killed Alexander, his clinical picture was much more consistent with an infection, one dominated by fever, a fever so debilitating that it rendered a man of legendary stamina and strength too weak to raise his head as his troops filed by his bed in silent review – typhoid fever, for example.
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Images: (1) Alexander the Great, Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copanhagan, Denmark, by Michiel2005. CC BY-NC 2.0 via Flickr. (2) The Death of Alexander the Great after the painting by Karl von Piloty. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.
Police were investigating an apparent hunting accident after a man suffered a gunshot wound to the head Sunday while fishing, the Kennebec Journal reported.
Al-Qaeda chief Ayman al-Zawahiri had already ordered the group in May 2013 to disband and return to Iraq, and announced that another jihadist group, the Al-Nusra Front, was Al-Qaeda's official branch in war-torn Syria.
The general command of Al-Qaeda rammed home the point in its late Sunday statement.
"Al-Qaeda announces it is not linked to the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, as it was not informed of its creation... (and) did not accept it," the statement said.
ISIL "is not a branch of Al-Qaeda, has no links to it, and the (Al-Qaeda) group is not responsible for its acts," it added.
Jihadists were initially welcomed by some rebels in Syria's conflict, but allegations of brutal abuses against civilians as well as rival opposition fighters has sparked a backlash.
Rebels have accused ISIL of seeking to consolidate power rather than fighting the regime, and even suggested the group was serving the regime's interests.
Al-Qaeda also criticized ISIL's mode of operations, saying jihadists should "be part of the nation" and avoid "any action that could lead to the oppression of jihadists, Muslims or non-Muslims."
Jihadists must "not rush to announce emirates and states... and impose them on people," said the statement.
In recent weeks, ISIL consolidated its grip on the northern city of Raqa, the only provincial capital to fall out of regime control since the outbreak of Syria's uprising in March 2011, imposing their strict version of Sharia law on residents.
It also issued four statements ordering women to wear the niqab in public, forbidding the sale of cigarettes and narghile (water pipe) products, banning music and making attendance of Friday prayers compulsory.
The tensions erupted in early January into armed clashes between ISIL and other rebel groups, including Islamist fighters.
"We affirm our disavowal from the sedition that is occurring in Syria between factions of jihadists, and from the blood that was shed by any party," Sunday's statement said.
In some cases, Al-Nusra Front participated in clashes against ISIL, though it has largely remained out of the fighting and has called for reconciliation.
In an audio message on January 22, Zawahiri called for an end to clashes between groups fighting to oust Syria's regime.
More than 1,400 people have been killed in the rebel-jihadist clashes.
The outside world doesn't know a whole lot about what is really going on in North Korea—how the people actually live and what they do. One thing we can prove, however, is that at least one North Korean citizen has played the Nintendo Wii.
Bad rye whiskey? Sadly, there is such a thing as bad rye; usually, the juice is so young, it has no nuance or subtlety, and all you get is fire and unpleasant fruity flavors. But enough about the not-so-good stuff. Let's talk instead of the stars of the budget-rye universe.
Good rye should be spicy, somewhat fruity, and a little more rugged than bourbon. A common analogy is to compare rye bread to corn bread, and use that comparison to point out the differences between rye and bourbon. (The analogy is imperfect, but it's a reasonable starting point.)
Rye is so hot right now that it's hard to find good 750-mL bottles for less than $20. So today I'm setting the limit around $25. Here are my 6 top picks, plus a few honorable mentions.
Rittenhouse Rye (100 proof, $23)
You knew I'd start here. And why wouldn't I? Even though Rittenhouse's price point has risen along with its star, this rye is still a great value. (Though I miss the days when I could get it for fifteen bucks.)
Rittenhouse is spicy, like you want a rye to be, with light woody notes from the barrel and hints of cocoa, vanilla, and caramel. There's something to the finish that almost suggests pastry. Rittenhouse is great on the rocks and in cocktails. It's the backbone for my favorite Old Fashioned, for example, and it's also excellent in a Manhattan. (The proof is high enough that you can be generous with the vermouth, and the drink won't get too sweet.) I also love Rittenhouse in a Boulevardier, the whiskey-based variation on the Negroni.
Old Overholt (80 proof, $21)
Overholt is a little milder and softer than Rittenhouse, and it's a good rye for anyone who is used to drinking bourbon or very smooth Scotch. (Rye nerds might want something a bit more pungent.) Overholt is light and herbal, only mildly woody, and with a fruity aroma. Overholt appears in an episode of Mad Men, when Don Draper mixes an Old Fashioned for a hotelier he meets at a wedding. However, in that era Overholt was still a 100-proofer. I'd love to try some, if any of you find it at an estate sale or something.
Pikesville Supreme (80 proof, $19)
Most rye in the United States is produced in what's called the Pennsylvania style (also known as Monongahela style), based on a style common in early American rye distilling, when most rye was made in Pennsylvania. Pikesville is perhaps the last known example of another style: Maryland. This type of rye is lighter and grassier than the Pennsylvanians, and also smoother and somewhat sweeter. Pikesville, like Rittenhouse, is made in Kentucky by Heaven Hill. For those of you who can find it, it's a good bargain.
Redemption Rye (92 proof, $24)
The next three ryes on the list have two things in common: First, they're all distilled at MGP Ingredients in Lawrenceburg, Indiana, and bottled by people who didn't distill it. (I have no problem with this, but I do wish companies would be more transparent about it. In the end, however, I honestly doubt very many consumers other than whiskey geeks give a rat's ass.)
Next, they all have a 95% rye mashbill, which is quite high for a rye whiskey. (By law it must be 51% or higher.) But they're different ryes. I'll talk a little about why.
First, Redemption. Spicy, rich, fruity, and mildly sweet, Redemption simply tastes more rye-forward than, say, Rittenhouse or Overholt. Some people don't like it for that very reason, but though I still prefer Rittenhouse's better balance, I still really enjoy Redemption's rye punch. Redemption is about 2 or 3 years old; it's hard to pin down the bottler on exactly how old. I think it's fine on the rocks, but it's better as a mixer.
Riverboat Rye (80 proof, $24 for a 1L bottle)
Younger sibling to Redemption, Riverboat is aged for a mere two years. It's the same stuff that's in the Redemption bottle, but it's younger and unfiltered. A retailer in Rhode Island told me once that it's also aged entirely on the bottom racks in its warehouse, but I can't verify that independently. The same whiskey aged at different locations in the same warehouse can taste different thanks to temperature variations. Riverboat is definitely a young rye; it's good in cocktails, but not your best choice for serving neat.
George Dickel Rye (90 proof, $23)
The difference between this and Redemption and Riverboat is that the Dickel Rye is finished with the same charcoal filtering that Dickel Tennessee Whisky gets. Dickel is smoother and easier to sip than Redemption or Riverboat. It's not as spicy as other ryes and it presents some citrus and a bit of soot from the charcoal.
Honorable Mentions: Great Not-Quite Budget and Hard-to-Get Rye
There are some great ryes out there that just barely miss the $25-and-under mark...or that are simply unavailable right now. Sazerac (the 6-year-old variety, also known as Baby Saz), for example, costs about $30 in my market. I love it for, well, for Sazeracs, but it's also great on its own, either neat or on ice. And it makes a lovely Old Fashioned. Bulleit Rye is another product of Lawrenceburg, Indiana. In California you might find it for $22, but most other places, it can clock in at $30. It's rich and peppery, with some fruitiness. It complements the Bulleit Bourbon really well somehow, even though it's made in a different distillery and a different state.
One rye that I really miss is Wild Turkey 101 Rye; it's sadly (mostly) off the market. I was buying it when Rittenhouse was on a shortage, and it quickly became my second favorite rye. And I was getting it for about $21, so if it were available, I'd list it here.
Share Your Picks!
Tell me, what is your favorite rye whiskey under $25? What would you add to this list?
About the author: Michael Dietsch lives with his wife and kids in Brooklyn. His first book, Shrubs, is due in October 2014. You can reach him on twitter at @dietsch.
Copperplate Technology = Toile de Jouy!
The early printed cotton was produced using woodblocks. In 1770 Oberkampf began using copperplate printing at Jouy – the technique had been used abroad in England and Ireland for a number of years, but Oberkampf was the first cotton manufacturer to bring copperplate printing technology into France. Because the lines on the engraved copperplates are finer than those on wood blocks, one was able to introduce the effects of light and shade. The copperplates also allowed for a larger repeating pattern. This opened up the possibility for designs – no longer limited to florals or geometric designs – Oberkampf commissioned the best artists to design pastoral scenes with humans figures. This new style allowed for the fabric to depict major events of the time period such as the first balloon flight (above) or the fascination with Egypt (below).
To celebrate the birthday of Renata Tebaldi, our friends at Opera Depot are offering a free download of live performances by this great diva. And speaking of divas, Our Own JJ returns to Operavore this afternoon for a talk about operatic miscasting. And don’t miss Zachary Woolfe‘s fascinating look at the Met’s new and different Prince Igor in the New York Times.
Industrial band Skinny Puppy have revealed that they invoiced the US government after finding out that their music had allegedly been used as a 'torture device' at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp.
Dystopian Brutalist Outerwear, which Van Strien exhibited at the Design Academy Eindhoven graduate show during Dutch Design Week last year, consists of five coats made out of cut sheets of folded tarpaulin.
"It's a kind of trend forecast for a dystopian future that, when everything is not so great with the economic stuff that's going on right now, we might be heading towards," says Van Strien. "It will be cold; people will be unhappy; we'll be living in buildings that are just grey blocks. These are coats that we could produce for people that don't have a lot of money, when we don't have a lot of materials, when a coat needs to last for a lifetime."
Van Strien says he chose tarpaulin because it is cheap, resilient and simple to work with.
"[The coats] are all cut from a single piece of black tarpaulin," he says. "You then have to weld the parts together with heat. In the front I've made closures with magnets and that's pretty much it. This material is super easy to work with, you don't need to finish it or anything and it will last forever."
The coats were designed to provoke a reaction and make people think about where the world could be heading, Van Strien says.
"A lot of people feel a bit creeped out [by the coats] and that is the goal, that we think about how we're handling our social malaise," he explains. "I see myself as a fashion designer, so I've looked at this from a purely aesthetic point of view. But the thought behind it is something that I feel very strongly about. I never make a garment just because it's pretty, it always has to tell a story."
Despite being designed for a future that does not exist yet, Van Strien says he has been approached by a number of people interested in putting the coats into production.
"I was not planning on putting these coats into production when I first made them, it was just a statement," he says. "But a couple of parties have come up and they asked me if I wanted to take them into production so now I'm considering it."
Martijn Van Strien. Copyright: Dezeen
We drove around Eindhoven in our MINI Cooper S Paceman. The music in the movie is a track called Family Music by Eindhoven-based hip hop producer Y'Skid.
@miserable_men is a parody Instagram account that shares candid photos of men shopping with their ladies at the mall. Of course it goes both ways when couples shop together; but the purse holding, phone staring, and the ultimate—the pass out—make for a pretty entertaining Instagram feed that has ballooned to over 50,000 followers in the last couple weeks.
You can find hundreds of more snaps on their feed and you are welcomed to send submissions to miserablemenpics@gmail.com
This Sunday is Super Bowl Sunday, which means something to most Americans. But not to all of us! In fact, some of us give absolutely no shits about the Super Bowl and find the spectacle of men inflicting life-altering traumatic brain injuries on one another to be boring and distasteful at best. For us, there is Animal Planet's Puppy Bowl, in which puppies frolic in a puppy-scale stadium. And this year, Hallmark Channel is adding a Kitten Bowl, which will be more of the same. But why is it stopping there? Plenty of other places should be getting in on this action. A few suggestions:
Sloth Bowl Any channel could have this. I'll grant that the sloth cam is actually very boring, and most of the time sloths do nothing. But … it would still be great just to have two hours of sloth footage, even if it took days of filming just to get two action-filled hours.
Bowling Bowl Duh. It is already in the name.
Goldfish Bowl They already live in a bowl! And surely there's a subculture of people who trick out their goldfish bowls. (For example, Gail the goldfish on West Wing? Her bowl was different in every single episode! True story.) Maybe Spike could have a contest for who has the most elaborate, interesting goldfish bowl. That's at least as exciting as sports.
ABBA Tribute Super Trouper Bowl VH1 Classic, asleep at the wheel! This could be a straight-forward tribute show, or it could be an ABBA-off of sorts, with different performers competing in a head-to-head battle and culminating in one winner being crowned the Dancing Queen. It would be even better if the cover were done in different styles, so it wasn't an ABBA impression contest — more an ABBA interpretation contest. SOS.
Superb Owl Stephen Colbert has already been making jokes about this, but why isn't there owl-oriented counter-programming? National Geographic Channel, get yourself some owl B-roll and just add narration about the badass majesty of these wondrous creatures.
Bowl Bowl When I was a 6 or 7, I went with my mom to a ceramics store to buy a big serving bowl. I was allowed to weigh in on the purchase, and I remember taking the responsibility extremely seriously. Like, Indiana Jones picking a chalice in Last Crusade seriously. We settled on a giant, heavy white bowl with a dainty yellow lip and a perky parrot painted on the bottom, and I remember thinking when I picked it up, barely able to wrap my arms around it, This is the greatest bowl in the world. I am proud to say that "the parrot bowl" remains a staple of family meals at my parents' home. But are there other amazing bowls out there? There must be, right? (Or maybe not. Parrot bowl is a freaking masterpiece, if I do say so myself.) HGTV should find 32 of the best bowls in the world — fancy glass bowls, funky earthy wooden bowls that hold fruit in rich people's kitchens, stark Marc Newsom bowls and cheeky Jonathan Adler ones, historic bowls and futuristic ones. Time for a best bowl contest.
Super Goal ESPN is obviously going to dedicate most of its resources to Super Bowl reporting. But the Worldwide Leader doesn't actually broadcast the Super Bowl. Surely there's room on, oh, ESPN 3 to air a special called "Super Goals," marking the other football's greatest scoring moments.
Super Hole Science Channel show about black holes! Alternately, something pornographic.
Penguin Bowl For a while there, it seemed like penguins were the animal people found adorable. Then mini-pigs kind of took over, and once we hit slow lorises, no one cared about penguins anymore. It's time to bring back the love! Travel Channel should film some Antarctic penguins in their natural habitat and Dark Side of the Moon–style sync it to commentary from a football game. Any football game.
"This dog just appeared out of nowhere and followed us for an entire week during our trekking trip in the Himalayan outback…When I decided to get up at 4 a.m. to climb the next 5000 m peak…he accompanied me as well. On the top he was sitting for the entire 30 minutes on this place"
In the January issue of the journal Clinical Toxicology, investigators at the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand and the University of Birmingham, United Kingdom offer yet another theory as to the cause of the untimely death of Alexander the Great just prior to his 33rd birthday. Their article has generated considerable chatter over the internet. In it, they propose that Alexander was poisoned by wine laced with an extract of Veratrum album (white hellebore). They base their theory on the fact that of all of the poisons proposed to date as Alexander’s killer, none is as likely as white hellebore to produce the symptoms Alexander is purported to have manifested during his 11-day terminal illness –“sudden epigastric and substernal pain accompanied by nausea and vomiting, followed by bradycardia and hypotension with severe muscular weakness.”
Al-Qaeda chief Ayman al-Zawahiri had already ordered the group in May 2013 to disband and return to Iraq, and announced that another jihadist group, the Al-Nusra Front, was Al-Qaeda's official branch in war-torn Syria.
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To celebrate the birthday of Renata Tebaldi, our friends at Opera Depot are offering a free download of live performances by this great diva. And speaking of divas, Our Own JJ returns to Operavore this afternoon for a talk about operatic miscasting. And don’t miss Zachary Woolfe‘s fascinating look at the Met’s new and different Prince Igor in the New York Times.
