Location: At Home
Senia [singing]: "You can't always get what you want. You can't always get what you want."

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Location: At Home

Location: At Home

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During the president’s two terms in office, the Washingtons relocated first to New York and then to Philadelphia. Although slavery had steadily declined in the North, the Washingtons decided that they could not live without it. Once settled in Philadelphia, Washington encountered his first roadblock to slave ownership in the region — Pennsylvania’s Gradual Abolition Act of 1780.

The act began dismantling slavery, eventually releasing people from bondage after their 28th birthdays. Under the law, any slave who entered Pennsylvania with an owner and lived in the state for longer than six months would be set free automatically. This presented a problem for the new president.

Washington developed a canny strategy that would protect his property and allow him to avoid public scrutiny. Every six months, the president’s slaves would travel back to Mount Vernon or would journey with Mrs. Washington outside the boundaries of the state. In essence, the Washingtons reset the clock. The president was secretive when writing to his personal secretary Tobias Lear in 1791: “I request that these Sentiments and this advise may be known to none but yourself & Mrs. Washington.”

There is more here, depressing throughout, and for the pointer I thank Michael Clemens.

On February 14th, Kakumei-teki himote doumei (革命的非モテ同盟) — literally, “Revolutionary Alliance of Men That Woman Are Not Attracted To”– will gather in Shibuya, an area of Tokyo popular with young couples, to protest Valentine’s Day and its roots in what they call “romantic capitalist oppression.”

The group, known as Kakuhidou for short, was started in 2006, when its founder, Katsuhiro Furusawa, returned home one day after being dumped by his girlfriend and began reading the Communist Manifesto. He quickly came to the realization that being unpopular with girls is a class issue.

Since then, the group has held several demonstrations each year, all coinciding with holidays that are associated with romantic love in Japanese culture, such as Valentine’s Day, Christmas, and White Day .

Kakuhidou’s slogans combine Japanese internet culture with classical Marxism, and its origins in cyberspace can be charted through its choice of language. For example, one frequent target of the group’s admonitions are the so-called “riyajuu” (リア充）, a neologism frequently used in online communities such as 2chan to refer to those who experience fulfillment in their offline lives (riyajuu is a portmanteau that combines “real” with “jyuujitsu”, the Japanese word for fulfillment).

The release posted on Kakuhidou’s website for this year’s anti-Valentines parade says “the blood-soaked conspiracy of Valentine’s Day, driven by the oppressive chocolate capitalists, has arrived once again. In order to create a brighter future, we call for solidarity among our unloved comrades, so that we may demonstrate in resolute opposition to Valentine’s Day and the romantic industrial complex.”

At previous events, leaders of the group have yelled slogans such as “I hope all riyajuus explode! But we’re still a little jealous!” while wearing shirts that say, roughly, “sex is useless.”

There is more here.  By the way, the group’s official vehicle is a Mercedes-Benz.

For the pointer I thank Andrea Castillo.

At least not too visibly:

Thijs Biersteker of digital entrepreneurs Moore has created a book jacket that will open only when a reader shows no judgment. An integrated camera and facial recognition system scans the reader’s face, only unlocking the book – in the prototype, filled with creative work for the Art Directors Club Netherlands annual – when their expression is neutral.

“My aim was to create a book cover that is human and approachable hi-tech. If you approach the book, if you’re overexcited or your face shows a sceptical expression, the book will stay locked,” explains Biersteker on his website. “But if your expression is neutral (no judgment) the system will send an audio pulse and the book will unlock itself. I often worry about my scepticism and judgement getting in the way of my amazement. Judgment should never hinder the relentless enthusiasm of seeing things for the first time.”

The full story, which includes photos, is here.  The Twitter pointer is from Ted Gioia.

Laser Umbrella

Stopping rain from falling on something with an umbrella or a tent is boring. What if you tried to stop rain with a laser that targeted and vaporized each incoming droplet before it could come within ten feet of the ground?

Zach Wheeler

Stopping rain with a laser is one of those ideas that sounds totally reasonable, but if you—

While the idea of a laser umbrella might be appealing, it—

Ok. The idea of stopping rain with a laser is a thing we're currently talking about.

It's not a very practical idea.

First, let's look at the basic energy requirements. Vaporizing a liter of water takes about 2.6 megajoules,[1]It takes more energy if the water is colder, but not much more. Heating the water up to the edge of boiling only takes a little of the 2.6 megajoules. Most of it goes into pushing it over the threshold from 100°C water to 100°C vapor. and a big rainstorm might drop half an inch of rain per hour. This is one of those places where the equation isn't complicated—you just multiply the 2.6 megajoules per liter by the rainfall rate and you get laser umbrella power requirement (watts per square meter protected). It's weird when units work out so straightforwardly: \[2.6\tfrac{\text{megajoules}}{\text{liter}}\times0.5\tfrac{\text{inches}}{\text{hour}}=9200\tfrac{\text{watts}}{\text{square meter}}\] 9 kilowatts per square meter is an order of magnitude more power than is delivered to the surface by sunlight, so your surroundings are going to heat up pretty fast. In effect, you're creating a cloud of steam around yourself, into which you're pumping more and more laser energy.

In other words, you'd be building a human-sized autoclave. Needless to say, autoclaves are not really a popular place to live.

But it gets worse! Vaporizing a droplet of water with a laser is more complicated than it sounds.[2]And to be honest, it sounds pretty complicated. There are many, many, many papers on this subject,[3]Quote from the article Explosion of a Water Droplet by Pulsed Laser Heating by J. C. Carls and J. R. Brock: "... in practice, heating a droplet to very high temperatures before substantial motion occurs ... might be difficult."

Other, out-of-context quotes from that same paper: "The droplet seems to maintain its basic shape and does not appear to be shattering", "The particles formed previously will probably be vaporized.", "By acting strangely, the equation of state is saying that all is not well", "" "Avalanche breakdown", "extremely low and sometimes negative pressures", "the most dynamic response possible", and "Notice the very high temperatures". and the general gist is that it takes a lot of energy—delivered fast—to vaporize the droplet without just splattering it apart into little droplets.

Here's a video of a droplet getting zapped by a laser pulse; you can see that it splatters the droplet, more than vaporizing it. The upshot is that cleanly vaporizing a droplet would probably take more than the already-unreasonable amounts we were considering.

Then there's the problem of targeting. In theory, this is probably solvable. Adaptive optics allow for extremely fast and precise control of beams of light. Covering an area of 100 square meters (which Zach also asked about in his full letter) would require something like 50,000 pulses per second. This is slow enough that you wouldn't run into any direct problems with relativity, but the device would—at minimum—need to be a lot more complicated than just a laser pointer on a swiveling base.

It might seem easier to forget about targeting completely and just fire lasers in random directions.[4] If you aim a laser beam in a random direction, how far will it go before it hits a drop? This is a pretty easy question to answer; it's the same as asking how far you can see in the rain, and the answer is at least several hundred meters. Unless you're trying to protect your whole neighborhood, firing powerful lasers in random directions probably won't help.

And, honestly, if you are trying to protect your whole neighborhood ...

... firing powerful lasers in random directions definitely won't help.

We’ve now seen a good twenty-five years of autocrats backing down, ceding power, and refusing to escalate, starting  around 1989 if not earlier.  Arguably North Korea and Saddam Hussein have been partial exceptions, but even there North Korea has stayed in its shell and Saddam had in fact largely disarmed his WMD.  We also see many autocrats — most notably those of China — who pursue remarkably sophisticated courses of action.  Just think how much more deftly they handled Occupy Hong Kong than the Ferguson police dealt with their situation.  Even the Iranian leaders seem quite sophisticated, even though most of us do not share their goals or endorse their means.

I call it The Great Autocrat Moderation.

If we look back in history, are autocrats generally this rational and conciliatory?  I am struck reading the new Andrew Roberts biography of Napoleon how he grew drunk with success and overreached and of course eventually failed (twice).  Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin, and Mao are some additional obvious examples of autocrats who, in terms of procedural rationality, simply collapsed at some point and very dramatically overreached.

Of course these are tricky examples.  The most famous autocrats are arguably going to be more subject to overreach, which in part drives their fame (infamy), and so if we consult our historical memories we may be selecting for overreach.  Your typical earlier autocrat may have been more rational than this list of ambitious tyrants might imply.  Was the typical dictator of Paraguay, historically speaking, really so irrational?  Still, it does seem that autocrats have been relatively benign as of late.

So how about Putin?  Is he like the autocrats of the last twenty-five years, or he is more like Napoleon and Mussolini with regard to his long-term procedural rationality?

I do not myself expect The Great Autocrat Moderation to continue for much longer. Let us not forget that some autocratic “tournaments” select for overreach, namely the autocrat had to think he could, against long odds, rise to the top and stay there.

I am indebted to a conversation with John Nye about the topics of this blog post.

• codec (88, 48)
• solenoid (87, 54)
• golem (89, 56)
• mach (93, 63)
• humvee (88, 58)
• claymore (87, 589
• scimitar (86, 58)
• kevlar (93, 65)
• paladin (93, 66)
• bolshevism (85, 60)
• biped (86, 61)
• dreadnought (90, 66)

That is from Christina Sterbenz.  Here are the words women are most likely to recognize over men:

• taffeta (48, 87)
• tresses (61, 93)
• bottlebrush (58, 89)
• flouncy (55, 86)
• mascarpone (60, 90)
• decoupage (56, 86)
• progesterone (63, 92)
• wisteria (61, 89)
• taupe (66, 93)
• flouncing (67, 94)
• peony (70, 96)
• bodice (71, 96)

…The male words tend to center on transportation, weapons, and science, while the female words mostly relate to fashion, art, and flowers.

The article is here, hat tip Yana.

Science: Male humpback whales, young and old alike, sing in a chorus to attract the attention of females, according to a study published in Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology. Previously, scientists had thought that only adult males sing. But after studying digital videos of some 87 male whales near Hawaii and data on whale sizes recorded by biologists aboard 20th-century Japanese whaling vessels, they determined that at least 13 of the 87 were not yet sexually mature yet were participating in the singing. Louis Herman of the University of Hawaii at Manoa, lead author of the study, and his colleagues say there are several benefits to the arrangement: The younger singers get a chance to learn the music, and they help amplify the song, which may attract more females.

Insurance companies may not cover schools which allow their teachers to carry firearms.

The Pacers survived Game 6 to force tonight's series-clincher in Miami.

Do you think Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh even remember there's a game? Will Ray Allen break a hip and/or disintegrate into dust before our very eyes? Do you suppose the Heat will also ask LeBron James to pass out Gatorade and mop the floor in addition to everything else?

Or will the Pacers' well-rounded starting five (which, I feel weird admitting, reminds me more and more of Detroit in 2004) lead Indiana to the NBA Finals?

Also, this:

What if Game 7 ended like last night's Game of Thrones?

— Erin Sorensen (@helloerinmarie) June 3, 2013

For real, though. What if it did and you missed it? Don't be that guy -- watch with your fellow DBB'ers. The ball tips shortly after 8:30 p.m. ET on TNT.

The critically acclaimed ESPN series is about to get really close to home in a very good, Bad Boys way. Whatcha gonna do?

Our very own MF Matt Watson retweeted the news with an appropriate reaction:

Oh hell yes MT @richarddeitsch: Among the upcoming 30 for 30s: The Bad Boys (on the Detroit Pistons teams) ...

— Matt Watson (@mattwatson) May 14, 2013

(You know it's credible because it comes from a verified account!)

This is going to be an awesome documentary. I just hope the Red Panda and Robocop get shout outs.

We'll obviously update you when we know more information.

Each column is interesting, for instance read down for “Most Compassionate.”  It’s funny how many individuals do the same for themselves, I might add, in what has to be one of the simplest and most common of all intellectual mistakes.

Those results are from the new Pew report, summarized by David Keohane here.  The French are growing increasingly disillusioned with the European project, and on key questions the French see the world as the Italians or Spanish do, not the Germans.  And there is this: “The report also takes down a few German stereotypes. Apparently, Germans are among the least likely of those surveyed to see inflation as a very big problem and the most likely among the richer European nations to be willing to provide financial assistance to other European Union countries that have major financial problems.”

Some wealthy Manhattan moms have figured out a way to cut the long lines at Disney World — by hiring disabled people to pose as family members so they and their kids can jump to the front, The Post has learned.

The “black-market Disney guides” run $130 an hour, or $1,040 for an eight-hour day.

“My daughter waited one minute to get on ‘It’s a Small World’ — the other kids had to wait 2 1/2 hours,” crowed one mom, who hired a disabled guide through Dream Tours Florida.

“You can’t go to Disney without a tour concierge,’’ she sniffed. “This is how the 1 percent does Disney.”

That is by the way much cheaper than Disney’s own “VIP service,” which costs over $300 an hour.  Here is more, and I thank Neal and also Adam Cohen for the pointer.

It is one of the most visually spectacular movies I have seen.  The first half is a very good movie in its own right.  The second half is mostly narcissistic trash, only periodically compelling, in which Cruise also rewrites the story of his break-up with Nicole Kidman, in what seems to me an unseemly manner.

Most of all, it is a Straussian commentary on Scientology (and Kidman), you can start your research here.  I am stunned but not surprised that very few reviews have picked on this angle at all (so far it seems that none have and even Quora fell down on the job).  Without such knowledge, the movie makes no sense whatsoever.  With such knowledge, the movie is entirely coherent but in some regards more objectionable.

There are also some nice references to other Cruise movies, such as Top Gun and Eyes Wide Shut, not to mention some of the non-Cruise classics of science fiction cinema, including Star Wars and 2001 and Solaris.

I am very glad I saw this movie, but your mileage may vary.  The Wikipedia entry is here.

Philadelphia 76ers

101

Final Recap | Box Score

109

Detroit Pistons

	Greg Monroe, C 37 MIN | 10-14 FG | 7-7 FT | 16 REB | 4 AST | 0 STL | 1 BLK | 2 TO | 27 PTS | +17 Monroe has owned the 76ers, averaging 22.7 points, 13.7 points and 4.3 assists in three games against them this season.
	Andre Drummond, C 33 MIN | 2-4 FG | 1-4 FT | 8 REB | 0 AST | 2 STL | 1 BLK | 3 TO | 5 PTS | -3 This was far from Drummond’s best game, but he’s so athletic, he still made several positive plays. That’s certainly an upgrade from Jason Maxiell‘s no-show starts.
	Brandon Knight, PG 31 MIN | 5-16 FG | 0-0 FT | 2 REB | 4 AST | 1 STL | 0 BLK | 3 TO | 12 PTS | +9 Knight, to his credit, eased his way into this game. He began by making a couple quality, but high percentage, passes and then worked for good shots. But as the game progressed, Knight drifted back into the player who took poor care of the ball and bad shots.
	Rodney Stuckey, PG 33 MIN | 3-9 FG | 0-0 FT | 4 REB | 6 AST | 1 STL | 0 BLK | 2 TO | 8 PTS | +13 Stuckey was clearly the point guard at the get-go, but he still deferred to Knight. At a certain point, he can’t just blame Lawrence Frank for taking the ball out of his hands. Stuckey has been more passive this season.
	Kyle Singler, SG 31 MIN | 6-11 FG | 2-2 FT | 5 REB | 0 AST | 3 STL | 0 BLK | 0 TO | 16 PTS | +18 Singler hadn’t scored this much in 11 games, but tonight was a reminder he’s still better than Middleton right now.
	Jonas Jerebko, PF 20 MIN | 3-7 FG | 3-4 FT | 2 REB | 2 AST | 0 STL | 1 BLK | 1 TO | 9 PTS | +12 A Jerebko that is good every other game is definite progress from earlier in the season.
	Charlie Villanueva, PF 6 MIN | 0-1 FG | 0-0 FT | 1 REB | 0 AST | 0 STL | 0 BLK | 0 TO | 0 PTS | -10 We know Villanueva isn’t defending or rebounding, but when he’s not even shooting, what’s the point?
	Khris Middleton, SF 16 MIN | 4-7 FG | 1-1 FT | 2 REB | 1 AST | 0 STL | 0 BLK | 1 TO | 10 PTS | -6 Middleton is definitely getting more comfortable on both ends of the court. He’s still behind Singler, but the gap might be narrowing. (I say "might," because Middleton hasn’t shown his improvement over a large enough and meaningful enough sample.)
	Will Bynum, PG 25 MIN | 8-13 FG | 4-4 FT | 3 REB | 6 AST | 0 STL | 0 BLK | 2 TO | 22 PTS | +4 Bynum is finishing the season on a high note and making sure he gets paid this summer. Good for him. He deserves one more multi-year contract.
	Kim English, SG 9 MIN | 0-1 FG | 0-0 FT | 0 REB | 0 AST | 0 STL | 0 BLK | 0 TO | 0 PTS | -14 English was a glaringly bad -14 in nine minutes, but I think this was one of many times single-game plus-minus misleads. English didn’t really do anything wrong, other than play six of his minutes with Villanueva. The rookie just happened to be on the court when Detroit missed shots and Philadelphia made them. That said, English didn’t do anything to positively impact the game, either.
	Lawrence Frank Frank stuck with Drummond long enough to let the rookie foul out, and really, he gave everyone who played a chance to show their ability. Some took advantage. Some didn’t.

No man can have a peaceful life who thinks too much about lengthening it, or believes that living through many consulships is a great blessing. Rehearse this thought every day, that you may be able to depart from life contentedly; for many men clutch and cling to life, even as those who are carried down a rushing stream clutch and cling to briars and sharp rocks.

-Lucius Annaeus Seneca

The Amish are renowned for how they take care of their elderly. The old who are sick in body and mind are not sent away to the care of specialists, but live at home with their family, who take care of them until the end. It is hard not to admire the Amish’s dedication to their elders, and to feel that there is more dignity in their way than ours.

But their way cannot be ours. The Amish are tightly knit traditional farm communities that do not move, and resort to extreme measures like total communal shunning in order to keep people in line with the accepted ways. Moreover, they are still a demographically young people, with something like 52 percent of their population under the age of 18. We are unwilling to make the sacrifices necessary to obtain their lifestyle, and we would be unable to support anything close to our current population if we did.

We moderns have beaten back death to an extent never imagined before in our history. Death used to be an uninvited guest you nevertheless expected to see on a regular basis. Now, we have all but conquered infant and youth mortality, where death was most common. And we are all living longer, and having fewer children.

As a result, we are ill prepared for dealing with death when it comes, and least prepared of all for the end of life decisions leading up to it. The modern world creates more and more new contexts for social interaction, none of which emerge with the expectation of dealing with death.

We are also an advanced people, capable of keeping a body with blood and oxygen circulating, and food and water digesting, long after there is any hope of an actual person waking up and living a life. This puts more and more people in the position of having to make a conscious choice to allow their loved ones to die. Even when the loved ones in question have left explicit instructions to this end, the people who have to make the ultimate call on when it is time to invoke those instructions must feel the weight of that responsibility. Nor is everyone so foresighted as to have such instructions in place.

Part of the problem is that we do not like to talk about this openly, and part of the problem is that we have some very naive attitudes about death and dying. If I could sign a contract to end my life were I to develop late stage Alzheimer’s, I would sign it this very day. I have no desire to live like that, nor would I want to remain an emotional—to say nothing of financial—burden to my loved ones. But there is no legal recourse for choosing to end one’s life.

We are more cosmopolitan than we used to be; most modern extended families are more dispersed geographically. The best of them are more like networks than communities; they keep in close touch and are quick to support one another. But a sick grandfather with dementia cannot live in a network; someone must make the hard choice about where they will live and how they will be taken care of. In modern homes where often both spouses are professionals and children are in school during the day, family members cannot devote the time and attention necessary to the care of their elderly. An expensive, specialized residence ends up being the default answer a great deal of the time. I don’t think anyone finds this solution to be ideal, but we have yet to come up with anything better.

We are bad at dealing with death even when we are of sound enough mind to make our own end of life decisions. Last year, a widely circulated article claimed that doctors were more likely to cut their losses and live out their last days peacefully, rather than to take on every possible expensive and painful treatment to extend their lives by a minimal amount. After reading the article, my cousin, who is a surgeon, commented that it ran counter to his experience. It was a nice story, but every time he had been involved in the end of life scenarios of fellow doctors, they made the same bad choices as everyone else.

But the point of the article was not really to document how doctors choose to die. Rather, the author was arguing that most people make poor choices in the face of death. He simply used the example of doctors as a piece of rhetoric. Whether or not the claim about doctors in particular is true, there is no doubt that we are far too inclined to go for certain suffering in exchange for a small chance of extending our lives, rather than choosing to live what days we have left in comfort.

Just as disuse of muscles leads to atrophy and isolation from disease weakens our immune system, our medical victories have made us emotionally and culturally fragile to death. Settled, agricultural societies had thousands of years to build up rituals and procedures around death. The conditions around modern end of life scenarios—the changing age distribution, the availability of aggressive medical treatment to stave off death for a month or a week or a day, the increasingly cosmopolitan nature of modern social settings—have only been around for the blink of an eye of history. Adjusting to these conditions will take many of our increasingly long lifetimes.

One thing is certain—we aren’t there yet. We aren’t even close.

A few days ago we announced that we were re-prioritizing our product roadmap for 2013 in order to build an RSS reader from scratch. While we had long planned to build something like this, we had no idea we’d be attempting to do it so soon, or within such a tight timeframe. But after Google’s announcement last week, and Reader’s imminent shutdown, we think it’s the right thing to do.  It’s certainly the self-interested thing to do, given how much we all relied on Google Reader. 

Over 800 comments were left on last week’s blog post. That’s more than we received when we told the world we were rebuilding Digg itself. It’s also proof that Google Reader users (and RSS devotees in general) are rabid information addicts with strong opinions.  We’re truly grateful for the input.

The comments are rife with practical, creative, and smart insights that we will do our level best not to squander. Over the next few months, our goal is to spend as much time as possible with devoted users of Google Reader and other reading applications.

After combing through all 800 comments, here are 4 points that seemed to recur, and loudly:

1. Keep it simple, stupid*

2. Make it fast (like, really fast)

3. Synchronize across devices

4. Make it easy to import from existing Google Reader accounts

Google did a lot of things right with its Reader, but based on what we’re hearing from users, there is room for meaningful improvement. We want to build a product that’s clean and flexible, that bends easily and intuitively to the needs of different users. We want to experiment with and add value to the sources of information that are increasingly important, but difficult to surface and organize in most reader applications — like Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Reddit, LinkedIn, or Hacker News. We likely won’t get everything we want into v1, but we believe it’s worth exploring.

We’re a small team, and while we tend to work best under tight time constraints, building a Google Reader replacement in a few months is a massive undertaking that will consume our days and nights. We’re confident we can ship a product that meets the principles above, but if a feature is missing on Day 1 that you were really looking forward to, we ask that you 1) tell us and 2) be patient.

With that in mind, we’re going to continue to gather input from Reader junkies, casual users, and even the original developers themselves. If you’re at all interested in being a part of the development process (or just keeping up with our progress), please join our email list. We’ll use that list to keep in touch with you and the thousands of others who have already signed up.

Digg

P.S. We’re also eager to work with any developers that want to lend a hand, so get in touch if you’re interested in being a part of this (mildly insane) sprint.

Google Reader is shutting down in a few months, so what to do?  Your suggestions would be most welcome, please leave them in the comments.

A related question is which blogs will be harmed the most by this development, assuming that the #2 choice of reader isn’t as good.  Very old blogs may be reevaluated as choices to follow, since we all will have to fill out new feeds all over again.  Blogs which post not so frequently will be hurt too, in relative terms as well as absolute.  If you know a blog will post frequently, you simply might substitute into site visits.  This will also likely hurt blogs with a lot of ads, such as the Forbes blogs which I know, again speaking in relative as well as absolute terms.

Addendum: Here are comments from Matt.