Andrew

There's finally a presidential candidate who fits the values, character and attitude of the Tea Party to a T — that's "T" as in Trump.

Donald Trump's candidacy is the apotheosis of a movement created to take down the Washington establishment. His brazen hostility toward every conceivable political institution and convention works so well because it echoes the nihilism that the Tea Party injected into the Grand Old Party.

The Tea Party was born in opposition to Obamacare. Its coming-out party was a coordinated ambush of Democratic lawmakers at town hall meetings in the summer of 2009. Though wary of its tactics, its rhetoric, and its antipathy for the GOP establishment, Republican leaders harnessed the growing strength of the Tea Party in 2010 to win control of the House and effectively block President Barack Obama's legislative agenda.

It was during that election that Tea Party–backed candidates began knocking off Republican incumbents and winning hotly contested open-seat primaries. The Tea Party was ascendant, and its influence in the halls of Congress could be seen in the failure of Obama and Republican leaders to reach a grand budget bargain in 2011, a series of standoffs over the federal debt limit, and the 15-day government shutdown in 2013.

But until now, there's never been a Tea Party presidential candidate. Trump, for better and worse, is exactly that — the logical extension of a Tea Party movement that is now playing at the highest level in politics.

"Here is the thing about Donald Trump. Donald Trump is hitting a nerve in this country," Ohio Gov. John Kasich said at the first Republican presidential debate of 2016 Thursday night. "People are frustrated. They're fed up. They don't think the government is working for them. And for people who want to just tune him out, they're making a mistake."

Trump is crushing old-school Tea Party favorites because they're seen as part of the establishment now

The brutal irony for some of his rivals is that they were elected, not too long ago, as Tea Party champions. Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, and Florida Sen. Marco Rubio all claimed Tea Party backing in winning their seats. Now their combined poll numbers don't add up to Trump's.

Real Clear Politics

Cruz was responsible for that 2013 government shutdown, and he's threatening to repeat the feat over federal funding for Planned Parenthood. He talks about the "Washington cartel" as a means of distancing himself from party leaders and other influencers in the nation's capital. He needs to have knock-down, drag-out fights with them in public, because it's hard to keep the confidence of anti-establishment voters when his job is in the Capitol. That's not a problem for Trump.

Trump's not a politician. He doesn't live in Washington. He bashes institutions and celebrities alike. And to the extent that he's been involved with politicians to help his business, he's refreshingly honest about it.

"I will tell you that our system is broken. I gave to many people, before this, before two months ago, I was a businessman," he said Thursday night. "I give to everybody. When they call, I give. And do you know what? When I need something from them two years later, three years later, I call them, they are there for me."

The middle-finger factor makes it hard to score points against him with Tea Party voters

Sign outside the Cleveland debate.

There are a lot of reasons Trump has attracted a significant chunk of the Republican Party to his candidacy, including his hard line on immigration and a disdain for Obama so great that he risked his credibility with the establishment by being a vocal "birther."

But perhaps the simplest explanation is the best: He relishes telling other people to go to hell. That's essentially what the Tea Party movement is all about. The Tea Party has no constructive agenda, just a desire to frustrate whatever Democratic and Republican leaders are trying to accomplish. It's anti-government, anti-politician, and anti-media.

So if Trump gets in a verbal scrape with a debate moderator or an elected official, he's a stand-in for Tea Party activists against the establishment. When he all but extends his middle finger to establishment types, he's reminding his supporters that he isn't of Washington. And when he comes under attack, they come under attack. That makes it very hard for his rivals to undermine him with his base.

Several of the candidates took shots at Trump during the debate, but they all seemed to glance off of him. Jeb Bush, asked by a moderator about a report that he had privately referred to Trump as an "asshole" and a "clown," denied that he made the remarks rather than getting in a fight with Trump.

It's not the litmus test yet, but, speaking before Thursday's debate, veteran Republican strategist Alex Castellanos said GOP candidates are going to begin to distinguish themselves by whether or not they can go toe to toe with Trump.

"If they can stand up to Donald Trump, maybe they can stand up to Putin," he said.

Hating media is good for Trump, and it won't stop them from loving him

After the debate, Trump made a personal appearance in the spin room next to the media's filing center. Typically, the top candidates send surrogates to speak for them, which prevents a post-debate gaffe. Trump's arrival touched off a stampede, as Reid Epstein of the Wall Street Journal reported.

The surprise GOP presidential front-runner’s post-debate gaggle sent reporters and photographers into a crush of humanity that sent several tumbling to the ground as the New York developer moved.

Trump proceeded to accuse the Fox debate moderators of being tougher on him than on other candidates. It's hard for a presidential aspirant to run afoul of any constituency by bashing the media, but it's a particularly good strategy for those who court Tea Party voters and disaffected conservatives.

And there's really no loss in terms of the media's appetite for covering Trump. More than 400 media credentials were approved, according to a Republican National Committee aide, and several veteran reporters said they'd never before seen so many journalists at a primary debate.

Mark Leibovich of the New York Times, who has written extensively on the parodies at the nexus of politics and journalism, explained the size and intensity of the media presence this way: "It’s bigger, it’s Trumpier, it’s first."

What Trump and the Tea Party have in common

It's easy to forget because of the amount of attention he's getting now, but Trump is no newcomer to stirring up controversy by going after establishment figures. As was pointed out Thursday, he once called Rosie O'Donnell a "slob" and other epithets, and he's made lewd remarks to women in the past. His response: "I think the big problem this country has is being politically correct."

Trump not only survived the first debate, but he seemed to thrive in moments of conflict with the moderators and his rivals.

A Monmouth University poll in July found that 55 percent of self-identified Tea Party Republicans held a favorable view of Trump, compared with 26 percent who held an unfavorable view. Whether people describe themselves as belonging to the Tea Party movement or not, the movement's basic anti-establishment bent has become a big factor within the Republican Party. That can be seen in the difficulty Republican leaders have had in corralling votes for even the most basic legislation this year.

What the Tea Party and Trump have in common is that neither cares much for the Republican Party establishment, and, ironically, that's got Trump in the pole position for the GOP presidential nomination.

Android: Last month, we got news of a particularly nasty Android vulnerability called Stagefright that affects nearly every Android device. If you want to find out if you’re vulnerable, Stagefright Detector can let you know.

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Tonight, Rand Paul was asked, straight-up, to defend a core part of his non-interventionist approach to foreign policy — arguably his signature reason for running. He punted. And in the process, he illustrated why his campaign is doing so badly.

Paul was asked to defend comments blaming the rise of ISIS on "GOP hawks," on the grounds that American interventions abroad had helped get arms into the hands of extremists. Paul demurred, saying that "only ISIS" is responsible for its violence.

The problem here is that Paul's libertarian base — the kind of people who love his father, former Rep. Ron Paul — want him to attack Republican hawks. They like Rand because he's willing to forthrightly and openly attack George W. Bush–style neoconservatism, to say that America's history of foreign wars might be a mistake. And, at times, Paul has been willing to say that stuff.

"ISIS exists and grew stronger because of the hawks in our party," he said in May. "Everything [the hawks have] talked about in foreign policy, they've been wrong about for 20 years but they have somehow the gall to keep pointing fingers and saying otherwise."

But recently, that kind of comment has been the exception. Since he launched his presidential campaign, he's soft-peddled his views. He's lined up more with the party, tacking hawkish on issues like Iran. And it looks like he's alienated his core audience. Republicans who want a traditional Republican will vote for a traditional Republican. Rand Paul's fans wanted someone who would force the Republican Party to change — but Paul isn't doing it.

When Paul turned to actually talking about ISIS, his answer was essentially nonsense. "I'm the leading voice in America for not arming the allies of ISIS," Paul said, as if that were a policy that anyone was proposing. "Hillary Clinton ... wanted to send arms to the allies of ISIS."

Presumably, what he means is that she's willing to arm the Syrian rebels, a policy she proposed as secretary of state. But that's a basic misreading of the Syrian civil war: The rebels, including al-Qaeda, are ISIS's enemies. The reason "ISIS rides around in US Humvees," as Paul put it, is that ISIS overrun Iraqi bases belonging to US allies — not because the United States has been supporting fighters aligned with ISIS.

This is a basic, basic mistake. But even if his answer made sense, it still has a non-interventionist implication: America shouldn't be sending weapons abroad to fight ISIS. That's going to piss off most Republicans as well as key GOP donors, who support more aggressive measures about ISIS. No one in the party will like that answer.

Paul's trying to thread a delicate needle: keep his libertarian base while expanding his reach to more typical Republicans. This kind of answer shows how he's failing at both ends.

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Fox News's second-tier debate had an impressive lineup of experienced politicians. It included Rick Santorum, the runner-up in the 2012 GOP presidential primary; Rick Perry, the longest-serving governor in Texas history; George Pataki, the three-term governor of New York; Bobby Jindal, the sitting governor of Louisiana; and Lindsey Graham, a two-term US senator.

But the most compelling candidate on the stage, by far, had never held elected office.

The only campaign Carly Fiorina has ever run was a failed challenge to Sen. Barbara Boxer in 2010. Her résumé comes from the corporate world — she led Hewlett-Packard from 1999 to 2000, and her record was, shall we say, mixed — but you wouldn't have known it by watching her performance on Thursday.

The debate was humiliating. It took place in an empty arena and the moderators, seemed intent on rubbing the participants' noses in their failure to qualify for the primetime clash. They began by asking, in so many words, why they were such losers that they hadn't made the cut for the bigger debate. Fiorina had the most graceful response:

Well, I would begin by reminding people that at this point in previous presidential elections, Jimmy Carter couldn't win, Ronald Reagan couldn't win, Bill Clinton couldn't win, and neither could've Barack Obama.

The moderators then moved on to asking why Donald Trump was crushing in the polls. Perry rambled through his reply. Fiorina responded with a nice zinger, a clear understanding of what was powering Trump's rise, and a fairly devastating closing line:

I didn't get a phone call from Bill Clinton before I jumped in the race. Did any of you get a phone call from Bill Clinton? I didn't. Maybe it's because I hadn't given money to the foundation or donated to his wife's Senate campaign.

Here's the thing that I would ask Donald Trump in all seriousness. He is the party's frontrunner right now, and good for him.

I think he's tapped into an anger that people feel. They're sick of politics as usual. You know, whatever your issue, your cause, the festering problem you hoped would resolved, the political class has failed you. That's just a fact, and that's what Donald Trump taps into.

I would also just say this. Since he has changed his mind on amnesty, on health care and on abortion, I would just ask, what are the principles by which he will govern?

In a strange way, Rick Perry also made the case for Fiorina. In his closing statement, he said:

Our best days are in front of us. We can reform those entitlements, we can change that corporate tax code and lower it. We can put America back on track on a growth level and a growth rate that we've never seen in the history of this country. Manufacturing will flow back into this country. It just needs a corporate executive type at the top that's done it before.

That seems like an argument for a used-to-run-a-company type, not a long-serving-governor type.

The consensus was clear: Fiorina won the debate

(Scott Olson/Getty Images)

Candidates relegated to this runner-up debate had a tough task ahead of them: They needed to convince voters, the media, and the GOP's donor class, that Fox News had gotten it wrong — that they were a primetime candidate who had ended up on the wrong stage.

After the debate ended, it was clear Fiorina — and only Fiorina — had succeeded. Fox News's instant analysts were effusive in their praise. "I was most impressed with Carly Fiorina. I just thought she stood above the other six people on the stage," Chris Wallace said.

"Carly Fiorina stood out with her precision and fluency," George Will agreed.

Viewers were also impressed by Fiorina. By the end of the debate. Google searches for Fiorina were outpacing searches Donald Trump — not to mention every other Republican presidential candidate:

Carly Fiorina enjoys post-debate attention as everyone else returns to obscurity pic.twitter.com/IRbMcuAcLA

— Nate Cohn (@Nate_Cohn) August 6, 2015

"I am not a member of the political class," Fiorina said in her closing statement. "I am a conservative. I can win this job. I can do this job."

After tonight, I bet quite a few more Republicans agree. So too might some of the other candidates, who will look at Fiorina's résumé and political skills and see a promising vice presidential candidate.

Fiorina is clearly ready for a bigger stage.

I can’t contain my excitement. I’m sitting at a train station right now, foregoing nourishment and hydration just to write these words of joy. Think back to your happiest first date and you’ll have a good idea of how I feel after my first time playing Battleborn. This game is just thrilling.

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Armada may already be out, but Ernest Cline fans now have a new date to look forward to: the movie adaptation of Ready Player One is scheduled for release on December 15th, 2017. Back in March it was announced that Steven Spielberg would be directing the film version of the popular sci-fi novel, but when someone has a scheduled as packed as Spielberg things tend to shift around quite a bit. With a confirmed release date, however, it appears that the movie is moving forward quickly after the director completes his next project, the Roald Dahl adaptation The BFG.

Ready Player One is a sci-fi action-adventure pop culture mash-up, set in a future dystopia in which all humanity spends its time in an elaborate VR simulation called The Oasis....

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If you work in an office, there's a good chance it's absurdly over-air-conditioned during the summer. But you might not be aware of one infuriating reason why: The formulas used to design and calibrate most heating and cooling systems are based on a single estimate of the metabolic activity of a 40-year-old, 155-pound male.

This formula for the human body's level of comfort, created in the 1960s, made no attempt to take women or people of different sizes or ages into account — and hasn't been touched for decades.

A new study published today in Nature Climate Change finds that women have much lower metabolic rates than the standard used in the formula — meaning they generate less heat — and that, as a result, it overestimates how much air conditioning they prefer. "This leads to uncomfortable people and is a waste of energy," says Boris Kingma of Maastricht University, the study's lead author.

The formula that controls buildings' temperature

(Shutterstock)

Heating or cooling a large public building isn't as simple as setting the thermostat to 70°F and walking away. People have different temperature preferences, and there are all sorts of complicating factors: Some parts of the building will be cooler than others, and people themselves can generate lots of heat, depending on what sort of activity they're doing.

In theory, industry standards require that 80 percent of a building's occupants find the temperature acceptable at any given time. To reach this threshold, engineers and building managers usually use a formula called Predicted Percentage of Dissatisfied (or PPD). It was developed during the 1960s by Danish researcher P. Ole Fanger, based on experiments with about 1,300 students.

The formula takes in a number of variables: a building's humidity, the movement of air within it, the amount of clothing people are wearing, and their metabolic rate (that is, the amount of heat produced by each person). It then uses these, along with some thermal physics equations and the survey data collected by Fanger, to predict what percentage of people will find a particular temperature satisfying.

This formula totally ignores women

There's a huge problem with PPD: Contrary to Fanger's belief, people's sex, age, and size plays a big role in determining what temperatures they find comfortable.

PPD doesn't take any of this into account, and its metabolic rate is solely defined as the average energy production of a 155-pound man. But as far back as 1985, research showed that the average woman generated much less heat (i.e., had a lower metabolic rate) than the average man. This goes a long way toward explaining the many subsequent studies that showed women were more likely to find rooms too cold than men.

For the new study, Kingma and colleague Wouter van Marken Lichtenbelt had women conduct light office work and measured their actual metabolic output (based on skin temperature). The results were 20 to 32 percent lower than the standard used in the formula.

Not surprisingly, the temperatures these women found acceptable didn't match up with what the formula predicted, either. But when their actual metabolic rates were used — rather than the standard one that's based on men — their preferences fell neatly into the zone predicted by the formula.

This isn't the sole reason for excessive air-conditioning

(Shutterstock)

PPD isn't the only thing that determines a building's temperature. It's used in designing heating and cooling systems and for setting baseline temperatures. But if people are complaining that a space is too hot or cold, most buildings allow office managers to adjust accordingly.

What's more, there are plenty of other factors to blame for overcooled (or overheated) offices. Large spaces that have just a few thermostats will inherently have trouble sensing and adjusting temperatures. Big offices also mean variability: Most people might be comfortable, but if you're sitting next to a vent that's meant to cool a large space, your desk might be absolutely frigid.

Still, it's pretty absurd that the fundamental formula used to predict people's comfort inside buildings is based wholly on the male body. And there's lots of anecdotal evidence, at least, that offices remain at the cooler temperatures suggested by the formula, against the wishes of female workers. Kingma says it's time for a new formula that uses measured metabolic rates instead of a single standardized one, and that can be more finely adjusted based on the occupants inside the building.

What might be the craziest about all this is that even though it wasn't entirely unknown that PPD is based on male metabolic rates, few people working in the field are aware of it. "For the indoor climate professionals I have spoken with," says Kingma, "it's an eye-opener."

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Sunglasses are an essential summer item, but there’s still a right time and place for them. This matrix graphic shows the proper etiquette for wearing and stashing your sunglasses in all types of situations.

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The first Republican presidential debate will be on Thursday, August 6. But the controversial question of who'll make it onstage still hasn't been answered.

Debate host Fox News can't reasonably fit the 16 GOP candidates in the race on the stage and give them each enough time for much more than an opening and closing remark. So Fox is limiting the debate to only the top 10 contenders in national polls — using criteria that have ruffled some feathers and opened the network to criticisms over a lack of transparency in its methods.

As a result, many candidates have been caught in a bind. About half — eight of the 16 in the field — have been polling below 5 percent, so they've all been desperate for a chance to impress GOP voters and boost their standing. The debate could be that chance — but if they don't manage to do better in national polls, they won't even be let in. And it's quite hard to get the media attention needed to make those national poll gains, given the saturation coverage of Donald Trump.

Indeed, some even fear that the debate selection process will change the very way the primary campaigns have traditionally worked — effectively winnowing the field months before early state voting begins.

What determines which candidates make the cut for the debate?

The short answer is that Fox News will pick the 10 GOP candidates doing best in an average of national polls.

Specifically, the network has said it will look at the five most recently conducted national polls from "major, nationally recognized organizations that use standard methodological techniques" up to 5 pm Eastern time on Tuesday, August 4 (tomorrow, which is two days before the debate).

But there are some specifics that Fox News has been much more vague about, as Harry Enten has been covering at FiveThirtyEight. Particularly:

1. Which polls will count? When Fox News says it wants polls using "standard methodological techniques," what does it mean? Will the network recognize only polls that use live interviewers to speak to respondents, or will it count robo-polls or internet polls too? And which specific organizations does the network view as "major" and "nationally recognized?" (On Monday afternoon, a source finally told Gabriel Sherman of New York Magazine that the polls would have to use live interviewers, but the network still hasn't confirmed that publicly. At least three new live interview polls will be released Tuesday.)
2. How will rounding be handled? Since several candidates are polling in the low single digits, decimal points could make a crucial difference, in both individual polls and the averages. If a poll finds a candidate at 2.5 percent, for instance, it's not clear whether, when Fox News enters it into its averages, it will round that up to 3, down to 2, or keep it where it is. Then there's the possible rounding of the averages themselves — will an average of 2.8 points beat 2.7, or will both be rounded up to 3, creating a tie?
3. And then what happens if there's a tie? If, say, two candidates end up tied for 10th place, will Fox News include them both? Or will it use a tiebreaker of some kind to limit the candidates on stage to 10?

By contrast, CNN, which is hosting the second GOP debate, has been extremely transparent about about these questions. It will average all live interview polls conducted by 14 specific organizations released between July 16 and September 10. It won't round the polling averages, and it will use two tiebreakers.

CNN

Fox News's opacity, in comparison, could give the network some flexibility to choose which minor contenders make the cut. Unless the network publicly announces more specifics in advance, it could wait for the polls to come in and then see which criteria produce the result it likes best.

Who's likely to qualify for the debates?

Getty

While there's still one more day in which things could change, recent national polls suggest that eight of the 10 debate slots will be filled by the candidates above, and that the other two will be up for grabs.

In the current RealClearPolitics average of polls, Trump, Bush, and Walker are the clear leaders, with each getting above 10 percent. Absent a quick collapse, all three are assured a ticket in.

Then there are five more candidates clustered around the 5 to 7 percent level. They are Marco Rubio, Ben Carson, Rand Paul, Mike Huckabee, and Ted Cruz. None of them are polling well, but there's a gap of a couple points between them and the next batch of contenders.

That would leave two more slots for the eight GOP candidates doing worst in the polls to fight over.

Wait, so Donald Trump is really going to be in the debate?

Trump has led all the recent national polls, so barring some shocking movement in the new ones released Tuesday, he won't just be on the stage, he'll be center stage (where poll leaders are usually positioned).

The prospect has caused Republican elites heartburn — and indeed, the New York Times's Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Martin reported that GOP donors and operatives were recently scheming about how to keep Trump out. Their problem, though, was that party elites have no real power to make this happen — the media organizations hosting the debates get to decide who qualifies. And to them, Trump is not only the poll leader, but also ratings gold.

So, the Times reported, party officials brainstormed about how to force the networks' hands. Some thought that if they could convince the other major candidates to agree not to participate in any debate with Trump — using the "pretext" that Trump's potential third-party run makes him unsuitable for a GOP debate — the networks would cave and find a reason to exclude the mogul. But the other candidates showed no interest in voluntarily withdrawing from a debate that could be crucial in boosting their profiles.

Who's in serious danger of failing to make the cut?

Getty

The eight candidates above are all polling quite low — usually between 0 and 3 percent. And only two of them will likely make it into the debate.

This isn't a bunch of random kooks. John Kasich, Chris Christie, and Bobby Jindal are sitting governors — with Kasich governing the crucial presidential swing state of Ohio, which also happens to be where this debate is located. Lindsey Graham is a sitting senator and a leading GOP voice on foreign policy. Rick Perry and Rick Santorum ran in 2012 — the former led polls briefly, and the latter won the Iowa caucuses. Carly Fiorina was a Fortune 500 CEO and is the only female candidate in the GOP field. George Pataki ... has been out of politics for a while, but did govern New York for 12 years. It's natural for utterly unknown candidates to be excluded from the debates, but by traditional metrics, this is quite a qualified bunch.

Currently it looks like Chris Christie, John Kasich, and Rick Perry will be battling for those two remaining slots. Yet relying on national polls to exclude so many candidates feels random and unfair to many — particularly because poll sampling error and pure random chance could be major factors in determining which two get in.

As the Upshot's Kevin Quealy and Amanda Cox explained, polls of GOP primary voters tend to have sample sizes of only a few hundred, so the responses of just a couple people who happen to be in the sample could elevate one of the bottom candidates above the others. "Methodologically, they might as well be drawing straws," Steven Yaccino of Bloomberg Politics wrote.

There's a small consolation for the candidates who don't make it — they can participate in a Fox News forum held earlier in the day. But far fewer people are expected to watch this "loser's bracket" forum at 5 pm on a workday, compared with the primetime main event.

The candidates are trying to adapt to the new system

Candidates who fail to make the debate aren't necessarily at the end of the road. They could focus on a more traditional strategy of campaigning hard in Iowa or New Hampshire — a strategy that helped Mike Huckabee and Rick Santorum come out of nowhere to win the Iowa caucuses in 2008 and 2012, respectively.

Yet if donors and potential donors view not qualifying for the debates as a serious failure, these candidates' money and support could dry up — and they could be forced to drop out of the race as a result.

Indeed, some observers, especially those in states with early primaries, like New Hampshire, fear that limiting entrance to the debates could prematurely winnow the field months before anyone votes.

It's a fear that's somewhat overstated — 10 candidates is still quite a lot to choose from, and some presidential candidates usually drop out well before the voting starts. But it is true that national polls have never been so important before — and that breaking through in them is expensive and difficult.

The national media has little interest spending much time covering ordinary campaign events, where the candidate recites his or her stump speech and takes positions similar to everyone else in his or her party. Instead, controversy gets airtime, as in the case of Trump. It's possible to go around the media and try to drive up a candidate's poll numbers with a national ad campaign, but that's quite expensive compared with early state spending.

So some candidates are already changing strategy to adapt to these new imperatives, desperately seeking to insert themselves into the national conversation somehow, as Vox's Jon Allen has written. Rick Perry, currently in 11th in the RealClearPolitics average, has seemed particularly desperate to qualify, and is trying to get more attention from the national media by capitalizing on the Trump phenomenon. He's picked a fight with the billionaire and even gave a speech in which he announced the "cancer" of what he called "Trumpism."

Meanwhile, Perry's Super PAC has been running national ads — a very unusual move, since primary candidates usually save their advertising money for early states. "We want to see him on that debate stage," Super PAC adviser Austin Barbour told the New York Times. Perry's operation can afford this — his Super PACs have raised $16 million so far, much of it from just a few donors. Chris Christie and his Super PAC have also been advertising nationally, on Fox News, leading some to gripe that the network is profiting from its restrictive debate criteria. But the cost of national ads would likely be prohibitive to the minor candidates who aren't so well-funded.

So far, Perry's gambit hasn't succeeded in boosting his numbers. What's already clear, though, is that 10 or so candidates will win big by merely getting into the debates — and the rest will have some explaining to do.

Microsoft's relatively new strategy of pushing more apps onto more platforms continues apace with the quiet release of Arrow Launcher Beta: a basic but functional launcher for Android devices. As the name suggests, Arrow Launcher Beta is unfinished, and has been pushed onto the mobile scene with little fanfare, attracting beta-testers via a private Google+ group. (We downloaded a mirror of the launcher via the unofficial site Microsoft News, but doing so doesn't get you the updates accessed by signing up for the beta.)

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I don't really have a lot to add to this one; here's a semi jumping over half the length of a football field. What else needs to be said? It's apparently a record for the longest semi jump, obliterating the 83-foot, 7-inch record set by Lotus last year in an insane stunt involving an F1 car swerving beneath the airborne big rig. Stunt driver Gregg Godfrey says he meant to only jump 140 feet, but accidentally jumped another couple dozen feet at an event in Montana last week. As mistakes go, that's a pretty awesome one to make.

Car jumps are cool enough as is, but there's something magical about a truck floating dozens of feet above the ground. Here's to you, Gregg Godfrey.

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If you've spent much time on the internet, you've seen a meme like the one above: a picture, white words, a black outline, and the same exact font.

It's described everything from cats:

Imgur

To German chancellors:

MemeStorage

Why do so many memes have the same appearance?

The answer tells us something about design, business, and how technology can help something stupid find traction.

The meme font was unleashed in 1965, with a typeface called Impact

Original brochure

That meme typeface is called Impact (technically, a "font" is a specific version and size of a typeface, like when it's italicized or in bold). Though Impact feels like the quintessential internet typeface, it was released in 1965.

In 2004, Geoff Lee told the now-defunct Typophile forum how he designed the typeface back in the day, using hand-cut metal to create each letter. A couple of years after creating Impact, Lee sold the typeface to the type foundry Stephenson Blake.

Stephenson Blake's early marketing materials show that from the beginning, Impact was valued for its legibility, especially over pictures. It was easy to read its thick letters even without a black outline. This picture from the original brochure looks like a modern meme:

Original brochure

So from the beginning, Impact's thick letters were designed to stand out (similar to its close cousin Haettenschweiler, which is a little narrower).

But it took more than great design for Impact to become the default meme font.

How Impact came to rule the digital age

Original brochure

When Geoff Lee created Impact in the '60s, he couldn't have anticipated that his typeface would become a digital titan. But there's a reason Impact rose above other typefaces with wide, easy-to-read letters: It had distribution.

As the digital age began, Impact got key placement thanks, in part, to the dissolution of the firm that commissioned the typeface. Impact was Stephenson Blake's second-to-last typeface. As the firm slowly shifted its focus away from type, it divvied up digital rights among former competitors. Impact ended up in the hands of Monotype. Monotype, in turn, licensed key fonts to Microsoft.

The lead for Impact built off a key decision in 1996, when Impact became one of the "core fonts for the web" — a Microsoft-curated attempt at a standard font pack that would work across the internet. Impact built off that lead when it was included in the market-dominating Windows 98 operating system, while some close competitors weren't. Though Arial Black and the much-maligned Comic Sans provided some competition, neither was quite as legible over images.

Existing on millions of computers and standardized across the web, Impact was primed to become the de facto font of the meme. People created early memes using MS Paint or Photoshop, but websites that generated image macros (a fancy name for text on picture memes) also became part of the scene. In 2003, Impact had a threshold moment when someone made the most memorable cat meme ever (note that it lacks the distinctive black outline common today, yet is still legible, thanks to Impact).

As more and more memes used Impact, the momentum was hard to reverse.

Will Impact stick around as the meme font of choice?

There have been attempts to innovate on meme form — apps like Super put text in boxes to improve legibility, and even sites like Vox experiment with adjusting darkness on background photos to use more respectable fonts.

But by this point, the meme font has itself become a meme — a viral idea that's very difficult to suppress. We expect memes to look a certain way, and that way includes Impact. The font is as legible as ever, and it resists user error, too (if somebody forgets the outline, adds a weird shadow, or even screws up the color, it will still look like a "proper" meme).

And Impact's advantages are likely to endure. That old 1965 brochure actually articulated them pretty well, in surprisingly meme-like language. You can imagine a cat saying Stephenson Blake's pitch for Impact, both in 1965 and for years to come:

Original brochure

"Quite different and so good," indeed.

Updated: A reader notes that a font is not just the style, like Helvetica Bold, but also includes the size, like Helvetica Bold 11pt (this article originally only noted the style distinction). If you want to truly geek out on typefaces and fonts, you can read more here.

Photographer Andrew Fladeboe has spent years traveling to countries around the world with the goal of capturing the unique relationship between humans and dogs. His goal is to document the different ways cultures have come to rely on working dogs in shepherding livestock. The ongoing project is titled The Shepherd’s Realm.

Fladeboe, currently based out of Minneapolis, Minnesota, started the series by traveling through the Netherlands, the Highlands of Scotland, Southern France, and Norway. In 2014, after his vision for the project gained traction and focus, he was awarded a Fulbright Grant to point his camera at the working dogs of New Zealand.

Seeker Stories recently released this short profile of Fladeboe and a look into his work:

Here’s a selection of dog portraits Fladeboe has published so far:

You can find more of Fladeboe work on his website and photoblog. An exhibition of his work is opening in October 2015 in New York City at PHH Fine Art. He has also published a 48-page photo book titled Dogs.

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Image credits: Photographs by Andrew Fladeboe and used with permission

The Merchant Customer Exchange's contactless payment system, CurrentC, is gearing up for a limited trial run next month in the stores of the companies that began backing MCX in 2012, including Walmart, Target, and Best Buy, according to unnamed sources speaking with Bloomberg.

The service is backed by a large roster of retailers, from Sears to Wendy's, who support the platform as a way to avoid losing integral shopping data to an increasingly competitive market thanks to the likes of Apple and Google.

CurrentC is different from Apple Pay however, using barcodes and RFID scanners in place of NFC terminals Apple took advantage of with Apple Pay. As Bloomberg points out, it also has a major hurdle regarding the signing of deals with major credit card companies, something it has yet to do.

While MCX is getting closer to releasing its app, there are plenty of hurdles. It hasn’t signed deals with major credit-card companies like Visa to use bank-issued card accounts within the app. That means a shopper wouldn’t be able to use, say, a Visa debit card from JPMorgan Chase & Co. This can be done with competing products like Apple Pay. Instead, users of MCX’s app will be limited to private-label store cards, like Target’s REDcard, or they’ll have to give MCX their checking-account details.

Also worrisome for MCX is the three-year exclusivity contract each retailer signed when the company began talks of the CurrentC system back in 2012. Those contracts -- which prohibited partnering with other mobile payment services -- begin to end next month, alongside CurrentC's soft launch in August. The company has already felt the weight of this, as Best Buy announced back in April it would begin supporting Apple Pay within its mobile app, with in-store support gearing up for later in 2015.

Not long after, MCX's CEO at the time, Dekkers Davidson, left the company, with a spokeswoman telling press that Davidson's exit had nothing to do with the announcement made by Best Buy days before. Payments security analyst Julie Conroy spoke on the subject to Bloomberg, reiterating on the public's trust issues with the company following a hack last year and stating simply, “I’m increasingly skeptical of their chance to really make a dent.”

Presidential hopeful and would-be Christ figure Ted Cruz recently did an interview with The New York Times, and it's an absolute must-read. Rather than delve deeply into policy, interviewer Ana Marie Cox presses the senator about who he is under that "wacko bird" exterior. As a youth, he was an unpopular nerd. He loved and still loves Spider-Man and Han Solo. He's a regular human being! However, there's just one thing about Cruz that will not stand: he is flat out wrong about Captain Jean-Luc Picard.

Cruz sides with Captain James T. Kirk, the OG captain of the Enterprise, in this battle (which is perfectly fair!), but he puts his foot in his mouth again and again during the interview. Take this statement:

Let me do a little...

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The word prenup can ruffle feathers pretty quickly. People have strong opinions on both sides of the matter: some think a prenuptial agreement is essential to a marriage; others say it’s a bad omen. We want to know whether or not you have one.

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Until last week, I used antiperspirant like a klutz. My wallet and undershirts suffered because of my ignorance. Yours need not suffer, too.

For 17 years, I had followed the same steps every day. After my morning shower, I applied two or three clicks of an antiperspirant stick. This sufficed. During my years in New York, sweat never manifested into a swampy, humiliating dilemma. Because I had to walk everywhere, deodorant wasn't good enough, but generic antiperspirant more or less did the trick. On days that reached the mid-90s, dark stains, shaped like the Great Lakes, formed on the T-shirt, just beneath my armpit, which I accepted as part of life.

But in Texas, where the temperature will pass 100 just for giggles, the routine began...

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Have you ever walked into a crowded room and smelled something gross and thought, "Man, someone forgot to shower this morning, huh." But then you realize that you forgot to wash the shirt you're wearing and you're actually what smells?

This is like that, but for copyright law.

Scanning through the takedown notices posted to ChillingEffects.org, reporters at The Next Web noticed something strange and frankly sort of embarrassing. In a piracy takedown notice sent to Google last week, Universal Pictures France listed a local address (127.0.0.1:4001) as the illegal source for a copy of Jurassic World — ratting out their own computer for piracy and demanding Google delist it from public search rankings. Basically, they found their own movie...

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Over the summer, DC welcomed its first cat cafe: Crumbs & Whiskers in Georgetown. So, naturally, I decided to spend a day there to see if it was actually viable as a cafe. Obviously, there would be cats. But a cafe should also be a workable place for people to sit back, talk to friends, and — crucially, since I did this on a Tuesday — work on their laptops. My specific task on June 30, the day in question, was to finish this post, which argues that all the countries of Europe should band together and form a single country. I sought to explain the necessity of unlimited intra-EU fiscal transfers while surrounded by fluffy animals. I did not succeed.

Entering the cat cafe

DC is actually a bit behind the curve. The first cat cafe opened in Taiwan in 1998, and the idea took off in Japan, which has about 150 cafes now. Within the US, the idea has spread to Denver, San Diego, New York, Oakland, and Portland, Oregon, among other cities. "Cat cafes aren’t just about petting cats," the Washington Post's Maura Judkis explains. "They’re about connection and yearning, about Internet virality, about experiences vs. objects, pleasure vs. responsibility, permanence vs. ephemerality. But, okay, mostly they’re about petting cats."

I sort of doubted Judkis's judgment initially. The great thing about cats is they are usually indifferent to your existence. A cat cafe seems like it should succeed as a cafe, as a place to hang out and get work done while in the presence of cats. They won't demand your attention, and instead will provide a nice, productivity-conducive ambience. This was my hypothesis, and it was quickly falsified.

Crumbs & Whiskers is housed in a slim two-floor unit on Wisconsin Avenue, Northwest, just north of P Street. There's a reception area and a small hangout space on the first floor, while floor two consists of a single big, white room adorned with every cat toy you can imagine. There are feather teasers and fake mice and one of those balls-rolling-around-a-plastic-disk things. There's a lounge with a scratchable surface, and whatever these orb things are:

Dylan Matthews

If you're a fan of the Japanese cat-collecting game Neko Atsume, Crumbs & Whiskers is basically what LARPing it would look like.

Trying to work in the cat cafe

There are accoutrements for the humans, as well: a copy of The State comedian Michael Showalter's seminal book Guys Can Be Cat Ladies Too, and this sign:

But as a cafe? You can get coffee and other drinks — but they have to be carried over from across the street due to health code concerns. There were a couple of chairs, but seating generally took the form of cushions on the floor and pillows for back support. It's great if you want to sit back, relax, and try to catch cats as they wander past you (though the official cafe rules beg customers "please don't pick up cats").

It's less great if you want to sit back, read a Kindle version of Glyn Morgan's The Idea of a European Superstate: Public Justification and European Integration, and consider the soundness of its arguments about the dangers of American unipolarity. Truth be told, I didn't even start reading it in the hour or so I spent on the second floor. I didn't even take out my laptop.

The main issue is the sheer number of cats involved. I honestly don't know how many I was expecting the cafe to have, but 25 still felt overwhelming:

Dylan Matthews

When I arrived a little after 10 am, there were maybe 10 humans, both customers and staff members, for an astounding 2.5-to-1 cat-to-human ratio. A human staff member informed me that five cats had just come in that morning. A few calmly slept in perches where their friends couldn't disturb them, like this fella who got a prime spot on a bookshelf just under the ceiling:

Dylan Matthews

Or gazed longingly out a window far from the humans:

Dylan Matthews

But when you have 25 cats and 10 humans (and some of those humans are staff members who can't really hang out), you're going to be confronted by some cats. They will meow at you. Sitting back and working while soaking in the cat-infused atmosphere was not, to my chagrin, a viable option. You can resist petting them for a few minutes, but the human will is only so strong. Mine is even weaker. I fiddled with my phone briefly before giving in and accepting that this was not a working visit. This was dedicated cat time.

The cat hierarchy

Crumbs & Whiskers, like most cat cafes, gets its cats from a local rescue group, in this case the Washington Humane Society. All of the cats are adoptable. And odds are the cat you befriend will be snatched up another cat-hungry customer if you hesitate for even a moment.

Take Lady Godiva:

Dylan Matthews

Godiva is friendly in ways that cats aren't supposed to be friendly. She willingly walked onto strangers' laps. She welcomed pets and belly rubs. She didn't bite or scratch at all. She let people violate the "don't pick up the cat" rule. And if that weren't enough, she has a long soft coat that wasn't matted at all. Godiva is a perfect cat. Unsurprisingly, she was adopted mere days after my visit.

Of course, only one person could have Godiva at a time (I never did, and am still bitter about it), and the other cats weren't pleased she was monopolizing the visitors' attention. Just look at Bobby's forlorn expression:

Dylan Matthews

Trying to work downstairs

Godiva was on the first floor, to which I had returned after an hour in hopes of finding a more hospitable work environment. I did make a bit of progress — I roused myself enough to ask an employee for the wifi password (it's "isbutteracarb?") and wrote maybe 200 words — but ultimately I gave up all attempts at productivity there, too.

I thought the fact that I couldn't get my hands on Godiva would enable me to work. I could quietly hack away at my EU post while the other customers competed for her affection. But her fellow first-floor cats had other plans. They were wise enough to up their game in reaction to Godiva's formidable challenge. None of them were quite as warm and friendly, but they were willing to curl up next to you, like this guy did:

Dylan Matthews

Between my attempts to woo Godiva and the entreaties from her rivals, I had to remain hyper-alert for my stay. The EU couldn't be allowed to distract me. Work would have to wait:

Dylan Matthews

My verdict

"It is a daily struggle," a wise woman once wrote, "for me to not buy more cats." If you know that feeling — if you yearn to give up your studio apartment and buy a ramshackle four-bedroom house out in the country and fill it with 20 cats — Crumbs & Whiskers is for you. It enables cat fanciers to experience what life would be like with a posse of two dozen fluffy companions without making them throw down for a home that could actually fit all of them, or scoop out the 20-odd cats' worth of excrement, or buy massive bags of cat food on a near-daily basis.

But as a cafe? Where you work and stuff? No way. Though it has wifi and power outlets and all the fixings, that is not what Crumbs & Whiskers is about. Learn from my mistakes: If you go, give up any ambitions toward productivity and expect to spend your entire visit interacting with cats. Don't fight it. Accept your fate.

Watch: The mysterious rise of the cat cafe

Google polarized the Gmail crowd when it released Inbox . For some, it was confusing and unhelpful. For others like myself, however, Inbox is a breath of fresh air. Here’s how it’s changed my workflow, and why I think it’s worth giving it a shot.http://lifehacker.com/how-googles-ne...

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Yash Bhardwaj of Jugaad Posters created this humorous little illustration showing what everyone who works with Photoshop’s .PSD files experiences at one time or another. Is this the versioning system you use when trying to finish up a project?

(via @theyashbhardwaj via DIYP)

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Image credits: Illustration by Yash Bhardwaj and used with permission

When the first Ubuntu phone came out, reviews were quick to criticize it for its lackluster hardware and unusual take on common mobile software interactions. It's been out for a while, now, and Alastair Stevenson has written about his experiences using it for an entire month. While he doesn't recommend it for phone users who aren't tech savvy, he does say that he began to like it better than Android after adjusting to how Ubuntu does things. From the article: [T]he Ubuntu OS has a completely reworked user interface that replaces the traditional home screen with a new system of "scopes." The scope system does away with the traditional mobile interface where applications are stored and accessed from a central series of homescreens. ... Adding to Ubuntu’s otherworldly, unique feel, the OS is also significantly more touch- and gesture-focused than iOS and Android. We found nearly all the key features and menus on the Meizu MX4 are accessed using gesture controls, not with screen shortcuts. ... Finally, there's my biggest criticism – Ubuntu phone is not smart enough yet. While the app selection is impressive for a prototype, in its infancy Ubuntu phone doesn't have enough data feeding into it, as key services are missing."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

AT&T will soon increase its activation fees for customers on regular postpaid contracts and those new to the carrier's Next upgrade plan. Droid Life first reported the pending hikes, which will raise the activation fee for one- and two-year contracts to $45 — up from the current $40 — starting August 1st. $5 isn't a ton of money, but this is still the type of move that frustrates consumers and makes AT&T look awfully greedy. That $45 figure is now the highest activation fee among all US mobile providers. AT&T increased it from $35 to $40 last June, a move that Verizon Wireless later followed.

But the worst change affects customers who sign up for AT&T's Next plan on or after August 1st. Like other carriers, AT&T's upgrade-when-you-want...

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• The eccentric, heroic life of Samuel W. Francis, inventor of the spork
• 7 world-changing inventions people thought were dumb fads
• These 7 inventions were supposed to change the world. They failed. Badly.

In the hyper-competitive world of technology, victories are usually fleeting. Asus once led the world with its Eee PC netbook, BlackBerry once held the messaging crown with BBM, and Nokia was once the name of a mobile empire. Nothing lasts forever and leaders are always toppled, but there is one exception to this rule, and that’s Apple’s iPad. The iPad grabbed the title of best tablet device when it launched in 2010, and it’s held onto it ever since. This past year has seen an exhibition of iPad clones emerging, culminating in Samsung’s perfect pair of Galaxy Tab S2 copycats: they’re the same size as Apple’s iPads, use a similar metal frame, and even have the same 4:3 aspect ratio. This isn’t competition. It’s capitulation.

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I was doing both the design and content updates for a client’s website. The client was launching a new product, similar to their current one, so the branding did not need to change much.

 Client: We have decided to use a different designer for the launch of our new product website. We will still need you to maintain the content updates for us.

Me: OK. That’s fine, just have the designer send me the when they are ready.

Two weeks later I receive the template files from the designer. They are an exact copy of the one I used previously down to all the code comments and last update timestamp, the only thing that changed was the product image. There was a note attached that said “Sorry this took so long, the idiot who worked on this before didn’t know what they were doing, but I managed to fix most of it.”

Is how fast time goes by a function of how old you are?

This interactive visualization by designer Maximilian Kiener makes that argument. It shows that the longer you live, the relative significance of any particular year of your life goes down.

So, for instance, for a 2-year-old, a single year is a full half of their young life. Every moment is a bigger part of the whole.

Maximillan Kiener

By 30, that's changed a lot. For an average 30-year-old, a single year is just 3.33 percent of their life.

Maximillan Kiener

By the time you're 60, the years have shrunk even more, to just 1.67 percent of your life.

Maximillan Kiener

So is there any reason to believe the scroll wheel is an apt metaphor for how we live?

Kiener says his idea for the visualization came courtesy of philosopher Paul Janet (1823–1899), who was cited in an 1886 article by William James in the Journal of Speculative Philosophy. In that article, Janet is quoted as writing:

Whoever counts many lustra in his memory need only question himself to find that the last of these, the past five years, have sped much more quickly than the preceding periods of equal amount. Let any one remember his last eight or ten school years: it is the space of a century. Compare with them the last eight or ten years of life: it is the space of an hour.

A formula similar to the one in the visualization follows.

So is the diminishing significance of each year the reason those summers in our 30s pass so much more quickly than the ones when we were 8? That's too hard to conclude — in the same article, James proposes that it's the monotony of routine, not the buildup of time, that makes time pass more quickly as we age. In other words, we've seen it all before. There's less novelty to distinguish one moment from the next.

Whatever the reason, the visualization shows one less arguable truth: Time often turns out to be simple math. And all those hours add up.

Thanks to Maria Popova's Explore for noting this slightly depressing visualization.

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To most people, the terms "car crash" and "car accident" are largely interchangeable. But a growing number of traffic safety advocates have been pointing out that there's actually a big difference — and they want journalists, public officials, and everyday people to say crash, not accident.

The two groups behind the recent campaign — Transportation Alternatives and Families for Safe Streets — argue that the term "accident" makes it seem like crashes are inevitable, rather than preventable. In a subtle way, it normalizes the crash and discourages us from looking more deeply into their causes — whether alcohol, reckless driving, or bad street design.

In a sense, reflexively saying "accident" is implicitly throwing up our hands in despair, rather than trying to fix the underlying problem. As Alissa Walker puts it in a excellent Gizmodo post on the campaign, "accident is the transportation equivalent of ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ ."

All this might seem pedantic, but there's a real point here. We live in an era when most Americans drive around in multi-ton machines at high speed, and these vehicles kill with surprising regularity. They cause 30,000 or so deaths per year, as many people as are killed by guns. If we want to cut down on that number, it's worth examining the language we use to describe these events.

How we started using the phrase "car accident"

Using the word "accident" to describe car crashes might seem natural. But early coverage of crashes in the 1910s and 1920s depicted the vehicles as dangerous killing machines — and their violent collisions were seldom called accidents.

This view influenced legal proceedings, too. Before formal traffic laws existed, judges typically ruled that in any collision, the larger vehicle — that is, the car — was to blame. In most pedestrian deaths, drivers were charged with manslaughter regardless of the circumstances of the crash.

In response to the emerging public backlash against cars (which were, at the time, largely owned and driven by the wealthy), automakers and other industry groups pushed for a new set of laws that kept pedestrians off the streets, except at crosswalks.

To get people to follow these laws, they tried to shape news coverage of crashes. The National Automobile Chamber of Commerce, an industry group, established a free wire service for newspapers: Reporters could send in the basic details of a traffic collision, and would get in return a complete article to print the next day. These articles, printed widely, shifted the blame for crashes to pedestrians — and almost always used the word "accident."

(Google Ngram V

That term took off in future years and became the most common way to describe collisions. It's impossible to attribute this solely to the wire services' articles, but at that early juncture in automotive history, they certainly played a big role.

Where the "crash, not accident" movement came from

"We would never call it a plane accident. Let's stop calling it a car accident." #crashnotaccident @NYC_SafeStreets #VisionZero @transalt

— Veronica Vanterpool (@Veevanterpool) July 14, 2015

As early as the 1960s, though, traffic safety professionals realized "accident" wasn't a particularly useful way to describe collisions. William Haddon, who in 1966 became the first director of what's now the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, required anyone who used the word in meetings to put a dime in a jar.

The same agency asked the public to stop using the term in 1994, and it no longer uses it in official capacities. In 2013, the New York and San Francisco police departments stopped using it in collision reports.

Still, "accident" has stuck around, both in common usage and newspaper articles. The AP Style Guide offers no definitive guidance on the matter, and lots of reporters tend to use "accident" without thinking. I've occasionally done so myself, even though I'm aware of the difference.

All this led Transportation Alternatives (a New York City biking, walking, and public transportation advocacy group) and Families for Safe Streets (a related group, formed by families of those killed or injured by reckless driving) to launch a public campaign last week, asking people to pledge to stop using the word. Supporters have been using the hashtag #crashnotaccident to call out journalism outlets for using the term in headlines. And earlier this week, the two groups hosted a vigil in Manhattan's Union Square to remember victims and draw attention to the importance of language in describing how they died.

How one word can make a big difference

In 2006, the New York Times reported that the driver of an SUV "intentionally ran over five people" in a Long Island town before fleeing "the scene of the accident."

As Transportation Alternatives' Aaron Naparstek noted, it's hard to imagine the same sentence being written about someone who shot five people. The fact that the Times used "accident" here shows how strong of a habit that word has become and how hard it is to eradicate it.

Of course, most car crashes aren't intentional. But using the word "accident" presupposes that they're not — and, more importantly, implies that nothing could have been done to prevent them.

"The word suggests an event that takes place without foresight or expectations," the public health researchers Hermann Loimer, Mag Dr iur, and Michael Guarnieri write in their history of the word accident. "Yet such events as a group are not random and do not occur by chance; they can be expected to happen."

Moreover, we have hard data on what causes crashes and how to prevent them. Men get into fatal crashes twice as often as women, and the difference can be attributed almost entirely to drunk driving. Putting roads on "diets" — slowing down traffic by turning a second traffic lane into a turning, bike, or parking lane — can cut down on crashes by anywhere from 18 to 25 percent. Protected bike lanes make biking dramatically safer, with various studies concluding that they can cut down on cyclist injuries by anywhere from 25 to 90 percent.

It might seem like a stretch to suppose that a single word can lead to any of these actions. But language can powerfully affect how we view the world — and what sorts of costs we're willing to bear — in ways that are hard to appreciate.

One good example of this is a related, everyday word that defines the relationship between car and pedestrian without us quite realizing it: jaywalking.

Government safety posters ridicule jaywalking in the 1920s and '30s. (National Safety Council/Library of Congress)

As it turns out, this word stems from the same 1920s effort by auto groups to keep pedestrians off streets. At the time, the word "jay" meant something like "rube" or "hick" — a person from the sticks, who didn't know how to behave in a city. So these groups promoted use of the word "jay walker" as a way to shame people who didn't obey traffic laws.

This single word was a key step in transforming the public street from a place for pedestrians to a place rightfully dominated by the car.

"In the early days of the automobile, it was drivers' job to avoid you, not your job to avoid them," says Peter Norton, a University of Virginia historian, told me for my story on jaywalking. "But under the new model, streets became a place for cars — and as a pedestrian, it's your fault if you get hit."