Snob

O Partido Popular achegou cando menos 500 millóns de pesetas desde Madrid ao PPdeG para os actos de 1989, ano da primeira vitoria de Fraga no país, segundo os papeis de Naseiro. Gastou o dobre do límite imposto polo Estado, de 235 millóns, e o partido declarou que só investira 199. 

Made by cartoonist Matthew Inman.

ENFP – Makes BEST FRIENDS FOREVER with everyone they talk to for five minutes.

INFP – Tells everyone at the party how much they love them and then drunk dials their ex and cries.

ISTJ – Stays mostly sober and low-key judges everyone else for acting like a drunken idiot.

ESFP – Table dances.

ENFJ – Frantically scans the room for anyone who looks lonely, then introduces him or her to every single person at the party.

INFJ – Reluctantly holds a counseling session in the bathroom with some drunk girl they don’t know.

ESFJ – Tells everyone else’s secrets.

ISFJ – Spends the evening holding back the hair of whichever of their friends starts puking first.

ISFP – Secretly hooks up with someone in the basement.

ESTP – Gets into a bar fight.

ISTP – Decides it would be fun to Unicycle on the roof and ends up in the hospital.

ESTJ – Makes boisterous, usually offensive jokes to anyone who’s willing to listen.

ENTJ – Networks the shit out of the party and wakes up with fourteen competitive job offers.

ENTP – Spurs a massive argument then leaves.

INTP – Smokes too much weed and wanders off from the party, accidentally ending up in the next town over.

INTJ – Takes scheduled hydration breaks in an attempt to reduce the impact of their inevitable morning-after hangover.

Twelve-year-old Jada Edwards reads voraciously, enjoys going to museums with her aunts, and stares at pictures of the ocean, thinking about the generations that came before her. While Jada is often called an “old soul,” in reality, she just wants to be popular.

“My mom’s friends are always saying, ‘She is wise beyond her years,’ or ‘She was born in the wrong century.’ What is that even supposed to mean? I just want to be invited to one of Jenna’s sleepovers so I can try cigarettes.”

Sadly, this “old soul” label has followed Jada her entire life.

“I used to write songs about, like, the importance of being kind,” she pauses. “God, what was wrong with me? I should have been begging my mom to buy me padded bras so maybe Brendan would notice me.”

Jada’s mother, Eileen, is proud of her child’s unusual leanings.

“She’s so imaginative,” she says, beaming. “When she was little, she used to get so depressed right before her birthday. She would say, ‘Only four more days and I’ll never be three again.’ And I would just think, wow, this kid’s really special.”

“Mom!” Jada interjects. “Don’t tell people that! I want to get picked early for Color Wars.”

Jada does her best to hide her old soul from her classmates, but sometimes this proves impossible.

“I’ve never had a student quite like her,” says seventh grade English teacher Martha Diehl. “Her writing is very mature, in an almost eerie way. All the other kids write dragon stories or dumb teen romances, but her psychological realist novella centering on a crumbling marriage—”

“Ms. Diehl, I told you not to tell anyone about that!” Jada interrupts. “What Ms. Diehl means is that I hate school! Haha, school is so dumb! Check out my Uggs.”

Jada may have a hard time ahead of her, as studies show that most old souls are not fully appreciated until college. “I can’t wait till then; I’ll finally have a boyfriend,” says Jada, while completing a needlepoint of her favorite W.H. Auden quote.

Unfortunately, by college, it’s only the straight male old souls who manage to reach the top of the social hierarchy by using their sensitivity to woo female English majors. For female old souls like Jada, achieving social prowess could take even longer.

“I know it will be a long road,” says Jada, with the resolve of someone who has lived through a lot. “I, of all people, understand that. But that doesn’t mean I’m not going to try, every minute of every day, to squash my old soul into oblivion. And then maybe, just maybe, someone will decorate my locker on my birthday.”

Girl Called ‘Old Soul’ Just Wants to be Popular is a post from: Reductress

This is Part 1 of a four-part series on Elon Musk’s companies.

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PDF and ebook options: We made a fancy PDF of this post for printing and offline viewing (see a preview here), and an ebook containing the whole four-part Elon Musk series:

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Last month, I got a surprising phone call.

Elon Musk, for those unfamiliar, is the world’s raddest man.

I’ll use this post to explore how he became a self-made billionaire and the real-life inspiration for Iron Man’s Tony Stark, but for the moment, I’ll let Richard Branson explain things briefly:1

Whatever skeptics have said can’t be done, Elon has gone out and made real. Remember in the 1990s, when we would call strangers and give them our credit-card numbers? Elon dreamed up a little thing called PayPal. His Tesla Motors and SolarCity companies are making a clean, renewable-energy future a reality…his SpaceX [is] reopening space for exploration…it’s a paradox that Elon is working to improve our planet at the same time he’s building spacecraft to help us leave it.

So no, that was not a phone call I had been expecting.

A few days later, I found myself in pajama pants, pacing frantically around my apartment, on the phone with Elon Musk. We had a discussion about Tesla, SpaceX, the automotive and aerospace and solar power industries, and he told me what he thought confused people about each of these things. He suggested that if these were topics I’d be interested in writing about, and it might be helpful, I could come out to California and sit down with him in person for a longer discussion.

For me, this project was one of the biggest no-brainers in history. Not just because Elon Musk is Elon Musk, but because here are two separate items that have been sitting for a while in my “Future Post Topics” document, verbatim:

– “electric vs hybrid vs gas cars, deal with tesla, sustainable energy”

– “spacex, musk, mars?? how learn to do rockets??”

I already wanted to write about these topics, for the same reason I wrote about Artificial Intelligence—I knew they would be hugely important in the future but that I also didn’t understand them well enough. And Musk is leading a revolution in both of these worlds.

It would be like if you had plans to write about the process of throwing lightning bolts and then one day out of the blue Zeus called and asked if you wanted to question him about a lot of stuff.

So it was on. The plan was that I’d come out to California, see the Tesla and SpaceX factories, meet with some of the engineers at each company, and have an extended sit down with Musk. Exciting.

The first order of business was to have a full panic. I needed to not sit down with these people—these world-class engineers and rocket scientists—and know almost nothing about anything. I had a lot of quick learning to do.

The problem with Elon Fucking Musk, though, is that he happens to be involved in all of the following industries:

• Automotive
• Aerospace
• Solar Energy
• Energy Storage
• Satellite
• High-Speed Ground Transportation
• And, um, Multi-Planetary Expansion

Zeus would have been less stressful.

So I spent the two weeks leading up to the West Coast visit reading and reading and reading, and it became quickly clear that this was gonna need to be a multi-post series. There’s a lot to get into.

We’ll dive deep into Musk’s companies and the industries surrounding them in the coming posts, but today, let’s start by going over exactly who this dude is and why he’s such a big deal.12^{← click these}

The Making of Elon Musk

Note: There’s a great biography on Musk coming out May 19th, written by tech writer Ashlee Vance. I was able to get an advance copy, and it’s been a key source in putting together these posts. I’m going to keep to a brief overview of his life here—if you want the full story, get the bio.

Musk was born in 1971 in South Africa. Childhood wasn’t a great time for him—he had a tough family life and never fit in well at school.2 But, like you often read in the bios of extraordinary people, he was an avid self-learner early on. His brother Kimbal has said Elon would often read for 10 hours a day—a lot of science fiction and eventually, a lot of non-fiction too. By fourth grade, he was constantly buried in the Encyclopedia Britannica.

One thing you’ll learn about Musk as you read these posts is that he thinks of humans as computers, which, in their most literal sense, they are. A human’s hardware is his physical body and brain. His software is the way he learns to think, his value system, his habits, his personality. And learning, for Musk, is simply the process of “downloading data and algorithms into your brain.”3 Among his many frustrations with formal classroom learning is the “ridiculously slow download speed” of sitting in a classroom while a teacher explains something, and to this day, most of what he knows he’s learned through reading.

He became consumed with a second fixation at the age of nine when he got his hands on his first computer, the Commodore VIC-20. It came with five kilobytes of memory and a “how to program” guide that was intended to take the user six months to complete. Nine-year-old Elon finished it in three days. At 12, he used his skills to create a video game called Blastar, which he told me was “a trivial game…but better than Flappy Bird.” But in 1983, it was good enough to be sold to a computer magazine for $500 ($1,200 in today’s money)—not bad for a 12-year-old.3

Musk never felt much of a connection to South Africa—he didn’t fit in with the jockish, white Afrikaner culture, and it was a nightmare country for a potential entrepreneur. He saw Silicon Valley as the Promised Land, and at the age of 17, he left South Africa forever. He started out in Canada, which was an easier place to immigrate to because his mom is a Canadian citizen, and a few years later, used a college transfer to the University of Pennsylvania as a way into the US.4

In college, he thought about what he wanted to do with his life, using as his starting point the question, “What will most affect the future of humanity?” The answer he came up with was a list of five things: “the internet; sustainable energy; space exploration, in particular the permanent extension of life beyond Earth; artificial intelligence; and reprogramming the human genetic code.”4

He was iffy about how positive the impact of the latter two would be, and though he was optimistic about each of the first three, he never considered at the time that he’d ever be involved in space exploration. That left the internet and sustainable energy as his options.

He decided to go with sustainable energy. After finishing college, he enrolled in a Stanford PhD program to study high energy density capacitors, a technology aimed at coming up with a more efficient way than traditional batteries to store energy—which he knew could be key to a sustainable energy future and help accelerate the advent of an electric car industry.

But two days into the program, he got massive FOMO because it was 1995 and he “couldn’t stand to just watch the internet go by—[he] wanted to jump in and make it better.”5 So he dropped out and decided to try the internet instead.

His first move was to go try to get a job at the monster of the 1995 internet, Netscape. The tactic he came up with was to walk into the lobby, uninvited, stand there awkwardly, be too shy to talk to anyone, and walk out.

Musk bounced back from the unimpressive career beginning by teaming up with his brother Kimbal (who had followed Elon to the US) to start their own company—Zip2. Zip2 was like a primitive combination of Yelp and Google Maps, far before anything like either of those existed. The goal was to get businesses to realize that being in the Yellow Pages would become outdated at some point and that it was a good idea to get themselves into an online directory. The brothers had no money, slept in the office and showered at the YMCA, and Elon, their lead programmer, sat obsessively at his computer working around the clock. In 1995, it was hard to convince businesses that the internet was important—many told them that advertising on the internet sounded like “the dumbest thing they had ever heard of”6—but eventually, they began to rack up customers and the company grew. It was the heat of the 90s internet boom, startup companies were being snatched up left and right, and in 1999, Compaq snatched up Zip2 for $307 million. Musk, who was 27, made off with $22 million.

In what would become a recurring theme for Musk, he finished one venture and immediately dove into a new, harder, more complex one. If he were following the dot-com millionaire rulebook, he’d have known that what you’re supposed to do after hitting it big during the 90s boom is either retire off into the sunset of leisure and angel investing, or if you still have ambition, start a new company with someone else’s money. But Musk doesn’t tend to follow normal rulebooks, and he plunged three quarters of his net worth into his new idea, an outrageously bold plan to build essentially an online bank—replete with checking, savings, and brokerage accounts—called X.com. This seems less insane now, but in 1999, an internet startup trying to compete with the large banks was unheard of.

In the same building that X.com worked out of was another internet finance company called Confinity, founded by Peter Thiel and Max Levchin. One of X.com’s many features was an easy money-transfer service, and later, Confinity would develop a similar service. Both companies began to notice a strong demand for their money-transfer service, which put the two companies in sudden furious competition with each other, and they finally decided to just merge into what we know today as PayPal.

This brought together a lot of egos and conflicting opinions—Musk was now joined by Peter Thiel and a bunch of other now-super-successful internet guys—and despite the company growing rapidly, things inside the office did not go smoothly. The conflicts boiled over in late 2000, and when Musk was on a half fundraising trip / half honeymoon (with his first wife Justine), the anti-Musk crowd staged a coup and replaced him as CEO with Thiel. Musk handled this surprisingly well, and to this day, he says he doesn’t agree with that decision but he understands why they did it. He stayed on the team in a senior role, continued investing in the company, and played an instrumental role in selling the company to eBay in 2002, for $1.5 billion. Musk, the company’s largest shareholder, walked away with $180 million (after taxes).5

If there was ever a semblance of the normal life rulebook in Musk’s decision-making, it was at this point in his life—as a beyond-wealthy 31-year-old in 2002—that he dropped the rulebook into the fire for good.

The subject of what he did over the next 13 years leading up to today is what we’ll thoroughly explore over the rest of this series. For now, here’s the short story:

In 2002, before the sale of PayPal even went through, Musk started voraciously reading about rocket technology, and later that year, with $100 million, he started one of the most unthinkable and ill-advised ventures of all time: a rocket company called SpaceX, whose stated purpose was to revolutionize the cost of space travel in order to make humans a multi-planetary species by colonizing Mars with at least a million people over the next century.

Mm hm.

Then, in 2004, as that “project” was just getting going, Musk decided to multi-task by launching the second-most unthinkable and ill-advised venture of all time: an electric car company called Tesla, whose stated purpose was to revolutionize the worldwide car industry by significantly accelerating the advent of a mostly-electric-car world—in order to bring humanity on a huge leap toward a sustainable energy future. Musk funded this one personally as well, pouring in $70 million, despite the tiny fact that the last time a US car startup succeeded was Chrysler in 1925, and the last time someone started a successful electric car startup was never.

And since why the fuck not, a couple years later, in 2006, he threw in $10 million to found, with his cousins, another company, called SolarCity, whose goal was to revolutionize energy production by creating a large, distributed utility that would install solar panel systems on millions of people’s homes, dramatically reducing their consumption of fossil fuel-generated electricity and ultimately “accelerating mass adoption of sustainable energy.”7

If you were observing all of this in those four years following the PayPal sale, you’d think it was a sad story. A delusional internet millionaire, comically in over his head with a slew of impossible projects, doing everything he could to squander his fortune.

By 2008, this seemed to be playing out, to the letter. SpaceX had figured out how to build rockets, just not rockets that actually worked—it had attempted three launches so far and all three had blown up before reaching orbit. In order to bring in any serious outside investment or payload contracts, SpaceX had to show that they could successfully launch a rocket—but Musk said he had funds left for one and only one more launch. If the fourth launch also failed, SpaceX would be done.

Meanwhile, up in the Bay Area, Tesla was also in the shit. They had yet to deliver their first car—the Tesla Roadster—to the market, which didn’t look good to the outside world. Silicon Valley gossip blog Valleywag made the Tesla Roadster its #1 tech company fail of 2007. This would have been more okay if the global economy hadn’t suddenly crashed, hitting the automotive industry the absolute hardest and sucking dry any flow of investments into car companies, especially new and unproven ones. And Tesla was running out of money fast.

During this double implosion of his career, the one thing that held stable and strong in Musk’s life was his marriage of eight years, if by stable and strong you mean falling apart entirely in a soul-crushing, messy divorce.

Darkness.

But here’s the thing—Musk is not a fool, and he hadn’t built bad companies. He had built very, very good companies. It’s just that creating a reliable rocket is unfathomably difficult, as is launching a startup car company, and because no one wanted to invest in what seemed to the outside world like overambitious and probably-doomed ventures—especially during a recession—Musk had to rely on his own personal funds. PayPal made him rich, but not rich enough to keep these companies afloat for very long on his own. Without outside money, both SpaceX and Tesla had a short runway. So it’s not that SpaceX and Tesla were bad—it’s that they needed more time to succeed, and they were out of time.

And then, in the most dire hour, everything turned around.

First, in September of 2008, SpaceX launched their fourth rocket—and their last one if it didn’t successfully put a payload into orbit—and it succeeded. Perfectly.

That was enough for NASA to say “fuck it, let’s give this Musk guy a try,” and it took a gamble, offering SpaceX a $1.6 billion contract to carry out 12 launches for the agency. Runway extended. SpaceX saved.

The next day, on Christmas Eve 2008, when Musk scrounged up the last money he could manage to keep Tesla going, Tesla’s investors reluctantly agreed to match his investment. Runway extended. Five months later, things began looking up, and another critical investment came in—$50 million from Daimler. Tesla saved.

While 2008 hardly marked the end of the bumps in the road for Musk, the overarching story of the next seven years would be the soaring, earthshaking success of Elon Musk and his companies.

Since their first three failed launches, SpaceX has launched 20 times—all successes. NASA is now a regular client, and one of many, since the innovations at SpaceX have allowed companies to launch things to space for the lowest cost in history. Within those 20 launches have been all kinds of “firsts” for a commercial rocket company—to this day, the four entities in history who have managed to launch a spacecraft into orbit and successfully return it to Earth are the US, Russia, China—and SpaceX. SpaceX is currently testing their new spacecraft, which will bring humans to space, and they’re busy at work on the much larger rocket that will be able to bring 100 people to Mars at once. A recent investment by Google and Fidelity has valued the company at $12 billion.

Tesla’s Model S has become a smashing success, blowing away the automotive industry with the highest ever Consumer Reports rating of a 99/100, and the highest safety rating in history from the National Highway Safety Administration, a 5.4/5. Now they’re getting closer and closer to releasing their true disruptor—the much more affordable Model 3—and the company’s market cap is just under $30 billion. They’re also becoming the world’s most formidable battery company, currently working on their giant Nevada “Gigafactory,” which will more than double the world’s total annual production of lithium-ion batteries.

SolarCity, which went public in 2012, now has a market cap of just under $6 billion and has become the largest installer of solar panels in the US. They’re now building the country’s largest solar panel-manufacturing factory in Buffalo, and they’ll likely be entering into a partnership with Tesla to package their product with Tesla’s new home battery, the Powerwall.

And since that’s not enough, in his spare time, Musk is pushing the development a whole new mode of transport—the Hyperloop.

In a couple of years, when their newest factories are complete, Musk’s three companies will employ over 30,000 people. After nearly going broke in 2008 and telling a friend that he and his wife may have to “move into his wife’s parents’ basement,”8 Musk’s current net worth clocks in at $12.9 billion.

All of this has made Musk somewhat of a living legend. In building a successful automotive startup and its worldwide network of Supercharger stations, Musk has been compared to visionary industrialists like Henry Ford and John D. Rockefeller. The pioneering work of SpaceX on rocket technology has led to comparisons to Howard Hughes, and many have drawn parallels between Musk and Thomas Edison because of the advancements in engineering Musk has been able to achieve across industries. Perhaps most often, he’s compared to Steve Jobs, for his remarkable ability to disrupt giant, long-stagnant industries with things customers didn’t even know they wanted. Some believe he’ll be remembered in a class of his own. Tech writer and Musk biographer Ashlee Vance has suggested that what Musk is building “has the potential to be much grander than anything Hughes or Jobs produced. Musk has taken industries like aerospace and automotive that America seemed to have given up on and recast them as something new and fantastic.”9

Chris Anderson, who runs TED Talks, calls Musk “the world’s most remarkable living entrepreneur.” Others know him as “the real life Iron Man,” and not for no reason—Jon Favreau actually sent Robert Downey, Jr. to spend time with Musk in the SpaceX factory prior to filming the first Iron Man movie so he could model his character off of Musk.10 He’s even been on The Simpsons.

And this is the man I was somehow on the phone with as I frantically paced back and forth in my apartment, in pajama pants.

On the call, he made it clear that he wasn’t looking for me to advertise his companies—he only wanted me to help explain what’s going on in the worlds surrounding those companies and why the things happening with electric cars, sustainable energy production, and aerospace matter so much.

He seemed particularly bored with people spending time writing about him—he feels there are so many things of critical importance going on in the industries he’s involved in, and every time someone writes about him, he wishes they were writing about fossil fuel supply or battery advancements or the importance of making humanity multi-planetary (this is especially clear in the intro to the upcoming biography on him, when the author explains how not interested Musk was in having a bio written about him).

So I’m sure this first post, whose title is “Elon Musk: The World’s Raddest Man,” will annoy him.

But I have reasons. To me, there are two worthy areas of exploration in this post series:

1) To understand why Musk is doing what he’s doing. He deeply believes that he’s taken on the most pressing possible causes to give humanity the best chance of a good future. I want to explore those causes in depth and the reasons he’s so concerned about them.

2) To understand why Musk is able to do what he’s doing. There are a few people in each generation who dramatically change the world, and those people are worth studying. They do things differently from everyone else—and I think there’s a lot to learn from them.

So on my visit to California, I had two goals in mind: to understand as best I could what Musk and his teams were working on so feverishly and why it mattered so much, and to try to gain insight into what it is that makes him so capable of changing the world.

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Visiting the Factories

The Tesla Factory (in Northern CA) and the SpaceX Factory (in Southern CA), in addition to both being huge, and rad, have a lot in common.

Both factories are bright and clean, shiny and painted white, with super high ceilings. Both feel more like laboratories than traditional factories. And in both places, the engineers doing white collar jobs and the technicians doing blue collar jobs are deliberately placed in the same working quarters so they’ll work closely together and give each other feedback—and Musk believes it’s crucial for those designing the machines to be around those machines as they’re being manufactured. And while a traditional factory environment wouldn’t be ideal for an engineer on a computer and a traditional office environment wouldn’t be a good workplace for a technician, a clean, futuristic laboratory feels right for both professions. There are almost no closed offices in either factory—everyone is out in the open, exposed to everyone else.

When I pulled up to the Tesla factory (joined by Andrew), I was first taken by its size—and when I looked it up, I wasn’t surprised to see that it has the second largest building footprint (aka base area) in the world.

The factory was formerly jointly owned by GM and Toyota, who sold it to Tesla in 2010. We started off the day with a full tour of the factory—a sea of red robots making cars and being silly:6

And other cool things, like a vast section of the factory that just makes the car battery, and another that houses the 20,000 pound rolls of aluminum they slice and press and weld into Teslas.

And this giant press, which costs $50 million and presses metal with 4,500 tons of pressure (the same pressure you’d get if you stacked 2,500 cars on top of something).

The Tesla factory is working on upping its output from 30,000 cars/year to 50,000, or about 1,000 per week. They seemed to be pumping out cars incredibly quickly, so I was blown away to learn that Toyota had been on a 1,000 cars per day clip when they inhabited the factory.

I had a chance to visit the Tesla design studio (no pictures allowed), where there were designers sketching car designs on computer screens and, on the other side of the room, full-size car models made of clay. An actual-size clay version of the upcoming Model 3 was surrounded by specialists sculpting it with tiny instruments and blades, shaving off fractions of a millimeter to examine the way light bounced off the curves. There was also a 3D printer that could quickly “print” out a shoe-sized 3D model of a sketched Tesla design so a designer could actually hold their design and look at it from different angles. Deliciously futuristic.

The next day was the SpaceX factory, which might be even cooler, but the building contains advanced rocket technology, which according to the government is “weapons technology,” and apparently random bloggers aren’t allowed to take pictures of weapons technology.

Anyway, after the tours, I had a chance to sit down with several senior engineers and designers at both companies. They’d explain that they were a foremost expert in their field, I’d explain that I had recently figured out how big the building would be that could hold all humans, and we’d begin our discussion. I’d ask them about their work, their thoughts on the company as a whole and the broader industry, and then I’d ask them about their relationship with Elon and what it was like to work for him. Without exception, they were really nice-seeming, friendly people, who all came off as ridiculously smart but in a non-pretentious way. Musk has said he has a strict “no assholes” hiring policy, and I could see that at work in these meetings.

So what’s Musk like as a boss?

Let’s start by seeing what the internet says—there’s a Quora thread that poses the question: “What is it like to work with Elon Musk?”

The first answer is from a longtime SpaceX employee who no longer works there, who describes the day that their 3rd launch failed, a devastating blow for the company and for all the people who had worked for years to try to make it work.

She describes Elon emerging from mission command to address the company and delivering a rousing speech. She refers to Elon’s “infinite wisdom” and says, “I think most of us would have followed him into the gates of hell carrying suntan oil after that.  It was the most impressive display of leadership that I have ever witnessed.”

Right below that answer is another answer, from an anonymous SpaceX engineer, who describes working for Musk like this:

“You can always tell when someone’s left an Elon meeting: they’re defeated…nothing you ever do will be good enough so you have to find your own value, not depending on praise to get you through your obviously insufficient 80 hour work weeks.”

Reading about Musk online and in Vance’s book, I was struck by how representative both of these Quora comments were of whole camps of opinion on working for Musk. Doing so seems to bring out a tremendous amount of adoration and a tremendous amount of exasperation, sometimes with a tone of bitterness—and even more oddly, much of the time, you hear both sides of this story expressed by the same person. For example, later in the comment of the effusive Quora commenter comes “Working with him isn’t a comfortable experience, he is never satisfied with himself so he is never really satisfied with anyone around him…the challenge is that he is a machine and the rest of us aren’t.” And the frustrated anonymous commenter later concedes that the way Elon is “is understandable” given the enormity of the task at hand, and that “it is a great company and I do love it.”

My own talks with Musk’s engineers and designers told a similar story. I was told: “Elon always wants to know, ‘Why are we not going faster?’ He always wants bigger, better, faster” by the same person who a few minutes later was emphasizing how fair and thoughtful Musk tends to be in handling the terms for a recently fired employee.

The same person who told me he has “lots of sleepless nights” said in the adjacent sentence how happy he is to be at the company and that he hopes to “never leave.”

One senior executive described interacting with Musk like this: “Any conversation’s fairly high stakes because he’ll be very opinionated, and he can go deeper than you expect or are prepared for or deeper than your knowledge goes on a given topic, and it does feel like a high wire act interacting with him, especially when you find yourself in a [gulp] technical disagreement.”7 The same executive, who had previously worked at a huge tech company, also called Musk “the most grounded billionaire I’ve ever worked with.”

What I began to understand is that the explanation for both sides of the story—the cult-like adulation right alongside the grudging willingness to endure what sounds like blatant hell—comes down to respect. The people who work for Musk, no matter how they feel about his management style, feel an immense amount of respect—for his intelligence, for his work ethic, for his guts, and for the gravity of the missions he’s undertaken, missions that make all other potential jobs seem trivial and pointless.

Many of the people I talked to also alluded to their respect for his integrity. One way this integrity comes through is in his consistency. He’s been saying the same things in interviews for a decade, often using the same exact phrasing many years apart. He says what he really means, no matter the situation—one employee close to Musk told me that after a press conference or a business negotiation, once in private he’d ask Musk what his real angle was and what he really thinks. Musk’s response would always be boring: “I think exactly what I said.”

A few people I spoke with referenced Musk’s obsession with truth and accuracy. He’s fine with and even welcoming of negative criticism about him when he believes it’s accurate, but when the press gets something wrong about him or his companies, he usually can’t help himself and will engage them and correct their error. He detests vague spin-doctor phrases like “studies say” and “scientists disagree,” and he refuses to advertise for Tesla, something most startup car companies wouldn’t think twice about—because he sees advertising as manipulative and dishonest.

There’s even an undertone of integrity in Musk’s tyrannical demands of workers, because while he may be a tyrant, he’s not a hypocrite. Employees pressured to work 80 hours a week tend to be less bitter about it when at least the CEO is in there working 100.

Speaking of the CEO, let’s go have a hamburger with him.

My Lunch With Elon

It started like this:

After about seven minutes of this, I was able to get out my first question, a smalltalk-y question about how he thought the recent launch had gone (they had attempted an extremely difficult rocket-landing maneuver—more on that in the SpaceX post). His response included the following words: hypersonic, rarefied, densifying, supersonic, Mach 1, Mach 3, Mach 4, Mach 5, vacuum, regimes, thrusters, nitrogen, helium, mass, momentum, ballistic, and boost-back. While this was happening, I was still mostly blacked out from the surreality of the situation, and when I started to come to, I was scared to ask any questions about what he was saying in case he had already explained it while I was unconscious.

I eventually regained the ability to have adult human conversation, and we began what turned into a highly interesting and engaging two-hour discussion.8 This guy has a lot on his mind across a lot of topics. In this one lunch alone, we covered electric cars, climate change, artificial intelligence, the Fermi Paradox, consciousness, reusable rockets, colonizing Mars, creating an atmosphere on Mars, voting on Mars, genetic programming, his kids, population decline, physics vs. engineering, Edison vs. Tesla, solar power, a carbon tax, the definition of a company, warping spacetime and how this isn’t actually something you can do, nanobots in your bloodstream and how this isn’t actually something you can do, Galileo, Shakespeare, the American forefathers, Henry Ford, Isaac Newton, satellites, and ice ages.

I’ll get into the specifics of what he had to say about many of these things in later posts, but some notes for now:

— He’s a pretty tall and burly dude. Doesn’t really come through on camera.

— He ordered a burger and ate it in either two or three bites over a span of about 15 seconds. I’ve never seen anything like it.

— He is very, very concerned about AI. I quoted him in my posts on AI saying that he fears that by working to bring about Superintelligent AI (ASI), we’re “summoning the demon,” but I didn’t know how much he thought about the topic. He cited AI safety as one of the three things he thinks about most—the other two being sustainable energy and becoming a multi-planet species, i.e. Tesla and SpaceX. Musk is a smart motherfucker, and he knows a ton about AI, and his sincere concern about this makes me scared.

— The Fermi Paradox also worries him. In my post on that, I divided Fermi thinkers into two camps—those who think there’s no other highly intelligent life out there at all because of some Great Filter, and those who believe there must be plenty of intelligent life and that we don’t see signs of any for some other reason. Musk wasn’t sure which camp seemed more likely, but he suspects that there may be an upsetting Great Filter situation going on. He thinks the paradox “just doesn’t make sense” and that it “gets more and more worrying” the more time that goes by. Considering the possibility that maybe we’re a rare civilization who made it past the Great Filter through a freak occurrence makes him feel even more conviction about SpaceX’s mission: “If we are very rare, we better get to the multi-planet situation fast, because if civilization is tenuous, then we must do whatever we can to ensure that our already-weak probability of surviving is improved dramatically.” Again, his fear here makes me feel not great.

— One topic I disagreed with him on is the nature of consciousness. I think of consciousness as a smooth spectrum. To me, what we experience as consciousness is just what it feels like to be human-level intelligent. We’re smarter, and “more conscious” than an ape, who is more conscious than a chicken, etc. And an alien much smarter than us would be to us as we are to an ape (or an ant) in every way. We talked about this, and Musk seemed convinced that human-level consciousness is a black-and-white thing—that it’s like a switch that flips on at some point in the evolutionary process and that no other animals share. He doesn’t buy the “ants : humans :: humans : [a much smarter extra-terrestrial]” thing, believing that humans are weak computers and that something smarter than humans would just be a stronger computer, not something so beyond us we couldn’t even fathom its existence.

— I talked to him for a while about genetic reprogramming. He doesn’t buy the efficacy of typical anti-aging technology efforts, because he believes humans have general expiration dates, and no one fix can help that. He explained: “The whole system is collapsing. You don’t see someone who’s 90 years old and it’s like, they can run super fast but their eyesight is bad. The whole system is shutting down. In order to change that in a serious way, you need to reprogram the genetics or replace every cell in the body.” Now with anyone else—literally anyone else—I would shrug and agree, since he made a good point. But this was Elon Musk, and Elon Musk fixes shit for humanity. So what did I do?

Me: Well…but isn’t this important enough to try? Is this something you’d ever turn your attention to?

Elon: The thing is that all the geneticists have agreed not to reprogram human DNA. So you have to fight not a technical battle but a moral battle.

Me: You’re fighting a lot of battles. You could set up your own thing. The geneticists who are interested—you bring them here. You create a laboratory, and you could change everything.

Elon: You know, I call it the Hitler Problem. Hitler was all about creating the Übermensch and genetic purity, and it’s like—how do you avoid the Hitler Problem? I don’t know.

Me: I think there’s a way. You’ve said before about Henry Ford that he always just found a way around any obstacle, and you do the same thing, you always find a way. And I just think that that’s as important and ambitious a mission as your other things, and I think it’s worth fighting for a way, somehow, around moral issues, around other things.

Elon: I mean I do think there’s…in order to fundamentally solve a lot of these issues, we are going to have to reprogram our DNA. That’s the only way to do it.

Me: And deep down, DNA is just a physical material.

Elon: [Nods, then pauses as he looks over my shoulder in a daze] It’s software.

Comments:

1) It’s really funny to brashly pressure Elon Musk to take on yet another seemingly-insurmountable task and to act a little disappointed in him that he’s not currently doing it, when he’s already doing more for humanity than literally anyone on the planet.

2) It’s also super fun to casually brush off the moral issues around genetic programming with “I think there’s a way” and to refer to DNA—literally the smallest and most complex substance ever—as “just a physical material deep down” when I have absolutely no idea what I’m talking about. Because those things will be his problem to figure out, not mine.

3) I think I’ve successfully planted the seed. If Musk takes on human genetics 15 years from now and we all end up living to 250 because of it, you all owe me a drink.

Watching interviews with Musk, you see a lot of people ask him some variation of this question Chris Anderson asked him on stage at the 2013 TED conference:

How have you done this? These projects—PayPal, SolarCity, Tesla, SpaceX—they’re so spectacularly different. They’re such ambitious projects, at scale. How on Earth has one person been able to innovate in this way—what is it about you? Can we have some of that secret sauce?

There are a lot of things about Musk that make him so successful, but I do think there’s a “secret sauce” that puts Musk in a different league from even the other renowned billionaires of our time. I have a theory about what that is, which has to do with the way Musk thinks, the way that he reasons through problems, and the way he views the world. As this series continues, think about this, and we’ll discuss a lot more in the last post.

For now, I’ll leave you with Elon Musk holding a Panic Monster.

___________

If you’re into Wait But Why, sign up for the Wait But Why email list and we’ll send you the new posts right when they come out. Better than having to check the site!

If you’re interested in supporting Wait But Why, here’s our Patreon.

Next up in this series: Part 2: How Tesla Will Change the World

Other posts in the series:

Part 3: How (and Why) SpaceX Will Colonize Mars
Part 4: The Chef and the Cook: Musk’s Secret Sauce

Extra Post #1: The Deal With Solar City
Extra Post #2: The Deal With the Hyperloop

Some Musk-y Wait But Why Posts:

The AI Revolution: The Road to Superintelligence

The Fermi Paradox

What Makes You You?

Sources

A large part of what I learned for this post came from my own conversations with Musk and his staff. As I mentioned above, Ashlee Vance’s upcoming biography, Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future, is excellent and helped me fill in a bunch of gaps. Further info came from the sources below:

Documentary: Revenge of the Electric Car
TED Talks: Elon Musk: The mind behind Tesla, SpaceX, SolarCity
Khan Academy: Interview With Elon Musk
Quora: What is it like to work with Elon Musk?
SXSW: Interview with Elon Musk
Consumer Reports: Tesla Model S: The Electric Car that Shatters Every Myth
Wired: How the Tesla Model S is Made
Interview: Elon Musk says he’s a bigger fan of Edison than Tesla
Interview: Elon Musk gets introspective
Business Insider: Former SpaceX Exec Explains How Elon Musk Taught Himself Rocket Science
Esquire: Elon Musk: The Triumph of His Will
Oxford Martin School: Elon Musk on The Future of Energy and Transport
MIT Interview: Elon Musk compares AI efforts to “Summoning the Demon”
Documentary: Billionaire Elon Musk : How I Became The Real ‘Iron Man’
Reddit: Elon Musk AMA
Chris Anderson: Chris Anderson on Elon Musk, the World’s Most Remarkable Entrepreneur
Engineering.com: Who’s Better? Engineers or Scientists?
Forbes: Big Day For SpaceX As Elon Musk Tells His Mom ‘I Haven’t Started Yet’

The post Elon Musk: The World’s Raddest Man appeared first on Wait But Why.

Sarah Cooper of The Cooper Review created this series of illustrations about the differences between living in New York and San Francisco. These experiences and impressions are her own, having recently moved to San Francisco after living in New York for five years. People who frequent or live in these cities, what do you think of Cooper's observations?

See the entire series here. 

Via Design Taxi | Images Sarah Cooper / The Cooper Review


 

LOS TELEVISORES son un grupo gallego formado por Lúa Sálamo (bajo, voces), Luis Martínez (guitarra, voz y Chico Javi (batería).

Su música es una energética combinación de punk pop, psicodelia, garage y new wave, rápidas y divertidas canciones con frescas melodías que te invitan a mover las caderas a un lado y a otro con ritmo frenético.

Influenciados por grupos como Kaka de Luxe, Glutamato Ye-yé. Los Bólidos, Aerolineas Federales,…

Las letras hablan de vengadores, chicos y chicas, drogas, amor, sexo, peleas, vacaciones, viajes astrales,…

Tienen autoeditado un single y publicado un Lp para Rumble records.

DISCOGRAFÍA:

– Chicos i Chicas (2014 Rumble records)
– Vacaciones (2012)

Los Televisores Bandcamp

The folks at Rockbeat Records have gone deep, culling together nearly 100 ultra-rare, delightfully campy Halloween nuggets from the ’60s on this well-curated three-disc set.

Don’t murder your next party with another tired spin of “The Monster Mash.” Even the weakest of these tracks provides a greater thrill than that tired old platter. Weird it up with bands like M.R. Baseman & the Symbols, the Twelfth Night, Kenny & the Fiends, the Grim Reapers, and dozens more from the ’60s garage heyday.

Strewn between tracks are trailers and excerpts from various B movies and horror shows. As a Halloween set, this is priceless, and fans of ’60s rock rarities will also want to take note. — AMG

320 kbps | 505 MB  UL | HF | TB | UP

Disc 1
1. The Mystrys – Witch Girl (2:03)
2. Teddy Durant – The Beast of Sunset Strip (2:25)
3. The Ebbtides – Seance (2:03)
4. Bela La Goldensetin – Why Do I Love You (2:09)
5. The Phantom Five – Graveyard (2:37)
6. Murray Schafe & the Aristocrats – Tombstone No. 9 (3:02)
7. Jackie Morningstar – Rockin’ In the Graveyard (2:38)
8. Alan Smithee – Halloween Convention of Spooks (0:56)
9. Round Robin – I’m the Wolfman (2:37)
10. Griz Green – Jam At the Mortuary (2:54)
11. The Grim Reapers – Two Souls (2:54)
12. The Connoissurs – Count Macabre (2:19)
13. The Madmen – Haunted (2:00)
14. The Vettes – Devil’s Driver Theme (2:07)
15. Terry Gale – The Voodoo (2:26)
16. Glenda & Glen – Voodoo?Doll (1:50)
17. Daron Daemon & The Vampires – Ghost Guitars (2:25)
18. Jim Burgett – Jekyll and Hyde (2:26)
19. Anton Giulio Majano – Atom Age Vampire (1:18)
20. Mann Drake – Vampire’s Ball (2:31)
21. Bobby Bare – Vampira (2:18)
22. Johnny Anderson – Zoola Zooky (2:24)
23. Alan Smithee – Frankenstein & Dracula (1:14)
24. Peter & The Wolves – Mr. Frankenstein (2:55)
25. Frankie Stein and His Ghouls – Dr. Spook Twist (2:02)
26. George Waggner – The Wolfman (0:33)
27. Gary Warren – Werewolf (1:52)
28. The Frantics – Werewolf (2:02)
29. Chance Halliday – Bury Me Deep (2:26)
30. The Weirdos – E.S.P. Theme For Shock Theatre (3:01)
31. Kenny And The Fiends – The Raven (1:57)
32. the executioners – The Guillotine (1:59)

Disc 2
1. Invasion – The Invasion Is Coming (1:44)
2. Ed Wood – Plan 9 From Outer Space (0:58)
3. Boots Walker – They’re Here (2:14)
4. The Quests – Shadows In the Night (2:33)
5. Positively 13 O’Clock – Psychotic Reaction (2:01)
6. The Spellbinders – Castin’ My Spell (2:25)
7. Chance Halliday – Deep Sleep (1:42)
8. Vic Plati Quintet – The Chiller (2:37)
9. Teddy Durant – The Night Stalker (2:11)
10. The Graveyard Five – Marble Orchard (3:17)
11. Glenn & Christy with the Adventures – Wombat Twist (2:15)
12. Billy Ghoulston – Zombie Stomp (2:18)
13. Irvin Yeaworth – The Blob (1:16)
14. Johnny Fraser and the Regalaires – It (2:07)
15. Mr. Baseman & The Symbols – Do the Zombie (2:17)
16. The Shandells – Go Go Gorilla (2:53)
17. Ronnie Self – Go Go Cannibal (2:06)
18. Phil Tucker – Robot Monster (0:50)
19. The Shades – Strolling After Dark (2:07)
20. Jericho Jones – Black Magic (2:07)
21. Karl Freund – The Mummy (0:38)
22. Lee Ross – The Mummy’s Bracelet (2:13)
23. The Contrails – The Mummy Walk (Walking Death) (2:36)
24. Fred F. Sears – The Werewolf (0:11)
25. Carl Bonafede & The Gemtones – The Werewolf (2:08)
26. Johnny Eager – Howl (2:12)
27. Herbert L. Strock – I Was a Teenage Frankenstein (1:32)
28. The Keytones – I Was a Teenage Monster (2:17)
29. Lord Luther with The King’s Men – (I was a) Teenage Creature (2:45)
30. Ted V. Mikels – The Astro Zombies (0:57)
31. Sonny Day and the Tony Ray Combo – Creature From Outer Space (2:29)
32. The Sabres – Spider Walk (2:28)
33. The Abstracts – Nightmare (3:07)

Disc 3
1. Ralph Nieson & The Chancellors – Scream (1:55)
2. Bernard Louis Kowalski – Night of the Blood Beast (0:48)
3. Billy & The Dukes – Roland (2:36)
4. Al Saxon – Evil Eye (2:31)
5. Kiriae Crucible – The Salem Witch Trial (2:52)
6. The 7th Court – One Eyed Witch (2:23)
7. Dave Gardner – Mad Witch (2:34)
8. Ervinna & The Stylers – Witch Queen of New Orleans (2:16)
9. Betty Lavett – Witchcraft In the Air (2:36)
10. The Circus – Burn Witch Burn (2:01)
11. Miss L. L.Louise Lewis – Monster’s Bride (1:48)
12. Glenn Ryle – Wolf Gal (2:17)
13. Gary Warren – Midnight Rain (2:33)
14. Jack Arnold – Creature From the Black Lagoon (0:40)
15. Evans Carroll & The Tempos – The Monster (2:08)
16. Billy Taylor And The Teardrops – Wombie Zombie (2:16)
17. Jan Davis – Watusi Zombi (1:59)
18. Terry Teene – Here Comes the Hearse (2:30)
19. Frankie Stein and His Ghouls – Knives and Lovers (2:19)
20. The Blue Knights – Madness (2:52)
21. The Elites – Jack the Ripper (2:09)
22. Larry & The Blue Notes – Night of the Phantom (2:13)
23. The Upperclassmen – Cha Cha With the Zombies (2:35)
24. Bela La Goldenstein – Old Boris (2:14)
25. Chris Kevin – Haunted House (2:03)
26. William Castle – The House on Haunted Hill trailer (0:32)
27. Kenny & the Fiends – The House on Haunted Hill (1:31)
28. Skip Manning – Devil Blues (2:31)
29. The Devotions – Devil’s Gotten Into My Baby (2:42)
30. The Twelfth Night – Grim Reaper (1:52)
31. James Duhon – Grave Yard Creep (2:33)
32. Original Trailer – Godzilla King of the Monsters (1:41)
33. Los Holy’s – Campo De Vampiros (3:12)
34. Richard Rome – Ghost a Go Go (2:12)

Smartphones and tablets have been great for games, but are much-maligned for the antisocial act of screen-staring. Luckily, games like Glitchnap's Sentree can help all your friends play together, with just a couple of devices. Read the rest

Suburbia is a technocrat’s take on urban planning. The art is streamlined to the point of austerity, there is almost no luck, and the game is unashamed to show off its mathematical guts.

[body_image width='1280' height='648' path='images/content-images/2015/05/02/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/05/02/' filename='the-10-conversations-graduating-college-students-are-about-to-never-have-again-522-body-image-1430527030.jpg' id='52010']Animal House screencap via Universal Pictures

College is a wonderful incubator of ideas. A 15-minute coffee break in the cafeteria can turn into an hour spent chatting about gender theory with that girl who never wears shoes. A quick trip to the dorm drug dealer can turn into a long, long discussion of the idea that—just think about it, man— we are all living inside a computer. The nation's universities are places of experimentation, where kids try on various adult skins to see which one fits. One week you're trying to get into scotch, the next you're attempting serious conversations about Kant and Foucault after half-listening to lectures about them.

As graduation season nears, many of these child/adult hybrids will be moving on from this comforting cocoon and entering the world of the workforce, where most conversations are about the weather, how you get to and from work, and how much you want to quit your job. So, class of 2015, stop for a second of reflection before you embark down the same road of toil your forefathers and foremothers trod down, and look back at the conversations that you only ever have when you have the naive confidence and enthusiasm of an undergrad.

The Argument Over Who Is More of an Alcoholic
"Did I get shitfaced every day since Minal's 'Why Is This in My Closet' Party? That was so long ago. I'm like officially an alcoholic."

"I'm drunk right now. And I haven't eaten anything this week except for Everclear and coconut yogurt. I'm way worse of an alcoholic."

"Yeah, but I woke up drunk from last night, then had a beer to get rid of my hangover. I just went to my professor's office hours, and I was drunk for the whole meeting."

"I was drunk for four of my finals."

Once you know someone who has done terrible shit while drinking and gone to rehab and made the AA-mandated apology rounds—or if you become that person yourself—jokes about alcoholism get a lot less funny. At a certain point, if someone says, "I'm an alcoholic," you get quiet instead of smirk-bragging about crushing a case of Busch.

That One About the Nature of Truth
"Um, actually, I don't think you can even make that assumption about Goddard's quote-unquote artistic intentions."

"Right? Like, what is art, even, until someone interprets it?"

"This couch could be art if I just said, 'Hey, this couch is art.'"

"As long as people believe you, that counts as art."

"As long as people believe in anything, it's true. Like, what is the world if not, like, a bunch of ideas people had that everyone goes along with?"

"If we all agree something is blue, it's blue, even if no one is seeing the same color."

"Totally. TOTALLY. Like, all words are just these empty signifiers, right? We just fill them in with whatever, our own bullshit."

This sort of thing is the undergrad-just-took-an-intro-to-philosophy-course-then-did-a-bong-hit version of that thing when three-year-olds ask "why" over and over again.

Bragging or Worrying About Your GPA
"I clearly did the research. I clearly put the works cited page in perfect MLA formatting, and she still gave me a fucking A minus!"

"Right, but she wrote on the front, 'unclear thesis.'"

"She clearly does not care about consistency in grading. In fact, she's probably sexist against men."

"Uh, OK. Well, I think you're gonna be fine. I'm getting a C minus in this class..."

"Yeah, well you don't know what it's like to have parents with high expectations."

Full-grown adults aren't dicks to each other about grades, because they have other things they can lord over one another, like marriages, children, jobs, and homes.

Your Close Readings of Hollywood Movies
"So, Rocky is obviously an anti-Nietzschian parable, with the strong man being overcome by the weak, but it gets really explicit in Rocky IV, with the blonde superman being knocked down by this avatar of conventional morality. It's total slave morality, this notion that the hero is this schmuck who is just this beaten-down nice guy. I mean, come on. Apollo Creed is so obviously the cooler one and the better fighter and just oozes charisma, why aren't we rooting for him? Doesn't he deserve to win? Why are our sympathies always attached to the so-called everyman?"

"OK."

"Also, Quentin Tarantino movies are racist."

Any Serious Conversation About Slavoj Žižek
"I like how Bernie Sanders sounds like a total Socialist."

"Bro, did you even read Žižek's The Sublime Object of Ideology?"

"Uh, most of it."

"Then you must know the fundamental theory error in Sanders's assumptions about Marxism."

"Maybe. But could you refresh my memory?"

"Žižek would say his brand of socialism doesn't explain why a commodity can affirm its social character, only the commodity-form of the product."

"Oh, totally."

Slavoj Žižek is a charming, goofy man, and probably the world's most famous Marxist intellectual—but unless you go on to a career in highbrow journals or academia, you'll probably never have to pretend you've read him again.

Related: Watch our own Alex Miller have a heart-to-heart with Žižek.

The Master Plan for Rebuilding Society
"I think I just figured out how to fix political corruption."

"Yeah?"

"Why is there a congress at all, or a president? We could vote with our phones, multiple times per day if there were direct democracy."

"Every decision would be in the hands of the people."

"No political offices to abuse, no officials to bribe. Government by the masses, for the masses."

"You'd still need some people in charge."

"How so?"

"To like, sign treaties, carry out orders. If people phone-voted to go to war, you'd have to have generals."

"One word, dude: robots."

The only place where this kind of conversation happens outside of college is Silicon Valley, where it happens every day.

The Fantasy About Never Needing to Make Money
"You know what? It may be 3 AM, and this vape made me higher than I've ever been in my life..."

"Me too."

"But this, right here? This is truer happiness than you can buy with a fucking American Express card."

"Money is a total trap. It's like Buddhism. A cycle of desire or whatever."

"All you need to do is start your own farm. Just on some abandoned land or whatever. Grow some carrots, lettuce, or just grow weed, barter for what you need. Hook a generator up to a bike..."

"Wait, what?"

"You can power things with your foot pedals. Just like Occupy Wall Street."

"I bet we could go to Detroit and set that up right now."

"Word."

Many people fantasize about building an autonomous growhouse-commune-farm in America's Rust Belt, but only a few have enough follow-through to make those plans come to fruition. Soon you'll be buying non-IKEA furniture and things for the kitchen, then eventually a car, and other tokens of responsibility. Pretty soon, you'll have a house, and probably kids and before you know it you feel completely justified complaining about how much it costs to build a deck.

How Society Disrespects the Young
"That cop only chased us out of that park because we're young, you know."

"Oh, I know. When our generation gets older, we're gonna end some of this discrimination."

"Yeah, it's bullshit that we have to buy a keg from a creepy guy in a parking lot instead of from a store, but we can legally go to war and kill people."

"You know what else is bullshit? We can't rent cars until we're 25."

"Also renting a car is like 50 bucks a day."

"That's bullshit."

In less than a decade, you will be physically uncomfortable when you realize that the bar you're in is mostly populated by kids in their early 20s on Tinder dates.

Reminiscing About Something and Slowly Realizing You Have Done Something Terrible
"Oh man, you were so wasted you went out in flip-flops when it was below zero!"

"I know man. And then we found that tarp, and that tent in the woods..."

"Yeah. That shit was filthy! And we lit it on fire!"

"Haha! That was probably someone's home!"

"Hah. Man. It was really cold that night."

"Yeah, dude."

The One About the President Being "Actually Worse than Hitler"
"Voting for Hillary? You would probably vote for a fascist like Obama too, right?"

"Obama is literally the only man who kept an out-and-out psychopath like Romney outside of the White House!"

"Whatever. Obama's a mass murderer. I read an article that said Obama deported more people, and arrested more journalists than any other president ever."

"He patched up the economy, didn't he?"

"They said the same thing about Hitler!"

You brain is sharpest when you're young and relatively unencumbered, but soon you'll have a job that wears you down to the point of dullness by the evenings. You'll also have seen enough politicians come and go not to get too excited over individual comings and goings. For most media consumers, the president just starts to feel like any other TV personality. Pretty soon, you can't seem to muster more emotion about him or her than you can about Mario Lopez.

Oh, and you'll start to really like Mario Lopez.

Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter.

A Charles Darwin todos o coñecemos porque é o pai da teoría da evolución e da ciencia moderna. Todos sabemos que foi un home decidido, que defendeu o que cría con seguridade (e non foi doado nin bonito), pero o certo é que en 1838 non tiña tan clara unha decisión. Debía casar ou non casar? Era o matrimonio unha boa idea?

Sacade as conclusións que queirades das opinións de Darwin, pero un ano despois estaba comprometido primeiro e casado logo con Emma Wedgwood, a súa curmá. Darwin tiña 29 anos (Emma 30), unha idade xa avanzada para casar (polo menos para ela) na época (e aínda así cando o fixeron deulles tempo a ter 10 fillos). Ela xa tiña rexeitado unhas cantas petición matrimoniais nos anos precedentes e el estaba namorado dela.

Pero antes de casar Darwin fixo o que todas as persoas que teñen que tomar decisións e que aman as listas fan. Fixo unha lista de ideas a favor ou en contra sobre o matrimonio (a lista non se aplica de forma específica a Emma Darwin, é  unha visión máis xenérica sobre os pros e os contras das relacións amorosas). Casar… Esa é a cuestión, escribe Darwin no comezo do texto.

Por que casar? As razóns que apuntan a favor do matrimonio son:

Nenos (“se Deus quere”)

Ter compañía constante (“e unha amiga na idade avanzada”) e que ademais “estea interesada nun mesmo”

Un ser querido e con que xogar (“mellor cun can de calquera xeito”)

Un fogar (“e alguén que coide da casa”)

“Os encantos da música e da conversación feminina”

“Esas cousas son boas para saúde dun”

E tachado (iso si, non lle debeu parecer tan interesante como nun primeiro punto): “ser obrigado a visitar e recibir visitas dos parentes” (logo engadiu que era unha “terrible perda de tempo”).

E ademais pensa que estar a vida enteira en soidade, “como una abella, traballando, traballando e nada máis que iso”, é “intolerable”.

“Imaxínate cunha encantadora e suave esposa nun sofá cun bo lume, libros e se cada música. Compara esta visión coa sombría realidade” que tiña na súa casa.

Por que non casar?

Primeiro queda co negativo: non haberá nenos, ninguén coidará del cando sexa vello e non terá a ninguén preto. Pero logo… Logo as cousas cambian, porque casar tamén lle quitará unhas cousas. Porque non casar tamén ten vantaxes.

A liberdade de ir onde lle dea a gana

Escoller o círculo social no que se move (ou non se mover en sociedade en absoluto)

“As conversacións con homes intelixentes nos clubs” (os homes da ‘boa sociedade’ británica do XIX tiñan todos o seu club, no que vían aos amigos e aos outros homes da boa sociedade e no que non entraban mulleres)

“Non estar obrigado a visitar aos familiares” e non hai por tanto que intervir en calquera parvada que lles pase

Non terá que soportar os gastos e a ansiedade derivada de ter fillos

“Se cadra discutimos” (querido Darwin, sempre hai discusións coa xente que un coñece, mesmo cando un non casa con ninguén)

Perda de tempo (con dobre subliñado)

“Non poder ler nas tardes” (se tes que falar e escoitar música, quedas sen tempo para ler, obviamente)

Ademais casar trae consigo: a gordura, a ociosidade, a ansiedade e a responsabilidade.

Unha vez que casas tes menos cartos para libros

“Se hai moitos nenos, forzado a gañar o pan (pero sen embargo é moi malo para a saúde dun traballar demasiado)”

E o argumento final: “Se cadra á miña muller non lle gusta Londres, así que a condena é o desterro e a degradación na indolencia, inactividade parvada”

(A transcrición deste escrito está nos papeis de Darwin online, descuberta en OpenCulture)

Imaxes artvintage1800s.etsy.com,

The post Por que casar (ou non) segundo Charles Darwin? appeared first on disquecool.

De vez en cuando, observar a un hombre realizar una acción que beneficia a las mujeres, o percibir pequeños detalles de machismo a mi alrededor, me hace pensar en formas de contrarrestar los “micromachismos”, esas motas de polen en el aire, imperceptibles pero constantes, que molestan por acumulación y ni siquiera te das cuenta de por qué. La mayoría de las acciones feministas son igual de pequeñas.

En esta lista, evito deliberadamente las “tomas de conciencia” y las acciones negativas. No se trata en la lista de hoy de que pienses; se trata de que hagas. Pensar, no hacer, callarte… pueden ser necesarios, pero no son de lo que quiero hablar ahora. Por eso voy a hablar de cosas pequeñas, mínimas. Casi obvias. Casi.

1. Sobre sexo. Practica y busca obtener consentimiento entusiasta. He hablado sobre evitar violencia sexual aquí. Y sobre si es posible hacer piropos feministas o no amenazadores, aquí.
2. Ten amigas.
3. Haz tareas de la casa. Muchas y a menudo. Haz más de lo que crees que te corresponde, a veces. Las que no sepas hacer, aprende. Recoge lo que tiras. Si contratas servicio doméstico, paga su seguro y págale bien.
4. Es a veces difícil de definir, pero hay algo que podemos llamar “trabajo emocional” que suele caer del lado de las mujeres. Te pongo dos ejemplos elementales: el matrimonio en el que ella compra los regalos de Navidad de toda la familia, la suya y la de su marido; y que en mi trabajo como profesora de Secundaria, observo que las chicas tienden a ser mediadoras espontáneas de conflictos entre compañeros y entre la clase y yo. Observa en qué situaciones consolar, mediar, animar, decir algo amable, etc. lo hace siempre una mujer, y adelántate. U observa cuáles de tus relaciones necesitan más de esto, y hazlo tú.
5. Lee teoría feminista. Hay mucha, con mucha variedad de temas, niveles de profundidad y dificultad, agresividad y “radicalidad”. Es decir: hay textos muy “radicales” pensados para principiantes, textos filosóficos abstractos  y complicadísimos, teoría política y económica, crítica de cine. Blogs y libros y DE TODO. Si no te gusta un libro/autora/corriente, no te preocupes, que hay más.
6. Mantente informado sobre noticias y acontecimientos que afectan a las mujeres. Busca más de una fuente de información.
7. Aprende sobre salud femenina y salud sexual y reproductiva (de hombres y de mujeres).
8. Habla con quienes tengan ideas erróneas sobre las mujeres o el feminismo. A ti te van a hacer más caso que a nosotras, casi seguro.
9. Ve a manifestaciones o participa en otras campañas de protesta por los derechos de la mujer.
10. Ofrécete voluntario para cosas que normalmente solo hacen mujeres.
11. Si tienes hijos, cuídalos. Cógete el permiso de paternidad.
12. Si las tienes cerca (en tu familia, entre tus amigos), pasa tiempo con niñas. Dedícales atención, juega con ellas, enséñales cosas.
13. Lleva a tus hijos a colegios mixtos. Lo ideal es que sean públicos; que sean mixtos es fundamental. Anima a tus familia y amigos a llevar a sus hijos a colegios mixtos. Lo mismo va para actividades de ocio.
14. Cuida de las mujeres de tu familia. Hazles caso, escúchalas.
15. En el trabajo, en casa, de compras, en un lugar de atención al público, casi siempre preferimos que nos atienda una mujer. Parecen más accesibles… y las interrumpimos más. A los hombres se los interrumpe menos, parece que siempre estén muy ocupados con cosas más importantes. Evita interrumpir a una mujer. Si te pueden atender igualmente un hombre y una mujer, moléstalo a él.
16. Apoya y difunde el trabajo hecho por mujeres. Esto va a depender de tu ocupación, y de tus circunstancias; puede variar mucho. Piensa en las mujeres que te rodean, en un trabajo y en tus aficiones, y si estás tratándolas con justicia. El trabajo de las mujeres a menudo pasa desapercibido, o no se valora lo suficiente.
17. Si te molesta la existencia de un espacio no-mixto concreto, participa en uno que sea equivalente, mixto, y feminista (o en el que las mujeres sean bienvenidas), y si no existe cerca de ti, créalo.

Es posible pensar en más cosas, seguro. A ver cuáles se te ocurren a ti.

Después de hablar con cuatro superdotados la idea que más se repite es: "Éramos niños diferentes, y como diferentes nos tocó adaptarnos a los demás para no sentirnos marginados". Y aun así se han sentido raros o desplazados durante su infancia. No en casa sino en el colegio, donde se aburrían. Luego, de adultos, nuestros cuatro protagonistas han entendido que no había tal problema en la diferencia, solo que no habían descubierto en qué consistía ésta. Nadie se lo había explicado.

Son inteligentes y listos, mucho más que la media, y han conseguido desarrollar una carrera profesional. Pero también han tardado tiempo en canalizar su talento y acoplarlo a sus verdaderas aspiraciones. El sistema educativo está de fondo, falló en casi todos los casos y obligaba a repetir patrones. "Me aburría, y si me aburría era por la incapacidad para encajar las rutinas", dice Lea. Y habla a propósito de la forma de aprender en clase, cuando uno ya conoce todo lo que le está contando el profesor. Ahí se crea una sensación de frustración, que luego es extrapolable a otras situaciones o momentos vitales.

Nos encontramos con cuatro adultos que han sido diagnosticados (es el término que se utiliza) como superdotados. Repasamos con ellos sus experiencias y hablamos sobre educación, infancia, empatía, relaciones sentimentales, fracaso, capacidad de adaptación, felicidad y depresión. En definitiva, sobre vidas de personas, que como nos dice Antonio, no se consideran Superman, sino Clark Kent.

Lea Vélez (47 años. Guionista y escritora)

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Todas las fotos de Iago Fernández

Vice: ¿Cómo descubriste que eras superdotada?

Lea Vélez: A partir de que mis hijos fueran diagnosticados, que es un término feísimo. Así lo dicen, la primera vez que lo escuché pensé: "¿Es que es una enfermedad?". Y, aunque no lo es, sí es un hándicap en muchos sentidos. Cuando iba al colegio era la clásica niña que leía una cosa y se me quedaba. Y eso me parecía lo normal. No entendía por qué el colegio era tan aburrido. Pasé una infancia muy buena en casa, pero el colegio era una burbuja del horror. Yo me descubrí a base de observar a mis hijos y ver que eran igual que yo. Pero ellos sí han sido testados. Mi hijo mayor, de 7 años, hablaba muy temprano y preguntaba cosas de Ciencia que te quedabas pegado. Vi una dinámica muy parecida a la mía. Me hice las pruebas y sí, claro, era.

Háblanos de tu carrera profesional.

He sido de buenas notas, y conmigo el mantra de los profesores era el de "si te esfuerzas puedes hacerlo mejor". Y no lo hice. No me ha ido nada mal. Pero es que yo tenía en mi casa un ambiente literario muy rico y eso es muy importante. Como era muy vaga, hice Periodismo (risas), para evitar el Latín, las Matemáticas, las Ciencias... y porque tenía que ver con la escritura. Como estaba despistada y no me veía buscando noticias por las calles, me apunté a la ECAM en la especialidad de guion. Y empecé a trabajar mucho en series de tele, hasta que abrí la vía de la literatura.

¿Cómo acepta uno que es diferente?

Es una larga evolución, porque sí eres diferente a la media. No te sientes mejor, ni por encima, ni más listo. Al contrario, te sientes distinto, raro, fuera de la órbita y no sabes por qué. Es como el cuento de El Patito Feo, la infancia amarga no te la quita nadie. Cuando un Psicólogo te hace unas pruebas y te dice por qué eres diferente ayuda mucho. También se siente un cierto rechazo por parte de la 'tribu', que percibe que eres distinto, que tienes otra manera de mirar o reflexionar y se pueden crear dinámicas de enemistad en el colegio. Y pocos profesores tienen la percepción de detectar a un niño con esa chispa, yo tuve una que me protegió muchísimo. Porque ella tenía muy claro quién era yo. Lo normal es que nadie lo detecte y no entiendes esa situación cuando eres niño.

¿Y es verdad que es más fácil de empatizar entre superdotados a la hora de las relaciones sentimentales?

El padre de mis hijos, que falleció hace tres años, era más superdotado que yo. Los iguales se reconocen en la manera de mirar, el sentido del humor, la ironía. Hay mucha gente que tiene alta capacidades y no lo sabe, pero hay ciertos patrones. En las parejas se ve, empatizas con gente que conecta contigo, además de listo, tiene que tener algo que te conecta con la mirada. En el caso de mi marido, todos sus amigos le decían lo inteligente que era, y yo tuve que tener un entrenamiento para pillarle. Tuvo una infancia igual de miserable que la de todos los demás, era inglés y en el sistema educativo allí había dos líneas: los listos y los revoltosos, vagos, etc. Él estaba en la segunda, aún así fue el primer premio de Matemáticas y Francés de todo el colegio.

Y cómo defines en una frase qué significa ser un superdotado.

Es un arma de doble filo. Es maravilloso poder ver el mundo así y también peligroso, como caminar al borde de un abismo.

Pilar Novo (45 años, profesora de Secundaria)

Vice: Hola Pilar, ¿cómo y cuándo descubriste tus altas capacidades?

Pilar Novo: Hace solo tres años. Tenía 42. Fue gracias a mi hijo, que a los 12 años tenía una situación difícil en el colegio. Pasamos un pequeño calvario. Cuando sucede, al principio no sabes por qué es. Mi hijo era muy razonable pero a lo mejor contestaba diferente y pensaba diferente. Claro, un adulto no se da cuenta, pero los niños lo ven diferente y en el colegio sufría mucho. Hasta que con 12 años le llevé a la Asociación Española de Superdotados y con Talento (AEST). Al llegar le conté el caso a su presidenta y al terminar de hablar me dijo que yo era superdotada, que me hiciese las pruebas junto a mi hijo. Nos las hicimos y el resultados fue que los dos teníamos Altas Capacidades.

¿Cómo ha sido llevar una vida sin saber que eras superdotada? ¿Nunca lo sospechaste?

Yo de pequeña era muy buena y siempre me intentaba adaptar. Era muy vergonzosa e intentaba no hacer cosas diferentes a mis compañeros y amigas, que me querían mucho. Supongo que al ser tan razonable y tan responsable, más de lo normal, nadie se dio cuenta. También recuerdo que pensaba de mis compañeros: "Pero cómo no se dan cuenta de esto" o cómo no hacen esto o lo otro"... pero me acostumbré. Luego tuve un accidente muy grave: me atropelló un autobús y me dejó 15 días en coma, con un golpe muy fuerte en la cabeza que, por suerte, no afectó a mi capacidad.

¿Qué sentiste al saber, a los 42 años, que eras superdotada?

Ahora tengo mucha más seguridad en mí misma. Pienso más rápido de lo que hablo y antes se me atrapaba la lengua, y ahora no: eso me ha dado seguridad, por ejemplo.

¿Hay algo que según tu experiencia te diferencia radicalmente de los demás?

No me siento diferente a los demás. Soy igual que todo el mundo, aunque una cosa que me caracteriza es que siempre he tenido mucha empatía: puedo comprender muy bien a las personas. Tengo más facilidad y eso me permite ayudar a los demás.

¿Te facilita ese grado de empatía tu labor como profesora?

Sin duda. Me gusta ayudar a mis alumnos, comprenderles y saber por qué no han hecho los deberes un día. Y centrarme en ellos para ayudarles en sus problemas. Los problemas que puedan aparecer en las personas se pueden ver desde arriba, desde otro punto de vista, y no enzarzarse en discusiones. Saber que estamos aquí para ayudarnos e intentar mejorar. No hay más.

¿Cómo llegaste a ser profesora?

No estudié matemáticas. Me licencié en Empresariales y eso me ha dado la base necesaria. Luego, después de 16 años sin trabajar dedicada a mis tres hijos, me saqué la oposición.

Antonio Ayuso (67 años, comercial)

Vice: Antes de preguntarte por tu experiencia, nos gustaría que nos dieras tu definición de Altas Capacidades.

Antonio Ayuso: Lo resumo en una palabra: frustración. Tú fíjate si la gente le da importancia a la inteligencia que el mayor insulto es decir que alguien es 'tonto'. Hoy en día ser inteligente es lo más de lo más, y no serlo es lo peor. Por eso la gente llama 'tontos' a los futbolistas. La importancia es excesiva. Somos personas normales, con ese defecto, diría yo. Somos humanos como los demás... A veces mucho más porque somos más sensibles y más empáticos, y eso también nos hace sufrir más.

¿Y cuál es tu definición de éxito?

En esta sociedad hay pocos superdotados que tengan el perfil de personas de éxito, y pocas personas de éxito que sean superdotadas. Se necesita un perfil diferente: ser extrovertido, estar adaptado socialmente y creer mucho en uno mismo, y esa no es nuestra historia. Hay que ser alguien que proyecta esa fe en sus proyectos y los convierte en realidad. Nosotros somos antihéroes.

Has sido, vendedor, empresario y director comercial. ¿Cómo llegaste a esta profesión?

Descubrí que era superdotado por mí mismo. A los 19 me hice el examen de orientación profesional y en el Cociente Intelectual (CI) obtuve 142. Me quedé muy asombrado, porque no me creía tan inteligente, pero me dio seguridad y me hizo darme cuenta de mis capacidades. Me cambió la vida: estudiaba matemáticas y abandoné los estudios, y pasé un tiempo un poco despistado. Luego hice unos cursos de programación cuando salieron los primeros ordenadores, pero acabé como visitador médico. Nada más comenzar me llamaron para ser programador IBM en Chrysler, y después de un tiempo me di cuenta de que lo mío era ser comercial, y entré en una empresa internacional.

¿Has ganado mucho dinero con tu trabajo?

Sí. He sido director comercial y también fundé mi propia empresa, y fui inversor inmobiliario de los que dan ideas sobre plano, pero a los 38, sobre todo por culpa de mi empresa, que vendía un producto desfasado, me arruiné y tuve que empezar de nuevo. Tenía mucha ambición, varias propiedades y mucha juventud, y lo perdí todo.

¿Crees que la sociedad tiene una percepción equivocada de los superdotados?

Mucha gente cree que ser superdotado es llevar la S de Superman en el pecho, pero en realidad no somos Superman, sino Clark Kent.

Federico Fernández (46 años, Psicólogo)

Vice: ¿Qué es para ti ser superdotado?

Federico Fernández: Es una cualidad. Algo orgánico. Como tener los ojos azules o las piernas fuertes. Tengo una hija de Altas Capacidades y trato de decirle que no es algo de lo que presumir. Solo se puede presumir del producto del trabajo que consigas con tu esfuerzo.

Valorando tu experiencia, ¿el factor de alta capacitación sido algo positivo o negativo en tu vida?

Hay mucha gente que sigue en ese cliché del éxito basado en ganar dinero o ser portada de una revista, y más en la sociedad de la información en la que vivimos, pero yo lo relaciono con ser feliz.

¿Tuviste dificultades?

La verdad es que tuve compaginar estudios y trabajo desde muy pronto. Pero era un chaval muy social, porque tener altas capacidades te da eso: capacidad para el camuflaje. Así que sí, he sido de mini y botellón, y me han gustado mucho siempre la música electrónica y el tecno. Siempre he tenido mucha facilidad para relacionarme. Lo que sí recuerdo es el silencio de la gente, que a veces se quedaba y se queda callada cuando se profundiza en algún tema. Con el tiempo me he dado cuenta de que era más problema mío que de mis interlocutores.

¿Qué tipo de música compones?

Hago electrónica con un toque clásico, porque también toco el piano.

¿Te gustó la música desde pequeño?

Es curioso, y va a sonar un poco pedante, pero cuando era niño lloraba escuchando música, y siempre me interesó mucho, tanto como los idiomas. De pequeño también lloré al darme cuenta, con siete años, de que había suficientes bomba nucleares como para acabar con el mundo entero, o al tomar conciencia de que mis padres se iban a morir alguna vez.

¿En qué has trabajado? ¿Cómo acabaste ejerciendo la Psicología?

A los 17 años empecé a trabajar en asuntos de la cámara de comercio alemana en Madrid, y al mismo tiempo empecé a estudiar la carrera de Matemáticas, pero me pareció un rollo. Luego me matriculé en Ingeniería de Sistemas, pero me saqué las asignaturas de varios cursos que me gustaban y lo dejé otra vez. A los 30 descubrí que tenía altas capacidades, después de hacerme un examen, y me di cuenta de que si no entendía a los demás era mi problema, así que tenía que empezar por entenderme a mí mismo. Pero también comprendí otra cosa: que en nuestra sociedad te piden que acabes una carrera y estudies también las asignaturas que no te gustan. Me licencié en Psicología a distancia, mientras trabajaba, y ahora tengo mi consulta y estoy desarrollando una App orientada a la relajación.

¿Cómo te sentiste al saber que eras superdotado?

De algún modo siempre lo supe, y mis amigos y mi entorno me decían que no hacía falta que me hiciese la prueba, que lo era sin duda. Pero yo necesitaba el papel.

¿Has utilizado alguna vez lo de ser superdotado para ligar?

No. Además, por mi experiencia a las chicas no les gustan los chicos con más labia de lo normal.

Este vídeo del río irlandés Bonet pasando por debajo de un puente de madera dura más de ocho horas y ya se ha visto casi siete millones de veces desde julio de 2013. Aunque lo de “ver” es una forma de hablar, porque muchos lo usan para dormir. Su autor, Johnnie Lawson, explica en la descripción en Youtube que el vídeo está pensado para funcionar como sonido relajante de fondo mientras dormimos, estudiamos o, como en este caso, escribimos un artículo para Verne.

Según recoge la BBC, el vídeo también forma parte de una investigación clínica que están llevando a cabo varios hospitales de Londres y cuyo objetivo es prevenir el trastorno por estrés postraumático en los pacientes de la unidad de cuidados intensivos. Este estudio proporciona a los pacientes materiales de relajación entre los que se encuentran algunos de los vídeos de Lawson.

Lawson lleva cinco años publicando vídeos de este estilo: suma más de 170 clips de ríos y lagos en los condados irlandeses de Leitrim y Sligo (en la República de Irlanda) y de Fermanagh (en Irlanda del Norte). Muchos de sus vídeos incluyen además consejos para relajarse y estudiar, que también podemos encontrar en su cuenta de Tumblr.

¿Y funcionan? Pues a juzgar por los comentarios, sí. Aelleb, de Bucarest, explica que sus vídeos “me ayudan a estudiar o simplemente para relajarme y aislarme de los desagradables ruidos de la ciudad”. A Irene Tsiouti, de Chipre, sus vídeos le ayudan a estudiar “porque tenemos dos niños en la casa que hacen demasiado ruido”. Y Cody Wilson “se lo pone casi cada noche para dormir”.

Los primeros vídeos de Lawson eran breves, como este de diez minutos que recoge el sonido de las olas contra las rocas y que suma 453.000 visionados. 

Lawson comenzó a hacer vídeos más largos cuando recibió comentarios de gente que conseguía quedarse dormida gracias a estos agradables sonidos de la naturaleza, pero se despertaba en medio de la noche en silencio total.

Algunos de sus vídeos combinan los sonidos naturales con música clásica, como este que ofrece cien minutos de Bach, riachuelos y pajaritos.

Y también tiene vídeos de una hora, ideales para acabar una tarea en concreto o simplemente echar una buena siesta.

 
Dr. Seuss and Nick Cave? Two great tastes that taste great together? Sure. Why not?

Nick Cave’s “Red Right Hand,” a single from his 1994 album

La Comisión Europea ha anunciado su intención de abolir esa lamentable práctica de bloquearte el acceso a contenidos en Internet dependiendo del país donde estés, la cual considera injusta y solo creada para fines comerciales.

Read more...

Chest Crawl, the 2012 LP from Portland’s Guantanamo Baywatch, announced the band as passionate adherents of early-‘60s surf music. However, despite what their name suggests, the Pacific Northwest trio aren’t hopelessly adherent to camp surf rock.
On paper, the aforementioned stylistic offerings seem to anticipate a nostalgic throwback act. However, even though Guantanamo Baywatch actively channel the music they enjoy listening to, they don’t settle with a tired imitation, nor a cheesy rip-off. On top of the stylistic diversification, Darling… It’s Too Late was recorded in a different manner to Guantanamo Baywatch’s previous two albums. Namely, they waved goodbye to the home studio and hooked up with Ed Rawls…

320 kbps | 75 MB  UL | HF | MC ** FLAC

…(Black Lips, The Coathangers) at Living Room Recording in Atlanta. It’s not as though they’ve embraced digital manipulation, but Powell says it was time to move on from the lo-fi setup.

“A lot of people listen to [old rock’n’roll] music and they think it’s really lo-fi, so they try to record it in that way. The thing is, back then when they were recording that music, they weren’t trying to be lo-fi” says vocalist/guitarist Jason Powell. “They were trying to be as hi-fi as possible. They just had old gear. It was new then, but it was different kinds of gear and I think that’s a big mistake people make – trying to make it super lo-fi sounding. I know that in the past, I’ve totally fallen into that. That’s one way to do it, but with the new album, we tried to do it differently.”

For our annual travel issue, we asked Ben Schott, author of Schott’s Original Miscellany, to offer up his essential etiquette for the globe-trotting gourmand (also see his Thanksgiving etiquette guide). The rules include never schlep a sheep:

Friendly Skies?

➤ Flying is increasingly hellish, so Bring Your Own Everything—from noise-canceling headphones to gigabytes of entertainment.

➤ If your terminal has a Shake Shack, you win! But don’t bring malodorous food onto the plane and expect not to be loathed. Pack fruit, veg, nuts, and berries, and create an oasis of freshness at 30,000 ft.

➤ An inflatable neck pillow might be acceptable for long hauls, but there’s no excuse for wearing it through the airport like a plastic “dog cone of shame.” (Teenage girls: There’s never an excuse for lugging a full-size bed pillow with you.)

➤ To talk to your seatmates or not: That is the question. Whether ’tis nobler during the flight to suffer the banalities of a rambling fool, or pretend to be asleep. It depends … are they cute?

Parlez-Vous?

➤ One of the joys of travel is the challenge of a new language. While English gets you pretty far in even the most far-flung places, there’s no better way to experience a culture, or interact with locals, than to strike up a conversation—even if it’s just a few simple phrases backed up by the international language of gesticulation.

Become a Regular

➤ While variety is the allspice of travel, it’s fun to establish a local, even if just for a week. Find a neighborhood café or bar, and pop in each day at the same time. Before you know it, you’re Norm from Cheers.
 

➤ Another good way to integrate abroad: Get your hair cut or beard shaved. Language barrier be damned! Don’t worry—it will grow back!

Eat, Pray, Love

➤ Make a list of local dishes you want to try, and avoid always the international menu of bland.

➤ If you fall for a particular dish, order it in a variety of places to see how it is differently prepared.

➤ Search out a local kitchen supply store. In Paris, the ironwork of the Eiffel Tower pales into insignificance next to the copper pots at E. Dehillerin in the 1st.

➤ Bring home basics like wooden spoons to add memories to mundane kitchen tasks.

➤ Never turn down a home-cooked meal. In fact, ask if you can come a little early to watch or help cook.

➤ Book restaurant tables before you leave home.

Unsocial Media

➤ Social media’s golden rule is “Post as you wish to view” —if you find other people’s smug selfies of Champagne quaffing irritating, guess what they think about yours?

➤ Posting pictures from a gelateria in San Francisco will immediately alert your family/friends/ex that you are in town. In cyberspace, everyone can see you eat ice cream.

When in Rome

➤ The surest way to grasp regional etiquette is to keep your eyes peeled. When using cutlery, serving food, or asking for the bill, do what the locals do. BUT: No matter how many people you might see spitting—don’t.

If it Moves, Tip It

➤ Tipping is complex and often counterintuitive. If in doubt, follow local custom—but don’t be shy about rewarding exemplary service, and never short-change a chambermaid: It’s a hell of a job, you slob.

Wish U Were Here

➤ Postcards are great, but letters are better—especially as you get to write on good old-fashioned hotel stationery.

➤ If you can find a postcard that features a picture of your hotel, remember to circle the window of your room. Old school.

What to Bring Back

➤ Everything changes far from home: Our senses are heightened, and our discrimination is diminished. Thus the perfect rosé we sipped in the starlight glow turns to vinegar when glugged on an autumnal Tuesday. Below is a guide on to what is safe to schlep:

The post A Modern Guide to Travel Etiquette appeared first on Bon Appétit.

You and your friend group do everything together—you moved to the same big city, got jobs in the same field, go to the same parties, shop at the same stores, laugh at the same jokes, and brunch at the same hot brunch spots. If this is your sitch, you probably have the same nightmare of waking up one day and realizing that all of your friends have gotten pregnant without you. Pregnancy pacts are the most solemn bonds we share with our fellow sisters, and finding yourself on the outside of an adult pregnancy pact can be a shock to anyone. Are your friends making preggo pacts behind your back? Let’s just imagine how awful that could be:

You thought that you could trust your friends, but apparently you were wrong. For the past few weeks your friends said they were busy going to various fitness classes and picking up extra shifts at their respective jobs. All of a sudden, they start gaining weight rapidly, and you wonder why since they’ve all been juicing like crazy. Suddenly, it hits you: Their Drynuary has been going on for months now. The only possible answer? They all made a pregnancy pact and left you out of it.

The reality of the betrayal sets in. For the rest of their adult lives, your friends will be making playdates at places that childless people can’t get into, like the playground and Chuck-E-Cheese’s. Even if you meet someone, fall in love, and get pregnant, you’re still going to be months, potentially even years behind their bond, as they smile knowingly at your clumsy foray into early motherhood, if you’re even lucky enough to have a baby. How could they do this? They knew this would hurt you, but they went ahead and let their husbands sperminate them without consulting you first. The ultimate betrayal. Your friends are selfish and you are the only good person you know. Why didn’t they say something??

You realize you’re going to have to find a new set of friends. Real friends wouldn’t make a pregnancy pact and quietly agree to get pregnant without you. Real friends would wait for you to fall in love, get married, or at least make an appointment with an adoption agency before they decided to get pregnant. Now your womb is empty and your eggs are dying as your fertile friends walk around with smug expressions and talk about how much their feet hurt. You have to stay strong.

If you’ve found yourself on the outside of a pregnancy pact, now is the time to delete their numbers from your phone, pour yourself a glass of wine, and get ready to start the next chapter of your life: a barrenness pact, with yourself.

Are Your Friends Making Pregnancy Pacts Behind Your Back? is a post from: Reductress

La sorpresa fue mayúscula cuando ECC Ediciones anunció la recuperación de ‘Hellblazer‘ en su totalidad en unos lujosos volúmenes (17 en concreto) que agruparían, por guionistas, las distintas etapas con que ha contado la colección. Un sueño hecho realidad teniendo en cuenta lo difícil de la empresa, no solo por la extensión de la obra, sino por lo especial de la edición, ya que no seguirá un orden cronológico. Muchos han sido los aficionados que se han apresurado a alzar la voz mostrando su disconformidad con esta solución pero también han sido bastantes los que han aceptado las reglas del juego y en lo único que piensan es en disfrutar de uno de los títulos más importantes que hemos tenido en los últimos años.

La primera entrega de tan magna colección debía estar a la altura de las circunstancias, muchas podían ser las elecciones pero finalmente se han decantado por Garth Ennis, un peso pesado dentro de Vertigo y de la cabecera de John Constantine. Una etapa que empezaría a dar sus primeros pasos cuando el irlandés llegó en 1991 con ganas de poner patas arriba todo lo relacionado con el mago más pendenciero del Noveno Arte. Para ello no se le ocurrió mejor forma de atacar la tranquilidad de Constantine con algo tan “mundano” como un cáncer terminal.

Esa historia, “Hábitos Peligrosos” publicada por primera vez en España por la fenecida editorial Zinco, fue el pistoletazo de salida para algunas de las aventuras más recordadas del personaje y viendo los guionistas que pasarían después (y los que estuvieron antes) eso es decir mucho. ¡Ojo! Se trata de una historia descomunal pero no será la única que nos vamos a encontrar en esta primera entrega. Los elementos que han hecho grande a Hellblazer están siempre presentes: antiguos dioses paganos, escenas en pubs londinenses donde el alcohol se sirve por litros y venganza, en grandes cantidades y con un objetivo en común: nuestro simpático y querido John.

Relatos todos ellos de una calidad sobresaliente y que encumbraron a Ennis hacía los puestos importantes de la industria gracias al tono tan particular que consiguió imprimir a la serie. Pero claro, también contó con grandes ilustradores de la época (y de la casa) como son Will Simpson, Mike Hoffman, Sean Philips o Steve Dillon (con quien años más tarde firmaría ese clásico titulado Predicador). Una primera entrega que promete emociones fuertes y muchas historias para recordar. Esperemos que un proyecto como este llegue a buen puerto y podamos tener en nuestras estanterías la edición definitiva de un título mítico.
[Grade — 9.50]

¿Sabes lo que significa la palabra cacosmia? Es una enfermedad que quien la padece está obsesionado con atrapar ladrones. Sí, me lo he inventado, como se hacía cuando «jugábamos al diccionario»: se buscaba una palabra y se creaba una definición. Eso hicieron hace ya más de veinte años Eduardo Armada Rodríguez y Miguel Carrera Andrés y ahora ambos han creado un juego de mesa basado en aquella idea: Sabidurius.

Lo primero que llama la atención del juego es su diseño. Creado por el artista Ramón Trigo, Premio Lazarillo de Álbum Ilustrado 2012 por Leviatán. El gran reto era crear una obra que fuera al mismo tiempo tan hermosa como práctica para jugar sobre ella. Y parece que lo consiguió. Para Sabidurius realizó el diseño de treinta obras que componen las trescientas tarjetas con novecientas palabras y definiciones, los elementos del juego y el tablero, donde los jugadores van siguiendo la senda marcada por un misterioso hombre de bombín siempre rodeado de interrogantes, siempre en la búsqueda de cada definición.

Una labor fundamental para conseguir que los jugadores se enganchen fue la búsqueda de términos muy poco frecuentes en el vocabulario cotidiano, prácticamente en desuso. Así que cada participante tiene que desarrollar al máximo su creatividad. «En Sabidurius todo vale, desde lo más serio y rebuscado, a lo más simple y delirante». Algo así como cuando te justificas con un profesor en la escuela, cuando llegas tarde al trabajo o cuando ligas.  «Las definiciones más disparatadas son las que más triunfan», señala Armada.

Gana quien logra persuadir a sus contrincantes de que su definición es la más acertada. «En realidad es algo que hacemos cuando nos encontramos con una palabra cuyo significado desconocemos. Pensamos: ¿a qué me suena? ¿Qué me sugiere?».  De alguna manera, sus creadores buscaron marcar una diferencia con otros juegos de palabras, como por ejemplo el Scrabble, pues buscaban que  tuviera como elemento primordial el ingenio de cada persona. «Lo que ocurre en nuestra cabeza desde que escuchamos una palabra hasta que elaboramos una definición tiene mucho que ver con la imaginación, el vocabulario, con la asociación de ideas, con la concreción, la capacidad de síntesis y, por supuesto, con la escritura; es todo un proceso creativo», afirma Eduardo Armada.

Esta lúdica también permite que quien juega se acerque a las palabras de una manera diferente, sin los agobios y las obligaciones de la academia. «Sin duda Sabidurius es una buena forma de perderle el miedo a las palabras y a la escritura». Además, para adquirirlo o lo haces a través de la web o en una librería. Así que si vas a comprar el juego, en una de esas también te llevas un libro.

La mayor satisfacción de sus creadores es darse cuenta de que Sabidurius ha conquistado desde adolescentes hasta abuelos casi centenarios. Y es más gratificante cuando ven a unos y otros compitiendo y riendo en una misma partida. «Resulta sorprendente lo que pueden llegar a escribir  ocho personas alrededor de una mesa cuando les pides que definan palabras como meliponinos», concluye Armada. Desde finales del año pasado ya está a la venta la segunda edición.

Por cierto, cacosmia, según la Real Academia de la Lengua, significa «olor fétido» o «perversión del sentido del olfato, que hace agradables los olores repugnantes o fétidos». Pero eso da igual. ¿Tú cómo la definirías?

Este post ¡Que no se cachifolle tu mente! El juego de las palabras raras, escrito por Carlos López-Aguirre, se publicó originalmente en Yorokobu.