Zephyr Dear

Last we heard from People People, we took a look at their 'invisible' speaker; the Stockholm-based design studio has since come out with several modern, minimal variations in highly competitive product categories, including headphones and a pocket watch. Their latest project is an update to yet another widely-used but largely undifferentiated product, the bicycle, and once again, People People strip the product to its essence and proceed to improve it with just a few signature details.

Taking inspiration from the iconic Kronan city bike—a workhorse despite its weight—the "Spiran" is "the sleeker and younger sibling of Kronan that moved into the city," and its name is a reference to that of its beloved predecessor: "Kronan is Swedish for 'Crown,' and Spiran means 'Scepter.'" Besides its clean lines and slim form factor, we were impressed with the integrated lock (sketch below; GIF after the jump); the premium materials and belt drive are also intended to maximize its utility with minimal maintenance.

We had the chance to talk to designer / People People co-founder Per Brickstad about the "Spiran":

To what degree is the Spiran is a successor to the Kronan, and to what degree is it a departure?

Per Brickstad: Kronan is based on old Swedish military bikes. Its sturdy, simple, rugged, reliable functionality has gone straight into the Swedish customers' hearts since it was introduced back in the 90's. The values listed above would probably in themselves be enough for a successful product, but I'm as a designer very fascinated by the way Kronan as a brand was so easily accepted as an obvious, unobtrusive instant design classic. People actually think it's a 120 year old brand rather than 20 years. In the same way Spiran takes inspiration from old Swedish postal bikes, and old porteur bikes in general, combined with inspiration from the more recent fixed-gear city messenger. These bikes were all made to transport things through a city, and are therefore the obvious inspiration for a modern city version of Kronan.

(more...)

A California lawsuit brought by elections watchdog the Fair Political Practices Commission has unraveled a network of nonprofits that the Koch Brothers used to launder millions in illegal campaign contributions. These were made to campaigns over two ballot measures: one that would have raised taxes on the wealthiest Californians; the other crippled unions' fundraising. The Kochs funneled $15m into these campaigns, using a series of front-organizations that were also apparently employed by other billionaires including Charles Schwab, Gene Haas, Bob Fisher, and Eli Broad.

By October 2012, Russo had steered nearly $29 million for his Props. 30 and 32 advocacy campaign to Americans for Job Security. But there was a problem. Election day was less than two months away, and the way campaign law works, the standards for disclosing donors get tougher within that two-month window. So, out of fear that its donors could somehow be revealed, AJS and its lawyers took precautions, choosing to funnel the money through the Center to Protect Patients Rights, which was run by Sean Noble, who was then the primary outside consultant and strategist to the Koch brothers' national donor network. The settlement documents indicate that AJS made three, no-strings-attached donations to Noble's group: $4.05 million on September 10, 2012, $14 million October 11, 2012, and $6.5 million.

Here, the money trail forks into two trails. In one direction, CPPR gave $7 million to a nonprofit called the American Future Fund, which in turn passed $4.08 million of that to a subsidiary in California. That subsidiary, the California Future Fund for Free Markets, finally spent the money on influencing Props. 30 and 32.

In the second direction, CPPR directed $13 million to its Arizona neighbor, Americans for Responsible Leadership. ARL then passed $11 million of that money to the Small Business Action Committee in Sacramento, which spent the money influencing Props. 30 and 32.

Here's the bottom line: A California fundraiser raised a boatload of money. He shuffled it through a network of secretly funded nonprofit groups to hide the donors' identities. And when the money finally arrived in California in time to influence the 2012 elections, the fingerprints on the money had been thoroughly scrubbed off—and in the process, the operatives masterminding this scheme had broken the law.

California Watchdog: "Koch Brothers Network" Behind $15 Million Dark-Money Donations [Andy Kroll/Mother Jones]

(via /.)

This is the single most useful keyboard shortcut I’ve ever found, but it seems no-one knows about it; at least, if they do, they didn’t tell me at any point in the first 33 years of my computer career.

If you copy (Ctrl-C) from a web-page, or a Word/OpenOffice document, or any other source that has formatting, then when you paste the copied material into a document that supports formatting (such as another Word/OpenOffice document or a WordPress post), the formatting — or at least, a broken attempt at it — will be pasted in. That usually means that you get fonts you didn’t want, that are inconsistent with the rest of the document. I imagine this is the cause of most of the horrible Font Soup you see in too many MS-Word documents.

This is a proper pain if, to pick a purely hypothetical example, you’re putting together a book based on your own blog-posts.

So instead, use paste-without-formatting. In OpenOffice (and its derivatives: NeoOffice, LibreOffice, etc.) this is on the Edit menu as Paste Special…, but you can use the shortcut Shift-Ctrl-V (or Apple-Ctrl-V on a Mac) to invoke it. It pops up a small menu of paste styles: double-click on Unformatted Text and you’re done.

It turns out that although there is no corresponding menu-item in the WordPress composer, the keyboard shortcut works — in fact, it works even better than it does in OpenOffice, as it doesn’t bother with the menu and just does the paste as unformatted text.

Shift-Ctrl-V: it’s your friend.

Rashid Rana's "Red Carpet 1" is a 2007 piece that appears to be a beautiful, intricate woven rug, but which actually consists of thousands of graphic images from Pakistan's slaughterhouse.

"Red Carpet 1 when looked at from a distance is a beautiful deep red carpet. Upon closer inspection, it is revealed that the carpet is made up of images taken in a slaughterhouse. The work reflects the duel existence of Pakistan as a purveyor of beauty and violence.

Rashid Rana. Red Carpet 1, 2007.

“Over and over again as I’ve dredged through this stuff, I kept finding programming constructs, ideas and approaches we call part of “modern” programming if we attempt them at all, sitting abandoned in 45-year-old demo code for dead languages. And to be clear: that was always a choice. Over and over again tools meant to make it easier for humans to approach big problems are discarded in favor of tools that are easier to teach to computers, and that decision is described as an inevitability.”

- The money shot in this really fascinating article on why we (usually) start counting arrays at 0 instead of 1 in programming languages, a story that also involves yacht racing. Recommended, even if you don’t program! 

The somewhat iconic face of HealthCare.gov, recently seen panicking over the health law's rocky roll out, has gotten the boot.

She is no longer, as of this weekend, the face of the health law's Web site. In her place are four bright logos, each representing a different way to apply for insurance coverage: Online, over the phone, with a paper application and in person.

The cheery couple on the next page also appears to have made a fast exit as well, replaced by some less functional circles, representing individuals and families.

As Alex Howard points out, this makes better use of the Web site's hottest real estate, putting the different ways to shop front and center. Whether these will be easier ways of purchasing coverage remains to be seen. The in-person navigators, linked to in the dark blue circle above, use the same Web site as the rest of the shoppers. Any problems that consumers going it alone run into don't disappear when an in-person assistant shows up.

As for the HealthCare.gov lady, she's been a small object of media fascination, mostly because no one has been able to track the woman down. This is not for a lack of effort: A number of reporters have made it known they would like to get in touch with the model. Some thought they might have found her on a modeling agency Web site (the boss there said it wasn't the same person); PRI's Todd Zwillich had a near-sighting on the New York Times Web site.

CNN ran an entire segment about the mystery. This actually happened!

Health and Human Services does not plan to release her information. Spokesman Richard Olague told Buzzfeed, “The woman featured on the website signed a release for us to use the photo, but to protect her privacy, we will not share her personal or contact info with anyone.”

After 26 days as the face of HealthCare.gov, she appears to have moved on to other endeavors. At least she hung around long enough to provide some Halloween costume information.

Early last week, we looked at one of the many reasons Healthcare.gov failed the way it did: The use of the "waterfall" software development methodology, completing one stage before moving on to another, rather than the "Agile" method, where software is built in iterative bursts, with testing throughout. It seems to have touched a nerve among computer folks, many of whom wrote in with observations on how Agile actually works, and whether it was even the right way to go for a site like Healthcare.gov. Herewith, a few of the most interesting (those without names asked for anonymity to protect their jobs).

----

From an IT consultant for governments and corporations:

From the Chief Technology Officer of a management consulting and IT firm focusing on defense and intelligence:

I was prepared to be enraged by another article that “doesn’t get it” but was pleasantly surprised by your article. My note here is not for attribution, but am open to talking with you.

A couple of comments:

• It was a traditional contract vehicle that brought in the design firms under Aquilent. The contract structures exist to allow that to happen but there needs to be strong government leadership and desire to do so. The government contract community is CHOOSING “Low Cost Technically Acceptable” as a framework. They don’t HAVE to. The procurement model supports many varieties of things but does not give the government leaders support for choosing innovation over low cost. The real story is about supporting Government leaders to do the right thing.
• The front end website was NOT developed Open Source as you state. It utilized Open Source code and published the code back. But it did not use the open source community to code and debug, so I think you got that wrong as far as I see. FYI, they have pulled their code back — it is NOT open to the public at this time. Maybe a story there.
• Some acknowledgement of the back end complexity should be made. There are 50+ exchanges interacting with massive archaic back end systems. That is not a good place for Agile. And I don’t think how back end systems function with Personal Data should be made public, do you? I think CGI probably take some blame but they are dealing with enormous challenges. The story you cited references this, but your does not.
• Agile requires a business owner to be embedded who can make real time decisions. Health Care system complexity does not lend itself to that being the case. The challenge is the complexity of the problem — a lot of that comes from CONGRESS!! No one has read ACA b/c its so complex.

----

From Agile coach Cliff Berg:

Well first of all, we need to distinguish program management from agile project management. Agile is a methodology pertaining to software projects. It does not speak to how one manages a large program - a collection of projects. Agile values and principles can be said to inform program management, but there is no consensus on how one manages an agile program. So if one says that a large software program was "done agile", one is mis-speaking because there is no such thing.

That said, there are many points of view in the agile community on how one should manage programs. This is often referred to as "scaling agile" (from the project level to the program level or organization level). This is an immature area however, and as I said, there is no consensus.

One also needs to distinguish between programs that are owned by the government and ones that are effectively contracted out. There is no sharp line between these two ends of the spectrum. What is typical is that an agency will contract out each step in the process, but insist that the government own the resulting product and often that it be built and deployed using government processes and systems. For example, an agency might have several different contractors build pieces, but each step of the process is overseen by a government manager: one might have a development manager (gov), a test manager (gov), a release management manager (gov), a data center ops manager (gov), etc., and each of these has a counterpart in the respective vendor - the vendors are often different for each step of the process. In this situation, the gov is able to ensure that agency processes are used - processes for governance and risk management. On the other end of the spectrum, the gov might contract with a systems integrator to develop, deploy, and operate an entire system with the gov playing almost no role: that is very rare for software.

Thus, the typical case is that the gov plays a very active role. I don't have insight into how healthcare.gov was managed, so I can't speak to where on the spectrum it was/is, but it sounds like it was somewhere in the middle. That would imply that the gov bears a-lot of responsibility for what happened, but I don't know for sure.

The vast, vast majority of government software projects operate in the manner that I described in which the gov basically embeds several contractors in the gov processes of development and deployment. Each contractor has project managers, but there are gov counterparts to those.

In that situation, it is often hard to say if a project is "done agile" because a project does not exist in a vacuum. Unlike a small team in a startup, a contractor agile team in a government agency has to abide by all of the governance rules that the agency has. The project also usually has to rely on various support functions for security, testing, enterprise architecture, deployment, data center operation, etc. These functions might be staffed by contractors, but they are usually managed by government managers. And each function usually uses different vendors for their contractors.

This makes it is really hard to do a project "agile". The challenge is getting all of the support functions to act in an agile manner - doing things "just in time" rather than doing big plans and schedules and designs. One also has to get the gov business-side stakeholders to properly support the agile process, by allowing requirements to evolve instead of contracting out a big up front requirements definition effort.

And the big elephant in the room is contracting/procurement. Traditional fixed price, fixed feature deliverable-focused task orders kill agile projects. Agile projects can only be successful if contracts are more flexible.

The process of converting an organization (like a gov agency) to properly support agile projects is referred to as "agile transformation". Agile transformation is really hard, and it is what I do. It is management consulting with a agile flavor, and it involves working with the CIO of the agency and the various managers to change how they do things. It also involves changing how the agency plans and manages its portfolio of IT projects and how it does contracting. Agile transformation utilizes "agile coaches" to evangelize the ideas and work directly with software teams, but there are usually a small number of senior "transformation coaches" (like me) who work with management to plan and oversee the process.

Thus, the situation of agile in government is not simple. If one says that there are successful agile projects in gov agencies, then one is implying that either (1) the project was given a "pass" and allowed to bypass the agency's support functions and governance steps, or (2) the support functions were made to work properly (in an agile manner) with the project. The latter is the ideal, and if that is the case, then there is a much larger story: it means that the agency was transformed and made to be an agile agency for its IT work - and that is a big deal.

Agile is pretty new in gov circles. There are lots of success stories, but they are usually special cases - the #1 from above - and that is not interesting because it is not scalable. What is more interesting is which organizations have been able to change how they work so that they can support agile projects in a repeatable manner for all their IT work.

---

From a quality assurance manager at a large e-commerce website:

It's an interesting question, though -- because what you are really asking is would the public be ok with the ongoing discussion of requirements and changes, and should that be done out in the open? I'm pretty sure you will find a litany of stories now about how the developers knew well in advance that this was going to turn out the way it did. The problem is the organizations involved are not set up to hear and respond to that kind of internal alarm in an effective manner, partially because their marching orders come from outside, by government folks that are also not geared to that kind of responsive change.

---

From Larry Lewicki, retired technologist at Texas Instruments and National Semiconductor:

I really liked your article from Oct 21. As a retired engineering manager (hardware - communications integrated circuits) -- I believe that there's a lot of truth to these observations. However, I'm still left with a big question:

Can an 'agile' environment can work within the legislative process?

My belief is that the rigid development of comprehensive front end specifications is indicative of a "legalistic" environment -- where there's significant lack of trust between the players who negotiate the law. (You agree to develop this -- no more - no less -- in this amount of time.)

It seems to me that the product paradigm based on hardware that a user owns -- and will use for a while (subsequently replacing) is inherently consistent with the 'legalistic' environment. The user "knows" what they own.

On the other hand, web based software -- that the user occasionally accesses - has a different paradigm. It can continually be upgraded without negatively impacting the user. Something like Google Maps or Google Docs -- is continually being upgraded -- I don't know what has happened in the last 24 hours since I started planning my vacation. I'm sure Amazon is modifying their web software as I'm typing this email.

Agile environments -- mean the specification is constantly evolving as well -- this very behavior seems counter to the way the US government writes legislation -- which in turn drove healthcare.gov.

---

Scott Simenas, retired software engineer with Raytheon:

Thank you for responding to my comments about your article "The way government does tech is outdated and risky." The problems affecting the Obamacare Website are not related to the contractor software processes used to develop the major components:

• Enterprise Identity Management (EIDM) QSSI lead contractor: Manages the user accounts and provides secure access.
• Federally Facilitated Marketplace (FFM) CGI lead contractor: User interface to the Obamacare Website .
• Data Services Hub (DSH) CMS lead contractor: Connectivity hub to the federal agency databases for the IRS, Social Security Administration, and Department of Homeland Security and connectivity hub to the more than 170 insurance carriers in the 36 states the FFM operates in.

The problems are related to:

• Inadequate testing of the DSH connectivity to federal agency databases and insurance carriers database. All the possible pathways to the legacy databases could not be tested until the system was fully integrated.
• Inadequate real-time performance of the existing federal agency databases and insurance carriers database. These databases were probably not designed to handle the large number of concurrent users expected for the Obamacare Website.

According to CGI Federal Senior VP Cheryl Campbell's written testimony to be presented to the House Commerce and Energy Committee on Thursday October 24th, all three contractor components were tested and validated well before going live on October 1st. Ms. Campbell states that the government agency Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) was responsible for overall system integration of the three contractor components and interfacing to the federal agency databases and insurance carriers databases. According to blogs and articles I have read the integrated Obamacare Website was not tested until the day before going live.

In my opinion any problems in the EIDM and FFM should be quickly and easily fixed. The harder problems to fix are in the DSH and the legacy databases. The Obamacare Website uses a loosely coupled database connectivity approach called federated database systems. The problem with this approach is performance and reliability of the overall system is only as good as the slowest and least reliable database in the federation and it may not be feasible to tune the individual databases for the required system performance. It is also extremely difficult and expensive to keep the data model in the DSH consistent with the all the disparate/redundant/inconsistent data models of the databases in the federation. If the federated database approach cannot be made to work, then the Obamacare Website may need to build a common database with a unified consistent/un-ambiguous data model that extracts and uploads data periodically from the legacy databases into the integrated common database. This may be the only way to provide the performance and reliability required by the Obamacare Website.

Newly published Snowden leaks show that the UK spy agency GCHQ took extraordinary measures to hide the eager cooperativeness of the country's phone companies, who were apparently delighted to help it spy on the nation and its allies; further, the leak details the GCHQ's internal conviction that their spying violated European law, and thus had to be kept a secret.

The agency fought domestic attempts to make wiretapping materials admissible as evidence lest the public discover the extent of its illegal spying programme, and it sought out sympathetic public figures to discredit opponents and celebrate its spying, including the LibDem peer Lord Carlile. Carlile has been slamming the Guardian for its coverage of the Snowden leaks -- apparently acting as a de facto PR agent for the nation's criminal spy-class.

GCHQ's submission goes on to set out why its relationships with telecoms companies go further than what can be legally compelled under current law. It says that in the internet era, companies wishing to avoid being legally mandated to assist UK intelligence agencies would often be able to do so "at little cost or risk to their operations" by moving "some or all" of their communications services overseas.

As a result, "it has been necessary to enter into agreements with both UK-based and offshore providers for them to afford the UK agencies access, with appropriate legal authorisation, to the communications they carry outside the UK".

The submission to ministers does not set out which overseas firms have entered into voluntary relationships with the UK, or even in which countries they operate, though documents detailing the Tempora programme made it clear the UK's interception capabilities relied on taps located both on UK soil and overseas.

There is no indication as to whether the governments of the countries in which deals with companies have been struck would be aware of the GCHQ cable taps.

Evidence that telecoms firms and GCHQ are engaging in mass interception overseas could stoke an ongoing diplomatic row over surveillance ignited this week after the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, accused the NSA of monitoring her phone calls, and the subsequent revelation that the agency monitored communications of at least 35 other world leaders.

Leaked memos reveal GCHQ efforts to keep mass surveillance secret [James Ball/The Guardian]

(via /.)

you know I am seeing a lot of people get upset and say that I am mean or evil and then in the very same post recommend my comic to their followers, and what I’m getting from this is that people LIKE to be sad and they want their friends to be sad about the same things with them.

so really I’m doing everyone a favor.

Emails about how wrong I am in 3... 2... 1...

The evil ones, according to C.S. Lewis. Micah Mattix finds this passage from his A Preface to Paradise Lost that explains why:

Satan is the best drawn of Milton’s characters. The reason is not hard to find. Of the major characters whom Milton attempted he is incomparably the easiest to draw. Set a hundred poets to tell the same story and in ninety of the resulting poems Satan will be the best character. In all but a few writers the “good” characters are the least successful, and every one who has ever tried to make even the humblest story ought to know why. To make a character worse than oneself it is only necessary to release imaginatively from control some of the bad passions which, in real life, are always straining at the leash; the Satan, the Iago, the Becky Sharp, within each of us, is always there and only too ready, the moment the leash is slipped, to come out and have in our books that holiday we try to deny them in our lives. But if you try to draw a character better than yourself, all you can do is to take the best moments you have had and to imagine them prolonged and more consistently embodied in action.  But the real high virtues which we do not possess at all, we cannot depict except in a purely external fashion. We do not really know what it feels like to be a man much better than ourselves. His whole inner landscape is one we have never seen, and when we guess it we blunder.

Noah Millman rather strenuously objects:

I’m genuinely perplexed what Lewis is talking about. Is he under the impression that the history of literature is bereft of heroes? Presumably, those would be people possessed of “high virtues” if the phrase has any meaning at all. I suspect Achilles wouldn’t pass muster for him as “good” – but if he’s not possessed of “high virtues” then I don’t know what the word means. Or does he think that bourgeois virtue is pale and boring? Is he under the impression that Dorothea Brooke is an uninteresting character? Or Leopold Bloom? Or John Ames?

And what about those evil characters? Iago, yeah, he’s a pretty rotten piece of fruit. But is Othello evil? What about Anna Karenina? Or Captain Ahab? For that matter, is Edgar really less-interesting than Edmund? Really? Are you sure?

And dare I mention in this regard Huck Finn’s own estimation of his damnedness, versus our own estimation of his heroism?

Saying “all it takes” to write a successful character is to release one’s own pent-up desire to do evil is akin to saying that “all it takes” to make a hit movie or television show is to show a little skin. Which is to say: it isn’t correct at all. Writing a successful villain is extremely difficult – because writing any kind of successful character is extremely difficult.

(Depiction of Satan, the antagonist of Milton’s epic poem, by Gustave Doré circa 1866)

An anonymous "US intelligence source" told a German newspaper that Obama had been briefed on the fact that the NSA had tapped German chancellor Angela Merkel's phone in 2010, and that he'd personally let it go. Expect a lot more of this, as spooks who are sick of being kicked around for conducting the spying that high-ranking administration officials had been delighted to green-light start to whisper the names of their collaborators in government.

Bild am Sonntag newspaper quoted US intelligence sources as saying that National Security Agency chief Keith Alexander had briefed Obama on the operation against Merkel in 2010.

"Obama did not halt the operation but rather let it continue," the newspaper quoted a high-ranking NSA official as saying.

News weekly Der Spiegel reported that leaked NSA documents showed that Merkel's phone had appeared on a list of spying targets since 2002, and was still under surveillance shortly before Obama visited Berlin in June.

Obama aware of Merkel spying since 2010: German media [Deborah Cole/AFP]

(via /.)

Blue Is the Warmest Color, the Palme d’Or-winning film by Abdellatif Kechiche, continues to draw controversy for its NC-17 sex scenes. But not every theater is taking notes from the MPAA:

[The recommendation from the MPAA ratings board that “no children will be admitted"] is only, in the end, a recommendation, without legal or contractual force. And at least one theater has decided to flout it. The IFC Center in Greenwich Village — part of the IFC family, which includes Sundance Selects, the label that submitted “Blue” to the ratings board in the first place — will not turn away curious youngsters. In an e-mailed statement, John Vanco, senior vice president and general manager of the IFC Center … announced that “high school age patrons” would be admitted.

A.O. Scott, whose 14-year-old daughter viewed the film (twice), offers advice to parents:

You have your own rules, and your own reasons for enforcing them, and naked bodies writhing in ecstasy may not be something you want your kids to see. But in some ways, because of its tone and subject matter, “Blue” is a movie that may be best appreciated by viewers under the NC-17 age cutoff.  It’s a movie about a high school student, after all, confronting issues — peer pressure, first love, homework, postgraduate plans — that will be familiar to adolescents and perhaps more exotic to the middle-aged. In spite of linguistic and cultural differences, the main character, moody, self-absorbed and curious, will remind many American girls of themselves, their friends and the heroines of the young adult novels they devour. The content of the film is really no racier that what is found in those books, but our superstition about images designates it as adults-only viewing.

Alyssa Rosenberg applauds Scott for “talking publicly about the value of introducing your children to challenging culture, instead of focusing solely and obsessively on the potential dangers”:

So often, pop culture’s treated as if its only possible impact on young people who consume it (and too often, older people, too) is deleterious. And it’s absolutely true that films, television, books, comics, video games, and even museum installations can be frightening, confusing, upsetting, and challenging.

But they can also provide flashes of profound recognition that make viewers, readers, and players feel less alone in the world. They can stun you with beauty, or wound you with ugliness. They can level you with humor. Loving something can provide profound connections to people who share your affection for it. And even when a piece of culture profoundly disturbs you, it can open up the world to you, and reveal big truths that you’d previously avoided. These are risks that are worth taking.

Daniel D’Addario agrees that teens “can handle some on-screen sexuality – and they might just be enriched by art.”  Michelle Dean praises the film but questions whether its depictions of lesbian sex are realistic.  For Stephanie Zacharek, the question is: “At this point, what reasonably curious person doesn’t want to see Blue Is the Warmest Color? But what’s going to happen when people trek out, revved up for lots of hot lesbian sex, and find something else?”

[S]ome will see Blue Is the Warmest Color as pure horndog bait, yet another degradation of the female image made by a guy with his dirty-minded camera. Others—more, I hope—will see a story about the universality of desire and heartbreak. Love will tear us apart again. For better or worse, that truth is more enduring than politics.

Richard Corliss calls the film “unmissable” and suggests other filmmakers take note:

Instead of wondering why there is so much whoopee in Blue Is the Warmest Color — and it’s actually not that much: about nine minutes in the nearly three-hour film — one might ask why there is so little in most other movies. Considering that sex is an activity almost everyone participates in and thinks about even more, it’s startling and depressing to think about how few movies connect their characters’ lives with their erotic drives.

David Edelstein also attests to the film’s power:

The movie goes on for three hours without an emotional letup — it’s finally overwhelming. People who’ve been through a terrible recent breakup—or can conjure up the sense memory of one — should approach Blue Is the Warmest Color with care. It might not just open old wounds. It might show you wounds you didn’t know you had.

Eric W. Dolan spots a remarkable recent homily from Pope Francis, a riff on these lines from the Gospel of Luke: “Woe to you, scholars of the law! You have taken away the key of knowledge!” He interprets the phrase as a critique of Christians who turn belief in God into an ideology. From the Vatican Radio transcript:

“The faith passes, so to speak, through a distiller and becomes ideology. And ideology does not beckon [people]. In ideologies there is not Jesus: in his tenderness, his love, his meekness. And ideologies are rigid, always. Of every sign: rigid. And when a Christian becomes a disciple of the ideology, he has lost the faith: he is no longer a disciple of Jesus, he is a disciple of this attitude of thought… For this reason Jesus said to them: ‘You have taken away the key of knowledge.’ The knowledge of Jesus is transformed into an ideological and also moralistic knowledge, because these close the door with many requirements.”

… “The faith becomes ideology and ideology frightens, ideology chases away the people, distances, distances the people and distances of the Church of the people. But it is a serious illness, this of ideological Christians. It is an illness, but it is not new, eh? Already the Apostle John, in his first Letter, spoke of this. Christians who lose the faith and prefer the ideologies. His attitude is: be rigid, moralistic, ethical, but without kindness. This can be the question, no? But why is it that a Christian can become like this? Just one thing: this Christian does not pray. And if there is no prayer, you always close the door.”

“The key that opens the door to the faith,” the Pope added, “is prayer.” The Holy Father warned: “When a Christian does not pray, this happens. And his witness is an arrogant witness.” He who does not pray is “arrogant, is proud, is sure of himself. He is not humble. He seeks his own advancement.” Instead, he said, “when a Christian prays, he is not far from the faith; he speaks with Jesus.”

Dreher comments:

As you know, I have been skeptical of Pope Francis, but this sermon of his really spoke to me. I had made an ideology of my Catholicism. I hadn’t meant for it to be that way, but that’s what happened. It came about mostly because I was rightly (I still believe) concerned with the loss of the sense of the holy, and of morals and doctrines, in contemporary Catholicism. But I made the cardinal error of ceasing to pray, or to pray as often or as well as I should have. I mistook talking and thinking about the faith for being serious about the faith. Ideologization helped make my faith brittle. I’ve found that the Orthodox approach to faith makes it much harder for people like me to make the ideologue’s error, though the temptation is always there.

It is hard to be mindful of right doctrine, and right morals, while at the same time remembering that the purpose of the Christian faith is not to learn how to behave morally. But it’s necessary. I am certain that Francis is onto something when he talks about how serious prayer — by which he means an encounter of the soul with the living God — is the antidote to ideological religion.

Read the extensive Dish coverage of Pope Francis here and here.

Evolution produced the Visayan warty pig during an angsty adolescent phase. Don’t ask. 

Teen wolf

You may have heard that Michael Arndt is no longer writing Star Wars: Episode VII:

As Episode VII continues pre-production, Lawrence Kasdan and director J.J. Abrams have assumed screenwriting duties for the film. Kasdan, who has been serving as a consultant on the film, is a veteran of several classic Lucasfilm productions, writing the screenplay for Raiders of the Lost Ark and serving as co-screenwriter for The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi. Acclaimed director and screenwriter Abrams’ credits include Super 8, Mission: Impossible III, Fringe, and Lost.

Perhaps it has something to do with this:

Or not. This Huff Po article reminds us there have been SW script shake-ups in the past:

After the success of Star Wars, George Lucas tapped Leigh Brackett, best known for co-writing the Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall classic, The Big Sleep, to write the script for the sequel. Brackett was also an acclaimed science-fiction writer. Unfortunately, what she turned in was not what Lucas wanted.

To be fair, unlike Arndt’s situation, Brackett would have most likely been allowed to revise her own draft. Sadly, Brackett died from cancer before she was given a chance. This left Lucas with an almost unusable script and no writer.

Lucas doesn’t get near enough credit for turning Empire into the movie we know today. It’s become the norm to blame Lucas for writing the sterile prequels (and, yes, he deserves his share of blame for that), but Lucas is mostly responsible for writing Empire as well, even though Lucas did not award himself a writing credit. It was only after Lucas finished his draft that Lawrence Kasdan was brought in to polish up some dialogue. (Kasdan played a much larger role on Return of the Jedi than he did Empire.)

Probably no great disturbance in the Force here, just the usual chaos in the creative process.

By the way, you can download the original Brackett script here.

NOTE: Saturday Hot Links will return next week.

These days, lovers of a rustic aesthetic can choose from all sorts of personal accessories made of wood—there are wooden iPhone cases, wooden eyeglasses frames and even wooden engagement rings. But a wooden purse? The idea sounds clunky at best, summoning images of a glorified briefcase or perhaps the enigmatic Log Lady from Twin Peaks.

The Tel Aviv design studio Tesler + Mendelovitch has managed to pull it off, however, with a line of "wood skin" clutches that are remarkably elegant and eminently functional, thanks to a set of diagonally-oriented crosshatches that allow the wood veneer to arch and fold like a textile.

The transformation from raw lumber to limber handbags did not come easy. It took the designers, Orli Tesler and Itamar Mendelovitch, years before finding a form that felt right. "It took such a long time to get the simple shape," Tesler says. "In the beginning, we interfered terribly with the wood." She had her partner experimented with weaving it, sanding it and breaking it up into small fibers. "Nothing seemed to showcase the wood in a new way."

(more...)

Bishop Fox:

Intro reconfigures your iOS device (e.g. iPhone, iPad) so that all of your emails go through LinkedIn’s servers. You read that right. Once you install the Intro app, all of your emails, both sent and received, are transmitted via LinkedIn’s servers. LinkedIn is forcing all your IMAP and SMTP data through their own servers and then analyzing and scraping your emails for data pertaining to…whatever they feel like.

LinkedIn is offering to take control of iOS devices via MDM security profile to set themselves as a rewriting-proxy email server under the guise of a cool new feature that millions of people will probably install. Technically, you could argue that this is opt-in, but it has massive security ramifications beyond what users should be expected to predict or understand.

Apple better already be paying attention to this. While it’s within the technical capability of iOS MDM profiles, it’s almost certainly violating the spirit of any common-sense rules or standards. Apple probably has enough of a relationship with LinkedIn, and enough power with the App Store, to wield a big stick and eliminate Intro without any technical changes to the profile system.

But what happens when using profiles for non-security, non-enterprise features becomes widespread? Won’t Google, Facebook, Twitter, and just about every social or ad-supported service want the same access to make it easier to mine your private data, spam your contacts, and evade App Store restrictions? It won’t be hard for the big services to come up with compelling features and friendly messaging to get millions of people to install their profiles, too.

And isn’t this a huge malware risk?

Apple needs a generalized solution to this problem quickly. The big question is whether they can do anything substantial about the profile system without causing issues for legitimate enterprise use¹ — I don’t know enough about it to say.

∞ Permalink

The other night I had a chance to sit down with Rev. angel Kyodo Williams, one of the foremost Buddhist teachers working on transformational activism today. We sipped on wine and she let me interrogate her about her work bringing the grounding practice of meditation into the activist world. As someone who has long advocated that meditation is a tool for inner change which can ultimately lead to social change, I was clearly fishing for some validation in her experience. She knew it, and eventually paused, looked me in the eyes, and said, "So why is it you do what you do?"

When angel asked me why I do what I do, I felt my heart break. I'm used to heart break, having suffered a pretty horrendous year of loved one's (plural) deaths, a broken engagement, job loss, and having my worldly possessions washed away in Hurricane Sandy. But this heart break wasn't about me. It was about my generation.

There are so many people in their twenties and early thirties that yearn for social change, but don't know how to do go about affecting it. They long for meaningful work but don't know how to focus their energy. They want to help others but spend most of their time struggling just to pay the bills. I travel frequently for my books and across America I meet these people, either when they are about to graduate from college or when they are a few years into the workforce, and talk to them about their quarter life crisis.

This quarter life crisis, this moment of freaking out about what you will do for a living, can be summed up in the question, "How am I going to have an impact in this lifetime?" On one hand, it's encouraging to see so many of my peers strive to live with purpose and considering that a marker of success. On the other, I see so many of them strive for that goal without any means to pursue it. That is where my heartbreak kicks in.

When my first book, The Buddha Walks into a Bar, came out I thought maybe one young person would read it and start meditating. Let's imagine that this young person is driven and smart. They get recruited by Goldman Sachs. They rise in the ranks and in 30 years they're the CFO. However, they have been meditating for the last 30 years and as a result have sown the seeds of mindfulness and empathy over that time. They wield the power of their position responsibly, with care for others in their heart, as a result of embodying the qualities of meditation. If that happens as a result of my books then I'll be thrilled.

This same motivation compelled me to start the Institute for Compassionate Leadership. Instead of passively offering meditation through a book I knew that we could use it as one of many leadership training skills. Having spent some time working on the Obama campaign I realized the genuine relationship building that took place in that environment was an effective way of creating lasting change within neighborhoods. If that authentic style of community organizing could be matched with the self-awareness and compassion practices of meditation it could revolutionize how we affect social change.

The notion of inner change actively being partnered with social change methodology excited me, and that's part of what I told angel. The rest was my concern around young people today finding work, and how the Institute has partnered with recruiters to aid in placing our aspiring change makers in meaningful employment. We provide aspiring change-makers with training in meditation, organizing, and leadership skills, support them with coaches and mentors who help them focus on a specific social change calling, and then put them to work in that field at the end of our program.

She understood. She nodded, hearing what I had said, embodying the deep listening that a good meditator or organizer would manifest. She gave me the gift of space. I felt encouraged to continue. I spoke of my dear friend Alex, who had suddenly died on the campaign trail, whose death pushed me to Ohio to continue in his stead, who was a compassionate leader himself. In that moment I realized that I started this organization as a way to honor the past and his legacy, but to work for the future and aspiring leaders like him. Finally angel looked up. "Sounds good to me."

I was heartened to learn more of angel's work, which seems to be constantly morphing and evolving to keep up with the needs of those she encounters. I aspire that my work will do the same thing. I know that there are others like us, bridging this gap between inner transformation and social change, and look forward to all of us working together to effectively aid a new generation of aspiring change-makers.

Lodro is now meeting with individuals interested in attending the Institute for Compassionate Leadership. To sign up for an informational interview click here. He is also traveling for his new book, Walk Like a Buddha.

In desperate bid for relevance 'Joe the Plumber' proves Dems are the real racists with epic cross-burning tweet.

domus-mundi:

Vincent Van Gogh

The phrase goes that one oughtn't reinvent the wheel, yet we've seen countless examples of people trying, from square to hubless to powered. The latest wheel reinvention to make the, er, rounds comes from Ackeem Ngwenya, a student of Innovation Design Engineering at London's RCA. Ngwenya's designed something that looks simultaneously nutty and completely feasible: A shape-shifting wheel he's calling "Roadless."

The "Why" of it is pretty simple. Ngwenya grew up in rural Africa, where "head-loading" remains the most practical way to transport goods, as arduous and inefficient as it is. He reckons that a shape-shifting wheel could adapt to different terrains, thus providing a one-size-fits-all solution for load-carrying carts, bikes or vehicles in areas with no infrastructure.

The "How" of it is both simple and fascinating. By using the principle of a scissor jack, and arraying a series of them around a circle, the wheel would either grow shorter and wider, or taller and more narrow, as the mechanism is manipulated.

(more...)

Charlie Stross, who's written a rather wonderful series of spy novels disguised as fat fantasy novels, has a fabulous riff on the surrealism of spies, who are often incompetent, paranoid nutcases, vested with terrifyingly limitless power.

I've been reading up on spies and their whacky goings-on for a couple of decades; they're all a bit bonkers, in a truth-is-stranger-than-fiction way. In fact, the truth is vastly stranger than anything one can get away with in fiction. From the CIA feeding LSD to an elephant, or MI5 searching for evidence that Prime Minister Harold Wilson was a Soviet mole, Mossad mistaking a Moroccan waiter for a PLO terrorist mastermind (and murdering him), or the DGSE, convinced that Greenpeace were agents of an Anglosphere Conspiracy against le Francaise, sinking the Rainbow Warrior—they're all batshit crazy, so far up their own funhouse-mirror-lined reality tunnel that they can't see daylight. Except the Soviets, of course, who were merely paranoid (for the CIA, DGSE, MI5, Mossad et al really were out to get them). And they believed James Bond movie props were real, and told the Soviet industrial complex to make them some. (Which then didn't work, because James Bond movie gadgets are just film props. But I digress.)

The surrealism of the intelligence community has been snowballing out of control since the end of the Cold War took away their 1914-1990 raison d'etre. Losing the cold war let the brakes off, as they went into full-blown panic mode looking for a new mission—and new techniques in pursuit of that mission. It coincided with Moore's Law and the explosion in computing power we've seen over the past few decades. Then the War On Terror came along; a brilliant excuse for pandering to every paranoid's fantasy and claiming a vastly increased budget, because nothing is more flexible than a war on an abstraction. And these things have a bureaucratic logic of their own...

...So picture me, rubbing my hands in glee and trying to extrapolate just how much worse the security/surveillance state could be, circa 2020, in a time-line where Washington DC was attacked with stolen nukes in 2003 by narcoterrorists from another parallel universe. And I think I've got a pretty good handle on how mad our Spook Century is going to be, until I run across stuff like the NSA bugging Angela Merkel's phone, or GCHQ bugging Belgacom, the main Belgian phone company, to snoop on the European Parliament.

And their code-name for the latter piece of work? "Operation Socialist". See! The Cold War legacy marches on!

Every time I think I've maxed out the satire and rotated the dial all the way up to 11, something from the Snowden leaks surfaces and the spooks make my worst paranoid tin-foil hat ravings and confabulated satire look ploddingly mundane.

Spook Century

Top Ten Signs you're 'KKK' hit man might be with the FBI: Agrees to work on layaway after you fess up that you're broke.

If the world ever got serious about addressing climate change, fossil-fuel companies could stand to lose billions of dollars — maybe trillions. These firms all have large reserves of oil, gas, and coal that would have to stay in the ground in order to avoid severe warming.

But how likely is this scenario? Some environmentalists have argued that regulations are inevitable — which would mean that up to 80 percent of listed fossil-fuel reserves may be "unburnable." In an extreme case, oil, gas, and coal companies could be left with more than $6 trillion in stranded assets. This, they say, amounts to a massive "carbon bubble" set to burst.

Those skeptical of this argument counter that the financial markets are more capable of assessing the risks facing companies like ExxonMobil or Chevron than activists are. On this view, it's unlikely there's any sort of bubble here.

This debate is slowly attracting a wider audience. On Thursday, the managers of 70 pension funds worth more than $3 trillion wrote a letter asking 45 of the world's top oil, gas, coal and utility companies to explain how the possibility of climate-change regulations might affect their business.

“As long-term investors, we see the world moving toward a low-carbon future in which fossil fuel reserves that companies continue to develop may actually become a liability," said Jack Ehnes, the head of California's State Teachers' Retirement System, one of the pension funds involved, which has $5.4 billion invested in major fossil fuel companies.

The signatories were largely public pension funds, including the comptrollers or treasurers of California, New York City, Maryland, Oregon, and Connecticut. There were also a few smaller private firms as well, including Rockefeller & Co. The effort was organized by Ceres, a group of investors that advocates for sustainable business practices, and the Carbon Tracker Initiative.

It's not clear how fossil-fuel companies will respond — or if they'll even respond at all. The pension funds in question make up only a small fraction of global investment in oil, gas, and coal. And the American Petroleum Institute has already dismissed the effort, with the group's chief economist telling Inside Climate News, "This is either delusion or wishful thinking on the part of some folks who just don’t like fossil fuels."

Even so, the notion that there might be a $6 trillion "carbon bubble" seems to be coming up more frequently, so it's worth dissecting.

Is there a $6 trillion carbon bubble?

Here's the basic argument: Earlier this year, the Carbon Tracker Initiative issued a report titled "Unburnable Carbon 2013," which calculated that the world's publicly traded oil, gas, and coal firms would need to leave 60 to 80 percent of their reserves unused in order for the world to have a likely chance of avoiding 2 C of global warming.* In theory, that's the goal that world leaders are aiming for.

Most fossil-fuel companies certainly don't act as if their reserves are largely worthless. Last year, the 200 largest listed companies spent more than $674 billion on developing their oil, gas, and coal reserves — under the assumption that it will largely get burned some day. But that, argues the Carbon Tracker Initiative, is a risky assumption — these investments could get upended by stringent limits on greenhouse gases.

"If [this level of capital expenditures] continues at the same level over the next decade," the report argues, then oil, gas, and coal companies "would see up to $6.74 trillion in wasted capital developing reserves that is likely to become unburnable."

Some observers remain skeptical of the idea that there's actually a $6.74 trillion carbon bubble waiting to pop. Economist Richard Tol has argued that the current valuation for fossil-fuel companies may just indicate that most investors don't believe a meaningful cap on carbon emissions is coming anytime soon. And that judgment could well be correct.

"Bubbles only arise if the 'market' is misinformed," Tol wrote in May. "The 'market' is by no means infallible when it comes to pricing risk, but an expectation of 'not much climate policy any time soon' strikes me as entirely realistic." (Here's a 2011 essay by Tol and Roger Pielke Jr. outlining this position at length.)

And even if carbon regulations wereforthcoming in the medium-term, it's hard to calculate exactly how much that might hurt the world's listed fossil-fuel companies. Much would depend on how strict the carbon limits are, and what they looked like.

In most plausible scenarios, it's hard to imagine that fossil fuels, which supply 87 percent of the world's primary energy, would disappear overnight. "I don’t believe the market puts much if any value on reserves or unproven resources which are not due to be developed within the next ten years," wrote energy analyst Nick Butler.

Questions about climate risks

Even so, James Leaton, the research director for the Carbon Tracker Initiative, countered that many investors weren't even asking about these risks yet. "The valuations of these fossil-fuel companies are based on certain assumptions about reserves," Leaton told me in an interview earlier this year. "But if you put in different assumptions, you get very different answers. We're trying to get investors to think about those different outcomes."

Over the past year, a few other financial analysts have started wondering whether the market might be mispricing the risk of carbon regulations or a shift to cleaner energy. In January, British bank HSBC published a report arguing that stricter emissions caps or weaker oil demand could undercut up to 60 percent of the market value of some European companies. "We believe that investors have yet to price in such a risk, perhaps because it seems so long term," the report said.

By and large, this is a question about politics: Are world governments really going to adopt stringent policies that curtail greenhouse-gas emissions and prevent global temperatures from rising more than 2 C? Could the politics of climate change shift suddenly? Plenty of climate-policy advocates are working toward that goal. But, for now, many investors in oil, gas, and coal firms seem to be betting that this isn't a major risk in the foreseeable future.

---------

* Note that the Carbon Tracker Initiative's numbers are roughly congruent with those in the most recent report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which essentially suggested (p. 20) that humanity could only emit about one-sixth of the carbon contained in known fossil-fuel reserves for a "likely" shot at preventing global average temperatures from rising more than 2 C over pre-industrial levels.

For on those calculations, see point #2 in this post, though note that the units are slightly different (1 trillion tons equals 1000 Gt).