Russian Sledges

Last week, I wrote about the fun and the pitfalls of viral maps, a feature that included 88 super-simple maps of my own creation. As a follow-up, I’m writing up short items on some of those maps, walking through how I created them and how they succumb to (and hopefully overcome) the shortfalls of viral cartography.

In northern Nigeria, radical Islamic terrorist group Boko Haram is facing a vigilante backlash from armed teenagers with nothing to lose.

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Amherst College said Tuesday it will ban students from joining fraternities and sororities, beginning this summer.

Amherst will prohibit student participation in fraternities and sororities and "fraternity-like and sorority-like organizations, either on or off campus," effective July 1, Cullen Murphy, Board of Trustees chair, told students in an email. The trustees also reaffirmed a 1984 decision barring formal college recognition of any Greek organizations.

"Violations of this decision will be treated consistent with other violations of the Honor Code, which sets forth standards and expectations that apply to all students, faculty and staff," Murphy wrote.

Amherst does not officially recognize fraternities, but has allowed them to organize underground so long as their activities stayed off the campus of the college, in Amherst, Massachusetts. The trustees' review of Greek life at Amherst, a top-ranked liberal arts college, followed a 2013 suggestion from the Sexual Misconduct Oversight Committee, composed of faculty, students, staff, administrators and trustees.

The committee was formed in response to an October 2012 student newspaper op-ed by Angie Epifano accusing the college of mishandling her sexual assault case, sending her to a psychiatric ward in response to her comments about being depressed. Epifano filed a federal complaint against the college in December 2013, sparking an investigation by the U.S. Department of Education into whether Amherst violated the Title IX gender equity law. In that complaint, Epifano lambasted the college for a sexually hostile climate she blamed on the underground fraternities.

The college Sexual Misconduct Oversight Committee took note of the Greek organizations as well, saying underground frats "simultaneously exist but do not exist," and noted the college did not enforce student conduct rules with respect to the frat houses.

As the Amherst Student, the campus newspaper, reported at the time, the committee said it was time the trustees "figure out once and for all what the fraternities’ role should be. Either they should be regularized or they should go entirely."

The trustees said Tuesday in a document accompanying the email that the board had considered restoring recognition to fraternities so that the school could police the system. Trustees also considered accepting the status quo, the document said, "along with its contradictions and consequences, indefinitely. Such a course, in the view of the Board and the Administration, would be counterproductive and unwise."

Instead, trustees chose "to reaffirm, unambiguously, the spirit and intention of the 1984 decision -- by prohibiting membership in off-campus fraternities, as peer institutions have done, while committing the College to new efforts on behalf of student life."

Students will be prohibited from on-campus activities "relating to rushing, pledging, initiating or otherwise admitting to or maintaining membership by any student of the College in any fraternity, sorority or other social club, society or organization (however denominated)," the email said. The email made no mention of students attending parties and other social events hosted by Greek organizations.

Other elite colleges and universities also have grappled with the status of Greek organizations.

Students at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania voted to make all fraternities coed, rather than ban them altogether. At Wesleyan University in Connecticut, school officials have warned students not to attend events at fraternities it has deemed unsafe.

Original Source

Are you lacking in nerdy friends? It may be time to move.

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Recently, I received some adorable new underwear courtesy of the lovely folks over at Dear Kate. And these undies kind of blew my mind.

What’s so interesting about Dear Kate underwear (other than the fact that they’re pretty damn cute)? Allow me to talk about monthly lady times for a moment.

You see, these are designed specifically to be worn during your period and contain a special liner to draw fluids away from your body and repel stains.

Now, I’m a lover of nice underthings. But I also have a lot of b-listers (and c-listers, honestly) hiding in the back that I wear during that time of the month. They are ugly. They are stretched out, faded, and frankly sort of pathetic. I don’t feel great when I wear them, but I always considered it a necessary precaution, especially during the first couple of days.

Having actual nice, pretty underwear that I don’t have to worry about ruining has totally changed my outlook when I get dressed. I had one less reason to feel miserable and gross. I particularly like the new Vera hipster they recently released (I have the orchid color), and want to buy a couple more.

Aside from the great concept and pretty designs, there’s one other thing that interested me about these. It’s such an innovative use of technical fabric, namely polyester.

Dear Kate was developed by Julie, whose background is in chemical engineering. She realized that so may women deal with the problems of heavy periods and overflow, and that new technology in textiles could help.

Julie did the R&D sewing herself, and is still the fit model for the brand. They’re also still manufactured in the US. I love stories like this: a woman sees a problem and how she can address it, and builds her company from there.

This is Julie sewing in the very beginning of the company.

This is Li Ping, one of the sewing operators who currently makes the garments in New York.

So why did Julie choose polyester to make her super absorbent gussets? Isn’t polyester just that cheap synthetic from the 70s? Isn’t it always horribly unbreathable?

For the answer to that, let’s first look at what makes a fabric breathable.

From fiber purist to poly stretch pants

Before I became a runner, I was a fiber purist. I only ever wanted to wear natural fibers and believed them to be objectively superior to anything synthetic.

In day-to-day life, I still wear natural fibers almost exclusively (perhaps with the occasional synthetic blended in, like spandex in pants, or nylon in socks). Generally, natural fibers are more breathable and feel great against the skin.

But when I began running longer distances, cotton no longer cut it. In the winter, I’d have to wear many layers of clothing when I headed out. After running for a while, my cotton leggings and t-shirts would become wet with perspiration, which is dangerous in very cold conditions. In extreme cases, it can lead to hypothermia.

In the summer, I’d sweat even more, and the moisture and salt would rub and grate against my skin, causing chafing. Let me tell you, there are few things less pleasant than being rubbed raw when you are on mile 17 on a hot day. So much pain coming at you at once.

So I began buying workout clothing in moisture wicking fabrics. I noticed that these fabrics were usually entirely synthetic, and I was confused. Aren’t synthetics supposed to be less breathable than natural fibers?

Are natural fibers really more breathable?

It’s true. In general, natural fibers are more breathable.

What does “breathable” really mean, though?

In essence, breathability refers to a fabric’s ability to maintain the equilibrium between the moisture contained in the fabric itself and the air around it. Fabrics that are constantly absorbing moisture and releasing moisture are more breathable than fabrics that don’t.

In practice, what this means is that when there is moisture released from your skin, it doesn’t become trapped in the air between your skin and the fabric.

Take linen, for example. This fiber has been used for centuries in hot climates to keep people cool in even extreme temperatures.

Wool is also very effective at maintaining that equilibrium, especially in thin layers. That’s why merino wool socks can keep your feet cool and dry, even in warm conditions (weird, huh?). Wool is a great all-weather fiber.

Cotton can also be very cool, especially when worn in very thin layers. Cotton is also quite good at absorbing moisture. You probably wear a lot of cotton in the summer for this reason.

Contrast this with a synthetic fiber like polyester. Everyday polyester doesn’t breathe in the same way, leaving heat and dampness trapped on your skin. Yuck.

Cotton will absorb about 7% of moisture, but polyester only about 0.4%. That’s a huge difference. When you buy a cheap polyester dress at Forever 21 and wear it in the heat of summer, you’ll feel that.

So why synthetics?

If all this is true, why choose synthetic fibers at all when moisture is a concern?

Put simply, not all synthetic fabrics are the same, even when they’re made out of the same fiber. Polyester fabrics are not all created equally.

Yes, natural fibers are breathable and lovely in everyday life. But where they are less successful is dealing with very high levels of moisture.

Natural fibers tend to absorb a lot of the fluid, holding onto it instead of releasing it all back into the outside air, away from the body. If you’re sweating a lot (or have a heavy period), the fabric becomes saturated. Not good in either of those situations.

This is where technology steps in, and why moisture-wicking fabrics are often referred to as a category of “technical fabrics.”

These wicking fabrics are made from blends of polyester. Remember what I said above about polyester only holding about 0.4% of moisture? In cheap polyester fabrics, this is very bad for staying dry.

But wicking polyester is woven differently. The weave is extremely permeable, meaning that moisture can pass through easily. The weave is designed so that the bits of moisture are pulled into the small holes in the weave and towards the outside of the fabric, where they can evaporate. Sometimes, additional chemical treatments assist this process (though not always).

So back to the panties.

Because they’re made with wicking fabric, moisture is pulled away from your body, and into the absorbent, thin lining within. They are extremely comfortable and, yes, breathable!

So next time you’re looking at a content tag and think about turning up your nose at polyester, consider whether it’s your everyday polyester or one of these modern fabrics. While you may still prefer natural fibers in everyday clothing (I do), when you have special concerns about moisture, technical fabrics might be the way to go.

It’s science!

PS: You can buy Dear Kate panties over here. They sent me some undies to check out, but they did not pay for this post or anything. I really love what they’re doing with these innovative fabrics!

Neil deGrasse Tyson may be a gifted popularizer of science, but when it comes to humanistic learning more generally, he is a philistine. Some of us suspected this on the basis of the historically and theologically inept portrayal of Giordano Bruno in the opening episode of Tyson's reboot of Carl Sagan's Cosmos. But now it's been definitively demonstrated by a recent interview in which Tyson sweepingly dismisses the entire history of philosophy.

In a video obtained by the AFP, Boko Haram leader Abubakar Shekau admitted to kidnapping more than 200 girls from a school in northeastern Nigeria last month . "I abducted your girls" he said. "I will sell them in the market, by Allah. There is a market for selling humans."

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popular shared this story from ZooBorns.

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Jail authorities knew of an heating problem and requested repairs one day before a mentally-ill inmate died in an overheated cell, though the repairs were delayed because of a long weekend.

According to the Associated Press, two repair requests prepared on Friday, Feb. 14 weren’t received until the following Tuesday because the maintenance department does not process work orders on weekends and because that Monday, President’s Day, was a federal holiday.

Jerome Murdough, a 56-year-old former Marine, was arrested one week before his death for trespassing onto a Harlem public housing project while seeking warm shelter from a cold night. Four hours after his body was found in a pool of blood and vomit in a Rikers Island jail cell, his internal temperature was 103 degrees.

A spokesperson did return the AP’s request for comment.

In March, one of four anonymous jail officials interviewed by AP said that Murdough “basically baked to death,” though the medical examiner’s office have not yet determined an official cause of death.

The interviewed officials said Murdough was on anti-seizure and anti-psychotic medication, which may have made the inmates especially vulnerable to heat, and that he did not open a vent in his cell to cool down, as others in the jail did.

[AP]

We love a listing that leaves us wanting more. Which is exactly what we get with this once-restored five-storey mill and cottage in Diss, Norfolk.

Ok, it might be nice to have just a little more, but we’re intrigued, that’s for sure. Part of that is because of so few photos being made available, but also because these period buildings were restored back in the 1960s.

What’s on offer is a five storey mill and a Victorian cottage, both of which are within half an acre of land and with frontage to the River Waveney.

The mill was converted by the current owner in the 1960s and has apparently ‘seen little alteration since’. However, it has been vacant for the last 12 years or so and does need refurbishing. But a look at the kitchen suggests something rather distinctive here already if you can do the work or want to try your own Grand Design. Within that mill is a living room on the ground floor, a kitchen floor, three bedrooms and bathroom over two floors, along with an upper floor which has ‘panoramic views’ across Diss and beyond. it also has a new double garage attached.

The mill cottage dates from around the mid-1800s and has been empty since the 1980s, requiring a complete renovation. Guessing that’s why pictures if the interior are so thin on the ground.

All are being sold as one lot, with a guide price of £395,000.

Find out more at the Zoopla website

Boko Haram gets lost in translation. Oh, and the word 'boko' isn't derived from the word 'book.'

_{"You always interpret the masculine – the classic masculine dressing with the feminine and the drama.”}

_{André Leon Tally interviewing Janelle Monáe at the 2014 Met Gala (x)}

The Vatican released new data on abuse at a UN hearing that's questioning whether abuse of children by Roman Catholic priests constitutes torture. Classifying sexual abuse as torture could expose the Catholic Church to a new wave of lawsuits.

The US Government Guide to Shirts

Apparently, if the internet were around in the mid-20th century, the US Government would have had a great menswear blog. Not too long ago, our friend CrimsonSox found a US government guide to quality suits, originally published in 1949. Today, he found a government guide to quality shirts, originally published by the US Department of Agriculture in 1939.

Like with the guide to suits, there’s some advice in here that’s still useful and some that’s a bit outdated (although, still fun to read). It’s still true, for example, that dress shirts are generally considered better made if they have mother-of-pearl buttons and fabrics woven in high thread counts. The section on detachable collars, on the other hand, is pretty much useless since shirts almost only come with attached ones these days. Back when this guide was published, men still had a choice between the two, and the advantage of detachable collars was two fold. First, you could just wash the part that most easily got soiled, rather than washing the whole shirt. Second, you wouldn’t have to throw your entire shirt away once the collar got frayed. Those advantages, of course, are pretty much moot as shirts have become cheaper and laundering easier.

My favorite piece of anachronistic advice might be the bit about how men should look for full cut shirts. The guide does make an exception, however. As it notes, “some brands of shirts are made especially for slender men, and should not be confused with cheap, skimped garments.” Thank you, US government, for acknowledging my existence.

Lastly, as with the guide to suits, there’s a nice section in here on fabrics. If you’ve ever wondered what’s the difference between broadcloth, oxford, chambray, etc., this is a good place to start. Just note that madras today mostly refers to the very colorful plaids that come out of India, not the plain stuff shown here.

JP: Adam called me up and said, “I’ve been so-called secretly playing drums in the basement of my house, trying to get my chops back up. Now that I can play again, I asked myself a question: if I was going to play music with somebody, who would that be? And the answer is: you and Amy. So, are you willing? My boy’s in high school now. I would love to do this thing if you’re willing to do it.” It broke my heart into a thousand pieces. What could your answer be, to that question? Of course. JMcD: Fuck you, old man. Fuck you. JP: I’m almost fifty! Get off my lawn.

Crafty Bastards: Beer in New England from the Mayflower to Modern Day from Audissey Media on Vimeo.

Huh? Yeah, they make trailers for books, it turns out. Here’s the one for my book, Crafty Bastards: Beer in New England from the Mayflower to Modern Day. (Don’t worry, it’s wicked short — and really well done.) It was filmed at the Cambridge Brewing Co.

Speaking of the Cambridge Brewing Co., it’s having its 25th anniversary this weekend, starting tonight and lasting through tomorrow night. There will be 25 beers on tap (including many from brewmaster Will Meyers’ barrel cellar), live music and a homebrewing contest. One of the featured beers is Cambridge Imperial Amber, which CBC alumni (including me) were invited to help brew. Yeah, that’s me in the photo mashing in. I’m heading to the brewpub to try some as soon as I publish this post.

Crafty Bastards officially came out yesterday and is now for sale in stores and online. If you like to shop local and independent, you can find Crafty Bastards at the Harvard Book Store and Porter Square Books in Cambridge, the Boston Shaker in Somerville and Sault in the South End. It will also be available around New England at bookstores large and small, and independent shops like A&G Homebrew Supply of Portsmouth, NH and Vermont Spirits Distilling Co. in Hartford, VT. Various New England breweries are also ordering the book to sell in their taprooms, which is a very appealing purchase option. Finally, you can order copies directly from the Union Park Press website (check out their other titles, especially Drinking Boston, while you’re at it) and on Amazon.

For updates and other fun stuff, check out my sweet new author website by Noah Kuhn of PilotMade. It has a calendar of parties, media appearances and signings in case you want to track me down at one of those. And if we run into each other and you happen to have my book on hand, I will gladly sign it.

 

Historical Map: Train and Tram Travel Times in Melbourne, Australia, c. 1920

A handsome isochrone map produced by Melbourne’s Metropolitan Town Planning Commission to show the “minimum” (i.e., absolute best scenario) travel time into the city via suburban railways and tram lines. Some later additions to the network seem to have been pencilled in at the bottom right of the map.

Side note: Wikipedia’s article on isochrone maps includes the incredibly lazy assertion that “isochrone maps have been used in transportation planning since 1972 or earlier”, simply because that’s seemingly the earliest example the author could find to cite. This map, as well as this example from Manchester in 1914 (one hundred years ago!), clearly show that they’ve been used for this purpose for much longer. The moral of the story? Don’t trust everything you read on Wikipedia!

(Source: Daniel Bowen/Flickr)

Chameleon hatching

New Orleans native Frank Relle captures stunning shots of his hometown late at night using long-exposure photography. The images show often overgrown and sometimes destroyed buildings devoid of human life.

I decided to pursue photography. I went to New York to find photography, but lost it in the bright lights and darkrooms. I came home to New Orleans and listened to Bob French’s voice on WWOZ.

photos by Frank Relle

via Juxtapoz

A few weeks back I attended The Speakeasy, a play and a bar and an interactive experience in San Francisco. I recommend it. To get to the play, you meet a man in a public space near Civic Center, who gives you a secret map to the location. The location is a fake clock shop (this isn't spoiling things as that's on the website), through which you enter the theater. Inside there are several rooms, decorated with patterned red wallpaper and everything vintage, sort of like Bourbon & Branch. You're led to your seat, which is in one of several...

[Visit Alcademics.com for the full post.]

Most server-side APIs these days are JSON-over-HTTP. Developers are generally comfy with this, but I notice when I look at the JSON that it’s often, uh, what’s the tactful term these days? Let’s say “generously proportioned”. And I see clumsy code being written to walk through it. The options for dealing with this are interesting.

For example

I’ve been working with keybase.io recently; when you talk to their directory through their API, an entry is represented by a User Object, which is not exactly lightweight; here’s part of one which may be retrieved here.

{
  "status": {
    "code": 0,
    "name": "OK"
  },
  "guest_id": "05a8fdd28c23a5d5dc2c2f588c3e7b08",
  "them": {
    "id": "922d9f5ffd96b34b9133483091738a00",
    "basics": {
      "username": "timbray",
      "ctime": 1395088335,
      "mtime": 1395088335,
      "id_version": 9,
      "track_version": 11,
      "last_id_change": 1396452398
    },
    "profile": {
      "mtime": 1395088563,
      "full_name": "Tim Bray",
      "location": "Vancouver, Canada",
      "bio": "Long-time Web guy, usually observed wearing ...
    },
    "public_keys": {
      "primary": {
        "kid": "0101389af6856a7ef3392860...
        "key_type": 1,
        "bundle": "-----BEGIN PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----...

And it goes on from there. For quite a bit, actually. But for what I’m actually going to do, I only need a couple of those fields (ctime and the ASCII-armored public key). Compose in your head, if you will, the sequence of JSONObject.getString() calls you’d need to retrieve the key bits in the bundle field. Feaugh.

Also, consider all the extra JSON bytes occupying network space that I fully intend never to look at; so there are two problems here.

Plan A: JPath

Back in the days when APIs were all XML, I got into the habit, in clients, of fishing the bits I needed out of overinflated server blobs using XPath. A reasonable person might think “JPath?” And indeed, there’s JPath at stsvilik/jPath and at artjock/jpath and JPath on npm and JSONPath and json-path and so on, and they all define idiosyncratic selector-string syntaxes that do way past than just walk down an object chain.

Plausible; maybe there’s a there in there somewhere.

Plan B: Send less

Wouldn’t it be better if the server just sent what I need? It turns out that Google+ goes part of the way there, clients can ask for Partial Responses, using a fields argument.

Which, by the way, uses an idiosyncratic selector-string syntax.

It clearly works at slimming down your JSON on the wire, but you still have to do the dorky walk-down-the-object-chain logic in the client.

Plan C: JWalk

I cooked this up in about fifteen minutes to help me pick out pieces of Keybase.io responses, without really thinking it over much. To get the primary public-key bytes out of an HTTP response body, you say:

  JSONObject user = new JSONObject(response_body);
  String key = JWalk.getString(user, "them", "public_keys", "primary", "bundle");

Source on GitHub, not that it’s very sophisticated or anything. It doesn’t allow you to select a particular array element, or jump steps with a “descendent” relationship or, well, anything; except walk through an object chain. So, no query string, just a JSON object and enough strings to get you where you want in the tree.

Hmm, it occurs to me that JWalk.getArray() should return an Iterator, since the only thing I’ve ever done with a JSON array is traverse it.

I suppose JWalk could be broken out as a separate package, but why bother?

Questions

Why isn’t this built-in to the JSON-API infrastructure?

What are the use-cases for anything more complicated than an list-of-string-keys selector?

If we could agree on a way to pick out a few pieces you need, wouldn’t it be better to send it to the server as part of the query, rather than using it in the client?

If you do get a big blob of JSON and know you only want a couple of pieces, why go through all the parse-time memory-management overhead of building data structures to hold the parts you don’t want?

Mon May, 5 2014 6:00 PM EDT — Mon May, 5 2014 8:00 PM EDT

Emerging from the shadow of San Francisco, Oakland has found its own style, shopping and food. But gentrification is a growing concern.

camel-pimp:

According to Rollercoaster Tycoon, this is what two thousand people drowning at once looks like.

Outstanding Restaurateur: Barbara Lynch, Barbara Lynch Gruppo, Boston (No. 9 Park, Menton, B&G Oysters, and others)

Inside, please find a list of forty-three movies, TV episodes, and short subjects by Werner Herzog, all of which can be streamed, along with some short descriptions of their content. One or two of the films are in German without subtitles; this is noted in the description.

Shelving system W W W by Viktor MATIC

(Want more? See NOTCOT.org and NOTCOT.com)

No sleep 'til breakdance.