In 1895, the astronomer Simon Newcomb published his "Tables of the Sun," based on observations of the sun's position from 1750 to 1892. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newcomb%27s_Tables_of_the_Sun) These calculations turned out to be reliable enough that astronomers continued to use them until the 1980s.
Before 1956, the second was defined as the mean solar second, or in other words, 1/86,400 of the time the earth takes to spin around on its own axis and see the sun again each day. But because the moon's gravity and the tides are slowing down the earth's spin, this is not a stable quantity.
From 1950-1956, the international authorities agreed to redefine the second to be the "ephemeris second," based on the speed of the earth's orbit around the sun in 1900, as predicted in Newcomb's tables. The earth's orbit around the sun is not slowing down, at least not on anything like the effect on the earth's spin around its own axis. (In practice the ephemeris second is measured by looking at the moon's orbit around the earth and taking pictures of what stars the moon is near.)
Because Newcomb's tables cover observations from 1750 to 1892, the "ephemeris second" corresponds to the mean solar second at the middle of this period, or about 1820. (http://tycho.usno.navy.mil/leapsec.html)
Meanwhile, from 1952 to 1958, astronomers from the U.S. Navy and the British National Physical Laboratory measured the frequency of cesium oscillations in terms of the ephemeris second. (http://www.leapsecond.com/history/1958-PhysRev-v1-n3-Markowitz-Hall-Essen-Parry.pdf) Cesium is even more stable than the orbit of the earth around the sun.
There are a few ways to do the calculations that they show in the paper (having to do with exactly what period they observed over and whether they corrected for some subtleties re: the moon's orbit), giving results between 9,192,631,761 and 9,192,631,780. The average was 9,192,631,770.
In 1967, this became the official definition of the SI second, replacing the ephemeris second. But the reason the number is what it is is because Newcomb analyzed observations from 1750 to 1892, and the middle of that period is 1820, and that's how fast the earth was spinning on its axis in 1820.
Thursday, August 30, 2012
Saturday, August 25, 2012
Q: If one day is not exactly 24 hours and is in fact 23 hours, 56 minutes, shouldn't the error add up, and shouldn't we see 12 a.m. becoming noon?
You're right that a "sidereal" day is about 23 hours, 56 minutes, 4 seconds. But this is not a day in the everyday sense.
A sidereal day is how long it takes the earth (on average) to make one rotation relative to the faraway stars and other galaxies in the sky.
If you find a star that is directly above you at midnight one night, the same star will be directly above you again at 11:56:04 p.m. the next evening.
Similarly, if you were sitting on the star Proxima Centauri looking through a powerful telescope at earth, you would see Toledo, Ohio, go by every 23 hours, 56 minutes, and 4 seconds.
However, we don't keep time by the faraway stars -- we measure time by a much closer star, the sun! And we are actually in orbit around the sun, orbiting in the same direction that the earth is spinning on its own axis. From our perspective, the sun goes a little slower in the sky because we are also orbiting around it.
How fast are we orbiting around the sun? We make one full orbit every year, or roughly 366.25 sidereal days.
So after a year, the faraway stars will have done 366.25 rotations around the earth, but the sun will only have done 365.25 rotations. We "lose" a sunset because of the complete orbit. (The extra quarter day is why we need a leap year every four years.)
So there are 365.25 "mean solar days" in 366.25 "sidereal" days. How long is a "mean solar day"? Let's do the math: One sidereal day is 23 hours, 56 minutes, 4 seconds, or 86164 seconds. Multiply this by 366.25 sidereal days in a year, and you get 31557565 seconds. Divide by 365.25 solar days, and we get that a solar day is.... 86,400 seconds. That's 24 hours exactly!
It's this "mean solar day" (24 hours) that is the normal definition of day.
If you want to do the math more exactly, a sidereal day is 86164.09054 seconds, and a tropical year is 366.242198781 sidereal days. That works out very closely.
(P.S. Unfortunately, the earth's spin has been slowing down because the moon is sucking away the earth's energy. Every time the high tide of the Atlantic Ocean slams into the east coast of North America, the earth slows its spin a little bit. The definition of the second is based on the speed the earth was spinning back in 1820, and we have slowed down since then. As a result, we occasionally have to add in a "leap" second to the world's clocks. See http://online.wsj.com/article_email/SB112258962467199210-lMyQjAxMTEyMjIyNTUyODU5Wj.html?mod=wsj_valetleft_email)
A sidereal day is how long it takes the earth (on average) to make one rotation relative to the faraway stars and other galaxies in the sky.
If you find a star that is directly above you at midnight one night, the same star will be directly above you again at 11:56:04 p.m. the next evening.
Similarly, if you were sitting on the star Proxima Centauri looking through a powerful telescope at earth, you would see Toledo, Ohio, go by every 23 hours, 56 minutes, and 4 seconds.
However, we don't keep time by the faraway stars -- we measure time by a much closer star, the sun! And we are actually in orbit around the sun, orbiting in the same direction that the earth is spinning on its own axis. From our perspective, the sun goes a little slower in the sky because we are also orbiting around it.
How fast are we orbiting around the sun? We make one full orbit every year, or roughly 366.25 sidereal days.
So after a year, the faraway stars will have done 366.25 rotations around the earth, but the sun will only have done 365.25 rotations. We "lose" a sunset because of the complete orbit. (The extra quarter day is why we need a leap year every four years.)
So there are 365.25 "mean solar days" in 366.25 "sidereal" days. How long is a "mean solar day"? Let's do the math: One sidereal day is 23 hours, 56 minutes, 4 seconds, or 86164 seconds. Multiply this by 366.25 sidereal days in a year, and you get 31557565 seconds. Divide by 365.25 solar days, and we get that a solar day is.... 86,400 seconds. That's 24 hours exactly!
It's this "mean solar day" (24 hours) that is the normal definition of day.
If you want to do the math more exactly, a sidereal day is 86164.09054 seconds, and a tropical year is 366.242198781 sidereal days. That works out very closely.
(P.S. Unfortunately, the earth's spin has been slowing down because the moon is sucking away the earth's energy. Every time the high tide of the Atlantic Ocean slams into the east coast of North America, the earth slows its spin a little bit. The definition of the second is based on the speed the earth was spinning back in 1820, and we have slowed down since then. As a result, we occasionally have to add in a "leap" second to the world's clocks. See http://online.wsj.com/article_email/SB112258962467199210-lMyQjAxMTEyMjIyNTUyODU5Wj.html?mod=wsj_valetleft_email)
Tuesday, July 24, 2012
Q: Why don't we see green stars?
Stars are black bodies in thermal equilibrium (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black-body_radiation). Their spectrum depends only on their temperature, and the shape of the spectrum is described by Planck's law (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck%27s_law).
As a result, only some colors are possible: the ones that can be formed by a black-body radiator with this shape of spectrum. The line in the CIE diagram below shows the possible colors of black-body radiation, depending on the temperature:
(from Wikipedia's http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:PlanckianLocus.png)
You will see essentially the same colors from incandescent light bulbs and toaster heating elements as from a star -- a 2700K tungsten filament will radiate light that appears to the human eye with the color corresponding to 2700K on the above diagram.
The "black body" curve does not go through anything you could really call green.
Qualitatively, for something to appear green, it essentially needs to stimulate the medium-wavelength cones more than the long- and short-wavelength cones in the human eye. Black-body radiation is too broadband to do this.
Here, the colored lines represent the sensitivities of the three kinds of cones in the human eye. The dashed line is black-body radiation from a 5400K star, obeying Planck's law. Black-body radiation is way too broad to hit the "green" cones without also hitting the "red" and "blue" ones. That's why this light appears white.
As a result, only some colors are possible: the ones that can be formed by a black-body radiator with this shape of spectrum. The line in the CIE diagram below shows the possible colors of black-body radiation, depending on the temperature:
You will see essentially the same colors from incandescent light bulbs and toaster heating elements as from a star -- a 2700K tungsten filament will radiate light that appears to the human eye with the color corresponding to 2700K on the above diagram.
The "black body" curve does not go through anything you could really call green.
Qualitatively, for something to appear green, it essentially needs to stimulate the medium-wavelength cones more than the long- and short-wavelength cones in the human eye. Black-body radiation is too broadband to do this.
Here, the colored lines represent the sensitivities of the three kinds of cones in the human eye. The dashed line is black-body radiation from a 5400K star, obeying Planck's law. Black-body radiation is way too broad to hit the "green" cones without also hitting the "red" and "blue" ones. That's why this light appears white.
Friday, May 4, 2012
Q: What is the safest, simplest, and most effective method to anchor an average-size sailboat?
There is technique (and many strong feelings) to anchoring, but I don't think there are any great secrets beyond what is taught in sailing classes. Just practice and patience and a lot of small things.
Usually anchoring can be done simply and without drama -- the need for experience comes when things go wrong. (Like pretty much 95% of things in sailing.) Of course it's a lot easier to anchor a Rhodes 19 in a nice lake with friends you sail with every weekend, versus anchoring an unfamiliar Beneteau 50 you just chartered off an unfamiliar island with inexperienced crew you are sailing with for the first time.
The way to be safe is to practice adequately, build up experience, and to keep learning from other sailors. US Sailing and ASA both teach "Basic Coastal Cruising" classes that including anchoring, and many sailors are flattered to help others learn this kind of thing. NauticEd (http://www.nauticed.org/sailingcourses/view/anchoring-a-sailboat) also has a $17 online course that is probably not bad.
Here are some general tips that they would teach you in a class:
Usually anchoring can be done simply and without drama -- the need for experience comes when things go wrong. (Like pretty much 95% of things in sailing.) Of course it's a lot easier to anchor a Rhodes 19 in a nice lake with friends you sail with every weekend, versus anchoring an unfamiliar Beneteau 50 you just chartered off an unfamiliar island with inexperienced crew you are sailing with for the first time.
The way to be safe is to practice adequately, build up experience, and to keep learning from other sailors. US Sailing and ASA both teach "Basic Coastal Cruising" classes that including anchoring, and many sailors are flattered to help others learn this kind of thing. NauticEd (http://www.nauticed.org/sailingcourses/view/anchoring-a-sailboat) also has a $17 online course that is probably not bad.
Here are some general tips that they would teach you in a class:
- Pick an appropriate anchorage, based on (a) shelter from wind and waves and lee shores (b) good holding ground [generally mud or sand will be preferred] (c) adequate scope, swing room, and depth under the boat.
- Coordinate and practice with the crew. Arrange hand signals if necessary. Do not raise your voice. Speak in complete sentences. Use headsets if helpful.
- Use an appropriate anchor. There are many strong feelings on this. For muddy or sandy bottoms, a lightweight-type (Danforth) anchor, appropriately sized to the boat, is generally fine. Of course there are many fancy anchors now available (Rocna, etc.) that are fine too.
- Use appropriate rode. In the Caribbean, all-chain rode (with nylon snubber) is typically used because coral reefs can chafe nylon rode, and all-chain rode typically requires less scope. If using an all-nylon rode, allow 7:1 scope for overnight anchoring.
- Consult a coast pilot (or cruising guide or similar publication) and nautical charts for information and warnings about the anchorage. In the BVI, the aerial photographs in "Virgin Anchorages" are very helpful for the first-time visitor to unfamiliar islands.
- Realize that the difficulty varies based on the conditions and the time of day. Anchoring in pleasant weather in a familiar spot with the sun up is one thing. An unfamiliar anchorage at night in a gale with cold rain or spray and a slippery deck is different and calls for much more caution.
- Cruise through the anchorage once before picking a spot to anchor. Don't just anchor in the first place that looks good. If there are other vessels already anchored, they have the right to set the anchoring method in use -- single bow anchor, Bahamian moor, two anchors off bow, etc. They have the right to ask you to move if you anchor too close. Feel free to slow down and ask the other vessels how much scope they have let out, etc.
- When you do pick a spot, allocate appropriate swing room for changes in wind and tide. Confirm appropriate depth with your depth sounder and charts.
- Assuming you are anchoring with a single anchor off the bow (the most common method): As helmsman, point the vessel into the wind and wait until ALL headway has stopped. Instruct the crew to begin LOWERING (not dropping or throwing) the anchor. Hopefully you have a working motorized windlass and have marked every 10 feet of the rode with little indicators -- these are both great conveniences.
- For all-chain rode, I like to first pay out 3:1 scope, then back down on it with the engine at 2,200 RPM. Then I pay out to 5:1 scope. For nylon rode, I generally pay out 5:1 rode, then back down on it, then pay out to 7:1 scope.
- With practice, you can confirm that the anchor has set by looking at how the rode "skips" across the surface of the water when it gets tensed up. In any event, don't leave the boat right away after anchoring. Confirm that you are not dragging. One classical technique is to sight a pair of objects off the beam and confirm that they retain their alignment (i.e. that the wind isn't pushing you back). Of course there are now GPS alarms for this kind of thing.
- If the water is clear and warm enough, DIVE the anchor to confirm it has set. Sailors in the BVI swear by this. The corollary is that you should plan to arrive in the anchorage before the sun gets low in the sky, so you can still see the coral heads and the ground and your anchor.
- If the anchor doesn't set, the first response should be to pay out more rode and see if it eventually sets. If that doesn't work, just pull it up, circle around, and do it again. Speak in complete sentences to the crew and explain that you are going to do it over again. Don't get angry if it doesn't work -- there's no shame in repeating the process 2 or 3 times. You'd much rather get it right than wake up with a "bump in the night" at 2 a.m.! If you still can't get it to set, you may have bad holding ground and have to pick a different spot.
- Sometimes, in a crowded anchorage, when you are trying to do this, the proprietors of nearby vessels will come out on deck and look at you with the death stare. And they will bring their fenders out and tie them on. In a truly obnoxious anchorage, they will even talk loudly about the "amateur" or the "credit card captain" in their midst. These people are dicks and you can't let them get to you, but the way to be a responsible citizen is to (a) know your own capabilities and those of your vessel [i.e. practice maneuvering when you are out in the open!], (b) don't attempt anything unsafe or beyond your ability (c) don't hit anybody (d) keep your calm with the crew. No jumping around, no yelling, no waving your arms angrily. Speak in complete sentences.
- If a nearby, previously-anchored vessel says you are too close and you have to move, you have to move. If they just give you the death stare and the full complement of fenders, consider yourself warmly welcomed. Dinghying over with treats and/or drinks can be a good way to introduce yourself.
Friday, April 20, 2012
Q: Does all "white noise" sound like the same hiss?
The answer is no: not all white noise sounds alike!
White noise can sound like "hissing" of a shortwave radio or it can sound like a Geiger counter (click..... clickclick............ click).
More:
A noise process is "white" if every frequency has the same power spectral density.
Any process where any two samples taken at different times will be statistically independent is white in this sense. In other words, if knowing the amplitude of the noise at time x tells us nothing about the amplitude at any other time, then the noise must be "white."
But there are many different-sounding processes that have this characteristic, because just knowing that two samples are independent does not tell us the distribution of the individual samples.
White noise can sound like "hissing" of a shortwave radio or it can sound like a Geiger counter (click..... clickclick............ click).
More:
A noise process is "white" if every frequency has the same power spectral density.
Any process where any two samples taken at different times will be statistically independent is white in this sense. In other words, if knowing the amplitude of the noise at time x tells us nothing about the amplitude at any other time, then the noise must be "white."
But there are many different-sounding processes that have this characteristic, because just knowing that two samples are independent does not tell us the distribution of the individual samples.
- One classical example is "thermal" noise, in which the samples are distributed according to a normal, or Gaussian, distribution. This is known as "white gaussian noise," and typically in communications will have been added to the signal we are interested in: hence, Additive White Gaussian Noise (AWGN). This sounds like "hissing."
- Another kind of white noise is "shot" noise, which can come from any Poisson process, including the particle decays heard by a Geiger counter. Here the individual samples aren't Gaussian deviates; they are impulses, either zero or big, and most of the time they're zero. But since knowing the time of one "click" tells us nothing about any other (and because each click carries all the frequencies), this is also white noise.
Thursday, February 9, 2012
Q: What were some surprising court decisions?
Thursday, February 2, 2012
Q: What are the most impactful inventions created in Boston?
I think the telephone is probably the all-time top Boston invention, but also these:
1802 -- Modern navigation -- Bowditch
1886 -- Management consulting -- Little
1901 -- Disposable safety razor -- Gillette et al.
1914 -- "Tech"nicolor -- Founded in Boston by Kalmus et al.
1919 -- Trans-Atlantic aircraft -- Hunsaker et al.
1929- -- Instant photography (Polaroid) -- Land
1931 -- Stroboscopy -- Edgerton, Germeshausen et al.
1937 -- Use of Boolean logic to design "digital" circuits -- Shannon
1940-45 -- Practical radar -- Anglo-American military collaboration at MIT
1944 -- Mark I/II computers and first computer "bug" -- Aiken, Hopper et al.
1945 -- Hypertext -- Vannevar Bush
1951 -- Huffman code
1951 -- Random access memory ("core")-- Project Whirlwind
1953 -- PET scan -- Brownell
1953- -- Doppler radar -- Gordon
1956- -- Chomsky hierarchy
1957- -- Generative grammar -- Chomsky
1957 -- Confocal microscope -- MInsky
1957-61 -- Time-sharing (and some of what we now call virtualization) -- Project MAC
1958 -- LISP -- McCarthy
1961 -- Chaos theory -- Lorenz (and many others)
1961-2 -- Digital videogame (Spacewar!) -- Graetz, Russel, Wiitanen, Kotok
1963 -- CAD -- Sutherland
1964 -- Minicomputer -- DEC
1964-5 -- Electronic mail -- Van Vleck / Morris on CTSS (also network email, Tomlinson in 1971)
1969 -- Apollo guidance computer that navigated to and landed on moon -- Instrumentation (now Draper) Laboratory
1970-90 -- Object-oriented programming and data hiding -- Liskov (and many others)
1972 -- Packet-switching and ARPANET -- Kahn, BBN, etc.
1973 -- Black-Scholes option pricing model -- Black, Scholes, Merton
1978 -- Practical public-key cryptography (RSA) -- Rivest, Shamir, Adelman
1979 -- Spreadsheet -- Bricklin and Frankston
1981-89 -- Copyleft/sharealike, GNU and free software movement -- Stallman
1995- - E-ink -- Jacobsen et al.
2000 -- Zipcar -- Danielson, Chase
1886 -- Management consulting -- Little
1901 -- Disposable safety razor -- Gillette et al.
1914 -- "Tech"nicolor -- Founded in Boston by Kalmus et al.
1919 -- Trans-Atlantic aircraft -- Hunsaker et al.
1929- -- Instant photography (Polaroid) -- Land
1931 -- Stroboscopy -- Edgerton, Germeshausen et al.
1937 -- Use of Boolean logic to design "digital" circuits -- Shannon
1940-45 -- Practical radar -- Anglo-American military collaboration at MIT
1944 -- Mark I/II computers and first computer "bug" -- Aiken, Hopper et al.
1945 -- Hypertext -- Vannevar Bush
1951 -- Huffman code
1951 -- Random access memory ("core")-- Project Whirlwind
1953 -- PET scan -- Brownell
1953- -- Doppler radar -- Gordon
1956- -- Chomsky hierarchy
1957- -- Generative grammar -- Chomsky
1957 -- Confocal microscope -- MInsky
1957-61 -- Time-sharing (and some of what we now call virtualization) -- Project MAC
1958 -- LISP -- McCarthy
1961 -- Chaos theory -- Lorenz (and many others)
1961-2 -- Digital videogame (Spacewar!) -- Graetz, Russel, Wiitanen, Kotok
1963 -- CAD -- Sutherland
1964 -- Minicomputer -- DEC
1964-5 -- Electronic mail -- Van Vleck / Morris on CTSS (also network email, Tomlinson in 1971)
1969 -- Apollo guidance computer that navigated to and landed on moon -- Instrumentation (now Draper) Laboratory
1970-90 -- Object-oriented programming and data hiding -- Liskov (and many others)
1972 -- Packet-switching and ARPANET -- Kahn, BBN, etc.
1973 -- Black-Scholes option pricing model -- Black, Scholes, Merton
1978 -- Practical public-key cryptography (RSA) -- Rivest, Shamir, Adelman
1979 -- Spreadsheet -- Bricklin and Frankston
1981-89 -- Copyleft/sharealike, GNU and free software movement -- Stallman
1995- - E-ink -- Jacobsen et al.
2000 -- Zipcar -- Danielson, Chase
Wednesday, January 11, 2012
Q: If I mix 700nm (red) light and 400nm (green) light, is the result a color that can't be made by a single wavelength?
The answer is yes -- if you mix light from a laser (monochromatic light) at 700 nm with another laser at 400 nm, the resulting radiation will be different from any monochromatic light.
That's true in two ways:
You can see this on the CIE standard observer colorimetry diagram:
(from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIE_1931_color_space)
This horseshoe-shaped figure represents the human perception of color near the area of focus (where cones predominate), once overall brightness (luminance) is factored out.
The top outside of the horseshoe (with the numbers going from "380" on the lower left to "700" on the lower right) is known as the "spectral locus": it represent the colors you can get with monochromatic light, e.g. by varyting a laser in wavelength from 380 nanometers to 700 nanometers.
The bottom line that directly connects "380" and "700" is known as the line of purples. These colors (all shades of purple) cannot be made by any single laser! And the entire interior of the horseshoe, including the middle where "white" is, also requires more than one laser.
Your color -- a combination of light at 400 nm and 700 nm -- will be found somewhere very close to the line of purples. (The more 400 nm, the more it will be closer to that side, and vice versa.) You can tell from the diagram that these colors aren't on the spectral locus, and therefore can't be made with a single laser.
======
The standard "R'G'B'" color spaces work by picking three illuminants from the inside of this diagram. (These can be three phosphors on a CRT, three filters on an LCD, three slices on the color wheel of a DLP display, three layers of emulsion on a piece of color film, etc.) Each illuminant's color has a point within the horseshoe, and the three points form a triangle. By varying the amount of R, G, and B, we can make a color that is perceived the same as any color that lies within the triangle.
Here's one of the most popular triangles, known as the ITU-R Rec. BT.709 or sRGB primaries. The three colors on your computer monitor are probably close to these points on the triangle, meaning your monitor can make any color within the triangle. But as you can see, it takes three illuminants to have any nonzero area in this "perceptual" space of colors (again, with luminance already factored out).
No single laser can do it.
That's true in two ways:
- The resulting radiation is radiometrically (or physically) distinct from any monochromatic light. Adding two sine waves of different frequencies won't make a sine wave.
- The resulting radiation is photometrically (or perceptually) distinct from any monochromatic light, when observed by a human with normal (trichromatic) vision.
You can see this on the CIE standard observer colorimetry diagram:
This horseshoe-shaped figure represents the human perception of color near the area of focus (where cones predominate), once overall brightness (luminance) is factored out.
The top outside of the horseshoe (with the numbers going from "380" on the lower left to "700" on the lower right) is known as the "spectral locus": it represent the colors you can get with monochromatic light, e.g. by varyting a laser in wavelength from 380 nanometers to 700 nanometers.
The bottom line that directly connects "380" and "700" is known as the line of purples. These colors (all shades of purple) cannot be made by any single laser! And the entire interior of the horseshoe, including the middle where "white" is, also requires more than one laser.
Your color -- a combination of light at 400 nm and 700 nm -- will be found somewhere very close to the line of purples. (The more 400 nm, the more it will be closer to that side, and vice versa.) You can tell from the diagram that these colors aren't on the spectral locus, and therefore can't be made with a single laser.
======
The standard "R'G'B'" color spaces work by picking three illuminants from the inside of this diagram. (These can be three phosphors on a CRT, three filters on an LCD, three slices on the color wheel of a DLP display, three layers of emulsion on a piece of color film, etc.) Each illuminant's color has a point within the horseshoe, and the three points form a triangle. By varying the amount of R, G, and B, we can make a color that is perceived the same as any color that lies within the triangle.
Here's one of the most popular triangles, known as the ITU-R Rec. BT.709 or sRGB primaries. The three colors on your computer monitor are probably close to these points on the triangle, meaning your monitor can make any color within the triangle. But as you can see, it takes three illuminants to have any nonzero area in this "perceptual" space of colors (again, with luminance already factored out).
No single laser can do it.
Sunday, October 16, 2011
Q: How does an investigative reporter get started?
Many investigative reporters got where they are by starting as beat reporters. This is a good way to get story ideas and familiarity with an area.
On "day one," you have an assigned "beat" -- an area of coverage. Maybe it's city government, or the courthouse, or local business. At the WSJ we had reporters covering finance, medicine and healthcare, technology, education, mergers and acquisitions, automobiles, energy, etc. We had a database where most Fortune 500 companies were assigned to exactly one reporter as the responsible person for any news involving that company.
We subscribed to the newswires (AP, Reuters, Dow Jones) and filtered for any news involving our companies and beats. We read the SEC filings.
On "day one," I called my companies and introduced myself as the new WSJ reporter covering them. They would invite me to their HQ to meet the CEO, one or two other executives, and the PR apparatus. Sometimes they would complain in a friendly way about previous WSJ coverage or about too-favorable coverage of their competitor. Sometimes they invite you to visit their factory or meet their customers. They encourage you to attend their industry conference or trade shows.
Some companies will go all-out. When UPS gets a new WSJ reporter covering them, they order the person a brown uniform in their size and have them ride in a delivery truck for a day so the reporter gets a sense of how the company works.
On "day one," you have an assigned "beat" -- an area of coverage. Maybe it's city government, or the courthouse, or local business. At the WSJ we had reporters covering finance, medicine and healthcare, technology, education, mergers and acquisitions, automobiles, energy, etc. We had a database where most Fortune 500 companies were assigned to exactly one reporter as the responsible person for any news involving that company.
We subscribed to the newswires (AP, Reuters, Dow Jones) and filtered for any news involving our companies and beats. We read the SEC filings.
On "day one," I called my companies and introduced myself as the new WSJ reporter covering them. They would invite me to their HQ to meet the CEO, one or two other executives, and the PR apparatus. Sometimes they would complain in a friendly way about previous WSJ coverage or about too-favorable coverage of their competitor. Sometimes they invite you to visit their factory or meet their customers. They encourage you to attend their industry conference or trade shows.
Some companies will go all-out. When UPS gets a new WSJ reporter covering them, they order the person a brown uniform in their size and have them ride in a delivery truck for a day so the reporter gets a sense of how the company works.
Saturday, July 2, 2011
Q: What are the most iconic images from astrophysics?
Saturday, June 18, 2011
Q: Is there any technical data available to support claims of “best HD picture quality” when choosing a satellite, cable or IPTV service provider?
I have done a real-time comparison between the HDTV signals transmitted by local broadcasters in the Boston area (NBC, ABC, CBS) over broadcast ATSC and the corresponding signals transmitted over Comcast service in QAM digital cable.
The two streams were bit-for-bit identical.
I'm sure it is true for at least some and maybe most "cable-only" channels, the different providers do vary in signal quality and how much they "re-compress" the signal.
But I can tell you that for the over-the-air channels, at least in Boston on Comcast, there is no difference between getting the signal over the air and getting it from cable. The two streams were exactly the same.[*]
A rigorous comparison of "cable-only" channels would be more difficult because it's hard to get these in unencrypted form from any provider. Just counting the bitrate (if available on a set-top box) is probably a reasonable proxy, but keep in mind that some providers (like DirecTV) use H.264 (aka MPEG-4 part 10) for at least some channels. That's much more efficient than the MPEG-2 part 2 used by digital cable and broadcast HDTV channels.
[*] The MPEG-2 video elementary stream was bit-for-bit identical. I didn't examine the audio but suspect it was the same. The systems-layer framing and other streams were different, if only because Comcast's channels are at 38.8 Mbps and broadcast ATSC is 19.4 Mbps and because the program IDs were rearranged.
The two streams were bit-for-bit identical.
I'm sure it is true for at least some and maybe most "cable-only" channels, the different providers do vary in signal quality and how much they "re-compress" the signal.
But I can tell you that for the over-the-air channels, at least in Boston on Comcast, there is no difference between getting the signal over the air and getting it from cable. The two streams were exactly the same.[*]
A rigorous comparison of "cable-only" channels would be more difficult because it's hard to get these in unencrypted form from any provider. Just counting the bitrate (if available on a set-top box) is probably a reasonable proxy, but keep in mind that some providers (like DirecTV) use H.264 (aka MPEG-4 part 10) for at least some channels. That's much more efficient than the MPEG-2 part 2 used by digital cable and broadcast HDTV channels.
[*] The MPEG-2 video elementary stream was bit-for-bit identical. I didn't examine the audio but suspect it was the same. The systems-layer framing and other streams were different, if only because Comcast's channels are at 38.8 Mbps and broadcast ATSC is 19.4 Mbps and because the program IDs were rearranged.
Tuesday, May 31, 2011
Q: What was the first digital newspaper in the world?
This is a provocative question, and it really depends on what you mean by a digital newspaper.
Arguably any written language formed out of a well-understood dictionary of symbols (like letters) could constitute a digital newspaper, since the signal distinguishing feature of "digital" technology is that a static discipline ensures that marginal inputs can become perfect outputs. This makes perfect copies possible and allowed scribes to preserve our culture for thousands of years, longer than the life of any physical medium.
Under this definition, the earliest handwritten gazettes, or even the texts of ancient civilizations could count.
But a major leap happened when perfect copies became not just possible, but easy and capable of mass production -- so maybe we should focus on the first typesetnewspapers.
Yet another leap happened when news began to be distributed not just in mass-produced digital form (the typeset broadsheet) that could be "easily" copied, but in electronic form that could be "instantly" copied.
Here we would be talking about the rise of telegraphy, which allowed the first stock tickers and the Associated Press and other newswires.
In the 60s and 70s, newspapers began to distribute national and international editions, sending their pages by satellite to printing presses across the country or in Europe. A battle ensued between the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times over the appropriate "digital" way to distribute their copy. The New York Times "digitized" its pages by scanning them and preparing a facsimile raster image, transmitting that pixel by pixel, and having it lithographed at printing presses across the country. The Wall Street Journal digitized its pages by coding the contents of each article letter-by-letter and sending that, along with a layout, to typesetters at each printing press who would have to re-typeset the pages before lithographing them. In John Hess's book "My Times," he describes how the NYT facsimile approach proved impractical with the technology of the day and was soundly beaten by the more data-frugal WSJ approach.
The 70s and 80s also saw the rise of electronic distribution to businesses and the public, with newspapers transmitting news copy to databases like Nexis and posting articles on online services like Compuserve and AOL. The 90s obviously saw extraordinary growth in the electronic distribution of news, as newspapers began posting their entire editions on the Internet.
I think if I had to pick one development along this timeline that signaled the birth of "digital" newspapers, it would probably be the invention of typesetting and the printing revolution, which made the mass-produced newspaper possible. It looks like that means I have to pick Carolus's "Relation," whose first edition was published in 1605.
But surely the invention of the telegraphic newswire is also a major, major advance that you could call the first "digital" newspaper.
And I think the anthropologists might point to the invention of written language in the first place -- and what it meant, namely the ability to perfectly copy texts and preserve them for longer than the life of any physical artifact -- as the signal development in our ability to use "digital" means to distribute and preserve our culture.
Arguably any written language formed out of a well-understood dictionary of symbols (like letters) could constitute a digital newspaper, since the signal distinguishing feature of "digital" technology is that a static discipline ensures that marginal inputs can become perfect outputs. This makes perfect copies possible and allowed scribes to preserve our culture for thousands of years, longer than the life of any physical medium.
Under this definition, the earliest handwritten gazettes, or even the texts of ancient civilizations could count.
But a major leap happened when perfect copies became not just possible, but easy and capable of mass production -- so maybe we should focus on the first typesetnewspapers.
Yet another leap happened when news began to be distributed not just in mass-produced digital form (the typeset broadsheet) that could be "easily" copied, but in electronic form that could be "instantly" copied.
Here we would be talking about the rise of telegraphy, which allowed the first stock tickers and the Associated Press and other newswires.
In the 60s and 70s, newspapers began to distribute national and international editions, sending their pages by satellite to printing presses across the country or in Europe. A battle ensued between the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times over the appropriate "digital" way to distribute their copy. The New York Times "digitized" its pages by scanning them and preparing a facsimile raster image, transmitting that pixel by pixel, and having it lithographed at printing presses across the country. The Wall Street Journal digitized its pages by coding the contents of each article letter-by-letter and sending that, along with a layout, to typesetters at each printing press who would have to re-typeset the pages before lithographing them. In John Hess's book "My Times," he describes how the NYT facsimile approach proved impractical with the technology of the day and was soundly beaten by the more data-frugal WSJ approach.
The 70s and 80s also saw the rise of electronic distribution to businesses and the public, with newspapers transmitting news copy to databases like Nexis and posting articles on online services like Compuserve and AOL. The 90s obviously saw extraordinary growth in the electronic distribution of news, as newspapers began posting their entire editions on the Internet.
I think if I had to pick one development along this timeline that signaled the birth of "digital" newspapers, it would probably be the invention of typesetting and the printing revolution, which made the mass-produced newspaper possible. It looks like that means I have to pick Carolus's "Relation," whose first edition was published in 1605.
But surely the invention of the telegraphic newswire is also a major, major advance that you could call the first "digital" newspaper.
And I think the anthropologists might point to the invention of written language in the first place -- and what it meant, namely the ability to perfectly copy texts and preserve them for longer than the life of any physical artifact -- as the signal development in our ability to use "digital" means to distribute and preserve our culture.
Saturday, May 28, 2011
Q: Is the Charles River safe to swim in?
It depends -- on the day, your location in the river basin, and who you are.
The short answer is that if you are young and have a robust immune system, swimming east of the Harvard Bridge, without recent rainfall, you should be fine. I have done it on hot summer days and it was beautiful. The government, which plays these things pretty conservatively, agrees that on most days, the river basin meets the standards for swimmability below the Mass. Ave. bridge.
The longer answer is that the conditions vary depending on where you are in the river and the day. For centuries, the Charles was practically Boston's sewer, not just for human waste but also for all manner of industrial heavy metals.
In 2010, most sites east of Magazine Beach would have been "swimmable" about 75% of the time. See this presentation last October by the Massachusetts Water Resources Authority. (http://www.charlesriverc
Unfortunately, last year we had a problem with "Harmful Algae Blooms," perhaps caused by hot water runoff from power plants. The state posted an algae advisory from July through September. See http://www.charlesriverco
During the summer, the Charles River Watershed Association maintains a system of weekly monitoring and flies flags to show whether the water is "safe for boating" at nine places. You can get the data at http://www.crwa.org/water
As I understand, the standard for "safe for boating" is less than 630 colony-forming-units of E. coli per 100 mL, plus an acceptable level of blue-green algae. The EPA standard for swimming is tighter, I understand around 225 colony-forming units, plus a limit on Enterococcus.
The short answer is that if you are young and have a robust immune system, swimming east of the Harvard Bridge, without recent rainfall, you should be fine. I have done it on hot summer days and it was beautiful. The government, which plays these things pretty conservatively, agrees that on most days, the river basin meets the standards for swimmability below the Mass. Ave. bridge.
The longer answer is that the conditions vary depending on where you are in the river and the day. For centuries, the Charles was practically Boston's sewer, not just for human waste but also for all manner of industrial heavy metals.
In 2010, most sites east of Magazine Beach would have been "swimmable" about 75% of the time. See this presentation last October by the Massachusetts Water Resources Authority. (http://www.charlesriverc
Unfortunately, last year we had a problem with "Harmful Algae Blooms," perhaps caused by hot water runoff from power plants. The state posted an algae advisory from July through September. See http://www.charlesriverco
During the summer, the Charles River Watershed Association maintains a system of weekly monitoring and flies flags to show whether the water is "safe for boating" at nine places. You can get the data at http://www.crwa.org/water
As I understand, the standard for "safe for boating" is less than 630 colony-forming-units of E. coli per 100 mL, plus an acceptable level of blue-green algae. The EPA standard for swimming is tighter, I understand around 225 colony-forming units, plus a limit on Enterococcus.
Sunday, May 8, 2011
Q: Do the odds in a horse race add up to more than 100%?
It doesn't quite make sense to sum odds. But if we talk about converting the odds into the probabilities of each horse's winning, then yes, they do add to more than 100% -- because the house takes more than 16% of every dollar bet!
For example, let's say we had two horses in a race, equally favored to win. A "fair" race chart, with no house take, would give each horse 1:1 odds against winning -- meaning a successful $1 bet will pay back a total of $2. The probability that corresponds to 1:1 odds is 1/(1+1), or 50% -- and two of these sum to 100%. Say you want to be guaranteed to walk away with $1. Then you need to bet 1/2 dollar on each horse. Exactly one horse will win (paying off 1:1, so you'll get a dollar back), so you will break even.
In reality, the odds won't be 1:1 for each horse. It will be something like 2:3 odds for each horse, meaning a successful $3 bet will pay back a total of $5. The probability that corresponds to 2:3 odds is 3/5, or 60%. Two of these sum to 120%! Say you want to be guaranteed to walk away with $5. Then you must bet $3 on the first horse, and $3 on the second horse. You've bet $6 to be assured of winning $5 -- the house has taken 16.7%.
We can see this if you look at the chart from yesterday's running of the Kentucky Derby (http://www1.drf.com/tc/kentuckyderby/2011/pdf/2011-kentucky-derby-chart.pdf ):
The race went off like this:
Let's say on each horse we made a bet "to win" in the amount of what it took to be assured of walking away with $1. Exactly one bet will succeed, so the amount we need to bet is the reciprocal of one plus the odds. (E.g. if the odds are 9.60 against 1, we can bet 1/10.60 dollars to receive $1 if it's a success.)
The total we need to bet is
1/21.90 + 1/9.50 + 1/10.30 + 1/24.10 + 1/17.80 + 1/35.70 + 1/28.90 + 1/6.20 + 1/9.10 + 1/12.90 + 1/12.90 + 1/18.20 + 1/37.30 + 1/40.30 + 1/13.50 + 1/10.60 + 1/33.90 + 1/34.60 + 1/36.80 = 1.195...
So it takes about $1.20 to be assured of walking away with exactly $1. The house is taking about 16%.
(To be fair, the house is not just one house -- OTB facilities take a cut, etc. etc. But from the perspective of the gambler, the house advantage in horseracing is much higher than even the worst casino games.)
For example, let's say we had two horses in a race, equally favored to win. A "fair" race chart, with no house take, would give each horse 1:1 odds against winning -- meaning a successful $1 bet will pay back a total of $2. The probability that corresponds to 1:1 odds is 1/(1+1), or 50% -- and two of these sum to 100%. Say you want to be guaranteed to walk away with $1. Then you need to bet 1/2 dollar on each horse. Exactly one horse will win (paying off 1:1, so you'll get a dollar back), so you will break even.
In reality, the odds won't be 1:1 for each horse. It will be something like 2:3 odds for each horse, meaning a successful $3 bet will pay back a total of $5. The probability that corresponds to 2:3 odds is 3/5, or 60%. Two of these sum to 120%! Say you want to be guaranteed to walk away with $5. Then you must bet $3 on the first horse, and $3 on the second horse. You've bet $6 to be assured of winning $5 -- the house has taken 16.7%.
We can see this if you look at the chart from yesterday's running of the Kentucky Derby (http://www1.drf.com/tc/kentuckyderby/2011/pdf/2011-kentucky-derby-chart.pdf ):
The race went off like this:
- Animal Kingdom, 20.90 (odds $1)
- Nehro, 8.50
- Mucho Mucho Man, 9.30
- Shackleford, 23.10
- Master of Hounds, 16.80
- Santiva, 34.70
- Brilliant Speed, 27.90
- Dialed In, 5.20
- Pants On Fire, 8.10
- Twice the Appeal, 11.90
- Soldat, 11.90
- Stay Thirsty, 17.20
- Derby Kitten, 36.30
- Decisive Moment, 39.30
- Archarcharch, 12.50
- Midnight Interlude, 9.60
- Twinspired, 32.90
- Watch Me Go, 33.60
- Comma to the Top, 35.80
Let's say on each horse we made a bet "to win" in the amount of what it took to be assured of walking away with $1. Exactly one bet will succeed, so the amount we need to bet is the reciprocal of one plus the odds. (E.g. if the odds are 9.60 against 1, we can bet 1/10.60 dollars to receive $1 if it's a success.)
The total we need to bet is
1/21.90 + 1/9.50 + 1/10.30 + 1/24.10 + 1/17.80 + 1/35.70 + 1/28.90 + 1/6.20 + 1/9.10 + 1/12.90 + 1/12.90 + 1/18.20 + 1/37.30 + 1/40.30 + 1/13.50 + 1/10.60 + 1/33.90 + 1/34.60 + 1/36.80 = 1.195...
So it takes about $1.20 to be assured of walking away with exactly $1. The house is taking about 16%.
(To be fair, the house is not just one house -- OTB facilities take a cut, etc. etc. But from the perspective of the gambler, the house advantage in horseracing is much higher than even the worst casino games.)
Wednesday, March 2, 2011
Q: How many read/writes does Twitter do a second?
It depends how you count. I'm no Twitter expert, but here's my understanding from a tech talk by Raffi Krikorian and colleagues in September 2010. Would happily correct this if anybody from Twitter wants to chime in.
- The volume of actual tweets is relatively small -- the most ever in a single second was fewer than 7,000 tweets, which is a peak load of less than 8 Mbps. Average load is about 1.6 Mbps, or 17 GB a day of tweets, and about 1,300 tweets per second. This is about 2% of the average trade frequency on Nasdaq.
- Twitter's architecture generally writes a reference to each incoming tweet immediately to the "timeline" structure of each recipient. Lady Gaga has 8.5 million followers, so when she tweets to the world, that causes 8.5 million updates to the recipients' timelines.
- Twitter's real load is not from tweets, but from changes in the social graph. "The rate of operations in the social graph is actually much faster than the incoming tweets we have," they said, meaning follow and unfollow events occur more often than tweets. Their flockdb graph store, built on MySQL, handles peak load of about 20,000 writes per second and 100,000 reads per second as of April 2010. (Apparently a common pattern for Twitter users is to sign up, follow a bunch of people, but rarely tweet themselves.)
- One difficult task comes from how Twitter handles "directed" tweets. Twitter only shows the tweet to people who follow both the sender and recipient, so the service has to compute the intersection between both groups at post time. "A bad case for us is if Lady Gaga responds to Justin Bieber. We have to compute the intersection between 6.xx million followers and 5.1 million followers. So you know Flock is having a bad day when celebrities start tweeting each other."
- The volume of tweets is only 17 gigabytes a day, but Twitter stores a lot more data than that -- the company tracks user behavior comprehensively, generating 12 terabytes of data a day. (I assume not all of this is stored for very long.)
Thursday, February 10, 2011
Q: Given that the universe is expanding and the Solar System is hurtling through space, is there any frame of reference for zero motion?
The laws of physics (Maxwell's equations, etc.) work the same in any inertial reference frame, so in that sense, no, there is no inertial reference frame that is the unique one with "zero motion." Space could just as easily be hurtling past the Solar System as the Solar System is past space!
However, one thing we can observe is the light from shortly after the Big Bang (about 300,000 years after). This "Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation" was discovered in the 1960s and has dimmed considerably over the last 14 billion years. It has the spectrum of a "black body" -- like the light you get off a hot piece of metal, like a lightbulb filament, except that this piece of metal is 2.725 Kelvins.
The COBE and WMAP satellites have observed that the light is slightly bluer in one direction in space (l = 264 degrees, b = 48 degrees) by about 3.4 milliKelvins and slightly redder in the opposite direction. We believe this is like the Doppler shift that happens when an ambulance drives by and shifts in pitch -- in other words, that the Solar System is flying through this background radiation, left over from the Big Bang, at a particular speed and direction.
We can calculate the velocity that must be:
Solving for v, we get v = 229 miles per second.
So, to sum up, in theory anybody in the universe who can measure the CMB precisely enough can agree on a "CMB rest frame" that is moving, relative to our Solar System, in the opposite direction from the galactic coordinates l = 264 degrees, b = 48 degrees, at the speed of 229 miles per second.
http://pdg.lbl.gov/2010/r
However, one thing we can observe is the light from shortly after the Big Bang (about 300,000 years after). This "Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation" was discovered in the 1960s and has dimmed considerably over the last 14 billion years. It has the spectrum of a "black body" -- like the light you get off a hot piece of metal, like a lightbulb filament, except that this piece of metal is 2.725 Kelvins.
The COBE and WMAP satellites have observed that the light is slightly bluer in one direction in space (l = 264 degrees, b = 48 degrees) by about 3.4 milliKelvins and slightly redder in the opposite direction. We believe this is like the Doppler shift that happens when an ambulance drives by and shifts in pitch -- in other words, that the Solar System is flying through this background radiation, left over from the Big Bang, at a particular speed and direction.
We can calculate the velocity that must be:
Solving for v, we get v = 229 miles per second.
So, to sum up, in theory anybody in the universe who can measure the CMB precisely enough can agree on a "CMB rest frame" that is moving, relative to our Solar System, in the opposite direction from the galactic coordinates l = 264 degrees, b = 48 degrees, at the speed of 229 miles per second.
http://pdg.lbl.gov/2010/r
Sunday, December 19, 2010
Q: How do you write a strong lede for an article?
Practice! And read the best stories in print. And read Blundell's "The Art and Craft of Feature Writing." Go look up old stories and see how they were constructed. Compare the NYT, WSJ, Washington Post and L.A. Times on the same story in history and see the choices each one made. More practice.
In straight news, you usually want to give the most important part of the story as clearly and succinctly as possible:
I often found that homing in on the "most important part," especially for a complex story, needed some repose -- sometimes you don't see what's in front of your face when you have been chasing it for two months. Some of our editors were fantastic midwives, helping reporters get to the meat of the story. For me, there was nothing like trying to discuss the story with someone else to clarify my thoughts.
Of course there is also nothing like trying to pound it out at 3:55 p.m. with an editor screaming for copy! That, of course, is also a way to improve.
(And to be clear -- by the time you see a lede on page 1 of a national newspaper, at least four people have had their hands on it, if not eight on a bad day.)
In contrast to straight news, the lede is much less constrained in a feature story. More than a few books have been written about feature writing (Blundell's being one of the best) and it is an art! The best leads edify, amuse, and still get to the point:
Unfortunately, sometimes a lede can be "too good to check" as the saying goes:
In straight news, you usually want to give the most important part of the story as clearly and succinctly as possible:
President John Fitzgerald Kennedy was shot and killed by an assassin today. (Tom Wicker, The New York Times, Nov. 23, 1963)
Men have landed and walked on the moon. (John Noble Wilford, The New York Times, July 21, 1969)
Five men, one of whom said he is a former employee of the Central Intelligence Agency, were arrested at 2:30 a.m. yesterday in what authorities described as an elaborate plot to bug the offices of the Democratic National Committee here. (Alfred E. Lewis, The Washington Post, June 18, 1972)
Doctors in New York and California have diagnosed among homosexual men 41 cases of a rare and often rapidly fatal form of cancer. (Lawrence K. Altman, The New York Times, July 3, 1981)
Enron Corp. filed for protection from creditors in a New York bankruptcy court, the biggest such filing in U.S. history. (Rebecca Smith, The Wall Street Journal, Dec. 3, 2001)
Months after the Sept. 11 attacks, President Bush secretly authorized the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on Americans and others inside the United States to search for evidence of terrorist activity without the court-approved warrants ordinarily required for domestic spying, according to government officials. (James Risen and Eric Lichtblau, The New York Times, Dec. 16, 2005)
I often found that homing in on the "most important part," especially for a complex story, needed some repose -- sometimes you don't see what's in front of your face when you have been chasing it for two months. Some of our editors were fantastic midwives, helping reporters get to the meat of the story. For me, there was nothing like trying to discuss the story with someone else to clarify my thoughts.
Of course there is also nothing like trying to pound it out at 3:55 p.m. with an editor screaming for copy! That, of course, is also a way to improve.
(And to be clear -- by the time you see a lede on page 1 of a national newspaper, at least four people have had their hands on it, if not eight on a bad day.)
In contrast to straight news, the lede is much less constrained in a feature story. More than a few books have been written about feature writing (Blundell's being one of the best) and it is an art! The best leads edify, amuse, and still get to the point:
To you, it's just a backhoe, a hulking mass of metal with a big bucket attached. But to Harvey Neigum, it's an extension of his soul. So here he is, after years of practice, climbing into his machine with the championship at stake.
It has all come down to this: Can Mr. Neigum make his eight-ton backhoe do the moonwalk? (John R. Wilke, The Wall Street Journal, Jan. 7, 1992)
Everything is bigger in Texas, even 10%.
Prominently displayed in Shirley Faske's office at Westlake High School is a notice advising students that they must rank "in the top 10%" of their graduating class to gain automatic admission to a Texas public university.
But last year, suburban Westlake crammed 63 of its 491 seniors, or 12.8%, into the top 10th, violating the laws of mathematics -- and of the Lone Star State. (Daniel Golden, The Wall Street Journal, May 15, 2000)
Here, amid the cracked earth and grizzled acacias of northwestern Kenya, rumors were running rampant about North Dakota.
Dozens of boys crowded around the UN compound where someone, somewhere, held a list of the US cities where they might be offered homes. An older boy asserted that North Dakota is colder than Nairobi, but this was impossible to confirm. Another was enraptured with the idea of Albany, and dreamily repeated the phrase “Albany, New York. Albany, New York,” a spot whose distance he estimated at a million, or possibly 2 million, kilometers.
And a 17-year-old, John Deng, had his heart set on Chicago, having learned that it is home to an abundance of bulls. To the son and grandson and great-grandson of cattle herders from the Dinka tribe — men who still sing adoring songs about the horns of their favorite oxen — Chicago has enormous appeal.
“I see that on some shirts, like Chicago Bulls. We believe that in Chicago we will have a lot of bulls,” said Deng, a young man with a gap-toothed smile who speaks a formal English akin to that of a BBC announcer.
Within hours, however, Deng would be told the name of a place that suggests a landscape without cattle: Arlington, Mass. It would mean nothing to him.
The flights to America are leaving every day now, screaming out of the bush in a huge cloud of orange dust, as the great migration of the group known as the Lost Boys of Sudan gets underway. Heads down, barefoot except for shower thongs, the departing boys file into the aircraft as grave as spacemen, sometimes without even looking back at the friends standing five deep against the barbed wire. (Ellen Barry, The Boston Globe, Jan. 7, 2001)
A bad taste lingers in the mouths of many mall walkers.
''Oh, yes, I can still taste it,'' said Mabel Mickle, 71, a retired financial analyst who for eight years has been walking for exercise in Evergreen Plaza, an enclosed shopping center in this southwestern suburb of Chicago.
There are some 1,500 malls in the United States, and most of them open early each morning to legions of sneaker-shod, hyper-organized and often elderly mall walkers. But Evergreen Plaza tried to go boldly where no mall had gone before. It all started in February when management sent out this notice: ''The mall will no longer be available to walkers."
Bruce Provo, managing partner of a company that owns the mall and the one who ordered its walkers into exile, said in his lockout order, ''We can no longer turn a blind eye to the realities of the world we live in.'' Those realities included mall walkers who muddied freshly buffed floors, hogged prime parking and demanded free Christmas gifts, Mr. Provo said in an interview.
''It got out of control from a standpoint of entitlement,'' he said. ''Predominantly they are seniors, O.K., and seniors are not great spenders, are they?''
Burned by a firestorm of bad publicity, boycott threats and patron poaching from nearby malls, Mr. Provo, 50, has been forced to retreat.
Across the United States, there are mall retailers who regard walkers as marginal shoppers, said Malachy Kavanagh, a spokesman for the International Council of Shopping Centers, a trade group based in Manhattan. But with the conspicuous exception of Mr. Provo, most dare not say so in public. Instead, malls from Maine to California, from Florida to Washington State, embrace their walkers in the name of community relations, comforting them with free coffee, shopping discounts and monthly blood pressure checks.
The antiwalker war that Evergreen Plaza fought so aggressively and then lost so pathetically demonstrates one of the hard realities of climate-controlled retail: In a nation that grew up in the mall and is now growing old there, mall walkers rule. (Blaine Harden, The New York Times, Aug. 28, 2001)
THE delicate posturing began with the phone call.
The proposal was that two buddies back in New York City for a holiday break in December meet to visit the Museum of Modern Art after its major renovation.
"He explicitly said, 'I know this is kind of weird, but we should probably go,' " said Matthew Speiser, 25, recalling his conversation with John Putman, 28, a former classmate from Williams College.
The weirdness was apparent once they reached the museum, where they semi-avoided each other as they made their way through the galleries and eschewed any public displays of connoisseurship. "We definitely went out of our way to look at things separately," recalled Mr. Speiser, who has had art-history classes in his time.
"We shuffled. We probably both pretended to know less about the art than we did."
Eager to cut the tension following what they perceived to be a slightly unmanly excursion - two guys looking at art together - they headed directly to a bar. "We couldn't stop talking about the fact that it was ridiculous we had spent the whole day together one on one," said Mr. Speiser, who is straight, as is Mr. Putman. "We were purging ourselves of insecurity."
Anyone who finds a date with a potential romantic partner to be a minefield of unspoken rules should consider the man date, a rendezvous between two straight men that is even more socially perilous. (Jennifer 8. Lee, The New York Times, April 10, 2005)
What time is it when the clock strikes half past 62?
Time to change the way we measure time, according to a U.S. government proposal that businesses favor, astronomers abominate and Britain sees as a threat to its venerable standard, Greenwich Mean Time.
Word of the U.S. proposal, made secretly to a United Nations body, began leaking to scientists earlier this month. The plan would simplify the world's timekeeping by making each day last exactly 24 hours. Right now, that's not always the case. (Keith J. Winstein, The Wall Street Journal, July 29, 2005)
ON A SUMMER DAY IN 2002, shares of Affiliated Computer Services Inc. sank to their lowest level in a year. Oddly, that was good news for Chief Executive Jeffrey Rich.
His annual grant of stock options was dated that day, entitling him to buy stock at that price for years. Had they been dated a week later, when the stock was 27% higher, they'd have been far less rewarding. It was the same through much of Mr. Rich's tenure: In a striking pattern, all six of his stock-option grants from 1995 to 2002 were dated just before a rise in the stock price, often at the bottom of a steep drop.
Just lucky? A Wall Street Journal analysis suggests the odds of this happening by chance are extraordinarily remote -- around one in 300 billion. The odds of winning the multistate Powerball lottery with a $1 ticket are one in 146 million. (Charles Forelle and James Bandler, The Wall Street Journal, March 18, 2006)
Unfortunately, sometimes a lede can be "too good to check" as the saying goes:
Ian Restil, a 15-year-old computer hacker who looks like an even more adolescent version of Bill Gates, is throwing a tantrum. "I want more money. I want a Miata. I want a trip to Disney World. I want X-Man comic book number one. I want a lifetime subscription to Playboy, and throw in Penthouse. Show me the money! Show me the money!" Over and over again, the boy, who is wearing a frayed Cal Ripken Jr. t-shirt, is shouting his demands. Across the table, executives from a California software firm called Jukt Micronics are listening--and trying ever so delicately to oblige. "Excuse me, sir," one of the suits says, tentatively, to the pimply teenager. "Excuse me. Pardon me for interrupting you, sir. We can arrange more money for you. Then, you can buy the comic book, and then, when you're of more, say, appropriate age, you can buy the car and pornographic magazines on your own."
It's pretty amazing that a 15-year-old could get a big-time software firm to grovel like that. What's more amazing, though, is how Ian got Jukt's attention--by breaking into its databases. In March, Restil--whose nom de plume is "Big Bad Bionic Boy"--used a computer at his high school library to hack into Jukt. Once he got past the company's online security system, he posted every employee's salary on the company's website alongside more than a dozen pictures of naked women, each with the caption: "the big bad bionic boy has been here baby." After weeks of trying futilely to figure out how Ian cracked the security program, Jukt's engineers gave up. That's when the company came to Ian's Bethesda, Maryland, home--to hire him.
And Ian, clever boy that he is, had been expecting them. "The principal told us to hire a defense lawyer fast, because Ian was in deep trouble," says his mother, Jamie Restil. "Ian laughed and told us to get an agent. Our boy was definitely right." Ian says he knew that Jukt would determine it was cheaper to hire him--and pay him to fix their database--than it would be to have engineers do it. And he knew this because the same thing had happened to more than a dozen online friends. (Stephen Glass, The New Republic, May 18, 1998)
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