Aquaponics: my future backyard “what the hell is that?”
A look at Rob Torcellini’s greenhouse.
It’s all part of a home experiment he is conducting in a form of year-round, sustainable agriculture called aquaponics — a neologism that combines hydroponics (or water-based planting) and aquaculture (fish cultivation) — which has recently attracted a zealous following of kitchen gardeners, futurists, tinkerers and practical environmentalists.
A couple quick video explanations makes it more clear:
Here’s some great engineering:
Faith and Sustainable Technologies offers free plans.
If you know of bigger or more easily scalable systems, let me know: jsong@jamessong.com
Motorino: best pizza in NYC.
Motorino named best pizza in New York City by the NY Times.
Where is it?
In the East Village:
349 East 12th Street
Sunday-Thursday 11AM-12AM
Friday and Saturday 11AM-1AM
Delivery: 212-777-2644
In Brooklyn:
319 Graham Avenue
Sunday-Thursday 11AM-12AM
Friday and Saturday 11AM-1AM
Delivery: 718-599-8899
John Mayer: Not your average douche.
A very flattering review of John Mayer in the Wall Street Journal.
In interviews, the 32-year-old Mr. Mayer comes across as somewhere between boyish and immature—self-absorbed, a little goofy and every now and then overly earnest. (Perhaps in answer to Rolling Stone’s question, his handlers declined to make him available to the Journal.) On stage, as he was here earlier this month, in the formal kickoff of a tour of the U.S. and Canada that runs into mid-April before he travels to Europe, Mr. Mayer has the opportunity to get down to business. Anyone who doubts he can do it hasn’t been listening.
That’s what I’ve been saying of Mayer for years. Here’s a guy with a great set of skills and artistic ambition but puerile and weak in mind — he has absolutely no idea how to mine his potential.
Dr. Amy Bishop: Cursed.
The Huntsville Times has identified the likely shooter in the University of Alabama shootings: Amy Bishop, a Harvard-trained neuroscientist.
At Harvard, we learned quickly that all female graduates are cursed: too smart to keep good men, too in-their-own-heads to get out of their own way. Assuming Bishop is the shooter, we can surmise that she felt she was doing the University of Alabama a favor by teaching there — “Deny me tenure? You looking to die today?”
OK Go: Here it goes again
Remember this?
Real Estate Royalty
Everyone in the NY real estate game knows it’s controlled by a handful of powerful families. The NY Times takes a look inside, and lets us know how they’re doing in the recession.
What distinguishes the families from other real estate players is that they buy property but rarely sell. They usually have relatively low levels of debt on their buildings, and they do a couple of projects every economic cycle rather than go on a binge, a practice adopted after bitter experiences with a deep recession in the 1970s. The families’ supremacy was challenged in the 1990s by the rise of publicly traded real estate companies and private equity firms. Land and construction prices began to soar, raising stakes for anyone undertaking a big residential or commercial project.
My right foot.
Living with plantar fasciitis is like living with a two-legged dog: walks in the park are never the same. It started two years ago, in Bangkok, when I felt like walking everywhere, every day, until my feet ached with exhaustion. I thought it would go away but months before I had completed a training regimen where I gained 12 pounds of muscle — and that’s when my feet started planning their revenge.
Basically, it’s like this: it feels as if someone has driven a nail into the bottom of my foot. And it’s there all the time, every day. Over the last two years, the left foot has improved greatly, while the right foot has gotten progressively worse. And that kind of pain, it should be known, leads one to consider things only hippies and hipsters would dare consider, things like barefoot running:
And wear shoes old women and small children would consider ridiculous:
The Strings That Bind Us.
I spend most weekends listening to Chrissi rant about String Theory and the horrors of advanced particle physics. Sometimes, when I catch myself paying attention, I learn something. One thing he’s turned me onto recently is Columbia physicist (and fellow Stuyvesant alum) Brian Greene. Greene is one of individuals who are very obviously good at what they do.
String Theory is one of those things only a handful of minds in the world can grasp with depth and Greene, in the following clip, hints at just how massive his must be:
And, if there’s any remaining doubt about Greene’s awesomeness, let it be known that he did Letterman.
I hurt myself Wii-ing.
Also in this week’s NEJM: a discussion of Nintendo-related injuries.
Nintendinitis. More interesting: Wiitis.
A healthy 29-year-old medical resident awoke one Sunday morning with intense pain in the right shoulder. He did not recall any recent injuries or trauma and had not participated in any sports or physical exercise recently. He consulted a rheumatology colleague. The Patte’s test was positive, consistent with acute tendonitis isolated to the right infraspinatus.
After further review of his activities during the previous 24 hours, the patient recalled that he had bought a new Nintendo Wii (pronounced “wee”) video-game system and had spent several hours playing the tennis video game. With the Wii system, the player faces a video screen and moves a handheld controller (approximately 14.5 cm by 3.0 cm by 3.0 cm, with a weight of approximately 200 g) containing solid-state accelerometers and gyroscopes that sense three-dimensional spatial movements. In the tennis video game, the player makes the same arm movements as in a real game of tennis. If a player gets too engrossed, he may “play tennis” on the video screen for many hours. Unlike in the real sport, physical strength and endurance are not limiting factors.
The final diagnosis for the isolated right shoulder pain was Nintendinitis. However, the variant in this patient can be labeled more specifically as “Wiiitis.” The treatment consisted of ibuprofen for 1 week, as well as complete abstinence from playing Wii video games. The patient recovered fully.
NY Times Style on Bespoke Clothes
Finally. It used to be that gentlemen knew the value of hand-sewn lapels and boots made from a model of your foot. No longer:
Sometimes the designer item can be a safer bet. The very growth of customization has eroded several terms crucial to knowing what you are getting. “Customized” and “made to order” refer to a stock item ordered in a different color or with, say, a different finish. “Made to measure” means making something new from a stock pattern in a stock fabric, but altered to a man’s measurements; a “custom-made” item is designed to one’s measurements and specifications from the ground up. But the terms are often used indiscriminately, leading to confusion.
No mention of Vogel, sadly.
But nods to Langlitz, John Lobb, and Michael Andrews. Ostensibly sensible, these choices belie their expertise: men who wear bespoke clothing know the best suits can be made in South Korea or Hong Kong just as well as they can be in New York (leather, admittedly, cannot: Langlitz is indeed very good at what they do) and for a fraction of the price — enough to cover the airfare and hotel. Can’t make the trip? There’s a fine tailor in Chinatown, just off the Bowery, that makes beautiful suits using fine Italian cloth — cheap — but you need to know what you’re talking about to have known that.
Your shoes hurt.
Modern footwear is causing us to change the way we move and, as a result, hurts our feet.
[New research from Harvard evolutionary biologist Daniel E. Lieberman ’86] examines how runners coped with the force of collision on their feet before the introduction of the modern running shoe in the 1970s. Comparing habitually barefoot runners with shoe-wearing runners, Lieberman and his fellow researchers found that runners who run with footwear tended to land on their heels, while runners who run barefoot tended to land on the front or middle parts of their feet.
Because humans do not have rigid bodies, only a certain percentage of human body mass—called effective mass—can feel the force of an impact.
Abstract, via Nature:
Humans have engaged in endurance running for millions of years, but the modern running shoe was not invented until the 1970s. For most of human evolutionary history, runners were either barefoot or wore minimal footwear such as sandals or moccasins with smaller heels and little cushioning relative to modern running shoes. We wondered how runners coped with the impact caused by the foot colliding with the ground before the invention of the modern shoe. Here we show that habitually barefoot endurance runners often land on the fore-foot (fore-foot strike) before bringing down the heel, but they sometimes land with a flat foot (mid-foot strike) or, less often, on the heel (rear-foot strike). In contrast, habitually shod runners mostly rear-foot strike, facilitated by the elevated and cushioned heel of the modern running shoe. Kinematic and kinetic analyses show that even on hard surfaces, barefoot runners who fore-foot strike generate smaller collision forces than shod rear-foot strikers. This difference results primarily from a more plantarflexed foot at landing and more ankle compliance during impact, decreasing the effective mass of the body that collides with the ground. Fore-foot- and mid-foot-strike gaits were probably more common when humans ran barefoot or in minimal shoes, and may protect the feet and lower limbs from some of the impact-related injuries now experienced by a high percentage of runners.
John Bowe and Us: Just Fucking Wrong.
John Bowe, co-writer of a lovely movie called Basquiat, put together an account of first-person experiences of love — and gets it totally wrong.
Fine, your life is ruined by some woman because you both can’t seem to make it work, and what do you do? Blame love. Call it faulty and confusing and utterly impenetrable.
Ostensibly, that seems fair. But it also seems too easy. “I’m right,” you say, and “I’m right,” she says and because you are both right, love must be wrong — easy, simple deductive reasoning.
Wrong.
Assume, for a moment, that love is simply an experience, like happiness or sadness or masturbation. It will come and it will go, necessarily, because biology demands it. What you have left, then, is the value of your relationship and what you are willing to sacrifice for that relationship determines said value.
So, if you let go of the relationship to resume your comfortable life, in essence you are saying that the relationship was disposable, as were your feelings of love (as are you, former lover). Because to continue that relationship would require great sacrifice (though, presumably, not your life, though you’ve admitted it was “the love of your life”), and you weren’t willing to do that because, presumably:
“You know that idea that true love conquers all?” he said. “It can conquer a hell of a lot, but it can’t conquer everything.
That actually says something about you, not love, because love is an experience (in a way), and it’s up to you to make the most of it. (Read: Dude, it was up to you to conquer everything. Why? Because you’re a man. That’s your job.)
Wal-Mart makes a funny.
Run during the AFC championship game:
James Patterson: writer, adman, shark.
The NY Times Magazine published a wonderful, wonderful piece on James Patterson — a guy who apparently has no problem publishing nine hardbacks every year, at the least.
Surprising:
There are many different ways to catalog Patterson’s staggering success. Here are just a few: Since 2006, one out of every 17 novels bought in the United States was written by James Patterson. He is listed in the latest edition of “Guinness World Records,” published last fall, as the author with the most New York Times best sellers, 45, but that number is already out of date: he now has 51 — 35 of which went to No. 1.
And incisive:
Unsatisfied with publishing’s informal approach to marketing meetings, Patterson had expected corporate-style presentations, complete with comprehensive market-share data and sales trends. “A lot of authors are just grateful to be published,” Holly Parmelee, Patterson’s publicist from 1992 to 2002, told me several weeks earlier. “Not Jim. His attitude was that we were in business together, and he wanted us both to succeed, but it was not going to be fun and games.”
And revealing:
Patterson built his fan following methodically. Instead of simply going to the biggest book-buying markets, he focused his early tours and advertising efforts on cities where his books were selling best: like a politician aspiring to higher office, he was shoring up his base. From there, he began reaching out to a wider audience, often through unconventional means. When sales figures showed that he and John Grisham were running nearly neck and neck on the East Coast but that Grisham had a big lead out West, Patterson set his second thriller series, “The Women’s Murder Club,” about a group of women who solve murder mysteries, in San Francisco.
Seriously revealing:
To maintain his frenetic pace of production, Patterson now uses co-authors for nearly all of his books. He is part executive producer, part head writer, setting out the vision for each book or series and then ensuring that his writers stay the course. This kind of collaboration is second nature to Patterson from his advertising days, and it’s certainly common in other creative industries, including television. But writing a novel is not the same thing as coming up with jokes for David Letterman or plotting an episode of “24.” Books, at least in their traditional conception, are the product of one person’s imagination and sensibility, rendered in a singular, unreproducible style and voice. Some novelists have tried using co-authors, usually with limited success. Certainly none have taken collaboration to the level Patterson has, with his five regular co-authors, each one specializing in a different Patterson series or genre. “Duke Ellington said, ‘I need an orchestra, otherwise I wouldn’t know how my music sounds,’ ” Pietsch told me when I asked him about Patterson’s use of collaborators. “Jim created a process and a team that can help him hear how his music sounds.”
The way it usually works, Patterson will write a detailed outline — sometimes as long as 50 pages, triple-spaced — and one of his co-authors will draft the chapters for him to read, revise and, when necessary, rewrite. When he’s first starting to work with a new collaborator, a book will typically require numerous drafts. Over time, the process invariably becomes more efficient. Patterson pays his co-authors out of his own pocket. On the adult side, his collaborators work directly and exclusively with Patterson. On the Y.A. side, they sometimes work with Patterson’s young-adult editor, who decides when pages are ready to be passed along to Patterson.
And, at times, obvious:
Patterson’s chapters are very short, which creates a lot of half-blank pages; his books are, in a very literal sense, page-turners. He avoids description, back story and scene setting whenever possible, preferring to hurl readers into the action and establish his characters with a minimum of telegraphic details. The first chapter of “The Swimsuit,” a recent thriller with a villain who abducts women for pornographic snuff films, opens with the kidnapping of a supermodel on a beach in Hawaii:
“Kim McDaniels was barefooted and wearing a blue-and-white-striped Juicy Couture minidress when she was awoken by a thump against her hip, a bruising thump. She opened her eyes in the blackness, as questions broke the surface of her mind.
“Where was she? What the hell was going on?”
(Did you ever think someone would give up their business model so easily, so freely?)
Joyous boredom
Jennifer Schuessler, an editor at the Book Review, tackles David Foster Wallace’s posthumous novel, The Pale King, and attempts to explain, most interestingly, the importance of being bored.
A library is an enormous repository of information, entertainment, the best that has been thought and said. It is also probably the densest concentration of potential boredom on earth.
Owl City: Fireflies
I heard this over Christmas, in New York, driving on the LIE, thinking “Deathcab for Cutie finally made something I can listen to.”
Crimsonlist
Harvard students Sasank Konda ’12 and Kane Hsieh ’12 have created Crimsonlist, a Harvard-based version of Craigslist.
A story in The Crimson asserts the idea is not new.
Brooklyn Banks: Deathwatch.
The Brooklyn Banks is set to close for some painting which, in NYC-terms, means it’ll probably close forever.
It’s a NY institution; everyone’s skated there — me included.
My, how things have changed.
What’s new:
1. Apparently, the Ugandan government has been on a standards binge, bearing down on Chinese businessmen for failing to import things of quality. The problem? The measures they use are largely subjective (e.g., pulling at shoes to see if they come apart), and some items they are complaining about are actually made in Uganda.
2. Cissy, my hapless lawyer, got married.
3. The migration of workers from China is palpable. Children no longer shout ‘mzungu,’ but ‘China’ instead. And Ugandans have started to adopt a sensitivity to the Chinese: they nearly all try to speak with a Chinese-inspired accent, which, in typical Ugandan fashion, sounds as ridiculous as it seems.
4. Those meddling European consultants keep trying to improve working conditions in Uganda, but are just fucking it all up. For instance, Uganda’s thinking about a minimum wage. The problem is that it’s just another tax on foreign investment, since Ugandans are the ones who set the market wages to begin with, and are the only ones able to flout regulations with ease.
Europe, America, just leave Africa alone. Clearly, the progress you’ve failed to make in the last 50 years should tell you that you’re not helping anyone.
5. Plastic scrap is now sold at a whopping 1000 shillings a kilo. Who would’ve known it could go so high?
6. Traffic is now everywhere, all the time (we’re up to the UAM series of license plates).
7. Nakumatt may be going down the tubes: I’ve never seen so many closed shops.
8. Puppies! Chicken and Beef procreated, making 8 more. Naturally, I’m calling the one we’re keeping McGangbang, a fusion of chicken and beef.
What hasn’t changed:
1. URA: still bureaucratic as ever.
2. The guys at Surgipharm are still rude.
3. Emirates service still sucks (it figures: Beatrice has gone to Canada).
Guidos: A guide.
Guido [m], Guidette [f], n. Originally an ethnic slur against Italian immigrants to America, since Guido was a common Italian Christian name (cf the Florentine poet Guido Cavalcanti, the Benedictine music theorist Guido d’Arezzo, the graphic artist Guido Silvestri), the term has been reappropriated, Judith Butler-style, by some Italian-Americans along the Jersey Shore [see entry] and now refers to a complex of aesthetic and moral choices made by young Italian-Americans. Among the values espoused by the self-described “Guidos” of “Jersey Shore”: heavy tanning, muscular definition, a labor-intensive toiletry regimen, family and hooking up.
I survived Uganda and all I got was this lousy…
Michelle Barnes, survivor of Marburg Fever.
When scientists trying to develop a Marburg vaccine at the National Institutes of Health heard about Ms. Barnes, they were eager to take blood samples from her. She agreed. They invited her and Dr. Fujita to Bethesda, Md., last June, to present her case to a standing-room-only crowd of researchers who had never seen a Marburg survivor.
Oh, just fuck me.
I’m watching a lecture video, and every time the prof uses the words “the situation” all I can think of is Jersey Shore. FML
Not to be outdone, YaleFML.com
And hey, since Facebook isn’t exclusive to Harvard anymore, something had to replace it. This is it.
Naturally, Yale has followed suit.
Thanks, Caroline.
A few days ago someone halfway around the world wired me enough money to buy a Ferrari. And, though I’m shamed to admit it, I just spent the day indulging my spendthrift ambitions, going so far as to buy a down featherbed and cashmere socks. (Ridiculous, I know.)
This someone, however, was not a total stranger. I’ve known him all of three days, from this past August, when he came to visit my factory in Uganda with the intention of investing. And, despite my company’s many problems, invest he did, because he saw what I see: potential.
His decision is vindication, in a way. You see, I once knew a girl — her name was Caroline — and I thought I’d drop everything in my life for her, including the factory. Sadly, she didn’t feel the same way about me. So she left, in search of something better, bigger, though with the same despondent look you see on chubby teenage girls who spend weeks scouring Internet dating sites for their Edward Cullen, only to fail, miserably.
Now I know what you’re thinking: pobre Jaime; he’s had it rough. But “hey,” I respond, “wait a minute, I was in the best position possible.” I didn’t get the girl, but hey, I got the money — and, unsurprisingly, I got another girl. So, in essence, I’m much better off than before, which means Caroline actually did me a favor — so shame on me, cashmere socks and all, because I never properly thanked her.