August 2013 – artdiamondblog.com

Science Discovers New Six-Foot Lizard

“A 6-foot monitor lizard discovered on Luzon Island in the Philippines.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. D3) The number of lizard species in the world — by most counts, around 4,000 — has just increased by one, with the announcement of a new species found on Luzon island in the Philippines.

But this is not a reptile you’d want in a home terrarium. It’s a 6-foot monitor lizard, gray with a spectacular pattern of colorful dots and other markings on its scales.
How did a species of lizard the size of a human remain undetected all these centuries? The answer is it didn’t. “It’s only new to science,” said Rafe M. Brown, an assistant professor at the University of Kansas and senior author of a paper describing the new species, Varanus bitatawa, in Biology Letters.

For the full story, see:
HENRY FOUNTAIN. “OBSERVATORY; A New Lizard? Well, New to Science.” The New York Times (Tues., April 13, 2010): D3.
(Note: the online version of the article has the date April 12, 2010.)

To Page and Brin Search Speed “Was Like Motherhood, and Scale Was Apple Pie”

(p. 37) The average search at that time, Hölzle recalls, took three and a half seconds. Considering that speed was one of the core values of Page and Brin– it was like motherhood, and scale was apple pie– this was a source of distress for the founders. “Basically during the middle of the day we were maxed out,” says Hölzle. “Nothing was happening for some users, because it would just never get a page basically back. It was all about scalability, performance improvements.” Part of the problem was that Page and Brin had written the system in what Hölzle calls “university code,” a nice way of saying amateurish.

Source:
Levy, Steven. In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011.

Philosopher Herbert Spencer Defended Capitalism in America

Source of book image: online version of the WSJ review quoted and cited below.

Spencer was sometimes a much better philosopher than the modern caricature portrays, a caricature exemplified by the review quoted below and, perhaps, by the book reviewed. I would like to look at this book sometime, because there may be some interesting history in it—though I am not optimistic about the book’s economic assumptions, or its account of Spencer’s philosophy.

(p. A11) Herbert Spencer, the 19th-century British philosopher, is remembered today as the forbidding — almost forbidden — father of “Social Darwinism,” a school of thought declaring that the fittest prosper in a free marketplace and the human race is gradually improved because only the strong survive. In Barry Werth’s satisfying “Banquet at Delmonico’s,” Spencer is also a querulous 62-year-old celibate whose 1882 American tour culminates in a feast to which are invited the “mostly Republican men of science, religion, business, and government” who shared and spread the Spencerian creed.

Applying Darwinian insights about evolution to political, economic and social life — though he did not himself use the term “Social Darwinism” — Spencer concluded that vigorous competition and unfettered capitalism conduced to the betterment of society. He predicted that the American, raised in liberty, would evolve into “a finer type of man than has hitherto existed,” dazzling the world with “the highest form of government” and “a civilization grander than any the world has known.”
. . .
The public clamor over the visit of a dyspeptic foreign philosopher to these shores was partly due to the indefatigable promotion of Edward Livingston Youmans, Spencer’s chief American proselytizer, who called his beau ideal the most original thinker in the history of mankind. Youmans is among the several critics and apostles of Spencer and Darwin whose profiles Mr. Werth skillfully interweaves in this Gilded Age tapestry.

For the full review, see:
BILL KAUFFMAN. “BOOKSHELF; Darwin in the New World; When the father of Social Darwinism came to America, the place where the fittest were supposed to thrive.” The Wall Street Journal (Fri., January 9, 2009): A11.
(Note: ellipsis added; italics in original.)

The book under review is:
Werth, Barry. Banquet at Delmonico’s: Great Minds, the Gilded Age, and the Triumph of Evolution in America. New York: Random House, 2009.

For a more balanced account of Spencer, see the first review below for the mostly good in Spencer, and the second review below for the mostly bad in Spencer:
Diamond, Arthur M., Jr. “Spencer’s Tragedy: Review of Herbert Spencer’s The Principles of Ethics.” Modern Age 24, no. 4 (Fall 1980): 419-421.
Diamond, Arthur M., Jr. “The State of Spencer: Review of Herbert Spencer’s The Man Versus the State.” Modern Age 28, nos. 2-3 (Spring/Summer 1984): 286-288.

Salt May NOT Be Bad for Our Health, After All

(p. A7) An influential government panel said there is no evidence that very low-salt diets prevent heart disease, calling into question current national dietary guidelines on sodium intake.
The Institute of Medicine, in a report released Tuesday [May 14, 2013], said there isn’t sufficient evidence that cutting sodium intake below 2,300 milligrams per day cuts the risk of heart disease. The group of medical experts also said there is no evidence that people who already have heart disease or diabetes should cut their sodium intake even lower.

For the full story, see:
JENNIFER CORBETT DOOREN. “U.S. NEWS; Low-Salt Benefits Questioned.” The Wall Street Journal (Weds., May 15, 2013): A7.
(Note: bracketed date added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date May 14, 2013.)

For a summary of the Institute of Medicine report, see:
Institute of Medicine of the National Academies. “Sodium Intake in Populations: Assessment of Evidence.” Report Brief. Washington, D.C.: National Academy of Sciences, 2013.

Urban Planners Made La Défense an Architectural Statement, But a Terrible Place to Live

“La Défense can feel like a ghost town after 5 p.m. and on weekends, once the district’s office workers have left.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. B1) . . . La Défense, begun during the presidency of Charles de Gaulle in the late 1950s and built just west of Paris by bulldozing slums and paving over farmland, has always worked better in architectural theory than in anthropological practice.

Rather than the Parisian business hub its founders described, it often seems more like the isolated end of a spoke that has highlighted a crucial flaw in urban planning — a concern with making architectural statements — rather than an affinity for the people in and around the buildings.
When non-French planning experts assess La Défense, they say it shares the same problems as the Canary Wharf complex in London, where developers have tried to supplant the City with Big Architecture and whose artificial origins may be hard to overcome. The experts look more favorably on the somewhat organic mix of (p. B6) business and residential of Lower Manhattan, which has evolved over the last century.
“La Défense has always suffered from a creative hypothermia,” said Wojciech Czaja, an Austrian architecture critic. “It is a sad area because it is atmospherically and emotionally perceived as a business district only.”
The public agency that manages the complex has hired an architectural firm to draft a new master plan in hopes of making the grandiose vision for La Défense a livable reality.
. . .
“There is nothing good about living here,” said Carlin Pierre, 54, who works at a waste disposal center in the district and resides in one of the Brutalist communal, rent-subsidized housing blocks tucked amid the high-rise office buildings. “Sure, it’s a nice area to come as a tourist, or even to work,” Mr. Pierre said, “but it’s terrible to live in La Défense.”

For the full story, see:
GEORGI KANTCHEV. “Plan Aims to Enliven Paris’s Financial District, Long Called Soulless.” The New York Times (Tues., July 30, 2013): B1-B2.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date July 30, 2013.)

Google Started in Garage

(p. 34) On September 4, 1998, Page and Brin filed for incorporation and finally moved off campus. Sergey’s girlfriend at the time was friendly with a manager at Intel named Susan Wojcicki, who had just purchased a house on Santa Margarita Street in Menlo Park with her husband for $615,000. To help meet the mortgage, the couple charged Google $1,700 a month to rent the garage and several rooms in the house.

Source:
Levy, Steven. In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011.

Dubai Has Strong Ruling Clan, But Weak Institutions

Source of book image: http://www.christopherdavidson.net/sitebuilder/images/DVOS_cover-210×300.jpg

(p. 4) For Mr. Davidson, Dubai’s greatest weakness lies in its autocratic governing system. Politics in the emirate, as in most of the Middle East, pivots not on institutions but on clans — a ruling dynasty and its favorites who own and run Dubai in opaque fashion.

True enough, but most of the Middle East is authoritarian, yet Dubai’s enlightened despotism and welcoming social environment have stood out for fostering economic advance. Like China, albeit on a tiny scale, Dubai is engaged in an experiment of economic liberalization without political democracy.
Mr. Davidson further contends that unstable neighbors threaten Dubai’s success, but here he may have matters reversed. When Egypt and Iran stifle their entrepreneurs, many of them find a wide berth in Dubai. When Saudi Arabia imposes cultural restrictions on its population, Dubai offers a place to drink and let loose. When India and Pakistan have trouble creating jobs for their large populations, Dubai absorbs labor migrants. When Iraq or Lebanon descends into war, Dubai profits from rebuilding them.
In short, until a vast arc of countries from East Africa to Southeast Asia changes substantially, Dubai will remain poised to benefit by providing a relatively open, secure, low-tax, business-friendly alternative.

For the full review, see:
STEPHEN KOTKIN. “OFF THE SHELF; The Glittering Emirate, Revisited.” The New York Times, SundayBusiness Section (Sun., December 7, 2008): 4.
(Note: the online version of the review has the date December 6, 2008, and the title “OFF THE SHELF; Dubai, the Glittering Emirate, Revisited.”)

The book under review, is:
Davidson, Christopher M. Dubai: The Vulnerability of Success. New York: Columbia University Press, 2008.

A Path to Bringing Back the Extinct Woolly Mammoth

(p. D3) For the first time in 43,000 years, a woolly mammoth has breathed again on earth.
Well, not the mammoth itself but its hemoglobin, the stuff in red blood cells that takes on oxygen in the lungs and offloads it in the tissues. By reconstructing the mammoth’s hemoglobin, a team led by Kevin L. Campbell of the University of Manitoba in Canada has discovered how the once-tropical species adapted to living in arctic temperatures.
Dr. Campbell’s work raises a somewhat astonishing possibility: that much of the physiology of extinct animals may one day be recoverable from the DNA extracted from their remains.
. . .
Two years ago, scientists at Penn State University sequenced a large part of the mammoth’s genome from a clump of hair. They published the sequence along with the arresting suggestion that for just $10 million it might be possible to complete the sequence and use it to generate a living mammoth.
The suggestion was not as wild as it might seem, given that the idea came from George Church, a leading genome technologist at the Harvard Medical School. The mammoth’s genome differs at about 400,000 sites from that of the African elephant. Dr. Church has been developing a method for altering 50,000 sites at a time, though he is not at present applying it to mammoths. In converting four sites on the elephant genome to the mammoth version, Dr. Campbell has resurrected at least one tiny part of the mammoth.

For the full story, see:
NICHOLAS WADE. “Mammoth Hemoglobin Offers More Clues to Its Arctic Evolution.” The New York Times (Tues., May 4, 2010): D3.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the article has the date May 3, 2010.)

“Better Coffee Rockefeller’s Money Can’t Buy”

“Page Morton Black, a cabaret singer, and William Black, the founder of the Chock Full o’Nuts company, in the early 1960s.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. A17) For Gothamites of a certain vintage, it was . . . a part of life . . . — a jaunty little waltz, its lyrics connoting warmth, fiscal security and celestial reward:

Chock Full o’Nuts is that heavenly coffee,

Heavenly coffee, heavenly coffee.
Chock Full o’Nuts is that heavenly coffee,
Better coffee a millionaire’s money can’t buy.

Page Morton Black, the cabaret singer whose sprightly rendition of that song in radio and television ads was indelibly engraved on New Yorkers’ brains at midcentury, died on Sunday [July 21, 2013] at her home in the Premium Point enclave of New Rochelle, N.Y. She was 97.
. . .
Mrs. Black, the widow of William Black, the founder of the Chock Full o’Nuts company, curtailed her singing career after their marriage. But her voice lived on in the jingle, which was broadcast for more than 20 years.
. . .
The jingle’s original last line, “Better coffee Rockefeller’s money can’t buy,” was changed in 1957, after John D. Rockefeller Jr. and his family complained.
. . .
Chock Full o’Nuts, now owned by Massimo Zanetti Beverage USA, has revived the jingle, in a new arrangement, for its contemporary ads. The lyrics have been adjusted for inflation, with “billionaire” replacing “millionaire” in the last line.

For the full obituary, see:
MARGALIT FOX. “Page Morton Black, 97; Sang Heavenly Jingle.” The New York Times (Tues., July 23, 2013): B3.
(Note: ellipses, and bracketed date, added; jingle italicized and indented in print version of obituary, by not online version.)
(Note: the online version of the obituary has the title “Page Morton Black, Who Sang Heavenly Jingle, Dies at 97.”)

“We Just Begged and Borrowed” for Equipment

(p. 32) Google was handling as many as 10,000 queries a day. At times it was consuming half of Stanford’s Internet capacity. Its appetite for equipment and bandwidth was voracious. “We just begged and borrowed,” says Page. “There were tons of computers around, and we managed to get some.” Page’s dorm room was essentially Google’s operations center, with a motley assortment of computers from various manufacturers stuffed into a homemade version of a server rack– a storage cabinet made of Legos. Larry and Sergey would hang around the loading dock to see who on campus was getting computers– companies like Intel and Sun gave lots of free machines to Stanford to curry favor with employees of the future– (p. 33) and then the pair would ask the recipients if they could share some of the bounty.
That still wasn’t enough. To store the millions of pages they had crawled, the pair had to buy their own high-capacity disk drives. Page, who had a talent for squeezing the most out of a buck, found a place that sold refurbished disks at prices so low– a tenth of the original cost– that something was clearly wrong with them. “I did the research and figured out that they were okay as long as you replaced the [disk] operating system,” he says. “We got 120 drives, about nine gigs each. So it was about a terabyte of space.” It was an approach that Google would later adopt in building infrastructure at low cost.
Larry and Sergey would be sitting by the monitor, watching the queries– at peak times, there would be a new one every second– and it would be clear that they’d need even more equipment. What next? they’d ask themselves. Maybe this is real.

Source:
Levy, Steven. In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011.
(Note: italics in original.)

FDR and LaGuardia Legacy for NYC: Feds Fund Foolish Projects?

Source of book image: http://si.wsj.net/public/resources/images/OB-XZ916_bkrvam_DV_20130627152210.jpg

(p. 16) Fiorello La Guardia is regularly ranked not only as the greatest mayor of New York City, but as the greatest mayor of any city in all of American history. His pugnacious charisma, managerial competence and expansive vision still set a near-impossible standard for any candidate for municipal office.

But, as Mason B. Williams’s fascinating new book “City of Ambition: FDR, La Guardia, and the Making of Modern New York” reminds us, La Guardia’s success rested to a large degree on Franklin Roosevelt’s decision to “channel the resources of the federal government through the agencies of America’s cities and counties.”
The questions raised by the New Deal’s role in the development of New York remain relevant. President Obama champions infrastructure spending, but does that spending create local value? Should Washington support cities, like Detroit, that cannot support themselves? Does the power created by an expansive public sector lead to unacceptable abuse?
. . .
Williams tells the story of La Guardia and Roosevelt with insight and elegance, but his book doesn’t address the deeper controversies around that partnership. Did La Guardia’s New Deal spending saddle New York with obligations too expensive to maintain in the long run? Did a car-heavy construction strategy eventually enable an exodus from the city? La Guardia built much that still has value, but did the precedent of federal funding make foolish projects more likely?
Still, Williams’s aim is to write history, not policy analysis, and he succeeds impressively at that. America’s cities are the country’s true economic heartland, and much of our most important past is urban. “City of Ambition” helps us to understand that past.

For the full review, see:
EDWARD L. GLAESER. “Fiorello!; LaGuardia’s Outsize Personality Contributed to His Success, But So Did His Partnership with Franklin D. Roosevelt.” The New York Times Book Review (Sun., July 18, 2013): 16.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date July 18, 2013, and the title “Fiorello!; ‘City of Ambition,’ by Mason B. Williams.”)

The book under review, is:
Williams, Mason B. City of Ambition: FDR, La Guardia, and the Making of Modern New York. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2013.