The Carboniest Carbon Paper Around

I. Love. Buckypaper.

Life Going Nowhere, Somebody Help Me

Somebody help me, yeah:

"Stayin' Alive" might be more true to its name than the Bee Gees ever could have guessed: At 103 beats per minute, the old disco song has almost the perfect rhythm to help jump-start a stopped heart.

And in a small but intriguing study from the University of Illinois medical school, doctors and students maintained close to the ideal number of chest compressions doing CPR while listening to the catchy, sung-in-falsetto tune from the 1977 movie "Saturday Night Fever."

The American Heart Association recommends 100 chest compressions per minute, far more than most people realize, study author Dr. David Matlock of the school's Peoria, Ill., campus said Thursday.

And while CPR can triple cardiac arrest survival rates when properly performed, many people hesitate to do it because they're not sure about keeping the proper rhythm, Matlock said.

Via Kottke.

In Your Life Or Any Other

I loved John McCain at the Al Smith dinner. Well worth watching to see a solid dose of generous humanity from a candidate whose campaign has often been anything but.

All the Animals Together

I'm so sorry. That wasn't footage of my Phillies celebration party at all, but a concert James Brown gave in Paris in 1976. Here are the goods:

Get Up and Jam

In honor of the Phillies' majestic win over the Dodgers last night, which finished LA and sent the Phils into the World Series, I had an impromptu party in my dining room for friends and neighbors at around one in the morning. My upstairs neighbor Brian had a Flip video camera and took some footage. Enjoy.

The Rose Is Obsolete

I replaced my first-gen MacBook Pro in August out of necessity. I colluded with a munchkin to break it, me by leaving it on the floor and him by throwing the alarm clock down on top of it, ruining the monitor. It's hooked up to my HDTV now, the most expensive (but also most capable) Apple TV ever made.

Since I was stuck, I had to spend $2G I didn't have to replace my existing lappy. I wasn't able to hold out for the new models that were by all accounts coming down the pike. But that wasn't so bad. I got a bump to Leopard, to a much bigger hard drive and faster Core 2 Duo processor, and dual-layer DVD burning. My accessories -- especially my protective leather case -- all still fit.

And when I finally heard what the deal was with the new models, I was unimpressed. I like the current MacBook Pro's keyboard. I like a physical button. A black bezel is fine, but who cares?

This, however, is incredibly cool:

Look at that gorgeous, gorgeous seamless edge.

each petal ends in
an edge, the double facet
cementing the grooved
columns of air--The edge
cuts without cutting
meets--nothing--renews
itself in metal or porcelain--
...

From the petal's edge a line starts
that being of steel
infinitely fine, infinitely
rigid penetrates
the Milky Way
without contact--lifting
from it--neither hanging
nor pushing--

The fragility of the flower
unbruised
penetrates space
-- William Carlos Williams

Locations Are Strategies

From Nobel winner Paul Krugman's 1998 summary of trends in economic geography [PDF]:

EVOLUTION. Interesting stories about economic geography often seem to imply multiple equilibria. Suppose, for example, that producers want to locate where other producers choose to locate; this immediately suggests some arbitrariness about where they actually end up. But which equilibrium does the economy select?

New economic geography models typically assume an ad hoc process of adjustment, in which factors of production move gradually toward locations that offer higher current real returns. This sort of dynamic process was initially proposed apologetically, since it neglects the role of expectations.

But it is possible to regard models of geography as games in which actors choose locations rather than strategies—or rather, in which locations are strategies—in which case one is engaged not in old-fashioned static expectations analysis but rather in state-of-the-art evolutionary game theory!

(To middle-brow modelers like myself, it sometimes seems that the main contribution of evolutionary game theory has been to relegitimize those little arrows we always wanted to draw on our diagrams.)

This is one paragraph in the original document; I added the extra breaks, to make it read a little more like one of Krugman's NYT columns.

The broader concerns of the article itself are fascinating:

In the case of high transport costs, there is relatively little interregional trade. So the wages workers can earn depend mainly on the amount of local competition and are thus decreasing in the number of other workers in the same region. On the other hand, when transport costs are low, a typical firm sells extensively in both regions. But since it has better access to markets if it is located in the region with the larger population, it can afford to pay higher wages—and the purchasing power of these wages is also higher because workers have better access to consumer goods. So in that case real wages are increasing in a region’s population...

[O]ne of the appealing features of the new economic geography: it easily allows
one to work through interesting “imaginary histories.” Suppose, for example, that we imagine an economy that starts with high transport costs and therefore with an even division of manufacturing between regions, a situation illustrated by the point labelled A. Then suppose that transport costs were gradually to fall. When the economy reached B, it would begin a cumulative process, in which a growing concentration of manufacturing in one region would lead to a still larger concentration of manufacturing in that region. That is, the economy would spontaneously organize itself into a core-periphery geography.

Nicht Ohne Du Vin

In the new New Yorker, Louis Menand brings his trademark Menandiness to text-messaging.

Look: frankly, it's impossible for anyone to really say who the audience of the New Yorker is. It appears to be mostly insecure middle-aged urban intelligentsia who would make fun of Iron Man if they hadn't once had a great conversation with Robert Downey Jr. Oh, and huge R. Kelly fans.

So, texting, maybe they do it all the time, and maybe this is one of those not-quite-newfangled things that they'd like to know enough about to make fun of with some kind of knowledge, or pretend to make fun of it so they can secretly indulge in their interest in the not-so-secret language of teenagers.

Either way, Menand splits the difference. So he cracks wise:

In some respects, texting is a giant leap backward in the science of communication. It’s more efficient than semaphore, maybe, but how much more efficient is it than Morse code? With Morse code, to make an “s” you needed only three key presses. Sending a text message with a numeric keypad feels primitive and improvisational—like the way prisoners speak to each other by tapping on the walls of their cells in “Darkness at Noon,” or the way the guy in “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly” writes a book. And, as Crystal points out, although cell phones keep getting smaller, thumbs do not.

(Hey, if semaphore or morse code were live options, I'd give 'em a whirl.)

Then he puts it in his historical context:

Most of the shortcuts used in texting are either self-evident (@ for “at” and “b” for “be”) or new initialisms on the model of the old “A.S.A.P.,” “R.S.V.P.,” and “B.Y.O.B.”: “imho” for “in my humble opinion,” and so on... “People were playing with language in this way long before mobile phones were invented,” [David Crystal] points out. “Texting may be using a new technology, but its linguistic processes are centuries old.” Acronyms, contractions, abbreviations, and shortened words (“phone” for “telephone,” and so forth) are just part of the language. Even back in the days when the dinosaurs roamed the earth and men wrote with typewriters, the language of the office memo was studded with abbreviations: “re:,” “cc.,” “F.Y.I.” “Luv” for “love” dates from 1898; “thanx” was first used in 1936. “Wassup,” Crystal notes, originally appeared in a Budweiser commercial. @(------ is something that E. E. Cummings might have come up with.

(In fact, "wassup" was first popularized by the show "Martin," where it was spelled "WZUP," after the titular character's radio call letters.)

God, weren't the twenties awesome? Finally, he adds some titillating foreign ethnography for experts true and vicarious:

A trillion of anything has to make some change in cultural weather patterns. Texting is international. It may have come late to the United States because personal computers became a routine part of life much earlier here than in other countries, and so people could e-mail and Instant Message (which shares a lot of texting lingo)... In the Czech Republic, for example, “hosipa” is used for “Hovno si pamatuju”: “I can’t remember anything.” One can imagine a wide range of contexts in which Czech texters might have recourse to that sentiment. French texters have devised “ght2v1,” which means “J’ai acheté du vin.” In Germany, “nok” is an efficient solution to the problem of how to explain “Nicht ohne Kondom”—“not without condom.” If you receive a text reading “aun” from the fine Finnish lady you met in the airport lounge, she is telling you “Älä unta nää”—in English, “Dream on.”

It's Marcel Duchamp in blue jeans! lhooq! ght2v1! rroseselavy! We should all either give up now or type only in French acro-puns. The French are just better at this than we are.

Achilles, That Splendid Splinter

John Updike, "Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu" (Oct 1960):

The affair between Boston and Ted Williams has been no mere summer romance; it has been a marriage, composed of spats, mutual disappointments, and, toward the end, a mellowing hoard of shared memories. It falls into three stages, which may be termed Youth, Maturity, and Age; or Thesis, Antithesis, and Synthesis; or Jason, Achilles, and Nestor.

First, there was the by now legendary epoch when the young bridegroom came out of the West, announced "All I want out of life is that when I walk down the street folks will say 'There goes the greatest hitter who ever lived.' " The dowagers of local journalism attempted to give elementary deportment lessons to this child who spake as a god, and to their horror were themselves rebuked. Thus began the long exchange of backbiting, bat-flipping, booing, and spitting that has distinguished Williams' public relations. The spitting incidents of 1957 and 1958 and the similar dockside courtesies that Williams has now and then extended to the grandstand should be judged against this background: the left-field stands at Fenway for twenty years have held a large number of customers who have bought their way in primarily for the privilege of showering abuse on Williams. Greatness necessarily attracts debunkers, but in Williams' case the hostility has been systematic and unappeasable. His basic offense against the fans has been to wish that they weren't there. Seeking a perfectionist's vacuum, he has quixotically desired to sever the game from the ground of paid spectatorship and publicity that supports it. Hence his refusal to tip his cap to the crowd or turn the other cheek to newsmen. It has been a costly theory—it has probably cost him, among other evidences of good will, two Most Valuable Player awards, which are voted by reporters—but he has held to it from his rookie year on. While his critics, oral and literary, remained beyond the reach of his discipline, the opposing pitchers were accessible, and he spanked them to the tune of .406 in 1941. He slumped to .356 in 1942 and went off to war.

In 1946, Williams returned from three years as a Marine pilot to the second of his baseball avatars, that of Achilles, the hero of incomparable prowess and beauty who nevertheless was to be found sulking in his tent while the Trojans (mostly Yankees) fought through to the ships. Yawkey, a timber and mining maharajah, had surrounded his central jewel with many gems of slightly lesser water, such as Bobby Doerr, Dom DiMaggio, Rudy York, Birdie Tebbetts, and Johnny Pesky. Throughout the late forties, the Red Sox were the best paper team in baseball, yet they had little three-dimensional to show for it, and if this was a tragedy, Williams was Hamlet...

By the time I went to college, near Boston, the lesser stars Yawkey had assembled around Williams had faded, and his craftsmanship, his rigorous pride, had become itself a kind of heroism. This brittle and temperamental player developed an unexpected quality of persistence. He was always coming back—back from Korea, back from a broken collarbone, a shattered elbow, a bruised heel, back from drastic bouts of flu and ptomaine poisoning. Hardly a season went by without some enfeebling mishap, yet he always came back, and always looked like himself. The delicate mechanism of timing and power seemed locked, shockproof, in some case outside his body. In addition to injuries, there were a heavily publicized divorce, and the usual storms with the press, and the Williams Shift—the maneuver, custom-built by Lou Boudreau, of the Cleveland Indians, whereby three infielders were concentrated on the right side of the infield, where a left-handed pull hitter like Williams generally hits the ball. Williams could easily have learned to punch singles through the vacancy on his left and fattened his average hugely. This was what Ty Cobb, the Einstein of average, told him to do. But the game had changed since Cobb; Williams believed that his value to the club and to the game was as a slugger, so he went on pulling the ball, trying to blast it through three men, and paid the price of perhaps fifteen points of lifetime average. Like Ruth before him, he bought the occasional home run at the cost of many directed singles—a calculated sacrifice certainly not, in the case of a hitter as average-minded as Williams, entirely selfish.

Updike's essay also may or may not be the locus classicus of the great Williams myth -- that Williams was robbed of career batting titles due to his two military tours of duty, putting lesser men ahead of him through a mistake of statistics -- but it offers the most graceful summary of it I've ever read:

But if we allow him merely average seasons for the four-plus seasons he lost to two wars, and add another season for the months he lost to injuries, we get a man who in all the power totals would be second, and not a very distant second, to Ruth. And if we further allow that these years would have been not merely average but prime years, if we allow for all the months when Williams was playing in sub-par condition, if we permit his early and later years in baseball to be some sort of index of what the middle years could have been, if we give him a right-field fence that is not, like Fenway's, one of the most distant in the league, and if—the least excusable "if"—we imagine him condescending to outsmart the Williams Shift, we can defensibly assemble, like a colossus induced from the sizable fragments that do remain, a statistical figure not incommensurate with his grandiose ambition.

via Bill Simmons, The Millions, and Kottke.

For My Baby

Jeff Mangum, on the small child's fascination with touching mouths and faces:

Now, how I remember you
How I would push my fingers through your mouth
To make those muscles move
That made your voice so smooth and sweet
-- "In the Aeroplane Over the Sea"