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fiefoe"The Naked Launch" / Nathan Heller
"The End of Food" / Lizzie Widdicombe
__ In isolated settlements, in smoky, fire-lit homes, New Englanders lived very much in the dark, where one listens more acutely, feels most passionately, and imagines most vividly, where the sacred and the occult thrive
__ the toadish guile of George Smiley
__ 30, still gusted along by the eagerness of youth
Jenali Cobb:
Residents of St. Bernard Parish, who blocked the roads in order to keep black residents leaving the city from coming through their community;
Malcolm Gladwell:
Chetty and his co-authors established their point in a number of ways. Suppose, they said, you look at parents who earn in the first quintile—that is, the bottom fifth of the U.S. income distribution. What are the odds that one of their children will—by the time that child reaches adulthood—make it into the top fifth of the income distribution? Those odds, they found, vary dramatically from one city to the next. In San Jose, for example, the probability is 12.9 per cent. San Jose, clearly, has a lot of good neighborhoods. So does Salt Lake City, where the probability of a bottom-quintile-to-top-quintile shift is 10.8 per cent. At the other end of the spectrum is Charlotte, North Carolina, where the probability is 4.4 per cent:
"The Yellow House" / Sarah M. Broom
In early spring, before the Jane magnolia tree bloomed, I set off to close the distance between the me of now and the me of then. When I made the drive to New Orleans from upstate New York, where I live now, I began as I had dozens of times before, from various starting points, cradling a longing to see what, if anything, had changed. These returns always seem necessary, as if I were a rubber band, stretched to its breaking point.
"Out of Bethlehem" / Louis Menand
More New Journalistically, she adopted a Haight personality. She blended into the scene; she internalized its confusions. She gave readers the sense that she was putting herself at risk by reporting this story, that she might get sucked into the Haight abyss and become a lost soul, too.
- They gave Jobs lots of demo models, so that if one ran down its memory he could quietly swap it out. At the climax of the presentation,Jobs wanted to play music; put a call on hold to take another one; e-mail a photo; and search the Web. The idea of him doing this live onstage, in sequence, made some engineers feel physically ill.
- These weren’t the same as the activists known as the New Left. They were, in mood and interests, transcendentalists. They hoped to escape the old-style organizations that kept people dutiful and hived off from one another.
- New-corporate businesses grow not by structure but by story. Ford expands its product line by creating a new model of car. But Amazon, Apple, and Google expand in the manner of a serialized comic, with each chapter supplying a new plot point about the company’s development—we’re taking over new markets every year! li>Bezos, in a similar vein, makes employees propose new products by writing mock press releases—the idea being that design starts with customer seduction.
- In 3.5 billion years, evolution has solved countless challenging problems without creating something that looks like a silicon chip.
- Rogers... In 2011, he and his colleagues announced the invention of a device that had hitherto seemed impossible: an integrated silicon circuit with the mechanical properties of skin.
- To locate arrhythmias—rogue electrical signals that can cause heart failure or stroke—doctors snake a catheter through a patient’s arteries and into this maze. The catheter has a silver tip, like a shoelace cap, typically with two electrodes on it. A skilled practitioner must poke two hundred points, in the course of two hours, to create a map of electrical activity. Doctors can use such a map to locate the source of an arrhythmia, and then they can sometimes insert another catheter to burn and destroy the site where the aberrant pulses appear to arise. But, since each signal is recorded at a different time, there is no way to watch a pulse propagate through tissue, which means that knowing where to burn is inexact.
- But the substrate material had to be heat-resistant; circuits are baked at temperatures upward of two thousand degrees Fahrenheit. It also had to have an atomic structure similar to silicon’s: semiconductors are grown as crystals in a vacuum chamber, and the substrate provides the initial template. In the process, the semiconductor and its substrate bond so tightly that separating the two with a third chemical is like trying to separate bark from a tree by setting the whole thing on fire.
- He added ridges to the stamp, which reduced its area of contact, and modified its mechanics, applying the same law of physics that dictates that a Band-Aid ripped off quickly will cling less than one pulled off slowly. The result was a stamp that adhered just strongly enough to the circuits to yank them off the substrate, and weakly enough so that, once they were planted on their new base, the stamp could peel away and leave them behind.
- Rogers realized that it could be his way around the material’s inelasticity. He would fabricate silicon in accordion-like shapes that could unfold and fold without breaking: stretchability without stretching.
- One, Semprius, uses the same stamping technique as his flexible devices do to print the world’s smallest solar cells onto flat panels;
- the cells, made with gallium arsenide, a high-performance semiconductor, and coated with lenses the size of pinheads, are too small to handle with traditional tools.
- a new research field called optogenetics, which entails threading light-emitting devices into the brain to trigger neurons with photons... The first step, using a virus to gain entry, is to infect a specific group of brain cells with a protein that makes them sensitive to light.
- two translucent L.E.D.s hung from a plastic cube the size of a die—the mouse’s top hat. Alongside each one was an electrode to measure neural signals and a temperature sensor to make sure that it wasn’t overheating the brain. Each strand was virtually invisible, about the size of four mouse brain cells. The strands would cause far less inflammation than typical, stiffer fibre-optic cables do. “The bad news is, it’s so flexible and floppy that it doesn’t have the rigidity needed to penetrate the brain tissue in the first place,” Rogers told me. To push it in, he had mounted the L.E.D. on a needlelike polymer base, using a thin film of silk glue that would dissolve in brain fluid. The researchers could lower the needle and L.E.D. into the brain, wait fifteen minutes for the silk to dissolve, and then pull out the needle, leaving the device behind.
- “We always describe Korea as having the technology of 2050 with the mentality of 1950,” Stawski told me.
- Jimin wanted to go on a theme date where they’d wear hats and dark glasses and set the timers on their cameras so it looked like they were being chased by paparazzi.
- Anyone who has experienced the jittery expectancy that texting can incite—accompanied by phantom vibrations and the ability to sense that your screen has lit up, even under a pile of ten coats—knows that communications can thwart communication. When the text arrives,the Pavlovian anxiety of waiting momentarily subsides, but the angst over what to make of the content escalates. “Analyze!” the call goes out, as messages are forwarded and phones are passed around tables, as though Rosa Mexicano were Bletchley Park. Falling in love turns into an exercise in code-breaking.
- It looks a little like an ice-cream truck, lightly weaponized for inner-city work.
- The videos of their early test runs, edited together, play like a jittery reel from “The Benny Hill Show”: bike takes off, engineers jump up and down, bike falls over—more than six hundred times in a row. “We built the bike and rebuilt the bike, just sort of groping in the dark,” Smart told me. “It’s like one of my colleagues once said: ‘You don’t understand, Charlie, this is robotics. Nothing actually works.’ ”
- The trick, as in any educational system, is to combine the two in proper measure. Too much rote learning can make for a plodding machine. Too much experiential learning can make for blind spots and caprice.
"The End of Food" / Lizzie Widdicombe
- The Silicon Valley disrupter pose can seem contrived, but Rhinehart comes by it honestly: before he could blow up diet dogma, he had to shake off organized religion.
- he said. “They’re hardwired to love meat, and they love the trappings of meat—Thanksgiving, Christmas, ballgames.”
- I asked Rhinehart if he had ever considered sponsoring a food truck. He seemed not to understand the question. “We thought about doing Soylent drone delivery,” he said, dreamily. “Where you just hit a button on your phone and a drone comes and drops a bottle of Soylent, and you refuel.”
- You begin to realize how much of your day revolves around food. Meals provide punctuation to our lives: we’re constantly recovering from them, anticipating them, riding the emotional ups and downs of a good or a bad sandwich. .. But Soylent makes you realize how many daily indulgences we allow ourselves in the name of sustenance.
- The problem was worse, Rhinehart noted, when he first posted the Soylent formula online: he overestimated the amount of sulfur. For weeks, he and his acolytes emitted clouds of sulfurous gas. “I cleared out a jazz theatre once,” he recalled, nostalgically... “Upon further review, we found we were getting enough sulfur from the amino acids,” he said. “It was a bug. But we fixed it.”
__ In isolated settlements, in smoky, fire-lit homes, New Englanders lived very much in the dark, where one listens more acutely, feels most passionately, and imagines most vividly, where the sacred and the occult thrive
_______________________
Anthony Lane:__ the toadish guile of George Smiley
__ 30, still gusted along by the eagerness of youth
Jenali Cobb:
Residents of St. Bernard Parish, who blocked the roads in order to keep black residents leaving the city from coming through their community;
Malcolm Gladwell:
Chetty and his co-authors established their point in a number of ways. Suppose, they said, you look at parents who earn in the first quintile—that is, the bottom fifth of the U.S. income distribution. What are the odds that one of their children will—by the time that child reaches adulthood—make it into the top fifth of the income distribution? Those odds, they found, vary dramatically from one city to the next. In San Jose, for example, the probability is 12.9 per cent. San Jose, clearly, has a lot of good neighborhoods. So does Salt Lake City, where the probability of a bottom-quintile-to-top-quintile shift is 10.8 per cent. At the other end of the spectrum is Charlotte, North Carolina, where the probability is 4.4 per cent:
"The Yellow House" / Sarah M. Broom
In early spring, before the Jane magnolia tree bloomed, I set off to close the distance between the me of now and the me of then. When I made the drive to New Orleans from upstate New York, where I live now, I began as I had dozens of times before, from various starting points, cradling a longing to see what, if anything, had changed. These returns always seem necessary, as if I were a rubber band, stretched to its breaking point.
"Out of Bethlehem" / Louis Menand
More New Journalistically, she adopted a Haight personality. She blended into the scene; she internalized its confusions. She gave readers the sense that she was putting herself at risk by reporting this story, that she might get sucked into the Haight abyss and become a lost soul, too.
