Apple for the day

Sam Gustin has an article in Time about Apple, yet again:

Apple suffered a major legal defeat this week when a federal judge ruled that the tech giant violated US antitrust law by orchestrating a conspiracy with five big publishers to raise electronic book prices. Consumers won’t feel much immediate impact from the decision, however, because e-book prices have fallen sharply since the publishers agreed to settle the charges before Apple’s trial.
The most interesting aspect of the case is the future of the publishing industry itself, says Mark Lemley, a Stanford law school professor and antitrust expert. The settlement limits publishers’ ability to influence the retail price of e-books, underscoring their waning power as the industry hurtles toward a future in which most books are bought and read in digital form.
In her 160-page decision, US District Judge Denise Cote found that Apple hatched a scheme with the five publishers— Macmillan, Penguin, Hachette, HarperCollins, and Simon & Schuster— to raise e-book prices by pushing the industry from the traditional “wholesale model”, in which retailers set the price, to an “agency model”, in which the publishers set the price. The conspiracy increased the cost of e-books for consumers, Judge Cote found. Apple was found guilty of violating the Sherman Antitrust Act.
“This was the publishers’ last-ditch effort to prop up their print business model,” said Lemley. “Over the long-term, it’s going to be very hard for them to maintain their traditional role as intermediaries, in which they take the lion’s share of industry profits.” Judge Cote determined that the goal of the conspiracy was to undermine Amazon, which had spooked the publishers by selling e-books for $9.99— below wholesale cost— in order to drive sales of its Kindle e-reader.
As Amazon gobbled up e-book market share after introducing the Kindle in 2007, the publishers feared that $9.99 would become an “entrenched” consumer expectation for e-books, and ultimately drag down the price of hard-cover books. In the traditional wholesale model, the major publishers were able to justify list prices of $25 or more for new print best-sellers because of the fixed costs associated with editing, manufacturing, and shipping books, as well as the system that compensated authors.
Brick-and-mortar retail giants like Barnes & Noble and now-defunct Borders were happy to pay the publishers $15 per best-seller under the wholesale model, because they knew they could mark up the price, perhaps not as high as the $25 list price, but high enough to make a profit and still make consumers feel like they were getting a discount. For decades this system worked well for the publishers, the retailers, and consumers.
Amazon radically disrupted that model because, instead of selling e-books above the wholesale price, the company sold e-books at a loss, in order to drive Kindle sales. As e-books exploded in popularity after the Kindle was introduced, the underlying cost structure of the publishing business began to crumble, because e-books cost much less to publish, store, and distribute than print books. By 2010, Amazon e-book sales had overtaken hard-cover sales.
As a result of Amazon’s e-book discounting, the publishers feared that their profit margins would erode, and they panicked. When Apple approached the publishers with a plan to raise e-book prices, the industry giants seized the opportunity to protect their pricing power. That’s where the price-fixing conspiracy occurred.
In the long-term, however, the publishers were fighting a losing battle, because e-books simply cost much less to produce and distribute than print books. Before the Apple trial even started, the publishers struck a settlement deal with the government worth tens of millions of dollars to be paid out to consumers who had been over-charged as a result of the conspiracy.
The agreement required the publishers to end their agency agreements with Apple, which allowed retailers like Amazon to once again set the price for e-books. Almost immediately after the settlement, e-book prices began to decline.
“The settlement had the effect of breaking up the conspiracy and introducing price competition back into the market,” said Lemley. Over the last year, the average price for best-selling e-books has declined by nearly fifty percent, according to Jeremy Greenfield, editorial director at Digital Book World, a leading trade publication covering the e-book and digital publishing business.
Apple, of course, is in a much stronger position than the publishers, not least of all because the company generates more profit every year than the entire value of the book publishing industry itself. This helps explain why Apple held out after the publishers had already settled. Unlike the publishers, Apple’s litigation and potential settlement costs were minuscule relative to its size, so the tech giant had almost nothing to lose financially by seeking to clear its name.
More importantly, Apple had sentimental and even prideful reasons not to settle with the government. Senior Apple executive Eddy Cue, the tech giant’s chief negotiator with the publishers, was keenly aware that the company’s late co-founder and visionary leader Steve Jobs was gravely ill in the run-up to the January 2010 iPad launch. Cue wanted to secure one final media coup for his mentor.
If Apple had settled, it could have been viewed as a tacit acknowledgement that Jobs might have broken the law, Lemley said. After all, some of the most damning evidence introduced during the trial included Jobs’ own statements, such as his now-infamous quote to his biographer Walter Isaacson: “We told the publishers: ‘We’ll go to the agency model, where you set the price, and we get our thirty percent, and yes, the customer pays a little more, but that’s what you want anyway.’”
Apple continues to maintain that it did nothing wrong, and has pledged to appeal the decision. “Apple did not conspire to fix e-book pricing and we will continue to fight against these false accusations,” Apple spokesman Tom Neumayr said. In addition to its appeal, which will take place in the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, Apple faces a new trial to determine damages based on how much money the tech giant made as a result of the conspiracy.

Rico says that the Sherman Antitrust Act was not named for Sheldon, the guy on The Big Bang Theory, though it surely should've been...

Stairway to heaven

Rico's been there, but not to the top:

The Ha'iku Stairs, also known as the Stairway to Heaven, form a steep mountain hiking trail (photo) that seems to disappear into the skies above Oahu.
The trail got its start as a simple wooden ladder attached to the cliff. It was installed during World War Two to facilitate the building of a giant VLF transmitter. As opposed to other VLF-transmitters, this station did not use any towers, but antenna cables spun between the cliffs above Ha'iku Valley. These, along with a building at the peak, could transmit signals that could reach submarines submerged in the waters of Tokyo Bay.
In the 1950s, the wooden stairway was replaced by metal stairs and ramps; 3,922 steps in all. The stairway became off-limits in 1987, when vandals destroyed three of its sections. Undeterred, thrill-seeking hikers soon took to sneaking up the stairs, incurring the ire of local residents.
Though the city repaired the broken and rusted segments in 2002 with the intent of opening the Ha’iku Stairs to the public, community complaints and liability concerns have kept them closed. At just eighteen inches wide, and more like a ladder in the steepest sections, the steps require climbers to travel single-file and make passing others difficult. A handrail on each side offers protection from tumbles down the mountain, but those rails-- and the stairs-- are often wet and slippery from the humidity.
To score a spectacular view of the sunrise, you’ll need to start your hike up Ha’iku Stairs in the dead of night. Each day at about 5 am, a security guard arrives at the foot of the stairs to enforce the no-trespassing rule. If you can find your way through the pitch-black jungle before the guard arrives, you’ll be able to hike to the summit and back without getting into trouble. (As long as you are quiet and polite, the guard may even congratulate you or take a group photo when you arrive back at the bottom.) The reward for completing the adrenalin-fueled, mist-shrouded ascent is a glorious 360-degree view of Oahu.

Rico says he's sure it's worth it, but he's not going...

Swatting the ghost of Steve Jobs

Farhad Manjoo has a Slate article about Apple and e-books:

A federal judge recently issued a damning finding that Apple conspired with five major book publishers to fix the price of e-books. The ruling is a chronicle of these firms’ incredible stupidity. In 2009 and 2010, the judge says, Apple and the publishers conspired, more or less in the open, telegraphing their moves to the press, memorializing their discussions over email, hinting at their anti-competitive agreements in public statements, and strategizing in swanky restaurants. For a short while, they succeeded in their goal of raising book prices: Overnight, the average price of e-books rose by nearly twenty percent, with some best-sellers shooting up by close to fifty percent. Books that used to sell for $9.99 were now $12.99 or $14.99, prices that Apple and the publishers believed would threaten Amazon.com, the undisputed king of e-books.
The ruling would be a great yarn if it involved just any companies, but it’s all the sweeter when you consider the players involved. The battle for the e-book market was, at its heart, a fight between Steve Jobs’ and Jeff Bezos’ differing business philosophies. Amazon was bent on keeping prices low, even at the cost of profits. Apple, as ever, wanted to make sure that it could make a bundle on e-books. The iBookstore was Apple’s effort to do to Amazon what it had so long done to the rest of the tech industry: beat it over the head with a combination of better software, hardware, and content. With the iPad, Apple hoped to create a device that would make Amazon’s Kindle obsolete, and give it the same dominance over books that the iPod had given it over music.
But Apple’s gambit failed. Predictably, the rise in e-book prices led to a decline in sales, hurting the publishers’ bottom line. The iBookstore, whose success the publishers were banking on, never really became a big hit. Then the government intervened and pressed antitrust charges. The Justice Department settled with the five publishers, but Apple maintained its innocence, went to trial, and has now suffered a devastating loss. (The company says it will appeal.) Altogether, then, the price-fixing effort was a resounding failure. In one of his last efforts to shake up the media world, Jobs went after Bezos with everything he had. And he lost.
Apple and Amazon are both often hailed as “disruptors,” but in this case, only Amazon earned that label. Amazon’s e-book plan aimed for a couple of simple goals: Bezos wanted to make e-books the primary format for publishing, and he wanted to establish $9.99 as the market price for new e-books. Amazon was willing to sacrifice profits in the short term to achieve these goals. By charging so little for e-books, Amazon was encouraging people to ditch print books, which— in the early days of the Kindle— still made up the bulk of Amazon’s book sales. More than that, Amazon was willing to lose money on every e-book it sold. The company dealt with publishers under the so-called “wholesale model”, meaning that publishers sold books to Amazon for a set price, and then let Amazon choose the retail price. Publishers often set the wholesale price at $12 to $14. Amazon then sold the books for $9.99— i.e, for less than it had paid for them.
Under this strategy, publishers still made a profit on each book— Amazon was taking the loss, not them— but publishers still hated Amazon’s $9.99 price. They feared that, once Amazon gained a stranglehold over the e-book market, it would force publishers to lower their wholesale prices. This was a reasonable assumption, because no business— not even Amazon, with its incredibly forgiving shareholders— can stand losing money forever. And if it got big enough, Amazon could do something even worse: it could replace publishers entirely, signing deals with authors that lowered book prices and gave writers a bigger cut on each book sold. (In fact, that’s exactly what Amazon does under its Kindle Direct program.)
How do you compete with a crazy person, a guy who seems congenitally allergic to profits? When it entered the e-book market, Apple had two choices. First, it could out-crazy Amazon— it certainly had the cash reserves to take a similar loss on e-books, to sell them at $9.99 or less in order to become a leader in the business. But Apple had no desire to do that. Documents in the case make clear that it didn’t see much value in competing on price, especially because it believed the iPad offered a better experience than the Kindle for e-books. Apple also had no interest in losing any money, whereas at Apple, profits are inviolable— the only real point of doing anything.
But how could Apple make a profit on e-books if the prevailing price, set by Amazon, was below cost? There was only one way: by working with publishers to force Amazon to raise its prices. To do so, Apple proposed that publishers adopt the “agency model” for e-books. Under this model, a publisher sets the retail price of the book, and the e-book store— i.e., Apple and Amazon—would take 30 percent of that price. Apple liked this model because it guaranteed a profit. Ironically for publishers, the new scheme actually lowered profits. Under Amazon’s plan, publishers were getting $12 to $14 per book; under Apple’s proposal, they would get seventy percent of $12.99 or $14.99 (which Apple had set as the maximum e-book price), or between $9 and $10.50. Still, the major publishers were thrilled with Apple’s model, because it allowed them to charge more than $9.99 per e-book; the higher retail prices, they believed, would make for a more sustainable e-book business in the long run. The only problem was convincing Amazon to go along with this plan.
That’s where the collusion came in. According to the ruling, after negotiating deals with Apple, five major publishers approached Amazon simultaneously with an offer it couldn’t refuse— either Amazon could move over to the new, higher-priced agency model, or it would have to wait months to begin selling best-selling titles in its store. Collusion was necessary here, the court explains, because if any single publisher approached Amazon with this deal, Amazon could have balked and simply delisted that publisher’s titles from the Kindle Store. (In fact, Amazon did that for a few days with books published by Macmillan.) The only way the publishers could fight Amazon was by illegally working together—and by making sure they had a fallback place to sell their wares in case Amazon refused, namely at Apple’s store.
Apple and the publishers sure come out looking sleazy in this saga. (Disclosure: I’m under a book contract from Simon & Schuster, one of the defendant publishers in this case.) One of the sorriest moments occurred in the fall of 2010, when Apple cooked up a way to pressure Random House— the only major publisher that had refused to switch over to the agency model— to join its bookstore. When Random House submitted a few e-book apps to Apple’s App Store, Eddy Cue, who heads Apple’s content division, refused to let the apps go live unless Random House agreed to do “an overall deal” with Apple. Random House capitulated; it joined the iBookstore and raised its prices.
It’s possible to sympathize with the publishers in this saga. With their business models in peril, they were stuck between two behemoths and had little leverage; though it’s illegal, collusion might have seemed like the only way to fight back against Amazon. But I really can’t see anything good in Apple’s effort. Jobs embarked on a strategy that had the effect of helping Apple and potentially helping publishers, but by raising prices on every customer. It was shameful. It was also a failure, and now, despite the iPad and the iBookstore, Amazon is still the undisputed leader of the worldwide market for e-books. Thank goodness.

Rico says that he thought selling at a loss was illegal, too; or is it just stupid?

Ugly reality

Guilty, sorry

John McWhorter has a Time article about Zimmerman:

While the jury for George Zimmerman’s trial could decide on a manslaughter charge, it wouldn’t be surprising if Zimmerman walks away a free man. The prosecution simply hasn’t been able to disprove his claim that he killed Trayvon Martin in self-defense, and Zimmerman has looked ever more the overzealous bungler than the bigoted murderer.
There seems to be a general consensus that, even if it was self-defense, Zimmerman should not be acquitted “because he started it”, which is to say, he got out of his car and approached Trayvon Martin. And it is true that if Zimmerman hadn’t processed Martin as suspicious because of his skin color, then Martin would still be alive.
But we need to be more careful about what we are thinking of justice as here.
A thirty-year-old black man we’ll call Darnell Haskins, not especially tall, and not in great shape, lives in a mostly black town where young white toughs from the town across the river have been committing petty burglaries lately. Haskins is a self-appointed neighborhood “mayor” of sorts who likes to keep an eye on things.
Haskins sees a white seventeen-year-old we’ll call Greg Pruitt walking through, follows him grumbling about these “young crackers” and stops him. It turns out Pruitt is just minding his own business visiting a friend, doesn’t take kindly to being detained, and one thing leads to another. Pruitt, six feet tall and not unaccustomed to defending himself, is on top of Haskins banging his head on the ground. Haskins, losing the battle and desperate, takes out his gun and fires. Pruitt dies.
All will agree that this is a reasonable reconstruction of what likely happened that night in Sanford, Florida, except with the races changed. So: how many people would think Haskins should spend his life in jail for murder, even though he started it?
Few. If anything, the gut feeling among many would be that we have to “understand” Haskins as reacting to centuries of white racism.
And that shows that what concerns Martin’s defenders is not justice in the abstract, but a class-action kind of justice, addressing the disproportionate violence and abuse against black men by law enforcement, school officials, or Zimmermans. People are hoping Zimmerman will be found guilty as a symbol of black grievance and, while that grievance is legitimate, first it’s something other than justice and second, even such a verdict wouldn’t change how America feels about black boys. Another thought experiment: if Zimmerman does get put away, the people who are supposed to be getting “teached” here will learn that a self-inflated twerp who didn’t know what he was in for ended up accidentally killing a black man and got sentenced far more harshly than he would have if he were white. Progress indeed.

Rico says that Zimmerman got off, sadly...

Battery of the future

Veronique Greenwood has a Time article about new technology:

Let’s all take a moment and give a shout-out to lithium; more specifically to lithium ions, most specifically to lithium-ion batteries. Without them, you’d practically be cut off. It’s lithium ion batteries that power your laptop, your smartphone, and your tablet, not to mention your car, if you drive a hybrid. For all they do, lithium-ion batteries are simple things, consisting of a cathode and an anode immersed in a lithium solution. They’re also frustrating things; rechargeable, which is nice, except that it sometimes feels recharging is all they do. Part of that is due to the anodes, which are typically made of graphite, but scientists have been pondering making them out of silicon, which could boost the batteries’ lifetime by thirty to fifty percent. Now a Korean team of researchers has published a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggesting an unusual source for that silicon: rice.
Rice husks, the outer shell that’s removed when rice is processed and packaged, are around twenty percent silica by weight. (Silica is the same substance that makes up sand: a silicon atom bonded to two oxygen atoms.) Rice is a staple crop for a third of the world’s population, with more than a hundred million tons of  husks piling up each year. So far, there hasn’t been much call for them, so they tend to be recycled into things like animal feed.
The reason the team thinks that this silica, rather than the silica that you can scoop up on the beach, is a good source for battery anodes, is that it comes prearranged in the kind of nano-scale structure that engineers try to build for such purposes. The big problem with silicon as a battery component is that when the battery charges, the silicon expands more than three hundred percent, and then shrinks back down as the charge goes down. After repeated cycles of swelling and shrinking like a carnival balloon, the silicon, quite understandably, starts to fall apart. But using silicon that’s patterned at the nanoscale seems to help with that problem.
Silicon with this durability and flexibility can be expensive to produce, but rice silica, whose whole purpose is to form a protective shell around the kernel that insects and pathogens can’t penetrate, has those properties naturally. When Jang Wook Choi at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, senior author of the paper, saw microscope images of it in a colleague’s lab, he lit up: “I became very interested because that structure might be ideal for silicon anodes,” he recalls. “I know that chemistry, I know that structure will be good.”
Good, that is, is if the structure would stick around once the silica was converted to silicon by means of chemical reactions. Through trial and error, the team perfected a method— involving a carefully calibrated dip in acid and a couple heat treatments— for removing the oxygen atoms from rice silica without upsetting the prized structure. Then they spread the purified silicon, now a yellowish powder, on a sheet of metal foil and set up a simplified version of a battery. They found the silicon could withstand at least two hundred charge cycles while maintaining a hundred percent of its capacity; not yet up to the standards required for lithium-ion batteries, but promising.
It’s not the first time researchers have looked at rice to find silicon. In fact, on the other side of the world, the lab of Yi Cui at Stanford University lit upon the same idea. Those researchers published a paper in late May with  similar findings. “It’s such an amazing source of silicon,” Yi says. “If you can convert silicon dioxide into silicon, that provides a lot of silicon nanostructure at low cost.”
You won’t be finding rice husks in your cell phone battery in the near future, if ever—there are still many kinks to be worked out, some quite significant. Jeff Dahn, a battery scientist at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia, Canada, points out one major issue: when lab mock-ups of silicon-anode batteries using rice husks are charged, they tend to degrade the lithium solution faster than would be acceptable in a commercial battery. So an improvement in one component of the battery leads to a breakdown in another.
Yi Cui acknowledges the challenges, but he is confident that improvements are forthcoming. “The purpose of these papers was to find a low-cost silicon source. Certainly the battery data could be better if we spend more time on it.” Meanwhile, the benefits of silicon anodes continue to beckon. Despite the swelling and shrinking, and despite the problems of degrading  lithium, the prospect of more energy-dense batteries still attracts researchers. Lots of minds are likely to produce lots of solutions, whether they’re rice or something else.

Rico says that, of even more interest, was this link: Tesla Shows Off Ninety-Second Battery Swap For Its Electric Car

Good news

http://mobile.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2013/07/11/zimmerman_manslaughter_judge_nelson_rules_jury_will_be_instructed_they_can.html?wpisrc=newsletter_jcr:content

Hubble sees an alien world

Rico says that this Slate article by Phil Plait is about another blue planet:

HD 189733b is blue!
I know, right? Isn’t that amazing? Okay, maybe I better explain.
We now know of roughly nine hundred planets orbiting other stars. They’re found by lots of different methods, but the most successful way is the transit method: if we see the planet’s orbit edge-on, then it passes directly in front of its star once per orbit. It blocks a wee bit of the star’s light, and if you point a telescope at the star at the right time, you can measure that drop in light. Mind you, at these distances the planet is far, far too small to see directly (the picture at the top of this post is an artist’s illustration of the planet, not a photo). But there’s a lot we can learn indirectly.
The star HD 189733 is about sixty light-years away and is actually a loose binary star, two stars orbiting each other. One is an orange dwarf, slightly smaller and cooler than our Sun, and the other is a red dwarf, much smaller and cooler than our star, orbiting the orange dwarf more than thirty billion kilometers away.
HD 189733b also orbits the orange star, but much closer in, only five million kilometers (about three million miles) away from the star. Every 2.2186 days (yes, days) it passes directly between us and the star, blocking a tiny bit of its light. That period is so short that we can observe a lot of these transits and build up quite a large amount of data. Over the years, we’ve learned that the planet is roughly the mass of Jupiter (just fourteen percent heftier), it’s a gas giant, and because it’s so close to its parent star, the temperature at the top of its clouds is more than a thousand degrees Celsius, or 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit). Yikes.
We’ve also learned it has high winds— observations of its “night side” show that it’s far warmer than expected, meaning hot air from the star-blasted day-lit side is being transported around to the dark side. Incredibly, detailed observations have detected the presence of methane, water (steam, really), sodium, and even indirect evidence of silicates.
And now we even know its color! It’s blue. How was that done?
Astronomers used a camera called a spectrograph, which breaks up incoming light into its individual colors. This is very similar to taking the white light from the Sun, passing it through a prism, and seeing the spectrum of colors like a rainbow. The camera is called the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph, and it’s on the Hubble Space Telescope, and I note with no small pride that I worked on STIS back in the day; I was on the team that calibrated and first used it when it was installed on the Hubble in 1997.
The star HD 189733 was observed with STIS over and over again as the planet orbited it. Every time, the light was split into thousands of individual colors. What the astronomers found is that, when the planet went behind the star, they saw less blue light, while all the other colors didn’t change at all. The obvious conclusion is that the planet is very blue.
Mind you, being blue doesn’t make it anything like Earth, because Earth is blue because our air scatters the blue colors of incoming sunlight. Note that Neptune is also blue, but that’s because it has a lot of methane in its air, which absorbs red light, leaving blue light to reflect back to our eyes. HD 189733b is most likely blue due to the silicates in its atmosphere that I mentioned; those scatter blue light.
So we have an interesting picture of this planet now. It’s roughly the same size and mass as Jupiter. It’s hot, so hot that water in its atmosphere is in the form of steam, and drops of molten magnesium silicate may rain down. It has hellish winds, whipping the atmosphere into a frenzy (and probably driving that magnesium silicate rain sideways, not down). It withstands periodic outbursts from its parent star that can blow a thousand tons of its atmosphere away every second. We even can figure out that it has lovely sunsets.
And it’s blue. Even from 630 trillion kilometers away, the color of this planet literally still shines through.
It’s incredible what we can learn about our universe simply by looking closely at it. It takes patience and sophisticated tech (STIS is a phenomenally complex and extraordinarily sensitive instrument), but mostly what it takes is imagination and the desire to learn. With all these advantages, it would be a crime not to try to understand the cosmos.

Rico says the universe is more interesting than we can imagine...

Won't fly here

http://mobile.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2013/07/11/zimbabwe_corruption_hosptial_charges_women_5_every_time_they_scream_during.html?wpisrc=newsletter_jcr:content

Smog-eating sidewalks

Rico says his friend Kelley forwards this, from Yahoo! News:

The eco-makeover of urban surfaces continues. First came white roofs. Then so-called cool pavement. And now smog-eating concrete.
Yup, sidewalks with a taste for filthy air.
Eindhoven University of Technology scientists have installed air-purifying cement onto a city block in Hengelo in the Netherlands and published the results, which found that it reduced nitrogen oxide air pollution up to 45 percent in ideal weather conditions. This is an average reduction of nineteen percent each day.
The concrete, dubbed “photocatalytic”, is made with run-of-the-mill cement sprayed with a chemical— titanium oxide— that neutralizes air pollutants, the researchers’ abstract states.
"The concrete could be a very feasible solution for inner city areas, where they have a problem with air pollution," said researcher Jos Brouwers in 2010, when the pavement was in its early stages.
So, what's the world waiting for? Why aren't urban jungles with smog problem— we're especially looking at you, Beijing— not jackhammering every piece of old school pavement and pouring the new stuff?
Well, like most public work projects, it all comes down to cost. Titanium dioxide pavement is simply more expensive than your grandfather's cement.
But, with further product tinkering and price–reduction, air-scrubbing pavement could be the stomping ground of the future.

Apple for the day

Apple, fortunately, has a lot of money to spend on lawyers, as Jacob Davidson explains in Time:

In 2012, the Department of Justice accused Apple of conspiring with publishers to raise eBook prices. Publishers had been chafing under Amazon’s discount eBook prices, and the DOJ believed that Apple had helped them conspire to switch to a new licensing model using the iBooks store.
Winner: The Department of Justice. Apple was found to have “facilitated a conspiracy” between the major book publishers. A new trial will be held to determine damages, but Apple has vowed to keep fighting the charges.

In 1994, Apple engineers codenamed the Power Macintosh 7100 as the Carl Sagan, hoping the computer would sell “billions and billions” of units, a reference to one of Carl Sagan’s catchphrases. But the late astronomer, worried that that the internal-only codename would be construed by the public as an endorsement, sent the company a cease and desist letter. Apple complied—and changed the codename to BHA, short for “butt-headed astronomer.” So Sagan sued for libel.
Winner: Apple. A judge dismissed Sagan’s claims of libel, noting that “one does not seriously attack the expertise of a scientist using the undefined phrase ‘butt-head’”. But Sagan sued again (this time alleging that his name had been misused), lost again, and then appealed that decision. Apple and Sagan finally settled in 1995, ending the brouhaha.

Rico says he remembers the 'butt-head astronomer' flapdoodle from his time at Apple... A classic:

Googled again

Rico says that Google has new ways of telling you that you're screwed:

Oops is, yet again, an airline term

Rico says they still haven't decided exactly what went wrong, but odds are the pilot is learning to say: "Do you want kim chi with that?"

Great technology

Rico says that he's become very fond of the Lift N' Peel sealing technology on his beverages:

History for the day

On 10 July 1940, during World War Two, the 114-day Battle of Britain began, as Nazi forces began attacking southern England by air. By late October, Britain managed to repel the Luftwaffe, which suffered heavy losses.

Scam for the day

From: "Dr. James L. Williams" <simonericci83@alice.it>

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the daily payment of $5000.00 until your total fund of $1.5M usd is completed.
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Apple for the day

http://techland.time.com/2013/07/08/apple-is-giving-away-free-apps-and-games-ahead-of-the-app-stores-5th-birthday/?xid=newsletter-techland


Sent from my iPhone

Mark Seymour
215.866.6184
mseymour@proofmark.com

GPS on the windshield

Jared Newman has an article in Time about the latest from Garmin:

As smartphones continue to make standalone GPS devices redundant, Garmin is trying something different with its upcoming heads-up display (HUD). The HUD uses a dash-mounted projector to display turn-by-turn directions, either on a transparent film on the windshield or on an attached reflector lens. It’s supposed to help you keep your eyes on the road by putting directions in your line of sight. The HUD also shows the current speed, speed limit, potential traffic delays and nearby safety camera locations.
Some cars, such as the BMW M6 and Lexus HS, have navigation HUDs built in. Garmin’s HUD is essentially an aftermarket version for any car, priced at $130 for the device itself. (You might also think of it as a cheaper alternative to Google Glass for putting directions in your peripheral vision.)
But there’s is an additional cost in the smartphone apps that you must purchase along with the HUD. Instead of having GPS directions built-in, the HUD receives navigation instructions from Garmin’s Navigon (iPhone and Android) or StreetPilot (iPhone and Windows Phone) apps, both of which start at $30 for regional maps, and more for nationwide or continent-wide coverage. The apps send directions to the device via Bluetooth or through the phone’s speakers.
In other words, even if you’ve been enjoying the free turn-by-turn directions that are likely built into your smartphone, Garmin is hoping you’ll buy its apps along with a HUD for easier navigation.
The downside to this approach, aside from the added cost, is that Garmin’s own apps aren’t tightly integrated into smartphones. You can’t use Siri to ask for StreetPilot directions on the iPhone like you can with Apple Maps, or use Google voice search to get Navigon directions on an Android phone like you can with Google Maps. That means you’ll still have to fiddle with your phone to open Garmin’s apps and enter your destination.
Still, the phone-to-HUD concept is a welcome one, especially if states start considering smartphone map apps to be a form of distracted driving. The more ways for us to keep our eyes on the road instead of looking down at a small screen, the better.
Garmin says the HUD will be available this summer.

Rico says that someone just needs to come up with a way to port the iPhone map app to a HUD projector, and screw Garmin...

Bolivian candlestick in an Old West auction

Rico says that it was probably a menorah, used by one of the 'hidden' Jews that came to the New World to escape the Inquisition...

Oops is, yet again, an airline term

Norimitsu Onishi, Christopher Drew, Sarah Maslin Nir, and Matthew L. Wald have an article in The New York Times about the San Francisco crash:

The nearly eleven-hour trip across the Pacific had gone smoothly as Asiana Flight 214 approached San Francisco International Airport,  an uneventful flight for the 291 passengers, including dozens of Chinese teenagers who were arriving for a summer camp to study English and tour colleges.
But, from seat 30K, Benjamin Levy knew something was wrong. Outside his window, as the plane approached the airport where Levy, a frequent traveler, knew there should have been tarmac, there was instead a terrifying sight: the waters of San Francisco Bay.
“The pilot put the gas full steam, and we tipped back up— he went full throttle to regain a bit of altitude,” Levy said from his home on Sunday, a day after he survived the crash landing that killed two sixteen-year-old girls among the group of Chinese students and injured 180 of the passengers arriving from South Korea. “We were so close to the water, the water got sprayed up,” Levy said. “There were walls of water beside the window,  before we started hitting earth.”
When the screaming ceased inside the Boeing 777, the plane rested on its belly, its tail and engines sheared by the crash. The head of the National Transportation Safety Board said that the pilots came in too slowly, took too long to realize it, and tried to abort the landing seconds before the crash. The South Korean Transport Ministry said the pilot, Lee Kang-guk, had only 43 hours of experience flying a 777. It was Lee’s first time piloting a 777 into the San Francisco airport, an Asiana spokeswoman said. “For now, this itself should not be cited as if it were the cause of the accident,” said Chang Man-hee, a senior aviation policy official at the transport ministry. “Lee himself was a veteran pilot going through what every pilot has to when switching to a new type of plane.”
In a dramatic moment-by-moment account, the NTSB's chairwoman, Deborah A. P. Hersman, suggested that crew members had little inkling of the impending crash until about seven seconds before impact, when one is heard on a cockpit recorder calling for an increase in speed. The call came too late. Three seconds later, an alarm sounded a warning that the plane was about to stall, Hersman said. One-and-a-half seconds before impact, the pilots advanced the throttles to get more power in an attempt to avert a crash. But, before the plane could gain altitude, it hit the sea wall, snapping off its tail section before skidding to a stop and catching fire.
Hersman’s comments, delivered at a news briefing, were based on preliminary data provided by the Boeing 777’s cockpit voice recorder and flight data recorder. Other data from a private firm, FlightAware, indicated that as the plane lost forward speed, it descended much faster than normal. Hersman emphasized that investigators could not yet draw any conclusions about the cause of the crash. But she did not indicate any sign of a mechanical malfunction, and focused almost exclusively on the actions of the pilots as they prepared for landing.
“Everything is on the table right now,” she said. “It is too early to rule anything out.”
Saturday was clear, with light winds, no wind shear and visibility of up to ten miles, Hersman said. Air traffic controllers had cleared the Asiana flight for a visual approach, meaning no guiding instruments were needed to land the plane.
What happened to the passengers depended in part on where they were sitting. Near the front of the plane, including the first-class cabin, some passengers fled clutching their carry-on luggage. In the center of the plane, where Levy sat, there was no inflatable chute, as there were at other exits. At the very rear of the plane, which bore the worst of the damage, overhead compartments opened upon impact, raining luggage onto the seated passengers. Levy said there was a woman with her leg crushed between two seats, which had become uprooted, and Levy and others worked to free her. Another woman near her was initially unconscious. “She wouldn’t move,” Levy said. “There were two other guys. We couldn’t pick her up.”
Suddenly, through the hole in the tail of the plane, a firefighter charged in, rushing Levy and the remaining passengers out as smoke billowed. The jetliner was on fire.
On Sunday, hospital officials said that nearly all of the most grievously injured passengers had been in the rear of the plane, including six people in critical condition with spinal injuries, paralysis, and head injuries, and a few with what was described as “road rash” as if they had been dragged.
It was not clear where the two girls who died were seated on the plane; both bodies were found on the tarmac. One of the bodies, found on the ground to the left side of the plane, may have been run over by a fire truck or another emergency vehicle in addition to her injuries from the crash, Robert J. Foucrault, the San Mateo County coroner, said on Sunday. Foucrault said his examination was not complete, so he could not confirm that was the case.
Jang Hyung Lee, 32, was seated with his wife and their fifteen-month-old son in the first row of economy class. He said he heard a distant thump, then a few seconds later, a louder thump, and then saw an engine on fire to the right. He said he was lucky to be sitting toward the front of the aircraft. Doors opened. He lined up to slide down the chute, clutching his baby in a carrier on his chest. His wife grabbed the diaper bag. The evacuation, at least in the front of the plane where the Lee family sat, was calm and orderly. “It wasn’t really chaos; people actually took their hand carriers,” Lee said. “People in front, they were pretty much okay. We could walk out by ourselves.”
His in-laws in business class said luggage fell from the overhead compartments. His mother- in-law somehow knocked out a front tooth and his father-in-law is suffering from back pain, he said, but they both made it safely down another chute to waiting paramedics.
Xu Da, the production manager at Taobao, the Chinese shopping website, wrote on Sina Weibo, a Chinese blogging site, that he smelled “smoke, and saw the flames.” Nevertheless, like many other passengers, he wrote that he grabbed his carry-on bags before leaving the plane. “I grabbed my bags as soon as it stopped,” he said of the plane. “My wife was very calm; she even picked up the scattered stuff on the ground,” he wrote, adding that the couple took their child and bags as they turned toward the rear. “There was a huge hole, quite round, so we rushed out there.”
Strapped into his exit row midway in the plane, Levy thought his ribs had been broken. Nonetheless, he stood up inside the shattered aircraft, pried open the emergency door, and began to shout out directions. “We were left on our own, there was no message from the pilot, from the crew, there was no one. We had to help each other out,” Levy said, describing how he and others stayed in the plane as they hustled other passengers out, shouting for people to keep calm, while thirty to forty people exited the door beside him.
The flight had a crew of sixteen, including four pilots who switched off during the flight in two-man rotations. Korean officials said the main pilot at the time of the landing was Lee Jeong-min, who had more than twelve thousand hours of overall flight experience and 3,220 hours in Boeing 777s. The pilot at the controls, Lee Kang-guk, 46, had almost ten thousand total flying hours, with just 43 of them in 777s, Korean officials said.
Hersman said that an electronic system called a glide slope indicator, which keeps planes at the proper descent angle, had been turned off, but that the crew should have known this, and that other tools were available to the pilots. “Pilots have available to them a number of options for how to get the plane in on the right speed, on the right approach, on the right path,” Hersman said.
Another tool, known as a localizer, which allows planes to line up along the center of the runway, was operating, as were the airport’s red and white lights that visually guide pilots to the runway.
Pilots can also use onboard GPS-based equipment to guide their approach to the runway.
Airlines had been told that the glide slope system was out of service, and many carriers, including Asiana, had been landing for weeks on that runway without difficulty, the official said. Air traffic control tapes indicate that the controller cleared the plane for a visual approach, for which the system was not necessary.
Some experts said that pilots often have little opportunity to practice landings without the aid of such technology, particularly on international flights into large, technologically advanced airports like San Francisco International.
Still, given that the weather was ideal and the guide lights were on, making a visual landing should not have been difficult for most commercial pilots, aviation experts said.
“Even if it was the least-experienced crew in Asiana Airlines, the maneuver that led to this crash, on a difficulty scale of one to ten, this was a two or three at the most,” said Oscar S. Garcia, the chairman of InterFlight Global Corporation, a consulting firm.

Rico says all the pilots need to learn to say: "Do you want kim chee with that?"

Gettysburg reenactment opens

Edward Collimore has an article in The Philadelphia Inquirer about Gettysburg:

Gunshots rang out, then full volleys, like the sound of ripping sheets, followed by the boom, boom, boom of cannon fire. Across steamy, sun-drenched farm fields outside Gettysburg came waves of gray-clad soldiers, pressing steadily toward a thin blue line of Union troopers that slowly gave way.
On Thursday, Independence Day, a great clash fought here 150 years ago raged again, much to the delight of thousands of people watching from grandstands, picnic blankets, and folding chairs. The reenactors and spectators came from all fifty states and at least sixteen foreign countries to remember and re-create a pivotal fight of the Civil War that forever left its mark on this Adams County crossroads town.
They watched men fall in battle and clouds of gun smoke billow across the landscape. And they heard horses thunder by while officers shouted commands barely audible over the battle's din. "What happened at Gettysburg was remarkable, and to see it live is an incredible show," said Mark Miller, fifty, a physician from Delhi, Ontario. "You can read history, but here you see it and realize how mistakes were made," he said, as artillery roared nearby.
Thursday's reenactments, at 11 am and 6 pm, covered the first of three days of the Battle of Gettysburg and set in place the battle lines for the second and third days of the clash.
"I can't imagine missing this," said reenactor J.R. Schroeder, 49, a Union officer who lives in Detroit, three of whose ancestors were in the Army during the Civil War.
On 1 July 1863, the Confederates were spoiling for a fight. The sun broke through the clouds at 8 am that day and shone off thousands of musket barrels along Herr Ridge, just outside Gettysburg.
CSA Major General Henry Heth looked down at Willoughby Run and up to McPherson's Ridge, then ordered the advance. By 9 am, the sparsely manned Union line began crumbling like a weakened dam against a Rebel force more than twice its size. And at 10:10 am, Union Brigadier General John Buford sent an urgent message to General George G. Meade, the commander of the Union army moving toward Gettysburg: "The enemy's force are advancing on me at this point and driving my pickets and skirmishers very rapidly."
As musket and cannon fire grew more intense, Major General John F. Reynolds rode up at a fast gallop in advance of approaching reinforcements. "What's the matter, Buford?" he asked. "The devil's to pay," Buford said.
Reynolds, a Pennsylvanian, promptly assessed the situation and sent a note to Meade saying he would hold the enemy "as long as possible".
In a meeting that would obviously never have happened in 1863, now, 150 years later, Union and Confederate officers gathered under a tent in the Southern camp, where they bent over a large, color aerial Google map to discuss the positioning of blue and gray troops and artillery.
"Don't worry about our guns," Confederate artillery Colonel Tom Alexander of Street, Maryland, told a commander.
"We're here to support you," said the Harford County, Maryland, sheriff's officer.
"No, you're not," quipped Union cavalry officer Doug Nalls, fifty, of Winchester, Virginia. "You're here to kill me." Nalls, a construction equipment operator, is usually a Confederate cavalryman, but switching sides to build up the number of Union cavalry, which had a bigger role in the first day's fighting.
"Most cavalry troopers carry two uniforms" so they can reenact as a Union or a Confederate soldier, said Jim Ranke, 64, a Federal cavalryman who also lives in Winchester. "We do it to make a better appearance. I do it reluctantly. Today, if I was a Union soldier, I'd know we have a tough fight ahead of us, and some of my buddies would die."
Even in the bloodless reenactment, the reenactors get a sense of what the real soldiers experienced. "When you see the overwhelming numbers of the other side, you can imagine the sinking feeling the Union soldiers had," said Federal officer David Shuey, 57, a first-person portrayal artist who lives in Newville in Cumberland County, Pennsylvania.

Columns of blue-clad infantry arrived just in time and moved quickly toward McPherson's Woods to shore up the collapsing Federal line.
Just then, the rebels struck and soon realized they were not fighting troopers but the Iron Brigade, infantrymen known for their grit, coolness under fire, and black felt hats.
"There are those damned black-hatted fellows again!" shouted a Confederate. "T'ain't no militia!"
Reynolds anxiously was watching the battle and urging the troops, "Forward! For God's sake, forward!" when a skirmisher's Minie ball caught him behind the right ear.
"He fell dead in an instant without a word," Union General Abner Doubleday would recall.
One of those watching the fighting stood out from the crowd if for no other reason than his head gear. Mark Brandt, 51, of Anderson, Indiana, wore a Civil War diorama on his head, complete with blue and gray soldiers, a stone wall, and trees. "I love history, and I have never been to Gettysburg," said Brandt, an Army veteran of Desert Storm, as cannons blasted in the background. "I drove sixteen hundred miles to get here. This is so amazing."
Nearby, Dylan Rains, eight, of Rancho Cucamonga, California, sported a kepi and sword, courtesy of his father, who had pushed him into coming to the reenactment.
"I love the Civil War, but I probably wouldn't do this if it wasn't for my son," said David Rains, 48, an Army veteran and employee of a papermaking company. "He's the whole reason we're here."
The vicious fighting of the first day continued until about 11 am, when an uneasy lull settled over the battlefield. Soldiers on both sides swarmed over the landscape, preparing for the next round.
After noon, the Confederates renewed their attack with fresh troops, this time flanking the Union forces. The Iron Brigade, supported by some artillery, tried to hold back the gray tide. One gunner said that "for seven or eight minutes ensued probably the most desperate fight ever waged between artillery and infantry at close range without a particle of cover on either side... bullets hissing, humming, and whistling everywhere, cannon roaring; all crash on crash and peal on peal, smoke, dust, splinters, blood, wreck and carnage indescribable."
Eventually, the Union line was forced to pull back to trees near the Lutheran Theological Seminary on Seminary Ridge, and then through town, where thousands were captured. The survivors later retreated to Cemetery Hill and Cemetery Ridge.
When the reenactment ended and the smoke cleared, a crowd of thousands erupted in applause and cheered Yankees and Rebels. They had filled a large grandstand overlooking farm fields that had become a sprawling amphitheater and history classroom.
Many reenactors had traveled thousands of miles to give their history lesson. Confederate Jack Eaves, 56, a retired timber industry worker, drove a Whitworth breech-loading artillery piece from Eureka, California. "I built it from the ground up," he said.

Long into the night of 1 July 1863, Gettysburg residents heard the pitiful cries of the wounded and dying. Fifteen-year-old Tillie Pierce described what she saw at a barn:
"Nothing before in my experience had ever paralleled the sight we then and there beheld... We were so overcome by the sad and awful spectacle that we hastened back to the house, weeping bitterly."
Nearby, Confederate General Robert E. Lee was preparing to renew the fight. He told his officers: "We will attack in the morning as early as possible."

Rico says that, after winning the lottery, he, too, will own a Whitworth breech-loading artillery piece. (He doesn't like standing in front of the muzzle...)

More updates from Gettysburg

The Philadelphia Inquirer has an article about the Gettysburg reenactment:

The fighting was heating up when an old man dressed in his Sunday-best joined the Union ranks. John Burns, 69, cobbler, former constable of Gettysburg and native of Burlington County, New Jersey, went to war wearing a blue swallow-tailed coat with burnished brass buttons and a tall, bell-crowned hat. "At any time, his figure would have been noticeable, but it was doubly so at such a moment," said Union Major Thomas Chamberlain. Burns asked a Federal officer for permission to fight the Rebels. "Certainly you can fight with us, and I wish there were many more like you," the officer said. Some of the soldiers in the Iron Brigade kidded Burns, calling him 'Daddy'. But they later cheered him when one of his bullets appeared to knock a Confederate officer from his horse. Burns was wounded, but survived to become a national hero and meet President Abraham Lincoln. "He was true-blue and grit to the backbone," said Sergeant George Eustice of the Iron Brigade. 

The fighting has ended on the Gettysburg battlefields, at least for Thursday. Though the day's battle recreation was bloodless, it was historically accurate in other ways, largely because of the reenactors' personal investment. A Union private can be authentically equipped with a uniform, shoes, musket, tent, and other supplies for about $1,200, said Jon Sirlin, a Philadelphia lawyer who is serving as a Union officer and chief of staff. Officers may spend considerably more; as much as several thousand dollars, when counting the costs of the uniform, tall boots, sword, sidearm, large tent, horse, and saddle. The expenses "can be a drag", said Sirlin, 64, "a historian by hobby" who lives in Center City Philadelphia. "There's interest but not the funds to pursue it." Some reenactors, such as Confederate reenactor Harry Sonntag, have spent more than most. The Northeast Philadelphia man has sunk about twenty thousand dollars into the hobby. "I'm a little atypical," said Sonntag, 46, who lives in the city's Winchester Park section, and is vice president of the American Living History Education Society. As a surgeon, he's equipped himself with a uniform, tents, period surgical instruments, knives, saws, tourniquets, clamps, and wooden and metal pitchers for drink. "Some might say that's hardcore," said Sonntag, a medical consultant. "Everything is accurate to 1861 to 1865." Others have spent at least fifteen to twenty thousand dollars on artillery pieces and limbers, said reenactor Terry Jones, who portrays an artist, such as Alfred Waud, whose drawings of battles were turned into woodcuts and reproduced in newspapers. But Jones, of Newtown Square in Delaware County, managed to get off for several hundred dollars. For his portrayal of a period artist, he bought a duster, cavalry boots, vest, hat, camp chair, sketch pad, and pen and ink. "I'm an artist, so I will have a little flask, too," said Jones, 66, who is the sculptor of the bronze General John Gibbon statue near The Angle, the target of Pickett's Charge on the third day of the battle. "If there's going to be combat," he said, "I have to position myself" for the best view. 

The Battle of Gettysburg is commonly acknowledged as a turning point in the Civil War, when the Union stopped the Confederate march north, and gained momentum that would ultimately lead to an overall Union victory. But talk to Confederate reenactors 150 years later, and one thing is clear: Southern pride roars on. "It was a Union victory at Gettysburg, but it was a hard-fight fought victory," said John Jacob, 69, from Oakley, California, and a Confederate reenactor. Jacob, sitting beneath a canopy in the Confederate camp, agreed with two friends who sat with him: the Union's victory doesn't dampen spirits of those this week who will be on the losing end of this battle. "I'm here because my ancestors fought here," said Richard Lawrence, 64, from Cottonwood, California, a friend and fellow reenactor with Jacob. Marty "Moose" Warren, a towering 38-year old from Cedar Grove, Tennessee, who was smoking a Marlboro beneath another canopy, said that the main point of reenacting was not to focus on results, but to educate the crowds. "We want to put on a show," he said through a thick Southern drawl. "We're all historians in one way or another." And Steve McDaniel, 61, a Tennessee State Representative, said that, whatever the outcome of the battle chosen for reenactment, the goal is to honor those who fought for their ideals. "We might not like it that the South lost," he said. "But what can you do?" 

For the ten thousand or so reenactors who make Gettysburg their home this week, "home" is a tent in a field. Both the Confederate and Union camps have seemingly unending lines of white tents, and reenactors erect the tents themselves. The process is relatively easy, they say: you simply spread the canvas over the ground, drive stakes through slots along the corners into the ground, then raise the center of the canvas up and use a few wood poles to hold it up. "It's just three pieces of wood and some stakes in the ground," said Jake Wolf, sixteen, from Cincinnati, Ohio. "It's pretty simple." Inside, depending on the level of period-authenticity the reenactor employs, they'll sleep on cots, in sleeping bags, or just on the ground. Most tents here this week have flaps acting as "doors", but in 1863, many people slept beneath smaller sheets without doors, their heads or feet often exposed to the elements, according to Grover Godwin of the Charlotte Artillery. The accommodations here this week could hardly be mistaken for even a basic motel room, but Justin Fox, 24, from Raleigh, North Carolina, said they work just fine. "It's pretty easy," he said. 

One telltale sign of a reenactor: facial hair. It comes in all shapes, lengths, and colors: red moustaches, brown mutton chops, snow-white full beards. Some come styled specifically for the event, others are more permanent fixtures. "He hasn't shaved his beard since December of 1987," Sue Maust said of her husband Ray, who has an eight-inch-long, scraggly black mane to match his long dark hair. Ray was a merchant, selling items with his wife at their shop, Sue's Creations. The couple, both 53 and from Cut'n'Shoot, Texas, said the heat was no bother. A novice facial hair wearer, however, begged to differ. "It's kind of rough up here in this heat," said Robert Meekins, 45, from Preston, Maryland. Robert and his brother Craig, 48, both part of the Second Maryland Infantry, grew facial hair specifically for Gettysburg. Robert had been growing his, an unkempt full face of hair, for about a month. Craig gave his salt-and-pepper goatee thirteen months to grow. Neither a typical beard wearer, Craig demurred when asked if he'll keep it after this weekend. "My wife doesn't like it," he said. 

A Civil War reenactor is easily identifiable by their wool uniforms and weapons. But there's a lot more to their outfits than meets the eye. Almost all carry canteens draped over their shoulder, which Carl Thelen, a member of the First Ohio Light Artillery, says is actually the most important item they carry, especially on a day like today of high humidity and temperatures into the 80s. "You're less inclined to fight when you're on the verge of dehydration," he said with a chuckle. Many also carry haversacks draped over the other shoulder, which can contain a variety of items. Thelen's, which was covered in tar to protect against water damage, contained a plate, some dried fruit, and a modern item: sunscreen. Ross Brault, a member of the Confederate 39th North Carolina, was carrying playing cards, a bit of leather string and a fork and knife. And other reenactors carried a variety of eccentric items. Ed Mann, 66, portraying Confederate General Thomas Jackson, had a pair of original 1860-period field glasses. And one item he was disappointed to have left at camp, that he said he almost always carried: his 1860-period Bible. 

Spectators filled two enormous grandstands positioned on either side of a mock battlefield just north of Gettysburg as the first day of reenactments began in earnest. At eleven o'clock, Union and Confederate reenactors staged the first battle of the day, recreating the cavalry battle at Hunterstown on 1 July 1863. In the vast Union encampment, reenactors lined up for drills, mounted horses, and filled canteens for a hot day ahead. Doug Snyder, of Harrisburg, is an analyst at HP by day, but a colonel in the Union Army for the weekend. Stationed in one of four Union headquarters, he interrupted an interview to grab a bridle for a higher-ranking officer. "That sounds like mortar fire," he said, grinning, as troops moved across the field. But the best part of this weekend, he said, is the people. "You make friends from all over the country," he said. "It's a great group to be with."

Rico says it was a good group, but it was hot... (And his now-white mustache has been with Rico a long time.)

A taste of war, 1863-style

Edward Collimore has an article in The Philadelphia Inquirer about the other recent Gettysburg reenactment:

The trap was set. The bait, a small unit of mounted Union troopers, peppered away at gray-clad cavalry east of Gettysburg, as if poking a hornet's nest, then hurriedly galloped off. In hot pursuit, the Confederates rode into the jaws of a large Federal force, and a maelstrom of muzzle flashes, gun smoke, thundering hooves, and whinnying horses.
That clash gave thousands of spectators a taste of what war was like 150 years ago, when the young, fair-haired General George Armstrong Custer lured Southerners into an ambush on 2 July 1863, on the road to Hunterstown.
The restaged fight outside Gettysburg was one of two that included another ferocious battle known today simply as the Wheatfield, where Union forces were cut to pieces and fought hand-to-hand with Confederates.
Many spectators cheered on the troops as the tide of battle shifted back and forth, and stood amazed at the jarring sound of cannon volleys, and the spectacle of massed cavalry and large marching armies with shouldered muskets.
"It looks like I imagined it would, but now I'm seeing it," said Mark Kraschneske, 49, of Erie, as he trained his video camera on the cavalry's flashing swords. "I've never been to a reenactment, but I think this is important to do. You have to know where you've been in history so you know where you're going," he said.
Nearby, Wayne Yoder, who is Amish, watched the battle with his wife and four-year-old son. They had a friend drive them five hundred miles from Rome City, Indiana to see the reenactment. "In an actual war, it would be a lot more intense," said Yoder, 33, an RV factory worker. "But this gives you a feel for how it would be."
Steve Alexander was resplendent in a black velvet uniform, a dashing figure out of a romance novel. He strapped on his sword, adjusted his handgun holster, then put the bridle on his horse and mounted it. The image was complete. Alexander was General George Armstrong Custer, right down to the curly golden locks of hair. "This is the way he would have looked," said Alexander, who has written two books on Custer and lives in the house where the general lived with his wife in Monroe, Michigan. "When he showed up at Gettysburg, everybody thought he was a dandy, but when he led troopers in battle, they changed their minds."
Nearby, Custer's men were getting ready for the fight, too. They would be sent out to stop Confederate cavalry, which, in 1863, was moving to support Southern infantry at Culp's Hill. Zachary Hubert and Todd Kidd cleaned their carbines in their tent, which was filled with saddles, bridles, swords, and handguns. "We're just firing blanks, but you have to be careful," said Hubert, 24, a trauma surgery nurse who lives in Lancaster. "In closer engagements, you point your guns up in the air."
Reenactors often feel a chill running up their spines, what they call "magic moments", during the battle when 2013 fades away, leaving 1863, with all the sights, sounds, and smells of the war. "When you see a flood of gray coming toward you, you get a sense of it, the power and emotion," Hubert said. The battle re-creations are "exciting and fun because there are no bullets in the guns and nobody is really trying to hit you with a sword," said Kidd, 23, a Penn State senior who lives in Lancaster. Sometimes, the action gets a little too real. "People can get cut with sabers and get black powder burns from muzzle flashes," he said.
During Friday's cavalry battle, Alexander rode onto the field and crossed swords with the enemy to the cheers of a crowd of about thirteen thousand. About twelve thousand reenactors have participated.
In the 1863 clash, Custer's horse was shot out from under him, and a Confederate trooper was about to slash him with a saber when Union Private Norvell Churchill deflected the blow, rescued the general, and shot the enemy. "If I was Custer," he said, "I'd be happy to be alive."
2 July 1863, was bright and sultry as Confederate General Robert E. Lee and his commanders gathered on Seminary Ridge to plan the army's next move. Lee's "old war horse", Lieutenant General James Longstreet, wanted to wait for more troops to arrive before renewing the attack. He sat on a log whittling a stick awaiting Lee's decision.
"I never like to go into battle with one boot off," Longstreet told another officer. Lee's mind was made up, however. "It was determined to make the principal attack on the enemy's left," Lee reported. Other troops would threaten the center of the Union line and the right flank.
At 10 am, he told Longstreet: "I think you'd better move on." Longstreet spent the next several hours maneuvering his command to avoid enemy detection.
The assault did not begin until about 4:30 pm and, when it did, it ran into an unexpected problem: the Union Third Corps, commanded by General Daniel E. Sickles, thousands of battle-hardened veterans who had marched forward from the federal line on Cemetery Ridge about three-quarters of a mile.
Battles in the Wheatfield and the Peach Orchard left the ground covered with dead and wounded. Union General Sickles was down with a shattered leg and his Third Corps was nearly destroyed.
Union Colonel Regis de Trobriand recalled: "It was a hard fight. The Confederates appeared to have the devil in them."
Union Private John W. Haley wrote in his journal: "Blood poured out like water. Both sides understood the value of this position."
For many reenactors, the Civil War hobby is in their blood. They have ancestors who fought in the war and they've had an endless fascination with it over decades.
"I had an ancestor in the 59th North Carolina" regiment, said Dwight Bass, 62, of Wilson, North Carolina, as he sat outside a tent in the Confederate camp. "I also remember my dad being into the war. He bought an original Springfield musket for fifteen dollars in 1956," said the painting contractor. "He and others would shoot black powder weapons." Later on, Bass recalled the excitement of the Civil War Centennial and began reenacting in 1979, sometimes portraying a quartermaster and, other times, an infantry soldier.
As the Union and Confederate reenactors clashed this week, he channeled a Southern soldier of 1863: "This is our chance to show them we're as good as any army in the world and to show them up North."

Rico says they showed 'em, all right: showed 'em how to lose...

Anti-Semitic? Maybe

Rico's friend Kema send this, by Ken Yellis:

Whenever I told someone that I was working on an exhibition called Passages Through the Fire: Jews and the Civil War, I typically got one of two responses; both reflect the need for the exhibit (now on display at Yeshiva University Museum in New York City), which presents the widely forgotten story of the full participation of Jews in the nation’s great existential crisis.
My sister’s reaction was typical: there were Jews in the Civil War? Who knew?
The second most common response was in some ways more interesting: the Jews who fought in the Civil War were against slavery, right? The discomfiting answer: not so much.
As Jewish historian Dale Rosengarten expresses it, quoting a Talmudic precept: “The law of the land is the law of the Jews.” From a modern perspective, it seems anomalous that a people whose history hinged on an epic escape from servitude would not have been deeply troubled by America’s “peculiar institution”, but few were.
Some Jews owned slaves, a few traded them, and the livelihoods of many, North and South, were inextricably bound to the slave system. Most southern Jews defended slavery, and some went further, advocating its expansion.
Notable among these was Judah P. Benjamin, labeled by the abolitionist Ben Wade, who served with Benjamin in the Senate, as “an Israelite with Egyptian principles.” Even in the North, many sympathized with the South, and only a very few were abolitionists. Almost all Jews sought peace above all else. Until the war was at hand, they remained silent on the subject.
For me, that silence is problematic.
As Arnie, in Nathan Englander’s short story Camp Sundown, puts it: “The turning away of the head is the same as turning the knife”. Yet the majority of American Jews were mute on the subject, perhaps because they dreaded its tremendous corrosive power. Prior to 1861, there are virtually no instances of rabbinical sermons on slavery, probably due to fear that the controversy would trigger a sectional conflict in which Jewish families would be arrayed on opposite sides. And that is exactly what happened.
Ironically, the silence was breached by an attempt to forestall the conflict. With Lincoln’s election and the gathering momentum of the secession movement, the celebrated New York Rabbi Morris Raphall attempted to make a case for reconciliation by defending slavery on biblical grounds. The speech had the opposite effect, triggering furious rebuttals from Rabbi David Einhorn and biblical scholar Michael Heilprin, among others, and widening the growing divide. Jews had at last engaged in numbers with the great issue of the age.

Rico says everybody's got their cross to bear... (Sorry, mixed metaphor.)

A good place to start, if you need one

Rico's friend Kelley says we should 'trumpet' this news by Jim Gallagher from the BBC:

Tiny functioning human livers have been grown from stem cells in the laboratory by scientists in Japan. They said they were "gobsmacked" when liver buds, the earliest stage of the organ's development, formed spontaneously. The team, reporting their findings in Nature, hope that transplanting thousands of liver buds could reverse liver failure.
Experts welcomed the findings, describing them as "exciting".
Scientists around the world are trying to grow organs in the lab to overcome a shortage of organ donors. Some patients already have bladders made from their own cells, but dense solid organs such as the liver and kidneys are much harder to produce.
The team at the Yokohama City University were reproducing the earliest stages of liver development, similar to that in an embryo.
They had mixed three types of cells: two types of stem cells and material taken from the umbilical cord. Unexpectedly, the cells began to organise themselves and appeared to curl up to form a liver bud. These buds were transplanted into mice, where they hooked themselves up with the blood supply and began to function as little livers. The transplants increased the lifespan of mice with liver failure.
Professor Takanori Takebe said: "We just simply mixed three cell types and found that they unexpectedly self-organize to form a three-dimensional liver bud; this is a rudimentary liver. And finally we proved that liver bud transplantation could offer therapeutic potential against liver failure." He told the BBC that he was "completely gobsmacked" and "absolutely surprised" when he first witnessed the buds forming.
The buds are 4 to 5mm in length, but the researchers say they would need to develop buds that are much smaller and could be injected into the blood. The buds would not grow to be a whole new liver, but would embed themselves in the failing one and restore it.
Dr. Varuna Aluvihare, a liver transplant physician at King's College Hospital in London, told BBC News: "This a great piece of work and as a proof of concept, very interesting. The real highlight is that such simple mixtures of cells can differentiate and organize themselves into highly complex tissue structures that function well in an animal model." He said the liver was very damaged in chronic liver disease so there were still questions about where the buds were transplanted and how they would function.
The risk of a tumor developing after the transplant would also need to be assessed.
Dr. Dusko Ilic, a stem cell scientist at King's College London, said: "The strategy is very promising, and represents a huge step forward. Although the promise of an off-the-shelf-liver seems much closer than one could hope even a year ago, the paper is only a proof of concept. There is much unknown and it will take years before it could be applied in regenerative medicine."
Professor Chris Mason, the chair of regenerative medicine at University College London, said there might be more immediate benefits for drug testing. New medicines can be toxic to the human liver in a way which does not show up in animal tests. He said using liver buds might be a better way to test for toxicity.

Rico says he used 'gobsmacked' just the other day to describe himself; a lovely Britishism...

Sums it up...

Rico says they were fifty bucks, so he didn't buy them in Gettysburg:

Unfuckingbelieveable

They're talking about a second miracle, thus making the most-recently-dead Pope eligible for canonization. (Okay, he was a nice guy, and all, but a saint? Hardly.)
The only unbelievable part is that anyone still believes this shit...

Pluto’s moons get Hellish names

Phil Plait has a Slate article about astronomical naming:

To hell with Pluto’s new moons. Figuratively, of course. But two newly discovered moons orbiting the distant world now have official (and underworldly) names: Kereberos and Styx. I approve but, if we're using an Underworld theme, I would've gone with Kate and Beckinsale...
Pluto is pretty small— 2,300 kilometers in diameter, smaller than Earth’s Moon, so it may be surprising it has moons at all. But it has gravity, and it can hold on to smaller bodies, and there’s plenty of room out there, billions of kilometers from the Sun, so there’s nothing big enough out there to strip them away, either.
Pluto’s biggest moon is Charon, which is just over half as big as Pluto itself. (That’s the biggest moon known relative to its parent world.) It was discovered in 1978. In 2005, Hubble observations unveiled two more moons, which were named Nyx and Hydra. A fourth moon, provisionally named P4, was found in 2011, and then P5 in 2012.
Get the trend? All the moons are named after characters associated with the Roman god of Pluto, god of the underworld Hades. Charon was the riverboat driver who brought the dead to Hades. Nix is named after Nyx, the goddess of the night, sometimes depicted as a mist that comes from the underworld. (The name is spelled with an i, rather than a y, to avoid confusion with an asteroid with that name.) Hydra was a nine-headed dragon that lived in a cave near the entrance to the underworld (and the nine heads were a sly reference to Pluto being the ninth planet).
Kerberos is the name of the three-headed dog guarding the underworld, usually spelled Cerberus, but again, this name was already taken by an asteroid. Styx was the river separating the underworld from the realm of mortals and also a 1970s rock band. (That last bit may be coincidence.)
I like these names. There was a push in early 2013 to get one of the moons named Vulcan— William Shatner liked the idea—but that poll was unofficial. However, Commission 46 of the International Astronomical Union, the humor-challenged group of astronomers who decide what gets officially named what, felt that Vulcan is not closely related to Pluto (and again, the name was already in use, an obviously common problem), so they went with Styx.
I like these names. And while the new moons look like mere points of light even using Hubble— both are probably only a few dozen kilometers across— we’re about to learn a whole lot more about them. Two years from now, in July of 2015, the New Horizons probe will zip past the Plutonian system, taking the first ever close-up pictures of the iceball and its companions. It’s not clear what it will find when it gets there, but then that’s why we explore, isn’t it? Even if it takes us to the underworld of the solar system itself.

Rico says it's nice to see astronomers with a sense of history, if not a sense of humor...

$57 million on a cemetery fund? Sure...

Mark Joseph Stern has a Slate article about some shady dealings by the Catholic Church:

According to documents released recently, Cardinal Timothy Dolan, the archbishop of New York City, moved nearly sixty million dollars into a cemetery trust fund in 2007 specifically to shield it from lawsuits by victims of clergy sexual abuse. The New York Times has the scoop:

The files contain a letter that Dolan wrote to the Vatican in 2007, in which he explained that by transferring the assets, “I foresee an improved protection of these funds from any legal claim and liability.”

The Vatican moved swiftly to approve the request, the files show, even though it often took years to remove known abusers from the priesthood.
The files also reveal graphic details of the alleged abuse, including new revelations about its magnitude:

Archbishop Listecki released a letter last week warning Catholics in his archdiocese that the documents could shake their faith and trying to explain the actions of church leaders while offering apologies to victims.
“Prepare to be shocked,” he wrote. “There are some graphic descriptions about the behavior of some of these priest offenders.”

Although Dolan has no direct connection with the abuse, he has long been suspected of helping to protect the Church from its repercussions, particularly during his tenure as the archbishop of Milwaukee:

Cardinal Dolan’s moves involving church assets have come under particular scrutiny. Lawyers for the victims said the documents would prove that he transferred $130 million from the church’s books— about $55 million in a cemetery account, and $75 million in an investment account— to shield the money from abuse victims.

This latest bombshell arrives after a tough week for Dolan: on Wednesday, he issued a joint press release calling the Supreme Court's DOMA ruling a "tragic day for marriage and our nation" that went against "the common good of all, especially our children".

Rico says that they'll probably fly this asshole off to the Vatican to shield him from jail... (So much for righteous indignation.)

The Greeks had, of course, a word for it

• Hermaphrodite: a son of Hermes and Aphrodite, with whom the nymph Salmacis fell in love and prayed to be forever united. As a result, Hermaphroditus and Salmacis became joined in a single body that retained characteristics of both sexes.

SEPTA-smart, but not

Rico says that's because they didn't put up the shelter...

More SEPTA-stupid

Rico says he may have to sit on it, since he has no idea how long before the bus comes, and have a wet ass...