Apple for the day

Matt Peckham has a Time article about a possible improvement for Apple's Maps:

You could argue Apple Maps’ lackluster debut last year had as much to do with our tendency to focus on sexy outlier goofs, as if those alone were sufficient evidence the app was problem-riddled. There’s no science behind that position, but the sensational resonates, and it’s eye-catching to learn that an industry darling like Apple might have crafted an app that embarrassingly confused, for instance, London, Ontario with London, England, or the lofty Willis (nee Sears) Tower in Chicago— the second tallest building in the US— with a comparably stubby skyscraper dwarfed by its peers. Were those errors pathological? Who could say.
Even I succumbed to the “where there’s smoke there’s fire” mindset at first, switching to Google Maps via the iOS version of Chrome, then to Google’s standalone iOS Maps app released back in December to the tech-blog equivalent of trumpets, confetti, and angels singing hosannas. When an app triggered Apple Maps, I killed it. I learned to work around Apple’s hooks, manually typing addresses into Google Maps instead of Safari, sacrificing the luxury of Apple’s seamless inline app connections for what I assumed was Google Maps’ greater fidelity.
But my experience over time has veered from popular sentiment. Google Maps was getting addresses wrong and dropping the GPS pin down on the road behind a business or on the wrong side of the street. In fact I started noticing the app was getting basic locations wrong roughly as often as Apple Maps does.
To be fair, neither Maps screws up most of the time: both take me from A to Z reliably, whether Z’s a business, a residence, or some backwoods state park hangout. But whether Apple’s quiet refinements are paying dividends or we’ve been wrong about the app’s shortcomings (or Google Maps’ superiority) from the start— all I have is anecdotal evidence— I’ve slowly gravitated back to using Apple Maps as my primary locational tool.
So when I read that Apple had snatched up Canadian data startup Locationary, it struck me as less a reactionary maneuver to shore up deficiencies in a still-ailing application than a progressive, aggregative one designed to distinguish Apple Maps from the crowd.
The mapping software industry’s holy-holy isn’t cartographical fidelity (already on offer), it’s figuring out how to fold in detailed, accurate, and— most important of all— always up-to-date information about the locations you’re searching for (or near, or topically about). The future of maps, among other whiz-bang features like three-dimensional, real-time verisimilitude, is their becoming semantically sophisticated extensions of our inquiries, not— as Apple Maps and Google Maps both currently work— the other way around, conjuring results, then handing us off to subordinates like Yelp and the like for evaluative drill-down.
Locationary, a portmanteau of location and dictionary, touts its Saturn platform as a way to synthesize and refine business profiles, taking component data from multiple sources (crowd-sourced, business-provided) and restructuring it as composite information— in other words, making sure business profiles are representative and up-to-date. The company describes its platform as using “a revolutionary real-time blending technology that can merge data from multiple sources as quickly as you can download it”. Think of it as another shot at a “neutral” connection hub, like LinkedIn for contact management, say, designed to unify disparate profile-building processes.
Mapping software is already complex enough without branching into far trickier services that intermingle locational and contextual information. We’re vectoring toward the sort of eerie moment you see in a movie like Minority Report, when Tom Cruise walks by those marketplace displays that react to him uniquely, hawking this or that service based on his profile in some aggregative system, but it’ll take a paradigm shift in profile administration to get us there.
The actual future is probably more private, of course: tiny screens that fit in our pockets and hands or that perch above our eyes, Google Glass-style. As Locationary CEO Grant Ritchie put it to The Globe & Mail a year ago: “Ten years from now, our mobile phones are going to know everything being sold around us— what’s on sale and where, how much it costs, what’s available in stock and where.”
But to get there, you have to do far better than manually phoning businesses to verify their information (as Ritchie claims Google’s been doing with Google Maps). If Locationary lives up to its claims then, and Apple is, at some point, able to launch a version of Apple Maps that offers accurate, comprehensive, contextually-meaningful locational information, it may indeed have something unprecedented to crow about.

Rico says he can hardly wait... (But 'portmanteau'? Another word you don't see very often.)

Whining about wine

Charles Bagli has an article in The New York Times about a problem worth having:

WineCare marketed itself as a high-security cellar that stores, catalogs, and cares for twenty-seven thousand cases of wine in the basement of a Manhattan warehouse, charging substantial fees to safeguard collections worth tens of millions of dollars.
But there was one problem: the cellar was just a hundred yards from the Hudson River. And when Hurricane Sandy struck, the water came rushing in.
Eight months later, WineCare has become the scene of one of the strangest stories to emerge from the storm, a classic Manhattan tale featuring boldfaced names, high-stakes legal battles and top-shelf luxury.
Shortly after the flooding, the owner sent customers a reassuring e-mail: “We believe at least 95% of the wine we are storing is fine.”
But since then, WineCare, which once offered a same-day delivery service from its warehouse in the Chelsea neighborhood, has steadfastly denied customers access to even a single bottle of Château Rayas Châteauneuf-du-Pape, Kistler chardonnay, or Rousseau Chambertin.
Now, amid concern that century-old bottles have been spoiled or celebrated vintages rendered anonymous by lost labels, some of the city’s most prominent wine collectors— including Donald Drapkin, a hedge fund manager who estimated the value of his wine collection at over five million dollars— have sued WineCare, which is now in bankruptcy court.
Hurricane Sandy killed 44 people in New York City, and damaged or destroyed three hundred thousand homes in New York State alone, making the October storm one of the most destructive ever to strike the United States. So, despite the extraordinary prices associated with the bottles in peril, the fate of a cellar of expensive wines has not elicited much public sympathy.
Even the Federal judge hearing the case scolded lawyers for the wine owners for their level of urgency. “There were thousands of victims of Hurricane Sandy,” he said, “most of which suffered a great deal more than your clients have.” But trying to ascertain the fate of the wine has become a relentless crusade for some of the owners and a matter of fascination within the ranks of wine collectors. “Everyone in the New York wine world is aware of it,” said Jamie Ritchie, president of Sotheby’s Wine, an auction house.
Meanwhile, Derek L. Limbocker, a onetime investment banker and society figure who founded WineCare and made it into one of the country’s largest wine-storage facilities, has publicly maintained that a vast majority of wine under his care is safe. He did not return calls requesting comment. But, under questioning at a creditors’ meeting in March, Limbocker revealed that floodwaters and humidity lifted the labels off as many as a hundred cases; cardboard boxes containing the wines disintegrated, and thousands of bottles broke as they were lugged up or down the stairwells of the warehouse.
Customers do not know the extent of the damage, because their repeated requests to view video from the round-the-clock, sixteen-channel surveillance system featured in the marketing materials have been denied.
“It’s the craziest thing I’ve ever seen,” said William C. Carmody, a trial lawyer who stored about thirty cases of wine at WineCare that he says are worth over a hundred thousand dollars. “I’m still being charged a monthly fee. But you can never get a straight answer.”
In January, one day before Philip Waterman III, a real estate investor with three hundred thousand dollars worth of wine at WineCare, was to conduct a court-ordered inspection of his 198 cases of wine, Limbocker blocked the maneuver by filing for bankruptcy protection. His lawyer, Lawrence V. Gelber, later told the court he needed “a proverbial breathing spell.”
Waterman, Drapkin, and others recently filed a motion asking the United States Bankruptcy Court in Manhattan to appoint a trustee to oversee WineCare and block the company’s pending move to a warehouse in Jersey City. They said in a legal brief that they had “lost faith in Derek Limbocker’s judgment, his management ability, and, most importantly, his integrity.”
Judge Robert E. Gerber denied the request and expressed little sympathy for their plight. At a hearing last month, he said there had been no evidence of criminal conduct and instead portrayed them as overly eager to get their wine when they wanted it. “What we have instead is a failure to meet predictions, not even promises,” the judge said.
George R. Bunn Jr., a lawyer, wine collector, and member of the Bunn coffee maker family, said that Limbocker, his friend, was the victim of a natural catastrophe. He acknowledged that WineCare’s efforts to get its cellars in order had taken “an awfully long time.” “Derek is an honest, straight guy,” said Bunn, who had wine stored at WineCare. “They tell me that ninety-five percent of the wine should be fine. We all hope we’re not part of the five percent.”
A wine enthusiast who once owned a liquor store on the Upper East Side, Limbocker saw a business opportunity in 2005, when he opened WineCare in the cellars of a brick warehouse that covered an entire block, from 11th to 12th Avenue, between 27th and 28th Streets. He and his partners, including one of the warehouse owners, pitched their service to collectors, restaurants, and wine shops.
WineCare featured everything the discerning oenophile would want. Coolers kept the storage cellars at a constant 55 degrees and 60 percent humidity, ideal conditions for preserving old bottles. There was a 24-hour security system and sophisticated software for tracking the location of each bottle.
As rare wine shifted from just a luxurious indulgence to an investment commodity, the company grew rapidly, until October, when the storm sent water gushing into the cellars.
Hortense Bernard, general manager of Millesima USA, a wine store that had 3,870 bottles at WineCare, said the storm waters should not have damaged the wine. But rapid changes in temperature and humidity can hurt wine. And, she added, “you can’t sell a thousand-dollar bottle of wine without a label.”
In the aftermath, Limbocker, who is married to a member of the du Pont family, sent an e-mail to customers saying that workers were carrying the thirty-pound cases of wine from the temperature-controlled cellars to higher floors.
Two weeks later, with fifty cases of wine piling up at his Park Avenue co-op, Waterman asked Limbocker for advice on an alternative storage facility. Waterman also offered to give Limbocker temporary space in one of his buildings.
But relations turned sour in December, after Limbocker told Waterman he had “absolutely no idea” when he could get access to his wine. Waterman soon filed suit against WineCare in State Supreme Court. “Fine wine, such as that in Waterman’s collection, is fragile and can easily be damaged if not kept in a climate-controlled environment,” the suit said.
Some restaurant owners who stored their wine at WineCare, like Keith McNally, are also seeking damages, because they were forced to quickly buy hundreds of cases of wine at top prices in order to serve diners.
Two of McNally’s restaurants— Minetta Tavern and Morandi— filed claims for a combined two million dollars worth of wine and a million dollars in damages.
As the legal troubles mounted, Limbocker filed for bankruptcy protection. He pleaded for time, saying he did not want to stop the bottle-by-bottle cleaning of the inventory in order to find the wine of a select group of large collectors. “It’s impossible, without scanning thousands of cases of wine, to find any particular client’s cases of wine,” his lawyer told the court.
In May, some of the wine owners, including Waterman; Lucio A. Noto, the former vice chairman of Exxon Mobil; and Barry S. Volpert, a partner at Crestview Partners, an investment firm, filed motions asking the court to appoint a trustee and block Limbocker’s plan to relocate. They were “no longer willing to tolerate the myriad excuses that the debtor has used to prevent some customers from seeing or recovering a single bottle of their wine,” according to the motion. “Debtor is now putting the wine at even greater risk as a result of the planned move in a season of high heat and humidity.”
The collectors lost on both counts; the wine is headed for New Jersey.

Rico says that they all took the 'wine cellar' concept far too seriously; their wine would've been fine on the second or third floor... (But Jersey? Now that's adding insult to injury.)

History for the day

On 22 July 1934, a man later identified as bank robber John Dillinger was shot to death by Federal agents in Chicago.

Best local company name

Main Line Hooker Service

Another blue planet

Michael D. Lemonick has a Time article about a blue planet that rains glass:

Back in the early 90’s, the Voyager 2 space probe, already out beyond Neptune and on its way toward the edge of the Solar System, swiveled its camera around to look back at its home world. It was difficult to see, but there, nearly three billion miles (4.8 billion km) away, lay Earth. Our entire planet, with all its flora and fauna and history and civilizations, was nothing more than a blip of blue against the background of stars— an object so tiny and frail that the phrase “pale blue dot” inspired the great astronomer-communicator Carl Sagan to write a book about humanity’s future in space.
Now astronomers are abuzz with news of a second pale blue dot— a planet orbiting the star HD 189733, about sixty light-years from Earth. It’s a tiny bit less hospitable than Earth: known as HD 189733b, the planet is a giant, gaseous world resembling Jupiter, but much hotter. With a surface temperature of 1800°F (980°C), rainstorms of glass (yes, glass) and winds that reach four thousand miles an hour, it’s not even remotely likely to be home to flora and fauna.
Measuring the color of this so-called exoplanet is a major scientific milestone nonetheless: it provides important clues to what the atmosphere is made of, which can in turn tell scientists something about the origins and composition of the planet itself. And while it’s not possible with current technology, observations like this one are a warmup for studies of true Mirror Earths— smaller, more temperate worlds like ours, where life could plausibly exist.
Unlike the 90’s-vintage pale blue dot, the 2013 version wasn’t photographed directly. It’s much too close to its star, and too comparatively faint, to isolate its light from that of the much brighter HD 189733. Instead, astronomers used the Hubble Space Telescope to watch as the planet, whose orbit is perfectly edge-on as seen from Earth, ducked behind its star and then re-emerged.
When planet and star are side by side, the Hubble picks up the light of the star itself plus the reflected starlight bouncing off the planet. When the planet moves behind the star, the reflected light disappears and, by making before-and-after comparisons, astronomers can calculate what the reflected light would look like in isolation.
In this case, it’s what scientists call an “azure blue”— a little more poetic-sounding than “pale blue”, but very much in the same ballpark. On Earth, the color is produced because the blue part of the Sun’s light is scattered in all directions by air molecules— eventually reaching our eyes from so many angles that the entire sky looks blue. That blue light is reflected back into space by our oceans. On HD 189733b, the same thing evidently happens, except that it’s glassy silicate particles that do the scattering, not air, and there’s no ocean to enhance the effect through reflection.
This observation is important not just because it keeps astronomers in practice for future studies, of course: it’s also crucial to understanding planets like HD 189733b— so-called “hot Jupiters”, whose very existence was completely unexpected when planet-hunters began finding them in droves in the mid-1990’s. “These new observations add another piece to the puzzle over the nature and atmosphere of HD 189733b,” said Frédéric Pont of the UK’s University of Exeter, lead author of the study, in a press release. “We are slowly painting a more complete picture of this exotic planet.”
The picture would be far more complete, of course, if, astronomers could send a Voyager-like probe to visit the HD 189733 system—and sixty light-years isn’t all that far away in a Milky Way that spans a hundred thousand light-years. If Voyager were headed in the right direction, we could even wait for that already-flying probe to get there. The bad news: at Voyager’s current speed, that would take about 1.2 million years.

Rico says that we're a blue planet, but fortunately it rains water here... (And he's not waiting up the million-plus years for a camera to get there.)

SEPTA-stupid, yet again

Rico says that, as usual, he sits and waits for an indeterminate amount of time for the next bus... (What is infuriating is that, for so little money, they could have a GPS system to tell them, let alone those waiting, where all their buses are... The drivers' union is probably against it.)

Civil War-era technique in Afghanistan

Rico's friend Bill forwards this article, by Claudine Zap, about Civil War-style photography:

While deployed to Helmand Province in Afghanistan, from April through June of 2013, photographer and California Air National Guard aerial gunner Ed Drew asked his fellow soldiers to sit for portraits.
The result— an astonishing mix of a modern war and an old technique called tintypes— created a unique look at the war zone and the people involved in it. They are the first tintype combat-zone photography since the Civil War, according to the Daily Mail.
But the nearly forgotten art form has been expertly undertaken by the San Francisco Art Institute student of photography and sculpture. "Tintypes are a slow and methodical process, which I felt would best highlight the humanity of the people I work with," Drew told Yahoo News, in explaining his choice of techniques.
The process was painstaking, and the artist always had to be a solider first. "Each one took about thirty to forty minutes to make," Drew said, "and was always contingent on not getting a rescue mission, which means I would have to immediately drop whatever I was doing and be in the air with my crew in less than ten minutes."
As his peers began to see the portraits take shape, they began booking appointments. "These photos are about people, not about the military or glorifying war, and it seems people really are picking that up," said Drew.

Rico says it's a great style...

Sports pun for the day

The famous NFL Samoan place kicker, 'Skip' Tumalu.

A Floridian in Nantucket:

Rico says that this is just not done in staid old Nantucket:

Just say no

Martha White has a Time article about data gathering:

Urban Outfitters was hit with a lawsuit charging that the trendy clothing retailer tricked customers into providing their ZIP codes by leading them to believe the information was necessary to process credit-card transactions, when the company really just wanted the information so it could mail them ads.
The lawsuit, filed in Washington, D.C., says customers started getting marketing materials from the company even though they’d never asked to be placed on a mailing list or given their full addresses. “Once the customer provides his/her ZIP code, the retailers have all the information they need to secretly obtain customers’ home or business address,” the suit says.
The suit sheds light on common but little understood data-collection practices by merchants. Most of us have, at some point, been asked for our address, ZIP code, phone number or e-mail address while buying something and wondered what the deal was. Here’s what you need to know:

Why do stores want the information? To try to sell you stuff, for the most part. But, in some cases, retailers want to know where their customers are coming from so they can figure out the best place to open a new store. “There are others that perform analytics on the information, which is what’s alleged in a lot of these cases,” says Aaron Simpson, a partner in the privacy and cybersecurity team at the law firm of Hunton & Williams LLP.
“It’s a question of transparency,” plaintiffs’ lawyer Scott Perry told Buzzfeed. Some stores are up-front about it and will ask you if you’d like to give them your information so you can get flyers or coupons. The problem comes when retailers don’t make that clear to shoppers.
They don’t need your whole address to find you, either, thanks to the growing sophistication of big data. A Forbes article last month highlighted some of these companies’ marketing claims: “Users simply capture name from the credit-card swipe and request a customer’s ZIP code during the transaction,” which lets stores “identify customers easily with accuracy rates close to a hundred percent” and send them “dynamic, personalized marketing”.
There’s also the more remote but more troubling possibility that stores collect this data in order to either sell it to a data warehouser, or buy additional data from one of those companies to create a more detailed profile of who you are, says Evan Hendricks, publisher of Privacy Times. ”They want it because they want to start building a profile,” he says. “I think it’s true sometimes they just want to send you a promotional flyer, which isn’t a burning privacy issue. But the trouble is, once they get your information, there’s very few restrictions on what they do with it.”

Do you have to give it to them? Generally, no. But like many other consumer-privacy issues, laws pertaining to it are made at the state level, creating what Simpson calls a “patchwork”. In other words: it’s a mess.
In the following states, it’s illegal for a clerk to tell you they require personal information to run your credit card: California, Delaware, Georgia, Kansas, Massachusetts, Maryland, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Texas and Wisconsin, plus Washington, D.C.
Elsewhere, a state might be running afoul of their merchant agreement with the card network, but they’re not breaking the law. For instance, MasterCard says: “A merchant cannot refuse to complete an in-store MasterCard transaction if the cardholder declines to provide this information to the checkout clerk.”
American Express lets stores call the shots, though. The company says, “It is the merchant’s discretion whether to process an American Express transaction if the cardmember refuses to provide his or her ZIP code.”
Are there any exceptions? If you swipe a card at a gas pump, you might get a prompt asking you for your ZIP code. This kind of transaction is generally exempt from laws about personal information, as are purchases that require delivery or installation, since the company needs to know where to send the package or technician.
When it comes to gas purchases, National Association of Convenience Stores spokesman Jeff Lenard says the ZIP code is a security measure. “Oftentimes, thieves test cards to see if they are still live at places where they don’t have to engage in a face-to-face transaction, such as at the gas pump,” he says. “Someone with a stolen card would be less likely to correctly enter the ZIP.”

Rico says you can always lie, and then argue about whether your card is stolen...

Apple for the day

Jared Newman has a Time article about the latest (maybe) iPhone:

It’s that time of the year again, when slow news days and general antsiness over the lack of new Apple gear conspire to produce a flurry of iPhone rumors. As always, reports about Apple’s next iPhone tend to range from completely reasonable to mind-numbingly stupid. This week provides us with examples from both categories.
Though I’ll never claim to know what Apple is doing before something’s officially announced, a dose of common sense goes a long way when judging all rumors and speculation that will surely flood the tech blogosphere in the coming months. With that in mind, let’s take a look at what the rumor mill is saying:

The idea that Apple might add near-field communications and a fingerprint reader to the iPhone has been kicking around for quite some time. Apple did acquire a fingerprint scanning company last year, and NFC is no longer a bleeding-edge technology, so it seems logical that both technologies will find their way onto a future iPhone, if not the next one. Indeed, murmurs of NFC and fingerprint scanning popped up this week on a couple of Chinese websites.
But, really, the details are what matter most, and we don’t know them yet. Keep in mind that Apple has taken potshots at NFC before. When announcing AirDrop, a way for iPhone users to share files in iOS 7, Apple’s Craig Federighi said (as captured by ABC News), there’s “no need to run around the room bumping your phone,” a clear jab at the overhyped NFC-based photo and video sharing in Samsung’s Galaxy S phones. If Apple does include NFC, it’ll probably be for something different, like tap-to-pay at retail stores. Whether that’ll happen this year is still anybody’s guess.
As for fingerprint scanning, we’ve seen the technology before as a way to securely unlock devices (including phones, as with the Motorola Atrix 4G). That alone isn’t really enough to justify adding a fingerprint scanner to the iPhone. For the technology to make sense, Apple would have to take it a step further. Imagine if you could use your fingerprint to skip over password entry when downloading apps, or to securely open apps that contain sensitive info, such as Dropbox or your banking app, without having to enter a PIN. Apple’s tight control over both hardware and software would make these kinds of uses possible by giving developers a way to add fingerprint sensing to their apps. Total speculation, but I could see this being the “wow” feature in the iPhone 5S (or whatever it may be called).

On the other end of the spectrum, we have a rumor that makes no sense. A report by Commercial Times, strangely picked up by Bloomberg with no skepticism, claims that Apple has decided to put a 4.3-inch display in the next iPhone, instead of a 4-inch one. This decision has reportedly delayed the launch until the end of the year.
Come on, people. Apple stretched the screen size on the iPhone 5 because there was tangible benefit: an extra row of app icons and more room for notifications, text and widescreen videos. Stretching it to 4.3 inches would provide no such benefits unless the resolution also increased. Doing so would create more headaches for app developers without adding much of a size benefit in return. It’s a bad idea all around, and we’re supposed to believe Apple would delay its top product until late in the holiday season to make it happen? That’s crazy.
Again, a little common sense goes a long way. There’s a strong argument to be made for a much larger iPhone with, say, a five-inch screen, sold alongside the four-inch version, but all signs point to that not happening this year either.
The one thing you can generally count on from every new iPhone is faster performance and an improved camera. So far, we’ve seen multiple reports of two gigs of RAM and a twelve-megapixel camera with improved low-light performance. Reports conflict on whether Apple will use a quad-core processor or simply increase the clock speed on the existing dual-core chip, but there seems to be consensus on Apple moving to a quad-core graphics chip. If you have no idea what any of this means, it boils down to the next iPhone being snappier and taking better pictures. No surprises there.
The bigger mystery is whether Apple will use Sharp’s IGZO display technology in the next iPhone, as Chinese site EXPreview claimed this week. Although analysts have been predicting a switch to IGZO at some point, there’s not a lot of solid evidence that Apple will adopt the technology this year. One of the major benefits of IGZO is improved battery efficiency so, if Tim Cook gets on stage and boasts about dramatic battery life improvements, we’ll know the rumors were right.

Of course, the last big question is when the next iPhone will actually come out. Rumors tend to be notoriously bad on this front. There are a handful of publications you can trust to get it right– All Things D, iMore, The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, and The New York Times, mainly– but if you see some random website claiming to have the exact iPhone release date pegged down, treat it with skepticism. When asked by friends and family, I typically say “September or October”, because that’s really all you can count on for now.

Rico says he can't afford one now, anyway, but it'll be interesting to see what it is...

Mother seeks to close loophole

Angela Couloumbis has an article in The Philadelphia Inquirer about gubs:

On a scorching summer morning in a state known for its staunch defense of the Second Amendment, the mother of one of the victims in last year's shooting at a Connecticut school came to the Capitol to talk about gun laws.
Francine Lobis Wheeler (photo), whose six-year-old son was among twenty first graders killed at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Connecticut in December of 2012, said she came not as an expert on policy or law, but as a mother with a credential no parent wants: "I have lost a child to gun violence."
When her testimony ended, there was not a dry eye in the room.
Wheeler, who grew up in Bucks County, asked legislators to end an exemption in Pennsylvania law that lets someone buy a rifle in a private online sale without undergoing a background check. "I think we all agree that expanding background checks will not eliminate all crime," she said, choking back tears. "The assault weapon that was used to kill my Ben, for example, was purchased legally, by the shooter's mother after a background check. But," she said, "if we are looking only to take steps that will stop all gun crimes, we set the bar for action too high. We know that background checks prevent convicted felons or mentally ill from buying guns."
The hearing before the House Judiciary Committee was billed as an informational session rather than a debate on a specific bill. But State Representative Steve Santarsiero, a Democrat from Bucks County, introduced legislation this year to expand background checks in the state to include purchases of long guns, including assault rifles, conducted in private sales. Santarsiero said that he had been unable to get a hearing on his bill in the committee. He said its chairman, Representative Ron Marsico, a Republican from Dauphin, had not committed to holding one.
Existing federal law requires licensed gun dealers to do background checks on buyers in any type of firearms purchase, but it does not cover gun shows. Pennsylvania law goes further, requiring anyone selling handguns to perform background checks, but it exempts sales of long guns. Advocates for changing the law contend this exemption has allowed a proliferation of unregulated sales of long guns, especially on the Internet.
Santarsiero argued that changing the law to remove the exemption is "an appropriate place to begin". He predicted that if the measure were to ever reach the floor of the Republican-controlled House, members would pass it, notwithstanding the legislature's traditional resistance to enacting gun limits.
John Hohenwarter of the National Rifle Association, whose group is against expanding the background-check system to include long guns, testified that rifles and shotguns are involved in only about four percent of Pennsylvania homicides.
Wheeler, for her part, said she had been stunned by the rancor surrounding the debate on how best to strike a balance between respecting gun owners' rights and enacting commonsense regulations to ensure that guns are purchased and used responsibly.
But the Council Rock High School graduate has nonetheless taken a frontline role in that debate. In April, at President Obama's invitation, Wheeler delivered the president's weekly radio address, trying to rally support for the expanded federal background-checks bill crafted by Senator Joe Manchin, a Democrat from West Virginia, and Senator Pat Toomey, a Republican from Pennsylvania. The bill, fiercely opposed by the NRA and other gun-rights groups, did not garner enough votes to pass the Senate.
In Harrisburg, Wheeler said her son's death had stripped her of fear and had given her the courage to speak up. "All this stems for the love I have for him," she said. "This is how I honor Ben and how I honor all victims of gun violence, by having the courage to find love, listen to one another, and make change happen."

Rico says it was a tragedy, but not the last one...

Movie review for the day

Even for Woody Allen, To Rome With Love, that Rico watched with the ladyfriend, was strange.
Was Alec Baldwin really standing over the kid's shoulder during his flirtation with the crazy girl, or was he an apparition?

Was that Penélope Cruz as the hooker-bride?

What was the whole 'famous-for-just-a-day' thing with Roberto Benigni?

Who knows? Who cares? It's just funny...

Quote for the day

Timbuktu travels and voyages to the poles are ways to benefit mankind as true, perhaps, as shooting them at Waterloo."

Don Juan

Give me back my iPhone!

Farhad Manjoo  has a Slate article about phone weariness:

Six years ago, Google launched an unconventional effort to gain a toehold in the growing smartphone business. Rather than make its own phones, the way Apple was beginning to do, the search company decided to make only half a phone: just the software to run the device, not the device itself. Google planned to give its operating system, called Android, to phone makers for free, and it would let them alter the OS in any way they liked.
Google thought that in the long run, the plan would pay off in two ways. First, it believed a free OS would push phone makers to create better web-enabled phones, and better phones would let people spend more time on the Internet. More time online means more opportunities to use Google s service and see Google ads— i.e., ka-ching! Android also provided a strategic benefit: If phone makers adopted Google's OS, the search company would retain some influence on the devices people used to get its services. If it weren’t for Android, Google’s customers would have been using devices controlled by Apple, Microsoft, Nokia, or RIM, all of which had incentives to limit Google’s reach. Android lets Google control its own destiny.
The strategy worked brilliantly. Android is now the world’s most popular mobile operating system. It’s unclear if Google makes much money from Android directly— by some estimates Google makes as much from ads on Apple’s iOS devices as it does on Android machines. But there’s no question that Android has helped lower the prices of smartphones across the globe, which can only help Google’s ad business. It’s hard to call Android anything other than a resounding success.
Well, except for one small thing: most Android phones are crap. As part of a New Year’s resolution, I promised to trade in my beloved iPhone 5 for an Android phone sometime in 2013. I reasoned that, as a tech writer, I should spend more time with the world’s most popular operating system. Phone makers and carriers have regularly sent me Android phones to test out in the past, but I’d never given most of them more than a passing look— I’d open them up, turn them on, get aggravated by their bad keyboards or poor touchscreens or frustrating add-on software, and I immediately package them up and send them back.
This shouldn’t be surprising— most Android phones are very cheap, and you get what you pay for. Over the last few months, though, I’ve been testing two of the most expensive, most advanced Android phones on the market, the Samsung Galaxy S4 and the HTC One. Actually, I’ve been doing more than that. I’ve been using two versions of each of these phones— the standard phone that you get for $199 when you sign a two-year cellular contract, and a second “Google Play edition”, which is a special, full-priced version that features only the essential software you need on a smartphone. (The Play edition HTC One is $599, and the S4 is $649.) I’ve been switching between these four devices, using one or the other as my primary phone at all times. Except for the brief period during which I tested out Apple’s new version of iOS, my iPhone hasn’t been charged in weeks, poor guy.
Altogether I experienced the best and worst of Android, and I saw, up close, Android’s basic problem. I’d sum it up as follows: Google makes a fine mobile operating system. Some phone manufacturers make attractive, powerful Android handsets. These phones have the potential to be really wonderful machines, even as great as Apple’s flagship phone. But then, at the last second, the phone makers and the world’s cellular carriers snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. They ruin the phones’ potential with unnecessary features and apps that lower the devices’ battery life, uglify their home screens, and make everything you want to do extra annoying.
This is one of the most important advantages Apple has over Android devices. When you buy an iPhone, it works exactly as Apple intended; it’s never adulterated by “features” that the company didn’t approve. But when you buy an Android phone, even a really great one, you’re not getting the device that Google’s designers had in mind when they created the OS. You’re not even getting the device that the phone manufacturer— Samsung and HTC, in this case— had in mind. Instead you’re getting a bastardized version, a phone replete with software that has been altered by many players along the way, usually in a clumsy, money-grubbing fashion.
I noticed this immediately when I first turned on the Sprint-powered HTC One and Galaxy S4. When you run an iPhone for the first time, you’ve go through just a handful of steps to get up and running: choose a language, add a Wi-Fi network, and log in to your Apple account. The same is true of the Google editions of the One and S4— just a few prompts and you’re good to go. But not the carrier versions. I had to sit through more than half a dozen screens. I was pushed to sign in to several social-networking accounts. I had to create accounts with HTC or Samsung’s own services. Then, when I thought I was at last ready to start using my phone, another prompt came on the screen to let me know that Sprint was installing some software of its own. After another five minutes, my phone was finally ready to use— but, when I browsed through the menus, there was a whole bunch of software that I didn’t need, including apps for Yahoo, Amazon, the NBA, a Sprint app for watching television, and a White Pages app. Why these apps specifically? Not because Sprint believes that you’ll find them really helpful, but instead because it received a promotional fee. Congratulations on your new phone— now look at all the ads.
You might not consider these preloaded apps such a big deal. We’re all used to getting crapware on new PCs; this is the same story, just on phones, and it’s not such a big hassle to delete everything you don’t need. But you shouldn’t have to delete stuff just to get your phone looking like you want it. Plus, I suspect that many users probably don’t even know how to delete these apps, so they just sit there, clogging up the home screen.
The worst thing about Android phones isn’t the crapware, though. It’s the “skins”—the modifications that phone companies make to Android’s most basic features, including the dialing app, contacts, email, the calendar, the notification system, and the layout of the home screen. If you get the Play edition of these phones, you’ll see Google’s version of each of these apps, and you’ll come away impressed by Google’s tasteful, restrained, utilitarian design sense. But if, like most people, you get your phone for $199 from a carrier, you’ll find everything in it is a frightful mess.
Google’s dialing app, for instance, uses a minimalist palette and big, readable, sans-serif numbers. Samsung’s is a garish shock of mismatched colors, lines, and shadows. It’s not just hideous but less functional. In the contacts pane, Google’s dialer smartly displays people’s names and numbers; you can dial just by touching the number. In Samsung’s dialer, you’ve got to tap a contact’s name, which brings up a new screen, which you’ve got to tap again to make a phone call. Meanwhile, if you click on a number in the call log, Samsung’s dialer doesn’t do the obvious thing and dial the number— instead, it shows you another screen, and to dial the number you’ve to press the green phone icon, which isn’t immediately obvious.
There are lots of annoying nuisances like this one, in which Samsung or HTC took Google’s easy-to-use design and monkeyed with it for no good reason. Together, all these little bugs add up to a frustrating experience. In most cases, you can fix the problem; you can replace Samsung or HTC’s apps with Google’s version, you can remove the unnecessary stuff from your home screen, you can opt-out of flashy but terrible gimmicky features (like the totally useless “eye tracking” system in the Galaxy S4). But doing so is too much of a hassle for people who just want a phone that works right out of the box. If that’s what you want, you’ve got two choices. You can pay full price for a Play edition Android device (I’d choose the HTC One over the Galaxy S4, because it’s much more attractive, physically). Or you can buy an iPhone.
Because I’m eligible for an upgrade with my carrier, I’d rather not pay full price for a Play edition Android. So, New Year’s resolution be damned, I’m sticking with Apple.

Rico says that, since you couldn't get his iPhone away from him with a gub, he understands completely... (But, with apologies to Phillip K. Dick, do electric sheep dream of Android?) But crapware? Classic...

Asiana won't sue after all

Josh Voorhees has a Slate article about the Asiana crash:

Looks like Asiana Airlines will not sue KTVU after all. Here's the airline's statement:

Asiana Airlines had intended to pursue legal action for a regrettable report on 12 July made by local San Francisco Bay Area broadcasting station KTVU. The report referred to the names of the pilots by using racially charged epithets. It profoundly disparaged Asiana, its employees, and all Asians. Asiana deplores the hateful words of the broadcast.
Asiana Airlines, however, has decided to not pursue legal action as a result of a public apology by KTVU for the report in question and its determination to keep all of its resources dedicated to caring for the passengers and family members of Asiana flight 214 and supporting the investigation into the cause of the accident.

It's unclear if the company execs had a change of heart, or if the original threat of a lawsuit was just to prove a point. Regardless, the Fox affiliate that misidentified the Asiana pilots on board the 777 when it crash-landed as Sum Ting Wong, Wi Tu Lo, Ho Lee Fuk, and Bang Ding Ow is now in the clear. The NTSB intern who "erroneously confirmed" the names in question wasn't so lucky, however: he lost his resume-building gig at the agency.
Backstory here, if anyone needs a refresher.

Rico says that Ho Lee Fuk pretty much summed it up, however. (Okay, okay, it was wrong, but it was funny...) Rico doesn't remember KTVU being a Fox affiliate, but then it's been a long time since he lived in the Bay Area...

Children die after eating lunch

Josh Voorhees has a Slate article about a bad meal in India:

This is a difficult one to start your morning with: officials in India say that at least 22 children are dead and more than two dozen others are sick after eating a free school lunch that was most likely tainted with some type of insecticide. It's unclear how exactly the chemicals ended up in the meal, but the early speculation is focused on the possibility that the food may not have been properly washed before it was cooked. The Associated Press has the details:

The children, between the ages of five and twelve, fell ill soon after eating lunch in Gandamal village in Masrakh block, fifty miles north of the state capital of Patna. School authorities immediately stopped serving the meal of rice, lentils, soybeans, and potatoes as the children started vomiting.The lunch, part of a popular national campaign to give at least one daily hot meal to children from poor families, was cooked in the school kitchen.
The children were rushed to a local hospital and later to Patna for treatment, said state official Abhijit Sinha. In addition to the 22 children who died, another 25 children and the school cook were in hospital undergoing treatment, P.K. Sahi, the state education minister. Three children were in serious condition.

Officials are still investigating exactly what happened, but they've already suspended the person in charge of the meal program and registered a case of criminal negligence against the school's headmaster, who reportedly fled as soon as the children began to get sick.

Rico says his knee-jerk reaction was 'now we're gonna have to ban school lunches' (like carrying gubs in school), but it's in India, so who cares? (Well, the Indians do, but they've got more kids where those came from...)

Rico says that his above callous comment about Indians earned him a rocket comment...

Why did prosecutors seat Juror B37?

Dahlia Lithwick has a Slate article about the Zimmerman jury:

Less than two days after a Florida jury found George Zimmerman not guilty in the death of Trayvon Martin, juror B37, one of the six members of the anonymous panel, signed with a literary agent to shop her book about the trial.
The news comes with a bonus video: juror B37’s entire voir dire captured on film and promoted by Gawker. The process by which counsel on each side of the case interviews prospective jurors is revealing in all kinds of ways, and a useful lesson in the strengths and weaknesses of the jury system. In the case of B37, it is also a master class on how to not know anything about something everyone else knows about.
Start with the general observations already raised in Gawker: B37 consumes no media beyond the Today show— no radio, no Internet news, and no newspapers used for anything but lining her parrot's cage. Perhaps because she does not consume any media, she was under the false belief that there were “riots” after the Martin shooting. She also described the Martin killing as "an unfortunate incident that happened."
But the tape raises another question that should be debated in every trial advocacy class in America: what were the lawyers, especially the prosecutors, thinking when they seated her? Why didn’t prosecutors use one of their peremptory challenges to nix her? She’s contrarian, she raised serious ontological doubts about the nature of truth-seeking, and she was only ever truly animated on the subject of rescue birds. Both lawyers were visibly cowed by her. I asked several prosecutors, former prosecutors, and public defenders to watch the video and report on the red flags it raised for them.
Almost all of them start with the same caveat: jury selection is not jury selection. “It’s de-selection” explains Howard Lidsky, a board-certified criminal-law attorney in Florida. “It’s impossible to make a judgment about jury selection unless you’re seated in the room,” he says. “You have eighteen people in the box and just six strikes. You may dislike a juror, but you might like the person sitting next to him even less.” Ken White is a former prosecutor and criminal defense attorney at Brown White & Newhouse in Los Angeles. He blogs at Popehat.com. He makes the same point: “Even if one prospective juror seems bad, you have a limited number of peremptories, and they may have judged the others as even worse. What was the alternative?”
Robert Weisberg teaches criminal law at Stanford Law School, and he immediately wonders what it meant when juror B37 asserted that “You never get all the information. How do you form an opinion if you don’t have all the information?" Weisberg sums up his lawyerly concerns in one sentence: “She thinks the world is one big reasonable doubt.”
Gail Brashers-Krug, a former federal prosecutor and law professor, is currently a criminal defense attorney in Iowa. She also jumped back when B37 said, ”You never get all the information“. “That's exactly what a defense attorney loves to hear,” says Brashers-Krug. “That's reasonable doubt, right there. If I were a prosecutor, that would make me extremely nervous about her.” She adds that B37’s devotion to animals might raise flags for her as well. “The animal thing is weird. She doesn't know how many animals she has, and she mentions her animals far, far more than her two daughters. She strikes me as eccentric and unpredictable. I never, ever want eccentric, unpredictable people on a jury.”
Brashers-Krug has another reservation about seating B37: “She really wants to be a juror. She seems to be going out of her way to minimize the disruptive effect of a multiweek trial on her life. Jurors rarely do that. She is also taking pains to avoid saying anything particularly sympathetic to either side. Both sides tend to be very skeptical of jurors who are particularly eager to serve on high-profile cases. Often they have their own agendas, or are attention-seekers.”
What about the odd moment when B37 called Martin a “boy of color”? White says he wouldn’t read too much into it. “There's a tendency to over-emphasize what we believe to be the right nomenclature. In the context of the whole paragraph, her ’boy of color’ sounded like she was trying to use a dimly remembered correct nomenclature (’of color’ was in vogue when I was in college), but not remembering the freight of ’boy’. ...Sure, you strike people based on really clear examples of nomenclature. As a prosecutor in a hate crime case, I once struck someone who said ’I have no problem with African-Americans or whatever you're supposed to call them these days.’ But most people don't live in our terminology-conscious bubble.”
Brashers-Krug further notes that jury selection in self-defense cases “tends to reverse the dynamic between prosecutors and defense lawyers.” As she sees it, “normally a prosecutor loves law-and-order types, elderly people, people who generally don't feel safe and want the police to protect them from the bad guys. In a self-defense case, though, that's the defense attorney's target juror.”
White also says he isn’t really bothered by B37’s contempt for the entire media: “Her comments about the media wouldn't have turned my head whatever side I was on. I think it's the prevailing American view, and not uncommon at all. I don't see how it's logical to trust Today and not other sources, but very little of our relationship with the media is logical, and mistrust is healthy.”
Watching B37 run rings around her interlocutors raises once again the fundamental question of what we achieve whenever we attempt to seat a juror who knows nothing whatsoever about a high-profile case. We are left with people who avoid any brushes with policy, law, or politics and— paradoxically— come to convince themselves (as does B37) that everything they will hear in the courtroom is truth. This is hardly a new problem. Mark Twain grumbled about it in Roughing It in 1864:

“In this age, when a gentleman of high social standing, intelligence, and probity swears that testimony given under solemn oath will outweigh, with him, street talk and newspaper reports based upon mere hearsay, he is worth a hundred jurymen who will swear to their own ignorance and stupidity, and justice would be far safer in his hands than in theirs. Why could not the jury law be so altered as to give men of brains and honesty and equal chance with fools and miscreants? Is it right to show the present favoritism to one class of men and inflict a disability on another, in a land whose boast is that all its citizens are free and equal?”

It’s not that juror B37 is a miscreant or a fool so much as a reflexive doubter that truth and facts are really knowable anymore. She speaks for the millions of Americans who believe that everyone is lying about something and the media lies about everything. The Internet, she explains, is for getting to the next level on Candy Crush Saga, not for getting information. And since everything is a lie, she doesn’t care enough to learn that the riots she believes to have happened did not. One wonders whether she would buy her own book about the truth behind the Zimmerman verdict.
In his day, Twain was fretting about seating juries comprised solely of “desperadoes…  beer-house politicians… bar-keepers and ranchmen who could not read.” Today, I worry about seating jurors who believe that since everyone is lying and everything is a lie, and facts are for lining the birdcage.

Rico says he's still puzzled by how they ended up with six white women (no minorities, no men) on the jury... (Whatever happened to 'twelve good men and true'?)

Levitation using sound waves

Tia Ghose has a Yahoo News article about some amazing science:

Hold on to your wand, Harry Potter: science has outdone even your best levitation spell.
Researchers report that they have levitated objects with sound waves, and moved those objects around in midair, according to a new study.
Scientists have used sound waves to suspend objects in midair for decades, but the new method, described on 15 July in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, goes a step further by allowing people to manipulate suspended objects without touching them. This levitation technique could help create ultrapure chemical mixtures, without contamination, which could be useful for making stem cells or other biological materials.
For more than a century, scientists have proposed the idea of using the pressure of sound waves to make objects float in the air. As sound waves travel, they produce changes in the air pressure, squishing some air molecules together and pushing others apart. By placing an object at a certain point within a sound wave, it's possible to perfectly counteract the force of gravity with the force exerted by the sound wave, allowing an object to float in that spot.
In previous work on levitation systems, researchers had used transducers to produce sound waves, and reflectors to reflect the waves back, thus creating standing waves. "A standing wave is like when you pluck the string of a guitar," said study co-author Daniele Foresti, a mechanical engineer at ETH Zürich in Switzerland. "The string is moving up and down, but there are two points where it's fixed."
Using these standing waves, scientists levitated mice and small drops of liquid. But then the research got stuck. Acoustic levitation seemed to be more of a parlor trick than a useful tool: it was only powerful enough to levitate relatively small objects; it couldn't levitate liquids without splitting them apart, and the objects couldn't be moved.
Foresti and his colleagues designed tiny transducers powerful enough to levitate objects but small enough to be packed closely together. By slowly turning off one transducer just as its neighbor is ramping up, the new method creates a moving sweet spot for levitation, enabling the scientists to move an object in midair. Long, skinny objects can also be levitated. The new system can lift heavy objects, and also provides enough control so that liquids can be mixed together without splitting into many tiny droplets, Foresti said. The system blasts sounds waves at what would be an ear-splitting noise level of 160 decibels, about as loud as a jet taking off. Fortunately, the sound waves in the experiment operated at 24 kilohertz, just above the normal hearing range for humans. However, "if you have some dogs around, they are not going to like it at all," Foresti told LiveScience.
Right now, the objects can only be moved along in one dimension, but the researchers hope to develop a system that can move objects in two dimensions, Foresti said.
The new system is a major advance, both theoretically and in terms of its practical applications, said Yiannis Ventikos, a fluids researcher at the University College London who was not involved in the study. The new method could be an alternative to using a pipette to mix fluids in instances when contamination is an issue, he added. For instance, acoustic levitation could enable researchers to marinate stem cells in certain precise chemical mixtures, without worrying about contamination from the pipette or the well tray used. "The level of control you get is quite astounding," Ventikos said.

Rico says science is cool, and this is amazing...

Apple for the day

Jacob Davidson has a Time article about Apple vs everybody:

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, and Apple has vowed to keep fighting the charges.

In 2012, Apple unleashed a wave of lawsuits against Samsung Electronics, spanning multiple countries and court systems, accusing the Korean manufacturer of copying many of the signature design innovations of the iPad and iPhone.
Winner: Apple. While the company saw limited success outside the US, and was even forced by an English judge to publish an apology stipulating that Samsung did not copy the iPad, Apple won big on its home turf. The US court ruled that Samsung had violated a slew of Apple design patents, including the iPhone’s signature “tap-to-zoom” feature, and awarded the company over a billion dollars in damages. Samsung is appealing but, for now, Cupertino remains on top.

In 2008, Apple alleged that New York City’s new Big Apple logo— which was meant to promote a citywide sustainability initiative— was too similar to its own iconic symbol, so they contested the trademark.
Winner: None. Apple withdrew the claim after NYC agreed to delete the leaf from its GreeNYC logo, but the tech titan also received an avalanche of bad press for what was perceived as a crazy lawsuit.

 In 2007, Apple announced the original iPhone, setting the tech world ablaze. The only issue was, Apple’s iPhone wasn’t the first iPhone. Cisco Systems had previously released another phone product with the same name, and sued Apple for violating their trademark.
Winner: Apple. The two companies settled out of court, and Apple never ultimately delivered on Cisco’s request that it make the two products interoperable. Today, the only iPhone anyone knows about is the kind with a fruit on it.

In 2004, someone, presumably from Apple, leaked upcoming products to multiple tech websites. Enraged, the company sued the bloggers and demanded they reveal their sources.
Winner: Bloggers. After originally losing their case, the bloggers appealed and, in 2006, the California Court of Appeals ruled that bloggers did count as journalists, and as such were protected from having to reveal their sources by the shield law.

In 1994, Apple engineers codenamed the Power Macintosh 7100  the Carl Sagan, hoping the computer would sell “billions and billions” of units, a reference to one of Carl Sagan’s books. 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-head 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 the only real winners here are the fucking lawyers...

Gubs for the day

Josh Voorhees has a Slate article about George Zimmerman that'll surely set the anti-gub people a-twitter:

Now that a Florida jury has found him not guilty of murder (or even manslaughter), George Zimmerman is free to reclaim any of his belongings that were held as evidence in his murder case. Yes, including the KelTec 9 pistol he used to shoot and kill Trayvon Martin.
It's unclear exactly when the gun will be returned to Zimmerman, although his defense team has made it clear that he will ask for it back. In fact, one of his attorneys went as far as to suggest it can't happen soon enough. Here's the pull-quote from Mark O'Mara's interview with ABC News over the weekend:

He said that Zimmerman intends to rearm himself. When asked if he would carry a gun, O'Mara said: 'Yes. There's even more reason now, isn't there? There are a lot of people out there who actually hate him, though they shouldn't."

Florida law bars anyone "convicted of a felony in the courts of this state" from possessing "firearms, ammunition, or electric weapons or devices unlawful". That, of course, doesn't apply to Zimmerman, thanks to the recent verdict. (O'Mara did, however, note that his client's concealed-carry permit may be in jeopardy.)

Rico says he suspects that Zimmerman will just carry, regardless...

A reason to go

Rico says he'll (hopefully) be organizing a legal trip to Havana in 2015 to celebrate (with rum and cigars, Rico has been informed) the 150th anniversary of the arrival of the CSS Stonewall (photo, above; later the Kotestsu, after being sold to the Japanese).
Given it's inexpensive, Rico will spring for a thank-you present for everyone who comes along, a 1/600 scale model:

Authors for the day

Daniel Politi has a Slate article about a surprising book from an accomplished (and rich) author:

It was a story that seemed too good to be true. A former military man tried his hand at writing, and managed to publish a complex crime novel that received great reviews. The Cuckoo’s Calling was hardly a commercial success, but many expressed surprise that a new author could write such a sophisticated first novel that received comparisons to the works of crime writers like Ruth Rendell and PD James, noted the Independent. Turns out, the novel that told the tale of a war veteran turned private investigator wasn’t his first novel at all. And, in fact, the author wasn’t even a man. It was J.K. Rowling, the world-famous author of the Harry Potter series. Her secret was revealed by the Sunday Times, that began investigating the book after it received an anonymous tip on Twitter, reports The New York Times.
"I hoped to keep this secret a little longer, because being Robert Galbraith has been such a liberating experience," Rowling said in a statement released by her publicist. "It has been wonderful to publish without hype or expectation, and pure pleasure to get feedback from publishers and readers under a different name."
Rowling’s attitude doesn’t seem all that surprising, considering how her widely anticipated first novel for adults, The Casual Vacancy, received decidedly mixed reviews after it was released last year. Demand for The Cuckoo’s Calling is now soaring, and a reprint is under way that will “carry a revised author biography, which reads: ‘Robert Galbraith is a pseudonym for J.K. Rowling’,” Reagan Arthur, publisher of Little, Brown, said in a statement, reports the Los Angeles Times.

Rico says it's nice to see her writing something other than that Harry Potter drivel... (Not that the little weasel didn't make her fucking millions...)

NASA’s good old days

Konstantin Kakaes has a Slate article about Voyager:

The speed of light is inconceivably fast. It is just shy of 300,000 kilometers per second. That is, for everyday purposes, instantaneous. A signal from the space probe Voyager 1, which is investigating the limits of the sun’s influence in the galaxy, takes just over seventeen hours to arrive at Earth. Voyager 1 is almost 125 times as far from the sun as Earth is, so the signal is very weak when it arrives. The tenuous radio waves are gathered by antennas of NASA’s Deep Space Network, in the Mojave Desert, outside of Madrid, and in Australia.
Despite shaky launches in 1977, both Voyager 1 and its sibling Voyager 2 have lasted more than 35 years in deep space. They were originally meant to visit only Jupiter and Saturn. Voyager 2 made it onward to Uranus and Neptune, and Voyager 1 is now probing the outer reaches of the solar system and might be on the verge of leaving entirely. (Voyager 2 is also still functioning, but is moving more slowly and now lags behind.) Departure is a complicated matter, though: As the Voyager team reported in late June in Science magazine, the solar system’s boundary is more muddled than astrophysicists had previously suspected.
The Voyagers are often described as pioneers, blazing a trail through the outer solar system. This isn’t entirely true. The first space probes to visit Jupiter and Saturn were called, well, Pioneers. Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11, to be precise. Both missions were born in the time of Apollo. Voyager 2’s encounters with Uranus in 1986 and Neptune in 1989 were just about NASA’s only successes in the 1980s. It was a bleak decade for NASA, when the failures of the space shuttle loomed large, casting a shadow that has yet to lift.
The institutional tension in NASA is often described in terms of the manned vs. unmanned programs. Though the budget fights were, and are, real enough, the true tension in NASA is between exploration— sending spacecraft to places they have never been before, whether or not with a person onboard— and the sort of aimless technological bloat typified by the space shuttle. The fact that NASA has done the second badly should not obscure the fact that it’s done the first very well. Last summer’s dramatic and successful landing of the rover Curiosity on Mars shows that spirit of exploration at NASA persists even amid a broader drift at the agency.
At its best, NASA’s exploration is both tangible— it sends objects out to sample distant, forbidding environments— and relevant— the faraway facts illuminate terrestrial truths, spiritual and scientific.
The spotlight was on the Voyager and Pioneer missions at the time of their planetary encounters. That is, after all, the reason they were built. But just as Voyager 1’s dispatches from the solar system’s boundary in June showed its residual scientific value, the Pioneers also had more science left to do after passing Jupiter and Saturn. In fact, what they found in the void of the outer solar system had potentially a greater scientific impact than anything they had found at the planets.
In my new e-book, The Pioneer Detectives, published today by the Millions, I tell the story of how John Anderson, a scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, discovered a strange, persistent anomaly in data coming back from the Pioneers. It took him years to confirm his suspicion, which he’d first noticed in the early 1980s, that some small, unknown force was slowing down both Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11. The anomaly had the potential to upend physics by indicating a flaw in the known laws of gravity—Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity. When Anderson and his collaborators announced the anomaly in 1998, the New York Times headline read: “After Major Study, Mysterious Force in Space Remains Mystery.”
Over the next dozen years, hundreds of physicists would work on what came to be called the “Pioneer anomaly,” some wondering whether it might allow them to explain away dark matter or dark energy. Even though the Voyagers were bigger and more sophisticated, the physicists focused on the Pioneers because of a technical coincidence. The older craft were stabilized in a simpler way: by spinning. This meant that the Pioneers were much more precisely navigated—a force the size of the Pioneer anomaly was not detectable on the Voyagers.
The main design argument against spinning is that it makes it hard to take pictures. The nonrotating Voyagers had cameras that took vivid photos of the planets and their moons. The simpler Pioneers could store only five commands in memory, and had to be constantly commanded from Earth, while the Voyagers were programmable and so could adapt to their longer mission. This difference was, in part because the Voyagers cost three times as much, and, in part, because computer technology was evolving rapidly in the years between the two missions.
Five and a half years before the Voyagers entered space, on March 2, 1972, Pioneer 10 took off for Jupiter. Pioneer 10 and its sibling Pioneer 11, launched a year later, were run by NASA’s Ames Research Center, a rival to the Jet Propulsion Lab, which handles the Voyagers. The Ames crew saw themselves as underdogs. “There was a big competition going on,” says Dave Lozier, who worked on the Pioneer program for decades. “[JPL] felt the solar system was their domain.”
But at JPL, the rivalry was less keenly felt. The Pioneers rarely came up in conversation with Voyager’s scientists and engineers, except for one crucial discovery Pioneer 10 made at Jupiter: The radiation environment around Jupiter was far harsher than expected. By some measures, it was 1,000 times stronger than anyone had thought it would be. “Everything on the spacecraft was being fried,” NASA’s deputy director later wrote. “[The] engineers said flatly that Pioneer 10 was about to go off the air.”
JPL was already a year into designing the Voyagers, but the laboratory had to go back to the drawing board to protect the probes from radiation. Edward Stone, Voyager’s chief scientist, says they had to completely redesign both the electronics and the optics. The radiation hardening contributed, he says, to the Voyagers’ longevity.
When the Voyagers were launched, neither was supposed to go past Saturn, so far as NASA headquarters was concerned. “We made, on the sly, a decision to put some special features in the sun sensor, including some amplifiers to boost the sensitivity of the device so that we would guarantee that the sun sensor would at least work out beyond the orbit of Uranus,” John Casani, who was in charge of the Voyagers just before they launched, told David Swift, a sociologist, for an oral history in the 1990s. The Voyager engineering team wanted to build a spacecraft to last, but NASA didn’t want to pay for it. “We did not ballyhoo any of the things that I’ve been talking about that we were doing. They were done quietly, in quiet council and deliberation. We never advertised.”
That quiet planning included the interstellar mission from the start, says Suzanne Dodd, who currently holds Casani’s old job running Voyager. Neither Voyager would have survived its Jupiter encounter if not for Pioneer 10’s scouting mission. In turn, Voyager 1 was able to figure out one reason there was so much radiation around Jupiter—Io, one of Jupiter’s moons, has volcanoes that spew tons of sulfur into space every second, which, through a complex series of interactions, exacerbates the radiation around Jupiter.
After the Pioneers and Voyagers, NASA, beset by the woes of the shuttle program, didn’t send anything to the outer solar system for more than a decade, until the launch of Galileo to Jupiter in 1989. Cassini was then launched toward Saturn in 1997. Both Galileo and Cassini were orbiters—by slowing down and orbiting their target planets, they could gather far more data. Though scientifically valuable, they aren’t explorers in the sense that the Pioneers and Voyagers are. Only New Horizons, currently en route to Pluto, can lay claim to this mantle. But as Dodd points out, the “Voyager spacecraft travel faster than New Horizons. They will always be the first.” (The Voyagers will run short of electricity around 2025, but if all goes well they should continue functioning until then, with scientific instruments gradually being turned off because of the diminishing supply of electricity.)
Both the Pioneers and Voyagers generated huge amounts of publicity when they flew by each planet. Reporters gathered by the hundreds at Ames and at JPL. Newspapers editorialized about the messages each carried to the stars—a plaque, in Pioneer’s case, and a golden record, in Voyager’s. Their trajectories had been agonizingly refined, right on up to Voyager 2’s mission past Neptune, which threaded a needle so that it could swing behind Triton, a Neptune moon, allowing radio scientists to see what happened to the radio signal when Triton passed in front of the radio waves. Robert Cesarone is the navigator responsible for threading that needle. As Cesarone told Swift, “Voyager was the moral equivalent of war. It was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.” Cesarone continued:
This is a mission that is going to be in the history books 500 years from now, but it won’t be in the history books because we learned what the harmonics of the gravitational potential field of Neptune were. Nobody’s going to care about that. The reader is not going to care, you don’t care, even I don’t really care. Why is it going to be in the books? Because it was a great adventure of the human race.
All these spacecraft were the product of paradox. They were made by thousands of people working together and operated over decades by thousands more. Their reliable functioning rested not on genius but on bureaucratic organization. Neither project exceeded its budget with cost overruns or with delays. But the diligence to see the projects through, to make science out of weak radio signals right on up to the edge of the solar system, required passion, and genius also. The Pioneers and Voyagers are lessons in how bureaucracy—a much maligned word—can channel the passion of individuals to accomplish wonderful things. As NASA enters the next phase of its existence, it would do well to remember the successes of these early space probes.

Rico says the Final Frontier has more wonders than we can imagine...

The other verdict

http://www.allvoices.com/contributed-news/14989814-the-other-verdict-the-dead-victim-trayvon-martin-was-put-on-trial-and-found-guilty?utm_source=stormpost&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Allvoices%20Newsletter


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Mark Seymour
215.866.6184
mseymour@proofmark.com

Apple for the day

http://newsfeed.time.com/2013/07/14/apples-latest-groundbreaking-discovery-a-15th-century-ruin/?xid=newsletter-daily

Most beloved reporter of WW2

Don Moore's War Tales has this about one of Rico's heroes:

I was interviewing Giff Stowell at La Casa mobile home park in North Port, Florida about his adventures in a B-24 Liberator bomber in the Pacific during World War Two. He had a handful of old war snapshots sitting on his dining room table. Included in the pictures was an almost unknown shot of Japanese flying to Ie Shima Island off Okinawa on 20 August 1945, to sign the first surrender document ending World War Two  A delegation of high-ranking enemy soldiers flew from there to Manila to meet with General Douglas MacArthur to plan the official surrender aboard the battleship USS Missouri on 2 September 1945.
The last picture in the stack was a black-and-white shot of a concrete pyramid. Near the top of the obelisk was a bronze plaque of the Statue of Liberty. Below, a larger plaque has the inscription: “At this spot the 77th Infantry Division lost a buddy, Ernie Pyle, 18 April 1945.”
Ernie Pyle had to be the most respected and loved newspaper reporter in the Second World War. Born at the turn of the century in Indiana, he went to work for Scripps Howard Newspapers before World War Two.
Pyle was with American troops in North Africa when they first faced General Erwin Rommel’s North Afrika Korps and got their butts kicked at the Kasserine Pass. He was with our troops in Sicily. From there he becomes a “foot-slogger” during the Normandy Invasion, and on and on the little man went, chronicling the front-line soldiers’ daily lives across France, Holland, and Germany, until V-E Day. It wasn’t long afterward that Pyle was on the front lines in the Pacific.
He was much more than just another embedded journalist covering the war a lifetime ago. He was the kind of guy who ate and drank with and slept next to our soldiers at the front.
Then Pyle wrote columns about individual soldiers, their triumphs and tragedies. Occasionally, he wrote about their deaths.
The Death of Captain Waskow is one of his most well-remembered columns. It’s the story of Captain Henry T. Waskow of Belton, Texas, who served as a company commander in the army’s 36th Division in Italy.
According to Pyle, the captain was the most beloved solder he ever met in the war. They brought Waskow’s body down from the mountain on a mule at night. Several members of his company gently lifted his body from the mule and laid it beside four other dead soldiers along a nearby stone wall. One by one, men from his unit walked up and said a few words to their dead leader. Pyle was close by with pencil and pad in hand.
He closed this column with these three paragraphs:

“Then the first man squatted down, and he reached down and took the dead hand, and he sat there for a full five minutes, holding the dead hand in his own and looking intently into the dead face, and he never uttered a sound all the time he sat there.
“And finally he put the hand down, and then reached up and gently straightened the points of the captain’s shirt collar, and then he sort of rearranged the tattered edges of his uniform around the wound. And then he got up and walked away down the road in the moonlight, all alone.
“After that, the rest of us went back into the cowshed, leaving the five dead men lying in a line, end to end, in the shadow of the low stone wall. We lay down on the straw in the cow shed, and pretty soon we were all asleep.”

This was Ernie Pyle at his literary best.
Less than a month before the end of the war he was on Ie Shima Island, a tiny speck of sand off Okinawa. The battle for Okinawa and the surrounding islands was the largest and bloodiest in the Pacific during WWII.
Ie Shima was held by Imperial Japanese marines. They were the biggest and baddest enemies Americans faced in the war in the Pacific. From what I’ve been told about his last day, Pyle was up front with members of the 77th Infantry Division who were attempting to take the island when he stuck his head up over an embankment. A Japanese sniper put a bullet right between his eyes.
The marker on Ie Shima (photo, below) marks the spot where he was killed 59 years ago doing what he did best: covering the troops at the front.
Ernest Taylor Pyle is buried in the Punch Bowl Cemetery in Honolulu, Hawai'i, along with thousands of other American servicemen. It is only fitting Pyle was laid to rest with the men he loved and reported about.

In 1945 a movie made about Ernie Pyle, starring Burgess Meredith, was called The Story of G.I. Joe: