about 10 hours ago: Pittsburgh Penguins' Matt Cooke (24) goes flying after a collision with Philadelphia Flyers' Scott Hartnell (19) in the first period of an NHL hockey game, Tuesday, Dec. 14, 2010, in Philadelphia. (AP Photo)
All good things must come to an end, blah blah blah. The Pittsburgh Penguins came out a little flat early on the road against their most heated rival, and even though they temporarily righted the ship, you could just tell watching that - short of Marc-Andre Fleury- things were a little "off" tonight. You usually don't win many games in the NHL when things are off, especially in a barn against a team like the Philadelphia Flyers.
In the first period Penguin-killer Claude Giroux gathered a lose puck and was all alone from point blank range to beat a stick-less Fleury. MAF lost said stick when trying to fish out the puck, and the Flyers pounced on him and took advantage of the Alex Goligoski - Deryk Engelland pairing that couldn't bail the goalie out. It'd be a rare gaffe for Fleury on the night.
Later in the second period, Evgeni Malkin celebrated his return to the lineup with a monster slapper on the power play. A welcome sight to be sure, since for the past few games the PP has seemingly been the "Pass the puck to Sid and see what he does with it Show". The tie would be short-lived, however, when Nikolai Zherdev showed some fancy dangles and great patience to evade Brooks Orpik's 2-on-1 defending and beat Fleury up high. 2-1 Flyers after two.
After the jump the rousing conclusion, and why even though Evgeni Malkin came back, it was the guy who they didn't have tonight that seemingly was the difference...
In the third period Malkin would again draw the Penguins even, scoring his 10th of the year and again on the power play. Philly would pull ahead for good though when Scott Hartnell battled with Orpik in front of the net, gained position and put a perfect tip on a Chris Pronger shot over Fleury's head.
Some other thoughts on the streak-buster:
· Malkin was a beast in his return, scoring the Pens two lone and accounting for almost 35% of the team's total shots on goal (8 out of 23). But it was the guy he mainly replaced who's absence showed. This game was meant for Chris Kunitz. Lots of energy, skating, checking, positioning. Kunitz has sort of been an after thought playing with Sidney Crosby, but it's probably worth pointing out Crosby had one of his quietest games at even-strength in recent memory. Credit Pronger and Matt Carle? Sure. But the Pens team didn't find their legs early in the game, and that's one area where Kunitz shines.
· Also another repercussion of having Kunitz and Jordan Staal out of the lineup? Meet your new first line power play forward Matt Cooke!
· For only the second time since November 6th, Fleury gave up three goals. But don't be confused, he was easily the Pens best and most consistent player all night long, stopping 34 of 37 Philadelphia shots, including several big-time chances. Fleury played with confidence and aggression; he deserved a better fate on this night.
· Frustating. Brilliant. Emerging star. Prone to mistakes. Kris Letang brings no shortage of accurate descriptions of his game, sometimes multiple ones on the same shift! He's skating like the wind and playing physical, but he'll be out of position here or there too. And at the end of the game he twice shot the puck high and wide that killed the offense when the puck went to the line and out once, and saved (barely) the other time by a lunging Malkin. Still, chalk a team-high 26:10 of ice-time up for Letang, with 9 attempted shots (3 on target), 4 hits, 2 giveaways and 2 takeaways.
· A lot of fans like the "buzz line" of Chris Conner, Mark Letestu and Tyler Kennedy. Tonight I thought they had an uneven night. Conner, to me, played perhaps his worst game of the season. He seemed ineffective and took a penalty in the 2nd period just seconds after Malkin tied the game. Kennedy, however, had a better outing and was even rewarded with a few shifts with the Crosby-Malkin line. Early on in the game it seemed like TK was the Pens best forward and about the only one moving his legs....Probably not a good sign.
· Speaking of not a good sign, the playing with fire award goes to discipline. While the Pens were on a PP, Pronger pushes Cooke into the net after the whistle. It's what Pronger does, you have to let it go. How does Cooke respond? By punching Pronger in the face. Penalty. Brooks Orpik took a run at somebody named Darroll Powe when he ran Fleury, but luckily the refs only whistled the Flyer. Malkin tripped a guy and got called for it, then tripped another for good measure. All told, the Pens gave the Flyers six chances (and 10+ minutes) on the power play. Not a good recipe for success, and finally the PK betrayed them on the sixth and final time when Hartnell scored his game winner.
· One streak may be over, but another trudges on: Crosby recorded two assists on the night and ties his career high with a 19 game point streak. As mentioned, El Capitan had a quiet night for his lofty standards, but still rattled off 21:20, took a game high 25 faceoffs (winning 56% of them), with 2 hits, 1 takeaway and 1 blocked shots. Throw in the 2 PP assists and that's a hell of a night for 99% of the league, but not for the ridiculously unfair heights Crosby's held to with his recent outings.
· Finally, fans talk that having Crosby-Malkin together should be good to get Geno on the right track. But don't forget about #87, who may be deferring too much, Sid was held without a shot on goal, the first game all season he hasn't had at least one. In one instance, Crosby tried to force a backhand pass to Malkin on a 2-on-1 that Pronger put himself in a position to easily defend. It's not a big-time concern, but definitely something to keep an eye on if the 87/71 connection stays in tact.
So that's the streak. On one hand, a disappointing effort against a divisional opponent who's now jumped the Pens for the points lead. On the other hand, the weight of the winning streak is over, which could be spun as a good thing for a team that has a big enough spotlight (and target) on its back already.
And the best news of all is the boys get the chance to wash the losing taste right out of their mouths tomorrow night when they get back at it against the New York Rangers. Surely NYR won't be feeling sorry for the Pens winning streak coming to an end, so now it's time to salvage the week and head into the season high 4 day break on a high note...
....And maybe even start a new streak in the process.
Ouch, Pens website. Did you really have to make it seem THAT dramatic?
Even that photo. Ugh.
So...ending the streak does kind of suck, but come on, can we really be that upset?
As far as we're concerned, tomorrow night we start back at game one of our next winning streak.
If this had been a movie, we'd have been looking for some drama, some story arcs. You have to lose sometimes, just to make it spicy.
Let's focus on the good times here tonight with a few individual awards, just to soften the blow before we reacquaint you with a world where the houses aren't all made out of black and gold gumdrops.
Put up your feet, take a deep breath, and repeat:
The Pens are Never Losing Again.
THE HONORARY BEAR GRYLLS AWARD OF EXCEPTIONAL KICKASSERY
Malks is finally back on the ice, making turning on the Penguins game feel a little bit more like being home. Of course, within moments on the ice he had reminded us that, no, this was not about being warm and cuddly and full of Christmas spirit, it is about striking raw fear into the hearts of grown men. On ice.
We're pretty sure he could survive days in the wilderness living only off of the land and and manliness.
THE GOLD STAR AWARD
Sometimes people be hatin' when they know they shouldn't be hatin'.
MAF, with the help of his guardian angel (Brent Johnson) sent by Curry himself led us through this winning streak. So we can't blame him for anything except for melting our hearts a little.
Facing a wicked amount of shots this evening, I think this man deserves our love, respect, honor and gold star stickers.
THE SILVER LINING
Flyers games always mean hilarious antics and photographic evidence of said antics that will keep us entertained for weeks to come.
The reality of this loss is that it was no biggie. We can accept less than perfection. Sometimes.
We're going to pick up right where we left off before this game. The Rangers? What do those jagwagons have on us? Absolutely nothing.
Streak Pt. 2, here we come.
If you get too overwhelmed by the loss of the streak, remember that somewhere the is probably a kitten playing with a dinosaur toy.
(The likelihood of this is actually quite tiny, but the universe is a lot better when you imagine it with kittens, unless you start thinking about the masses of murdered kittens due to Pierre McGuire and his penis head and constant yammering and oh god the kitten massacre it is coming back to me no no no)
*Deep breath*
We will get through it, we will see another day, and we will never, ever lose again.
Go Pens.
A couple days back Barry Melrose was on ESPN, once again having a good-natured chuckle at his own expense over the whole not-being-such-a-sweet-coach-in-Tampa-Bay thing.
A lot of people make those quips, and they often cite his misuse of Steven Stamkos as the reason for his downfall.
But, they shouldn't. I'm not so sure he misused him at all.
For young players entering the NHL, there's a sizable learning curve, and I'm not convinced that only giving a rookie a moderate amount of ice time early in his career is a detriment to his development. I know it helped me in college.
That learning curve is why a lot of NHL teams keep their draft picks for the nine game maximum before sending them down -- even if they don't keep them, getting their feet wet can be huge for development.
When you make the step up from playing against boys to battling men, you learn how much the little things like winning puck battles mattered to your stats in previous seasons. Suddenly, you find your opportunities to create cut in half. And when you do get them, the goalies are even bigger and faster.
You need some reps to learn some new tricks, and to find that new "compete level", but not so many that you're constantly tired and unable to prove the things you can do when you're feeling your best.
The biggest shock for most up-and-comers is the violence with which guys at the higher level enter into combat over a loose puck. I remember being shocked at the force with which some established NHLers would hack and shove in a battle, even in summer hockey.
Everybody just seems ... angry.
While playing said shinny, Dany Heatley shattered my stick with a chop, took the puck and didn't look back. If you see him doing that against another NHLer that's bringing the same intensity, you lose context on the level of tenacity that's actually involved in those moments. In training camp, when the young prospects are in the mix with players like that, the hostility gap is huge.
You learn to expect that as the season goes on, and more importantly, you learn to bring it yourself.
When you do have the puck -- and I know it sounds obvious -- but it takes some time before you sear into your thick skull that "oh, I have to skate my hardest EVERYWHERE."
Most pro players were, at one time or another, one of the best players at a lower level where the game was considerably slower. At those levels, you get accustomed to grabbing the puck and letting your natural speed keep you up to pace while you made your decisions.
Thus, what used to be your breakaway speed at that level, your passing gear, is what you have it in even when you're just lugging the puck up through the neutral zone. Just a few games back I saw Tyler Seguin get caught from behind and have the puck stolen, a play that reminded me, embarrassingly, of my first AHL game.
Ooohhh, so I'm the not-so-fast kid here, hey?
Noted.
For almost all rookies (there are a few exceptions, of course), it takes months before you learn to effectively use your speed to challenge opponents, as opposed to using it for survival. Positioning becomes key. Timing matters more.
Stamkos, like so many other rookies, was no different. You can cite his before Melrose/after Melrose stats all you like, but a big part of his massive jump (and therefore his earning of more ice time) is that he just advanced along the learning curve and simply got better as an NHL player, not because he was given more ice time just for the sake of it by a new coach.
It's why we're seeing "rookie" Logan Couture excel so much this year -- he played modest minutes during a lengthy 40 game adjustment period last year, and came into this NHL season with a massive leg up on the other rookies -- he knew what to expect.
Fans often have high expectations for their top draft picks, but they need to understand how big the jump truly is.
The learning curve takes time, and this time of year, some guys are starting to come around the bend.
Tuesdays with Stoosh
Because there's really nothing to complain about right now, I give you several thoughts, dudes…
= Is it a bad thing that I'm a thousand times more excited for this Pens-Caps Alumni game than I am the actual Winter Classic? Yes? No?
You are, too? OK, cool.
= So what took the NHL so long to figure out that this is Alumni Game is an awesome idea? How was this not done before in conjunction with a Winter Classic? Or an All-Star Game? Or just for the hell of it?
How did the NHL miss on this until now? Is there another group of sports fans who show more appreciation for days gone by than hockey fans? We still speak of past players as fondly as the current players, unless you're Rico Fata. Look around a Pens crowd and you'll see just as many Lemieux, Francis and Jagr jerseys as you see Crosby, Malkin and Staal ones. Hockey fans pined so much for classic jerseys to become available that it spawned the creation of the NHL Vintage jerseys. They have an entire clothing line manufactured by a brand called "Old Time Hockey", and there's also a line dedicated solely to the Original Six. We still play NHL '94. The NHL actively sell merchandise featuring old logos…hell, they sell merchandise featuring teams that no longer even exist.
Weren't you watching the looks on faces in the crowd last year in the Bell Centre when all those Habs legends came out and took warm-ups? We love old stuff. We love old players. No-brainer. Keep doing stuff like this.
= And hey, how's that for a kick in the nuts, Whalers/Jets/Nords fans? Bettman couldn't justify keeping your teams around because your markets weren't good enough for his US television empire, but he'll gladly keep selling swag with your team's logos. Ouch, man. Ouch.
= Back to the alumni game. From the day this was announced last week, this generated a much more genuine buzz among Pens fans than any other WC-related announcement to date. Someone can correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe Alumni games used to be part of the All-Star Game festivities at one point. Even if they weren't, why not make them a part of some sort of event going forward? Dump some of the stupid skills events at the All-Star Game for an alumni game.
= This, of course, begs the bigger question: What kind of asstastic market research was behind the NHL's decision to limit tickets to this Caps-Pens Alumni Game to 10,000 people? You're playing this in a stadium that can seat 65,000+ people. You're putting names on the ice like Francis, Trottier, and…oh yeah, LEMIEUX. IN PITTSBURGH. You could've sold tickets for fifty bucks a piece and people would've gladly handed it over, even if they were stuck in the last row of Heinz in those endzone seats just to see Lemieux skate out and take warm-ups. I know *I* would've.
How do they misfire on something like this? How do you not allow at least 20,000 or 30,000 seats for a game like this? This alumni game is going to be great stuff, and sticking it in front of just 10,000 people in that stadium is going to make it look like the fourth quarter of a Steelers-Patriots playoff game.
= Or a Thrashers crowd. Take your pick.
= And none of this is to say that I'm not excited for the Winter Classic. I am. Sort of. I guess. OK, so if the weather stays the way it's been, it'll make for one hell of a nice setting and it'll be great. At least until the NBC announcers open their mouths, and that's going to be the worst thing about this Winter Classic thing. This thing is going to be a 150-minute assault that will alternate between the NHL's biggest OvieSidgasm to date, and Edzo, Pierre and Milbury attempting to wax poetic about pond hockey and trying to convince us that every player on the ice had never seen an ice rink with a roof until they got to the NHL. I'm not even sure Doc Emrick can save this.
= Look, I hate to get down on this whole Winter Classic thing. Seven or eight years ago, Pittsburgh isn't even a blip on the NHL's radar for an event like this. It's a week-long thing and there's going to be a lot of awesome stuff built around the event, including the RMU-RIT and WBS-Hershey games at Consol on the 30th. They're going to have a public skating rink set up adjacent to Heinz Field. Lots of stuff is going to be happening around this, so kudos and thanks to the Pens, the NHL, the folks at RMU and Wilkes-Barre and whoever else was instrumental in setting this stuff up.
= And I understand all the reasons why the NHL wants to do this or even has to do this. It's marketing and corporate dollars and it's abundantly clear when you look around any of these new arenas or stadiums that those dollars keep teams and leagues operating. The criticism comes because this is the fourth Winter Classic and Pittsburgh's second, so practically every non-Pens fan (and even some Pens fans) thinks it shows blatant favoritism by the league. And they're right. This is Year Six of the Crosby-Ovechkin Era of the NHL, and this rivalry angle has been beaten more times than the Caps defense. We're tired of it. Caps fans are probably tired of it. Fans of other teams are tired of it. It's no different than Manning-Brady in the NFL or Yankees-Red Sox in baseball.
But I'll give the league this much. The last time the Pens were involved was the first one, and the whole thing was regarded as a joke until people watched the NHL Network broadcasts of the team practices and realized how awesome it looked. When gameday with graced with a standard Buffalo snowfall, the result was a picture-postcard setting that probably surpassed anything the NHL expected when the idea crossed their minds. Before the buzz for the event could even reach full volume, this Pens-Caps matchup was already being discussed. So they decided to milk it for two years, get some other marquee/larger-market teams involved, and then get their Pens-Caps dream matchup once the memories of Crosby beating Miller in the shootout were a little less fresh.
= The question the league will have to answer after this year regarding the WC is where to take it from here. They can't play Crosby vs. Ovechkin EVERY year (right?). One would have to think the Rangers are involved in the next one somehow – probably at the new Yankees or Giants Stadium. It'd be nice to bring Minnesota into the loop, considering it's pretty much the closest thing the US has to Canada in terms of hockey being engrained into the culture, and no other state has weather tailor-made for an outdoor game like Minnesota. I'd say they'd get some of the Canadian cities involved but when it comes to US broadcasts, the league seems to pretend the Canadian teams don't exist.
= I know the last thing this Pens team seems to be focused on are the individual awards, but that doesn't mean the fans can't be. So that being said, Error! Hyperlink reference not valid..
Yes, there's a long way to go, but it says something about how well the kid is playing when this kind of stuff is getting noticed.
= Pens are in Philly tonight and then back home to play the Rangers tomorrow. After that, they don't play against until next Monday night. That should help the injury timetable for guys like Malkin, Staal and (yes, even) Comrie immensely.
= Through his first eight games this year, Marc-Andre Fleury posted a GAA of 3.59 GAA. His save percentage was .853 and he gave up 25 goals.
In the 14 games since - starting with the win over Tampa on Nov. 12 - Fleury's GAA is 1.71, his save percentage is .940 and he's allowed just 24 goals. He's been helped by the team in front of him, of course, but those are still some unbelievable numbers.
= Something to watch: Flyers rookie goalie Sergei Bobrovsky has never played more than 35 games in a season. He's already played 22 this year. He's playing some pretty solid goaltending right now, but he may hit a wall at some point.
= There's a Pelle Lindbergh comment there somewhere, but I'll let that go.
= Wonder if Dan Ellis would be incessantly bitching about Linus Omark's shootout goal if he had stopped the damn shot.
= Real #DanEllisProblems – the fact that he was beaten by what was mostly a run-of-the-mill wrist shot, especially one that came a good two or three seconds AFTER the spin move.
= Going to be really interesting to see what happens in Washington if things don't get improve. Atlanta has closed to within two points of the Caps for the Southeast Division lead, and Tampa is just three points back. It says something for their top-end talent that they've still got the third-highest point total in the East. But when you watch them play, they look like a team whose players just met each other for the first time an hour before opening faceoff.
You watch the Caps and it's the same problems that have plagued them since 2008-09. They're sloppy in their coverages. They don't play both ends of the ice. Their forwards aren't interested in playing defense, and neither are a few too many of their defensemen. They acquired Scott Hannan to shore up their defense, but didn't realize he moves about as well as Hal Gill. The major problem with that is that Hal Gill can get away with moving like Hal Gill because he's 6'7" and uses a hockey stick that's six feet long. Scott Hannan is 6'1".
Rumors have been circulating about a coaching change and as always, the Bylsma example gets cited. "Well, look what the Pens did when they made a coaching change." Yep. And look who the Pens had on their roster. What about Alex Ovechkin, Alexander Semin and Mike Green makes anyone think those guys have the fortitude to work hard night in and night out to win games? People realize the Caps are a Sergei Fedorov goal away in 2008-09 from never making it beyond the first round of the playoffs, right?
And how is a coaching change going to help when the everyone in that locker room knows the owner is constantly pulling the rug out from under the coach? How would Ovechkin and Semin respond to a coach who all of a sudden demands more accountability on the ice when they've never been held to any sort of standard before?
Jamie Olivier – He understands everything about health care except how to fix it
Is Jamie Oliver the Biggest Loser of All?
He understands everything about America's public-health crisis — except why he can never fix it
By Stephen Marche
ABC
Published in the January 2011 issue, on sale now
(Obama) Win McNamee/Getty Images; (Biggest Loser) NBC/Photofest
Jamie Oliver cannot get over how fat Americans are. On the first season of his hit ABC show, Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution, which debuted last year just as Michelle Obama was launching her national antiobesity initiative (the Let's Move! campaign) and the ninth season of NBC's cash cow (The Biggest Loser) was getting serious, the British celebrity chef could not believe that nearly half the adults in Huntington, West Virginia, were obese. He could not fathom how much they ate. He was outraged at the quality of the chicken the children were eating at school. And though he literally tried to get the town's residents to eat their vegetables, the West Virginians were back to flavored milk and "processed-food Fridays" the minute he left. Now Oliver is back for a second season and trying his luck in L. A., where he'll take another shot at convincing Americans to choose mushroom pappardelle and seasonal parsnips over a burger with fries. He will fail, of course, not for lack of effort but because he just doesn't get the fact that excessive consumption is woven into our national DNA. Being an American means and has always meant eating too much, even if the likes of Jamie Oliver tell us not to, and even if, as one study predicts, it means the next generation of Americans could be the first to expect a shorter life span than the one before it.
The Granger Collection
Oliver means well, and I admire his guts. The guy has sold twenty-four million cookbooks and starred in a dozen television shows in his native country. His crusade to improve school lunches in Britain was a triumph; it changed how an entire generation of schoolchildren eats lunch. He understood the roots of the bad food they were eating — cheap, lazy, shortsighted government administrations mired in bad practices — and against that framework he knew what role to take, the firebrand reformer, a traditional role in Britain. With "Food Revolution," he's trying to transfer that approach to the United States, but anyone who has lived in America knows that the government is not the cause of American fat. Americans are. The obesity problem is social — historical, even — not political. The founding myth of the country, and its most important holiday, Thanksgiving, is a spectacle of overeating. Expansion has always involved feasting. The story of the western frontier is the story of driving immense herds of protein across an empty landscape toward their eventual slaughter. The industrial explosion of the mid-to-late nineteenth century that swelled the population of the country demanded huge amounts of food, and the Greatest Generation didn't create the most powerful country in the history of the world while on a diet. Food was their fuel, and if they worked hard and brought home lots of bacon, why not eat it?
PRNewsFoto/Newscom
That's where we ran into trouble. Our eating habits were formed during times of immensely productive manual labor. If you're working twelve-hour shifts at the car plant, you can eat whatever you want. You can even eat the food celebrated on Guy Fieri's show, Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives, which drifts from restaurant to restaurant featuring all these delicious extravagances of the industrial age: burgers with skirts of bubbly cheese, fried chicken and waffles with maple syrup and hot sauce. But these foodstuffs are now reminders of better times, like the boarded-up factories in Detroit: We used to be able to eat them without consequence because we used to work a lot harder. With five and a half million manufacturing jobs lost since 2000, unemployment still above 9 percent, and many American workers happy to sit at their desks while underpaid immigrants and overseas workers do the heavy lifting for them, many of us are working less, and working less physically intensive labor, than at any time in recent history, and we've got the extra pounds to show for it. So while America's gut is a medical problem on a massive scale, it is also a clear indicator of industrial, and possibly national, decline.
(Obama) Paul J. Richards/AFP/Getty Images; (Food) Amy Richardson/Pretty Pretty Yum Yum
Which is why having a Brit lecture Americans about obesity is so galling. For one thing, England was recently declared the fattest nation in Europe, meaning Oliver might want to clean up his own house before coming over and criticizing ours. And for another, the English have always seen lecturing Americans as a cherished part of the Special Relationship. And for our part, Americans usually entertain British advice because we know, in some sense, that the Brits have been in our shoes before. It reminds me of how the generals of ancient Rome, riding in victory parades after battle, would always keep a slave holding a crown over their heads and whispering in their ears, "All glory is fleeting. All glory is fleeting." So we've welcomed British commentators in America, living memento mori to remind us that global dominance — theirs in the nineteenth century, ours in the twentieth — is ultimately fleeting. Oliver has just, and I think it's quite by accident, cut too close to the bone. It's one thing to be told that all glory is fleeting when you're in triumph; it's quite another when you're struggling to pay your mortgage.
Sonja Flemming/CBS
Oliver treats the epidemic of obesity in America as it should be treated — as a public-health crisis — and his approach only makes our own perverse reactions to the growing emergency seem more ridiculous. The First Lady wants us all to start gardens — a loopy suggestion undertaken for a photo op — while fat people keep eating deep-fried butter at the state fair and thin people continue to check the daily postings on thisiswhyyourefat.com. But if you're looking for a solution to the weight problem, you won't find it on "Food Revolution" or even "The Biggest Loser." Instead, head over to CBS, where its breakout show, Undercover Boss, has fat-cat CEOs busting their asses doing a hard day's work. Because only when we figure out how to put Americans back to work, and how to rebuild a sagging infrastructure and stanch the flow of jobs overseas, will the pounds start melting off.
Robert DeNiro: What I've Learned
As he approaches his seventies, the icon reflects on his Godfather days, his relationship to Marlon Brando, and why he'll never really retire
By Cal Fussman
Nigel Parry
Published in the January 2011 "Meaning of Life" issue. Click here for more.
Those who say don't know. Those who know don't say. That holds up over time.
So does: If you don't go, you'll never know. I tell that to my kids.
Ten years seems only a few years ago.
If it's the right chair, it doesn't take too long to get comfortable in it.
Italy has changed. But Rome is Rome.
We made a rubber wall for the jail scene in Raging Bull. It was hard rubber foam. Smashing your head into a real wall wouldn't have been possible. You've got to do it till you're happy.
I'd like to look at all of my movies once just to do it — just to see what it makes me think, to see what the pattern was. But with all the movies I've been in, that would mean watching two or three a day for a month. I don't know where I'd get the time.
If Marty wanted me to do something, I would consider it very seriously even if I wasn't interested.
My definition of a good hotel is a place I'd stay at.
If I remember correctly, there were not many sequels at the time. The Godfather was one of the first. So we didn't think about sequels the way we do now. I remember seeing the entire street between Avenue A and Avenue B converted into the early twentieth century. The storefronts, the insides of the stores. The size of it was incredible. You knew what you were doing was ambitious.
I'll always be indebted to Francis.
When I did The Deer Hunter, I thought, Thailand is such an interesting place. I'll be back soon. But I didn't get back for something like eighteen years.
Everybody can criticize. But at the end of the day, you know Obama's intentions are in the right place.
You should've done this. You should stand up for this more than that. The president's got to deal with that every moment. Imagine what it would be like with all the different forces coming at you, having to compromise, to weigh the consequences of one decision as opposed to another. It's tricky. Come to think of it, it's kind of like being a director.
I always tell actors when they go in for an audition: Don't be afraid to do what your instincts tell you. You may not get the part, but people will take notice.
From Jodie Foster:
By the time I got the role in Taxi Driver, I'd already made more stuff than De Niro or Martin Scorsese. I'd been working from the time I was three years old. So even though I was only twelve, I felt like I was the veteran there.
De Niro took me aside before we started filming. He kept picking me up from my hotel and taking me to different diners. The first time he basically didn't say anything. He would just, like, mumble. The second time he started to run lines with me, which was pretty boring because I already knew the lines. The third time, he ran lines with me again and now I was really bored. The fourth time, he ran lines with me, but then he started going off on these completely different ideas within the scene, talking about crazy things and asking me to follow in terms of improvisation.
So we'd start with the original script and then he'd go off on some tangent and I'd have to follow, and then it was my job to eventually find the space to bring him back to the last three lines of the text we'd already learned.
It was a huge revelation for me, because until that moment I thought being an actor was just acting naturally and saying the lines someone else wrote. Nobody had ever asked me to build a character. The only thing they'd ever done to direct me was to say something like "Say it faster" or "Say it slower." So it was a whole new feeling for me, because I realized acting was not a dumb job. You know, I thought it was a dumb job. Somebody else writes something and then you repeat it. Like, how dumb is that?
There was this moment, in some diner somewhere, when I realized for the first time that it was me who hadn't brought enough to the table. And I felt this excitement where you're all sweaty and you can't eat and you can't sleep.
Changed my life.
Jodie told you that? No, I have no memory. People have memories of things that I don't remember. She was, what, twelve? Amazing ...
If you don't do it the right way now, it'll never be what it should be — and it's there forever.
It's always the same old story — the fine line between the money and quality. Do we have to spend this for this? Well, yeah, because if we don't ...
If there's a shortcut taken when you're building a hotel, people are going to notice and feel cheated out of something. It's kind of like a movie: Cumulatively, all the shortcuts and cheats take away from the texture.
Sometimes if you have financial restraints, it's a benefit. It forces you to come up with a more creative way.
I just go to the theater. Nobody bothers me. I don't even get recognized. I do it a certain way.
Couldn't get into the IMAX 3-D Avatar.
As long as you've got kids, there's gonna be a problem.
I don't know if I've been taught anything by my kids. But things are revealed to me. They unfold. Now you're a grand-father. And your kids are giving you advice.
It's interesting when your kids give you advice. I had a conversation with my oldest son the other day. He was saying, "You should do this ... and this ... and this." Not that I agreed with him on everything. But it was a good feeling.
You get older, you get more cautious.
Situations come up that you've been through and you can see where they're gonna go.
Good advice can save you a little aggravation.
I just had my twins here. They're fifteen. When I was a teenager, there were less restrictions than I put on my kids. But I know those restrictions are important. Yet they have to have room. It's a delicate balance. You say, I survived it. How could they? And yet they do. With a little luck.
I might laugh more now than when I was younger. I'm less judgmental.
It takes a lot for me to give one of my father's paintings as a gift.
I've kept my father's studio for the last seven-teen years — since he passed away. I've kept it just about the way it was. At one point I was thinking of letting it go. Then I had a gathering of family and friends — you know, to see it for the final time. Videotape it. But I realized it's different in person than it is on video. It's another experience. So I've held on to it.
Be brave, but not reckless.
No matter what Marlon did, he was always interesting.
Shows you how primitive things used to be: We had to set up a tripod to videotape Marlon's scenes in the screening room at Paramount so I could study his movements. I played it on a little reel-to-reel.
Marlon and I never talked about our performances in The Godfather. What was he going to say? We knew each other. I spent time on his island with him. But you don't talk about acting. You talk about anything but acting. I guess the admiration is unspoken.
Yeah, you can make new friends. I recently met a couple of people that are a lot younger than me. It's a nice thing.
Reality is this moment.
Some people understand what it is to create something special, and others are thinking what they can get out of it.
I'm not going to read all the books I want to read.
I might like to do things that are more retiring. Like sit in a place and just look at the view. Take a nice walk. Have a coffee. But not retire. As long as I'm enjoying what I'm doing, why retire?
You go through a lot of different phases in life. I used to have dessert all the time as a kid. Now I don't eat dessert much. Except when I'm in special restaurants and I tell myself, Well, I'm here. I have to have the dessert.
Now is now. Then is then. And the future will be what the future will be. So enjoy the moment while you're in it. Now is a great time.
Robert Duvall: What I've Learned
The actor on DeNiro, Pacino, Brando, Coppola, Caine, and the smell of napalm in the morning
By Cal Fussman
Gillian Laub
Published in the January 2011 "Meaning of Life" issue, on sale now
Seeing your name on the list for KP or guard duty when you're in the Army is like reading a bad review.
When I knew nothing, I thought I could do anything.
A friend is someone who many years ago offered you his last $300 when you broke your pelvis. A friend is Gene Hackman.
If you don't have heroes in the beginning, you don't grow.
Making the first Godfather was more laughs than making Godfather II. That's because Jimmy Caan was in the first Godfather.
Sometimes I'll be flipping the channels and come across The Godfather or The Godfather II. I'll say to myself, Let me watch five minutes. Coppola made them so beautifully that I end up watching the whole thing.
Coppola always wanted my mother's crab-cake recipe. He came to my house to talk about doing Godfather III, and I wrote it down for him. But I decided not to do Godfather III. It boiled down to money. If you're gonna pay Pacino twice what you pay me, fine. But five times? Come on, guys. The thing is, when Coppola left my house, he forgot to take my mother's crab-cake recipe. He kept calling, but I think it was more for the recipe.
A young actor once asked me, What do you do between jobs? I said, Hobbies, hobbies, and more hobbies. It keeps you off dope.
Sometimes working fast is better than waiting, waiting, waiting to get it right.
"I love the smell of napalm in the morning. It smells like victory." People come up to me and say it like we're the only two people in the world who know.
The attention I get on the street is enough to be flattering, but not so much to be a nuisance.
Art is competitive.
When you dance tango fast, you have to think slow.
I met my wife in Argentina. The flower shop was closed, so I went to the bakery. If the flower shop had been open, I never would've met her.
I was a little concerned about being with a much younger woman at first. So I asked Wilford Brimley about it. Wilford is a very sharp guy. He used to be a bodyguard for Howard Hughes. He said, "Let me tell you something, my friend, the worst thing in the world for an old man is an old woman!"
You never know how reality is going to coincide with your dreams. You're optimistic, and you go from there.
A horse is not like a dog. It don't love ya.
De Niro, how's he doing these days? He's got his own set of rules, that guy.
When I was four years old, I observed a sheepherder eating at my uncle's ranch in Idaho. I couldn't even speak well, but I said to my mother, "That man eats like this." And I started imitating him. All the cowboys and cowhands were laughing at my imitation. So I guess I've always enjoyed characters.
I feel like our country is just a big giant kid with tremendous talent — like an athlete. A big giant kid that's made mistakes, but there's a lot of potential.
Maybe I'm wrong. But I think if the United States went down, it would be kind of a dark world.
Sometimes, when you look back on it, the $10-million-and-under movies are some of your favorites.
You get to a certain point where your career kind of works for itself — although you can never take that for granted.
Getting together with friends and holding court over a meal is one of the great things in life.
Say hello to Brando and he'd know you wanted to say hello to him, so he'd ignore you. He had a way of playing a game with life. You never knew what to expect. Because other times, out of nowhere, he'd reach out to you in a way that was very special.
When I finished Lonesome Dove, I said to myself, Now I can retire. I've done something. Let the English play Hamlet. I'll play Augustus McCrae.
What is it that Michael Caine says? "You don't retire. The business retires you." So until they wipe the drool away...
Virginia's the last station before heaven.
I have this great horse named Don Manuel — Manu, for short. When your photographer comes, Manu will probably try to get into the picture. He always does, that horse.
Ricky Gervais: What I've Learned
The comedian (and host) on his ascent to Office fame, and why there's no such thing as a genius on TV. Also: impressing people.
By Scott Raab
Nadav Kander/Contour
Gervais hosts the Golden Globes January 16; his HBO special, Out of England 2, debuts December 18; and The Ricky Gervais Show, an animated series, returns on January 14.
Published in the January 2011 "Meaning of Life" issue, on sale now
A sore throat means cancer until the doctor says, "Don't be so stupid."
No one can say I've failed except me, artistically, because no one knows my ambitions. They don't know what I was trying to do.
Whenever I hear someone in TV or a comedian called a "genius," I think, Medicine lost another one. You mustn't put even someone as great as Larry David alongside Newton.
Newton couldn't tell a joke. He'd fluff every line, but he had other strings to his bow.
I'd never tried my hardest at anything before The Office. I put everything into it and I never compromised — and I learned what an amazing feeling not compromising is.
We've got a little bit of David Brent in all of us. We all sometimes mistake popularity with respect. We all want to be liked. We all wonder whether our perception of ourselves is exactly the same as the rest of the world's. And we all want to feel that we belong.
The only thing I ever demanded was final edit.
Stand-up is the last bastion of self-censorship outside the novel.
I never forget that I'm still a real person in the real world. I never completely suspend my disbelief in art.
I love Laurel and Hardy. I love them because they're precarious. I love them because even though outwardly the comedy comes from them saying, "I'm with this idiot, I'd be better off without him," you know they wouldn't. You want them to fucking hug. They found the DNA for comedy, and it hasn't been improved upon.
The funniest person you know isn't a comedian. He's a friend of yours or a family member, because of the absolute wealth of input you have together, the two-way connection.
Americans are told they can be the next president of the United States. In Britain, we're told, "It won't happen to you. Don't be stupid. Don't even try."
Honestly, no one swears like the British. A cockney saying "cunt" is the scariest thing.
I'm overwhelmed with feeling when I see a mountain or a dolphin, or when I think of how amazing evolution is. I just know that it wasn't made by design, that's all. And I know that when we die, we're dead. But love isn't an illusion.
Hell is guilt. That's my hell.
After The Office, the check came through, and it slightly ruined it. Because I didn't want it to be mixed with why I was proud.
It's like a giant panic room we've got. The whole house — you press a button and steel shutters come down on every window. I have good security. It's fundamental. And we're in the nicest neighborhood in London. You never know.
I'm not paranoid, though. It's more to do with comfort, privacy, security. Fundamental. You can't enjoy your life if you're worrying about other things.
I think I'm giving the wrong impression — the shutters make me look like a mental case. They just come down over the windows at night, on the inside. When we go to bed.
I don't want to impress people I wouldn't cross the road to talk to. I want there to be a strict door policy at my club. I want to go, "You can't come in. You won't like this. And I don't want you to like it."
I don't like it when people say, "I did it for the money." I don't like it when they go, "I'm just being honest." Okay, fine — but now I can't count you with this other group of people that've never let me down. Neil Young, he's never let me down.
Music is still to me the greatest art form. I'm in awe of it. A chord can make me feel sick.
Intelligence is certainly linked to violence in hominid evolution, because we were born without armor and claws and teeth. So we had to work out ways to live and to kill, and we were great at it. We're the best at it.
If you're going to try serial killing, do it properly. Don't just kill 'em. Kill 'em, fuck 'em, eat 'em. If I was a judge and you came to me and you'd killed twenty people, I'd say, "Did you fuck 'em and eat 'em?" and you said, "No," I'd say, "Get out of my fuckin' courtroom."
I have a gym in my house. The thing is, though, I'm only trying to live longer so I can eat more cheese and drink more wine.
These are pajamas. They're getting a bit thin, though. I've got to throw these away soon. Nothing bad. They're clean and they're comfortable. Who are we trying to impress?
Aaron Sorkin: What I've Learned
The screenwriter on his (very) brief political career and how his work has evolved over the years. Also: what a friend really is.
By Cal Fussman
Ture Lillegraven
Published in the January 2011 "Meaning of Life" issue, on sale now
Everybody does lists of the hundred greatest movie lines of all time. "You can't handle the truth!" always seems to be in there, which is very nice to see. But for me, the best line will always be: "We're going to need a bigger boat."
The rules are all in a sixty-four-page pamphlet by Aristotle called Poetics. It was written almost three thousand years ago, but I promise you, if something is wrong with what you're writing, you've probably broken one of Aristotle's rules.
You're allowed one fuck in PG-13. The rules are silly. Not all fucks are equal and not all cocksuckers are equal.
I had a lot of survival jobs. One was for the Witty Ditty singing-telegram company. I was in the red-and-white stripes with the straw boater hat and kazoo. Balloons. Even when you're sleeping on a friend's couch, you have to pay some kind of rent.
I desperately need the love of complete strangers. That's one reason I overtip. I love when skycaps, waiters, and valets are happy to see me.
The only political experience I've ever had came in sixth grade when I had a crush on Jenny Lavin. Jenny was stuffing envelopes after school at the local McGovern-for-President headquarters. So I thought it'd be a good idea if I volunteered, too. One weekend they put us all in buses and took us to White Plains, the county seat, because the Nixon motorcade was coming through. We went with signs that said MCGOVERN FOR PRESIDENT. I was holding up one of these signs and a 163-year-old woman came up from behind, took the sign out of my hand, whacked me over the head with it, threw it on the ground, and stomped on it. The only political agenda I've ever had is the slim hope that this woman is still alive and I'm driving her out of her mind.
I do not diminish the incredible symbolic importance of a black man getting elected president. But my euphoria was a smart guy getting elected president. Maybe for the first time in my lifetime we had elected one of the thousand smartest Americans president.
I kind of worship at the altar of intention and obstacle. Somebody wants something. Something's standing in their way of getting it. They want the money, they want the girl, they want to get to Philadelphia — doesn't matter. And if they can need it, that's even better.
Whatever the obstacle is, you can't overcome it like that or the audience is going to say, "Why don't they just take the other car?" or "Why don't you just shoot him?" The obstacle has to be difficult to overcome. And that's the clothesline that you hang everything on — the tactics by which your characters try to achieve their goal. That's the story that you end up telling.
Oh, I'd love to get A Few Good Men back. I feel like there isn't a scene where, if I could have it back for half an hour, I couldn't give you a better scene.
I keep thinking that I graduated from college a couple of years ago when it was actually 1983.
You'll be able to say "motherfucker" on network television before you'll be able to take God's name in vain.
When you're a hit, you get a little more elbow room and you walk with a bigger stick.
Except when I didn't have any, money has never been that big of a deal to me.
A friend is somebody who says the same things to your face that they would say if you're not in the room.
By the way, you don't have to necessarily always enjoy being with your friends. It's possible to have friends that drive you out of your mind. Don't you have friends that you've had since you were a little kid? And you constantly have to explain to people who're just meeting him: "I've known him since fifth grade. He really is a good guy. Trust me. Really — he's got a heart as big as Montana."
I feel like if I'd gotten married once a year, every year since I was twenty-five, there would never have been the same five groomsmen twice. Two new people would always be coming in. My brother is a constant. He would stay.
There are these signposts along the way of getting older. The first is when the Playmate of the Month is younger than you are. Suddenly you're starting to feel dirty because you're twenty-three and she's nineteen and you really shouldn't be looking at that picture.
The next thing that happens is professional athletes are younger than you are.
Then coaches and managers are younger than you are.
And finally, the last one that happens: I'm the same age as the president of the United States.
When I'm done with an episode of television, I feel euphoric for about five minutes and then I'm Sisyphus.
All being finished means is that you haven't started yet.
Jodie Foster: What I've Learned
The actress and director on why all her films are about spiritual crisis, even that one with Mel Gibson
By Cal Fussman
Guy Aroch
Foster directed and costars in The Beaver, to be released next year.
Published in the January 2011 "Meaning of Life" issue, on sale now
Fears. Some of them are wounds that exist long before we exist.
My mom was always late. It drove me crazy as a child. So I'm always on time-or early.
There's a tremendous amount of power that comes from not having to say yes.
It's very hard for me to get a new car. It's really hard for me to get a new house. It's really hard for me to move on from the things that give me stability. I just ... don't. There's a tenacity to that which is great, because I'm totally loyal. But that keeps you living in the past a bit. And it's hard to embrace the future if you are continually holding on to who you used to be.
There are probably a series of moments that tell you what you are going to become. To me, that doesn't mean a moment I thought, I'm going to be famous and get a bunch of Academy Awards. To me, it's the moment that you know you will be the one who fulfills your mother's vicarious power issues.
I love Los Angeles. I loved growing up here. I love living here. But it's a different approach in life. If you have a problem, you just go to the beach. You play volleyball or something. There's an external way of handling all your issues.
Often people think of strength as surviving. But I think it's surviving intact, and there's a big distinction.
My definition of a friend is somebody who adores you even though they know the things you're most ashamed of.
All my films are about people in a spiritual crisis. The Beaver, for sure.
You couldn't pay me to be in my twenties again. I didn't know that I was ever going to be successful. I didn't know if I would be able to ever afford a place to live. I didn't know if I would take care of my family. These seem like dumb questions when you're forty-five. But when you're twenty-three, all these are just a bunch of question marks ahead of you. I can't live with that anxiety.
The hardest thing about life in your forties is that it's heavy. You have to take responsibility for it, because you made it heavy. You're the one who wanted to have children. You're the one who wanted to have a big job. You're the one who wanted to have more than one house. You're the one, and you have to take responsibility for those choices. I wouldn't do it any differently, but part of me will always miss being light.
The second half of the job is trying to get that back.
People are always surprised when I say that I'm an atheist.
In my home, we ritualize all of them. We do Christmas. We do Shabbat on Fridays. We love Kwanzaa. I take pains to give my family a real religious basis, a knowledge, because it's being well educated. You need to know why all those wars were fought.
Jonathan Kaplan was adamant that the rape scene in The Accused be everything that we rehearsed. There would not be one ad-lib. But even after going through a massive amount of rehearsal, after every take, three of the guys just started crying. They were a mess. I had to spend my time telling them, "It's okay. I'm fine. Everything's okay." There was one guy who was not a mess at all. He was like, "My hair okay?" He was my buddy. That was the guy I could hang with because at dinner we just talked about his dog or his life.
Some part of my brain is fried in the mathematical department. I can't retain numbers. If you tell me to be there at 9:30, I have to write it down because I remember 8:45 or 10:20. I can't remember my phone numbers. I don't know what eight times seven is. I've seen through the new occupational therapies how they isolate parts of the brain that are damaged. For me, it's the whole abstract-number thing. But I can tell you a story about anything and remember it all.
Fear is the number-one emotion that we're spending tremendous amounts of brainpower to cover up.
I can shop for stationery. Books. Little kids' clothes I can do. Sporting goods. Hardware. But not my own clothes. I go into a clothing store and start shaking. There's so much to pick from, and I never pick anything good. I have to rely on movies I make. I have in my contract that they have to give me whatever clothes my character wore. Because otherwise I wouldn't have any clothes to wear.
The most interesting thing about being a parent is being witness and supporting what they already are. It's standing there in awe. You get to be the one on the sidelines clapping.
In the end, winning is sleeping better.
Ted Danson: What I've Learned
The 63-year-old actor on playing Sam Malone, sparring with Larry David, and why he doesn't let global warming worry him too much
By Cal Fussman
Jeff Minton
Danson will publish a book, Oceana, about the world's oceans, in March.
A friend is someone who will allow me to be a really bad friend and not hold it against me.
My job on Larry David's show is to make him intensely Larry, to make him as Larry as you could possibly make Larry. Put him into a corner, box him in — so that the explosion is bigger.
Comedy has to be rooted in sadness or it's worthless to me. Sam Malone, the alcoholic ...
My lessons didn't come at my father's knee. Like all good lessons, they were learned from example.
I grew up in Flagstaff, Arizona, without a television or any connection with pop culture. My father was a director of a museum and research center. Many of my friends were Hopi kids, which meant I'd go to their villages and mesas. They'd pray and dance to their gods the way they'd been doing for hundreds of years. So I was blessed with tolerance.
Courage is something I don't know how much I have. You can't plan for it. You either do the right thing or you don't when the moment comes.
If you've got integrity, it will smack you very hard when you fuck up.
If you don't have integrity, you'll go on for a very long time beating the crap out of people, robbing, stealing — and there's nothing inside you that tells you what you're doing is wrong. Life won't even bother to slap you.
To grow up knowing you're loved is astounding. It's a huge gift to a child.
The only reason to be a celebrity is you get to meet interesting people.
You want to know who you are in the world for real? Hang around with your kids. They don't give a rat's ass what you do for a living.
The secret to our marriage? We laugh a lot.
Your kid turning sixteen is a reason for prayer. As a parent, they're out of your control. You never had control anyway. But now it's really clear that you need to pray — because that's all you've got.
A good script is one that doesn't let you go, "I get it!" on page 5.
My wife has known Bill and Hillary Clinton for thirty years. Bill is like her big brother. It's not so much the president part that strikes you about him, as he is so remarkably bright. They're both so powerfully bright. Their great joy in life, the thing that bonds them together, is that they love to fix things. It's just a joy to be around them. We laugh and talk about kids and life and movies — it's not what you'd think.
Anything great can be used as a weapon.
When you're not in love and you've just had sex, then it's kind of like, "Well, what's next?"
Everything that I thought or believed in went flying out the window in the face of the stark realness of my mother dying. I really have no idea... .
We could commercially fish out the oceans while at the same time environmental damage messed with the bottom of the food chain. There are so many stresses on the ocean that we could literally collapse it if we're not careful.
Look, no one gets out of this alive. That's not the game plan. We all die. So nobody's going to get an award for saving the planet and get to live forever. Okay, then, let's engage the problems with a joyous and hopeful heart. Because it doesn't matter if we blow it. It's not like this is a desperate game where if we win, we won't die. We all die.
Why is it that we can make our sandwiches together, walk our dogs together, roll up our sleeves and make something in our community better, but as soon as we talk about ideas, whether it's religious or political, we become entrenched. I can't stand what looks to me like the selfish, shortsighted righteous far Right. They cannot stand my liberal dada dada. And we will fight to the death. When only two minutes ago we were making sandwiches together.
Can I have as many guests as I'd like? Okay. Three. Jesus of Nazareth. Muhammad. And Buddha. We'd have some grape leaves — something simple and easy to digest. A little green tea. I'd say, "Fellas, let's talk ..."
To be held in low esteem by Larry David is like being on Nixon's enemies list.
Your children may rat on you. Your wife will fire back at you. But if you're not kind to your dogs, what can they do? A really big test of how kind a human being is comes with how well he treats his dogs.
Acting was the perfect outlet for a guy like me, who's always wondering what it's like to be you.
Why Isn't Backgammon More Popular?
Photo: Khairil Zhafri
Levitt and I just recorded a Q&A session for the Freakonomics Radio podcast, using the questions that all of you recently submitted. You'll hear the results soon, probably in January. Thanks for the good questions.
One question we didn't get to, from Tg3:
I have heard Dubner casually mention that he is a backgammon player. Are there ever Levitt vs. Dubner battles? More importantly, why is such a great game not more popular in North America?
Sadly, Levitt and I have never played. But it's the second part of the question that got me thinking. Why not indeed? Off the top of my head, I'd say:
· Well, it's not so unpopular, and there are those who say a renaissance is perhaps underway. My friend James Altucher and I have a running game (101-point matches) that we usually play in diners or restaurants, and almost inevitably a small crowd (or at least the server) will hang out to watch and talk about the game …
· That said, yes, it's a fringe game. Why? I'd say it's because too many people play it without gambling, or at least without using the doubling cube. Without the cube, a game that is intricate and strategic — because the stakes are higher — becomes an often-boring dice race. Once you use the cube, especially with dollars attached to points, the game changes completely because the most exciting and most difficult decisions have to do more with cube play than with checker play.
· Why is the game itself too often uninteresting? Don't get me wrong: I love playing backgammon. But the fact is that the choice set of moves is in fact quite small. That is, for many rolls, there's clearly one optimal move, or perhaps two that are nearly equal. So once you know those moves, the game is limited, and you need some stakes to make it interesting. Unlike, say, chess, where the options and strategies are far more diverse.
This last point, if arguable, got me to wondering: in what percent of backgammon turns would there seem to be clearly one optimal move — versus, for comparison, chess?
Since James is a superb chess player and also an excellent backgammon player (and a smart guy in general), I asked him. His answer is well worth sharing:
It's an interesting question. Let's define optimal first.
Let's say a program has an evaluation function (EV). Given a position, the EV returns a number from 1 to 10 based on how good the position is for the person whose move it is. If it's a 10, the person with the move wants to get to that position. The EV is a function of various heuristics added up (how many people are on the center, how many pips I'm ahead in the race, how many slots I control, how many loose pieces I have, etc). When it's my turn, the computer looks at all my initial moves and finds the ones resulting in the best EV. It then looks at all my opponent's responses to each move and finds the ones resulting in the lowest EV for me (this now propagates up to become the EV of my initial move). It then looks at all my responses to my opponent's responses and finds the ones with the best EV (and does the propagation again). This is called min-max. Looking at all the best moves only is called alpha-beta search and is how most game programs work.
So the question is, what is "optimal?" On a scale of 1 to 10, if a move is 3 better than the next move, is that optimal? Let's say it is.
In chess, it's easy to see optimal moves. If someone does rook takes queen, then hopefully I can take his queen and it's a fair trade. By far that will be the only optimal move. Other optimal moves lead to checkmate or great increases in material. Otherwise, its probably not optimal. In a typical chess game, maybe 5 percent of the moves have a value greater than "one pawn's worth."
In backgammon, I'd say its 10 percent. I'm saying this based on experience with Backgammon NJ [an excellent program, BTW], discussions with backgammon game programmers in the past, and I'm using 10 percent rather than 5 percent because backgammon is slightly less complex than chess. It's not simple though. To be a backgammon master probably requires almost as much study but not quite.
Hope this was helpful.
Yes, James, helpful indeed — because I now know a bit better how you think about the game, which I desperately need to finally beat you in our 101-pt. matches. Thanks!
The Dangers Of Externalizing Knowledge
Contemplating the shortcomings of the younger generation has ever been a hobby of the elder. As I start to transition to the latter population (perhaps a bit early for my age), I've found myself worrying more and more about the kids, and how little they seem to appreciate things. That kind of complaint is neither constructive or original. But the fact is that the kids are growing up pretty weird these days, because of the way technology has outpaced our institutions of learning and standards of knowledge.
The short attention span and reliance on non-text media are to be expected in an age where attention is indulged by on-demand information, and the effects of these things will continue to be written about, rightly and wrongly. There is a more subtle and insidious trend, however, that may prove to be more damaging than tech-born changes in learning modality.
It's a process that has been going on for a long time, but that recent developments may push to the breaking point. The problem, as I see it, is that we have stopped valuing the accumulation of information within ourselves.
Externalization
The fact that virtually all of the world's knowledge is only a few taps away is truly mind-blowing. No matter who indexes it, who serves it, who edits it — the knowledge is there, and the knowledge is with you, always. This is one of the most important developments in history, and its repercussions can't be underestimated. But to consider it an unmixed good would be premature and naive.
Thinkof that habit which I and likely everyone reading this succumb to now and then. You are talking with a friend, and can't remember who that guy was in that movie. Without thinking, you pull out your phone and search. Mystery solved, it was Patrick Swayze. Harmless enough, right? The web in our pocket allows us to settle bar bets and track down trivia with ease. A tiny load off everyone's mind.
The problem lies with the trend. We're looking up more things, more often, and not because we're more curious. It's because we can't be bothered to retain even the data that matter to us. The GPS in cars is an advance party of this trend: every couple months we hear of some driver who has followed the GPS to the bottom of a lake, or used a highway as a walking path because it was labeled as such on their phone's map. My dad, who has driven to visit my brother in Vancouver, B.C., a dozen times, still uses the GPS despite my brother living in the same neighborhood for several years now. When I went up with him a month ago, the GPS route was slightly different, and my dad nearly had a panic attack. I convinced him to take the correct exit, but he was this close to doing something he knew was wrong simply because the map indicated he should.
Now, I don't mean to rest my case on these anecdotes. But there is truth in them, and you likely recognize yourself in them to some extent.
Because of this reliance, do people know their cities, roads, and neighborhoods better? Not as well? Or simply in a different way? After all, services like Foursquare and Urban Spoon encourage serendipitous discovery of restaurants and locations. I think it is a strange paradox, that these technologies expose us to new things while at the same time clapping blinders on us.
To return to the thesis, however: general knowledge seems to be following the path of locational knowledge, and the consequences are similar, but more dire. While consulting the GPS means you don't build an internal map of your neighborhood, consulting the external knowledge engine of the internet means you don't build a map of your entire intellectual world. And unlike your neighborhood, Google doesn't have an easy analog for you to peruse. They may be working on that, but is that really a function you want to outsource?
Internalization
It sounds a bit alarmist, I admit — I'm more old-fashioned than most people in this regard. I'm afraid of what will happen if this trend continues, because I feel the externalizing of information to this extent (that is, the extent to which I fear it will reach in the coming years) erodes some of the core facets of personality and individuality. I know that's raising the stakes somewhat, and I do that just to feel I'm saying something important, but I do think it's true.
If you think about the way we are each of us constructed, mentally, we are to a great extent a collection of data and experiences. Consciousness and personality emerges from the soup of people, places, and things we've experienced in our lives. The connected world we now live can vastly increase the number of these elements, ideally, and it's already done a huge amount towards keeping people in touch.
But the volume of these elements is becoming so great that it overwhelms our capacity to internalize. Luckily, many of us have blowoff valves, like our blogs (I'm paid to open my valve, to my everlasting wonder), our Facebook accounts, and so on. And we've gotten so much in the habit of deflecting this tsunami of things and experiences that we are becoming less and less likely to actually retain and internalize any of them. Try this experiment: if you have a blog, a Posterous or Tumblr or what have you, try to remember as many items you've posted as you can, right now, without checking. Write them down or something. I have a "blowoff valve" blog myself, and I've posted hundreds of quotes, images, and such to it — but I have trouble picturing more than a few dozen. That terrifies me, and although it may not terrify you, you at least sense there's something to it.
If these things you've collected are important to you, or you found them interesting, why aren't they inside you? Why aren't they becoming part of the sea of experiences that makes up your unique intelligence and personality? If you fail to integrate an experience, it was, for all intents and purposes, no better than a dream.
We've gone from being intellectual predators to intellectual filter feeders, and soon I wonder whether we'll even deserve that title.
Volition
The counter to this is that, freed from the necessity of remembering every little thing, we are better able to focus on what we think is important. Another paradox, in that as the internet and connectivity expands our world exponentially, we find ourselves putting finer and finer a point on our role in it. No more renaissance men — I suppose Leonardo himself might have been frustrated by the sheer amount of info he'd have to command.
So it's become far easier to acquire expertise — at the cost of insight. There's a reason, after all, why it's called insight. Because insight is the result of recombination, hybridizing ideas, internal accidents, emergent properties of ideas we never even knew were related.
The trend isn't exactly reversible; it's simply the shadow cast by the towering, profound benefits of the internet and portable communication. And of course internalization can be taken to extremes as well — imagine the oral poets of the bronze age, with little room in their heads for anything but tales and epithets. But we mustn't let the externalization exceed our ability to recognize and accommodate it. It's our responsibility now to diversify our intellectual landscapes; the world won't always require it, but we should require it of ourselves.
Over the weekend, the Wall Street Journal ran an article pointing out how Google is increasingly favoring its own properties, in search results over natural results to outside sites which previously commanded the top spots. This practice is especially noticeable with Google Places and local results, but there are other examples as well from product and mortgage search to health search.
We've seen these spats before, particularly between Google and Yelp. Citysearch and Tripadvisor are also taking a traffic hit, it seems. Google responded yesterday with a post on its public policy blog titled "Local Search: It's all about the best answers for users."
Yeah, right. Don't kid yourself. It's all about what is best for Google. How else do you explain the preponderance of Google Places listings in local search results for queries such as "NY Chiropractor" (see screenshot) or "NYC spa"? In each case the top 7 links after the paid ads are businesses which just happen to have a Google Places page.
Is it just a coincidence that the top seven links in a row happen to be businesses with Google Places listings (which you can see by clicking on the Google Places links on the right). There is hardly any room on the all-important first page for any natural results below. What's more, for the chiropractor search the first two Google Places results are ones with yellow "tags," which are $25 local-search ad units targeted at small businesses. So even after the regular paid ads highlighted with a pink-shaded background, the next two results are also ads disguised as quasi-natural search results.
The Google Places results don't always take up nearly the entire first page. Sometimes they come up in a single box with a smaller font, and just two lines each per listing. Try searching for "Columbus mechanic" or "NYC gym" and you will see what I mean.
Displaying local results this way is a little less in your face, but the end result is the same. In both cases, the main link still goes to the businesses' own websites, but the Google Places links are also prominent. Either way, the message is clear to local businesses: list your profile in Google Places and you will have a better shot at appearing at the top of the first search results page.
Are these results better for users? It depends on how good are the Google Places listings. Some of them are very good, I will admit. But try any local search and I bet you will consistently get Google Places results, sometimes taking up most of page—not always at the very top, but always as a block. They can't all be better than results for businesses which don't happen to have a Google Places listing. Remember, Google Places is still fairly new and developing. Google is clearly using its main search page to push Google Places and make those listings more prominent. Over time, it will become a self-fulfilling prophesy and those listings will be the best because businesses will learn that is the most important place to be in order to be found by Google.
No wonder other SEO-friendly local listings and reviews sites such as Citysearch, TripAdvisor, and Yelp are up in arms about this favoritism. They are being muscled out of their previous cosy spots by the search engine which makes all the rules.
Why Groupon Works
By FREAKONOMICS
Google's recent reported $6 billion bid for Groupon — rebuffed, for now — took observers by surprise and worried the company's investors. James Surowiecki analyzes the deal and Groupon's business model. "Groupon, by contrast, is a much more old-school business. It doesn't have any obvious technological advantage. Its users don't really do anything other than hit the 'buy' button," writes Surowiecki. "And its business requires lots of hands-on attention: thousands of salespeople to sell to and service local businesses, copywriters to come up with the right pitches for customers (Groupon's clever ad copy is one of its selling points)." Despite these caveats, Surowiecki points out that "[t]hese days, the Web is full of good, solid businesses that may not be remaking the world but that are helping give people what they want. If that's what Groupon ends up being, well, there are worse fates."
Paying Drivers to Not Speed
By FREAKONOMICS
A number of Freakonomics readers have alerted us to yet another novel lottery idea. As Wired reports, Kevin Richardson won Volkswagen's Fun Theory contest for his idea: "Kevin's idea is both smart and simple. As well as ticketing you when you run through a speed-radar too fast, Kevin's 'Speed Camera Lottery' also notices you when you come in at or under the speed-limit. It then automatically enters you in a lottery. And here's the really smart part: the prizes come from the fines paid by speeders." The camera is currently in use in Stockholm, where the "average speed of cars passing the camera dropped from 32km/h before the experiment to 25km/h after."
Why Did We Take Brett Favre's Streak for Granted?
By: Sean Gregory
Topics: Brett Favre, Football, Minnesota Vikings, New York Giants, sports, streak
Minnesota Vikings quarterback Brett Favre watches from the sidelines their game against the New York Giants in Detroit December 13, 2010.
REUTERS/Rebecca Cook
The guy on the sideline, with the beanie and gray stubble, at times looked bored, and at other times happy he wasn't the one out there getting pounded on the football field. Now that Brett Favre's streak of starting 297 straight games, dating back to September of 1992, is history, it's only fair to wonder: did we take his astounding record for granted?
We probably did. In part, Favre is to blame. Since he "retired" at the end of the 2007 season, his annual "to play or not to play" dramas grew tiresome, and seemed egotistical. He skipped the dog days of training camp, which betrayed his working-man image. How many Americans can afford to skip the unpleasant days on the job, and just clock in for the good stuff? Many fans just wished the streak, and Favre, would go away.
(See Brett Favre's top 5 retirement ramblings.)
But he didn't, and Favre's number of consecutive starts ballooned to 297, before a sprained sternoclavicular joint forced him to sit out Minnesota's game against the New York Giants, which was played in Detroit after snow caused Minnesota's domed stadium to collapse Sunday morning. But before last night, how many fans could easily recall how many straight games Favre had played, like they instantly remember magic numbers in other sports, such a Lou Gehrig's original Iron Man streak, 2,130 straight games? Wally Pipp, the man who played first base for the New York Yankees before Gehrig took over, for a generation, is so well-known that he became a verb. Workers are afraid to miss a day in case a young upstart takes their place and does a better job: you don't want to get "Wally Pipped." Don Majkowski, the man whose injury paved Favre's way in Green Bay, hasn't reached such cultural resonance. No old sap is getting Majkowskied.
(Is Favre's true legacy bad sportsmanship?)
Cal Ripken played 2,632 straight games for the Baltimore Orioles. That streak is revered; the night Ripken passed Gehrig back in 1995 became a national celebration - even the President showed up. But wasn't Favre's streak much more difficult to pull off? What's harder: standing on a baseball field for an hour or two, everyday, playing shortstop, or lining up under center once a week in football, where very large men are paid very large sums of money to knock you out of the game? Favre's body got buried in the turf every game, but he kept bouncing back up. He played with broken bones. He took a mental pounding too: Favre played one of the best games of his career, back in 2003, the day after learning that his father had died.
No disrespect to Ripken: in a daily endeavor like baseball, there's certainly more opportunities for a freak accident that could stall such a streak. But baseball has always been a sport that overvalues its numbers. Since it is played at a slower pace than other games, there's more time to ruminate on individual feats. So let's give Favre his due; he's the ultimate Iron Man in pro sports history.
After the game, Favre talked about the numbness in his hand - it looked as purple as his Vikings uniform - and didn't seem to eager to return to the field. With just three more meaningless games left in the season for Minnesota, the Vikings need to give lesser lights like Tarvaris Jackson and Joe Webb a chance, to see if they can quarterback the team next year.
It sure sounds like Favre has played his last game. Let's hope that's the case too
Unplugged
When do Supreme Court justices need to just sit down and be quiet?
By Dahlia Lithwick and Sonja WestPosted Tuesday, Dec. 14, 2010, at 6:28 PM ET
http://www.slate.com/id/2277953/http://www.slate.com/id/2277953/Retired Justice John Paul Stevens During his 35-year career on the Supreme Court, Justice John Paul Stevens gained a reputation as the mild-mannered jurist who sought permission before asking questions of oral advocates. Over his decades on the bench, Stevens gave few interviews, rarely made controversial remarks in his speeches, and wrote no books.
Then he retired.
Now, mere months after hanging up his robe, Stevens has been traveling the country, letting us know what he really thinks on everything from his views on the opposition to the "Ground Zero Mosque" ("American Muslims should enjoy the freedom to build their places of worship wherever permitted by local zoning law") to capital punishment (a system infected with racism, political exploitation, and "regrettable judicial activism") to the merits of Bush v. Gore ("it had obviously no merit to it").
And he is not alone. The two other retired justices have been dishing as well. Earlier this year, the formerly mild-mannered Justice David Souter let loose about the messy realities of constitutional interpretation, and Justice Sandra Day O'Connor came to the defense of the three Iowa Supreme Court justices who were facing retention elections because of their votes in favor of same-sex marriage.
Other justices don't even bother to wait until they are off the bench to speak out. Justice Stephen Breyer told Fox News this weekend that the Founders were in favor of gun regulation and that his colleagues got their history wrong. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was equally blunt about her desire for more women on the court. Justice Clarence Thomas responded to criticism of the court's campaign finance ruling, as did Justice Samuel Alito (albeit less directly and more in the manner of someone cheating at charades). And then there is Justice Antonin Scalia, upon whom we have depended for decades for enlightenment (sometimes with corresponding and arguably obscene hand gestures) on controversial issues ranging from abortion to civil liberties for homosexuals and women's equality (or lack of it).
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One can only imagine what he'll say when he teaches the upcoming class on the Constitution to members of Congress that's being organized by Rep. Michele Bachmann.
Occasionally, the justices slip their personal views into their judicial opinions. A notable example was Justice Harry Blackmun's plea in his concurrence in the 1992 abortion case Planned Parenthood v. Casey. After pointing out that the constitutional right to abortion hung by a one-vote thread, Blackmun candidly laid the judicial and political realities on the line: "I am 83 years old. I cannot remain on this Court forever, and when I do step down, the confirmation process for my successor well may focus on the issue before us today. That, I regret, may be exactly where the choice between the two worlds will be made." Stevens offered an equally pointed extrajudicial observation in a dissent in a Seattle schools voluntary desegregation case in 2007, when he observed, "It is my firm conviction that no Member of the Court that I joined in 1975 would have agreed with today's decision."
There has been growing debate about the ethics and proper parameters of judicial recusals, where the concern that a justice's extracurricular activities, investments, or relationships suggest that he or she has prejudged a case. Last week, for instance, questions were raised about Judge Stephen Reinhardt's fitness to evaluate the appeal over California's Prop 8 because of his wife's involvement in the case. Today the Internet is buzzing with accusations that Virginia's Judge Henry Hudson had a financial connection to a group that worked to oppose the Obama health reform law. These are hard questions that go to basic matters of judicial behavior: Who can they marry? Where can they invest? With whom can they go to shoot some waterfowl?
But if we put aside these difficult issues related to extrajudicial entanglements, there lies a more basic matter that the justices must also begin to address. What about the judicial gut-spilling? Above and beyond the ethical rules that require a justice to recuse herself if she has evinced bias in a specific case, should the justices be held to a different standard when it comes to what they say and how they say it? Should these standards be different for sitting and retired justices? As justices speak more and more frequently off the bench, should they come to some agreement about when their words undermine the institution as a whole?
One viewpoint—let's call it the old school—holds that justices should say nothing that isn't contained within the four corners of a written opinion. When justices pontificate off the bench, it sows confusion and controversy and undermines the impression that jurists all float above the fray. The other side holds that transparency is always better than mystification and that so long as there is no real threat to the court's impartiality in a particular case, there is great value in lifting the veil of secrecy around the workings of the court and revealing the men and women hiding out behind the red velvet curtain.
The old-school view might be summarized like this: Dissenting in the 1962 case of Baker v. Carr, Justice Felix Frankfurter warned his brethren, whom he believed were incorrectly interpreting the Constitution, that the "Court's authority—possessed of neither the purse nor the sword—ultimately rests on sustained public confidence in its moral sanction." Frankfurter's rephrasing of Alexander Hamilton's symbolic description of how the judiciary comes up with the short end of the balance-of-powers stick remains pertinent—so much so that Justice Breyer invokes it regularly. Congress can always back up its decisions through its power over spending, and the president gets to call out the military if folks get out of line. The court, however, has nothing but its words on the page and a faith that the public will heed those words.
Compared with the other branches of government, then, the court has significantly more reason to worry about its prestige. Part of that prestige is bought with illusion: costumes and curtains and a supporting cast that glides about the courtroom on silent feet. But is all this mystery and magic threatened when the justices open their mouths on 60 Minutes, sound off to a group of high-school students, or pen a blistering book review? When Stevens observed in the Seattle schools decision that the composition of the court, and not the Constitution, dictated the holding, he was surely speaking the truth. But was it a truth America could afford to hear? Sometimes the perception of perfectly neutral justice is as important as justice itself.
Conversely, why shouldn't justices be allowed to speak up, especially if they are discussing judicial matters? Surely the justices have a right to speak their minds, up to and including, criticizing the president or berating their colleagues. If the president, the media, and members of Congress are free to opine on the courts, shouldn't justices be allowed to weigh in, too? Depending on your own ideology, there are likely justices whose off-the-bench truths you feel are desperately needed while others should be sent to their quiet places. That fact alone suggests that this is a problem that transcends partisanship.
How can we balance a justice's desire to get things off his chest against the need to protect our collective faith in the institution that cannot exist when that faith is annihilated? And how can we do so without permanently sacrificing the valuable insights we stand to gain by listening to those select few whose vantage point is unparalleled?
To be sure, sitting justices are free to do and say what they wish. They decide for themselves what is and is not appropriate and what need or need not be said. That makes answers to these questions purely academic. But for sitting justices, it seems the balance must tip toward restraint the closer the issue appears to the core work of the court. Moreover, we'd add that judicial editorializing never belongs in the text of an opinion, even in a concurrence or dissent. Supreme Court opinions, after all, are not blog posts. They're official judicial decisions meant to be a sophisticated analysis of legal documents and precedent.
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Even outside the courthouse, however, sitting justices should exercise serious caution before going off-script. The more the commentary involves matters that have been, are, or may be before the court, the more suspect it becomes. Caution lights should flash over any remarks that cast doubt on the validity of a decision, a colleague, or the judicial process. Whether it's an interview, book, or speech, these nine jurists represent the court, regardless of where they are and to whom they are speaking. They should also consider that they represent that court whether or not the proceedings are recorded, televised, or just tweeted by someone in the audience. We mere mortals might get to blab about what the court should or shouldn't do, but we have no real power—the justices do. And as Spider-Man continues to remind us, with great power comes great responsibility, and sometimes that responsibility is to hold your Article III tongue, even when you'd rather not. To this we'd also add the rather obvious observation that if the justices want to be seen talking and thinking about important matters of law and policy, there is an easy solution that wouldn't damage the prestige of the court at all: Allow oral argument to be televised.
At the same time, we'd suggest that taking an oath of office should not come with a lifetime gag order. Once the black robe has been permanently sent to the cleaners, we think the balance tips in favor of disclosure. Retired justices are different from their former colleagues and serve a different role in the institution. They are still a little like "them" because they've sat in those chairs and seen the inside workings of the law machine, yet they're also a little like "us" in that they no longer have any power over cases, parties, or the future meanderings of the law. This calculus changes, of course, if they frequently sit on the lower courts by designation or give an encore performance at the high court itself. But when retired justices who are basically done with the job of judging want to tell us that they regret a vote, how we can improve the system, or that the robes are kind of itchy, then bring it on. They've earned their right to speak out, and we've earned the right to hear what they have to say.
Air Force Is Through With Predator Drones
· By Spencer Ackerman mailto:spencerackerman@gmail.commailto:spencerackerman@gmail.com
· December 14, 2010 |
· 5:24 pm |
· Categories: Drones
· http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/12/air-force-is-through-with-predator-drones/070511-f-2185f-259-jpg/http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/12/air-force-is-through-with-predator-drones/070511-f-2185f-259-jpg/
Wave a tear-stained handkerchief for the drone that changed the face of air war: the Air Force won't buy any more Predators. The Reaper drone is about to be in full effect.
This year, the Air Force completed its scheduled purchase of 268 Predators from manufacturer General Atomics, somewhat behind a schedule the service announced in 2008. By "early 2011," says Lt. Col. Richard Johnson, an Air Force spokesman, "we're taking delivery of our last Predator."
February, to be exact, according to Kimberly Kasitz, a General Atomics spokeswoman. "We've actually had a couple of internal celebrations," she says.
That doesn't mean the end for the Predator, exactly, since the Air Force will continue to fly the planes it's bought. But it does mean the beginning of the end. "We're not replacing the Predator with the Reaper," Johnson says, "but as the [Predator] fleet diminishes by attrition, we'll phase in the Reaper."
Ah, the Predator: flying at up to 25,000 feet for around 20 hours at a time, the drone was supposed to be a pure surveillance aircraft. But starting in late 2000, the Clinton and Bush administrations decided to outfit the Predator with Hellfire missiles to reduce the lag time between identifying Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan and attempting to take him out. Bureaucratic wrangling delayed the armament, but in November 2002, a CIA-operated armed Predator blew up a Jeep carrying some of bin Laden's acolytes. The age of the Predator — an age of remotely-piloted air war — had begun.
Unlike the Predator, the Reaper is no accidental warrior. Also built by General Atomics, it flies twice as fast (150-170 knots cruising, 260 max), at higher altitudes (around 50,000 feet), and carries ten times the payload (over 2 tons) as the Predator. That allows it to strap on the AGM-114 Hellfire missiles, as well as GBU-12 and GBU-38 precision bombs. And as a surveillance aircraft, it's got more electrical power than the Predator, which means "we can integrate new or improved sensors on the aircraft," Johnson says.
The Reaper came into use in 2007. So far, the Air Force owns 57 of the drones and plans to buy another 272, for a total buy of 329 planes — the pace of which will be determined by congressional moneymen. Many of the drones are already in Afghanistan. Air Force officers pilot them from Creech Air Force Base in Nevada.
Of course, the Air Force isn't the only U.S. operation that flies armed drones. The CIA operates an unacknowledged drone program over the Pakistani tribal areas (and, possibly, in Yemen soon). The Air Force is widely believed to supply the CIA with its drones. If so — the CIA declined comment for this post — a phase-out of the Predator and phase-in of the Reaper will mean an eventual upgrade for a drone program that's already fired off 108 strikes in the last year.
And it's the lethality of that program that's gotten other countries wanting the same weapons. WikiLeaks exposed U.S. allies like the United Arab Emirates and Turkey champing at the bit to buy armed Reapers from the U.S. almost as soon as the Predator upgrade came online. Armed drone sales to non-NATO allies are probably still years off, but in July, General Atomics got State Department approval to sell the unarmed version of the Predator as surveillance aircraft to non-NATO countries like Pakistan, Egypt and the UAE.
And that's just the beginning. China, Iran and Israel are just some of the countries that have their own indigenous drone programs. The Reaper is already getting an upgrade: in July, General Atomics rolled out its post-Reaper drone, the faster, stealthier Avenger. Even as the Reaper takes over for the Predator in the U.S., the global proliferation of drone technology is the pathbreaking plane's real legacy.
Defensive Selling
How businesses cope with rage-filled customers.
By Timothy NoahPosted Tuesday, Dec. 14, 2010, at 7:32 PM ET
A senior citizen checks in at the airport using a credit card.Consuming is a two-way street. This column usually concerns itself with the customer's plight, but every once in a while it's worth remembering that the seller's life has its travails, too. After my sophomore year at college I took a summer job at a liquor store in a decrepit neighborhood near (then-seedy) Venice Beach. "Forget all that 'customer is always right' crap," a seasond coworker advised me. "In here, the customer is usually a drunk." He had a point. After one of them tried to smash the storefront window with a length of plywood (I can't remember how we'd failed him), I traded Venice Beach's balmy breezes for a bookstore in sun-splashed Beverly Hills, where the clientele was sometimes rude but never dangerous.
There is, as it happens, an entire literature advising businesses how to deal with customer complaints, and lately I've been perusing one of the more popular volumes, A Complaint Is A Gift: Recovering Customer Loyalty When Things Go Wrong. Its authors, Janelle Barlow and Claus Moller, cite a 2007 study that found that 47 percent of those who suffered a "negative experience" with a business or other organization responded by swearing and/or shouting. Interesting regional differences were observed. Midwestern customers were "more likely to swear, feel their chest tighten, or get a headache," while Westerners were likeliest to saunter silently off, never to return, and perhaps write something nasty about the company online. Southerners were quick to complain and bad-mouth the company to their friends, but least likely to swear. The best possible type of customer to screw over was apparently a Northeasterner. This group was "least likely to register a complaint, tell others, or post a blog entry or online review." Does that mean Northeasterners are the most courteous people in America? More likely, I think, is that Northeasterners encounter bad customer service so frequently that they've stopped even noticing it.
But what about when the customer is out of control, like my plywood-wielding drunk? We turn now to Chapter 8, "When Customers Go Ballistic." Barlow and Moller outline five principles to handle "difficult customers."
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1.) Aikido. This concept is borrowed from Japanese martial arts. "Masters of aikido do not resist the physical force of their opponents," Barlow and Moller explain. "[R]ather, they turn with it and let it pass them." Anger, they explain, is "like a volcanic eruption." Don't interrupt the volcano while it's spewing lava! Take notes instead. Once the eruption is over, acknowledge your customer's anger by saying something like, "I know you're angry. I would be, too." If that doesn't calm your volcano down, remove him from the crowd so he can subside without losing face in front of the other customers. If the customer shows no signs that he will ever subside, then say as nicely as you can that you don't seem able to satisfy him and that perhaps some other business might serve his needs better. Then breathe a sign of relief as he stomps off.
2.) Pacing. "All of us have a strong tendency to like people who are most similar to us," Barlow and Moller write. You must therefore find something in yourself that resembles the customer and display it. Obviously this is going to be tricky when the customer is in a really bad mood. If he's shouting, you don't want to start shouting, too. But neither do you want to be smiling. Instead, put on a sober face and make eye contact to acknowledge that this is a serious problem (even if it isn't).
3.) Euphemism. Euphemism isn't the term Barlow and Moller use to describe this principle, but that appears to be its essence. Avoid saying anything that sounds like a command or contradiction. For instance, don't say "You must." Say, "I need you to." (Fear of enraging nicotine addicts is why "No Smoking" signs were replaced by language-mangling signs that said "Thank you for not smoking.") Avoid words like "but" and "however" because the pissed-off customer will only hear the words that follow these qualifiers. If you have to say "no," then first "put a look of regret on your face or make an 'effort' sound." Say you're sorry you can't do X, then explain why, then suggest an alternative solution.
4.) Partnership. Talk about solving a problem together. Make your challenge the customer's challenge. What are we going to do, partner? Avoid handing him off to someone else, but if you must (assuming the customer is on the phone), then ask for his phone number in case he gets disconnected and then stay on the line until the person you're handing him off to is on the line.
5.) Get personal. Don't call him "sir." Address him by name, and give him your name, too. Give him a business card if you've got one. If the customer hurts your feelings, let him know.
The aikido method reminds me of some advice a mentor gave me when I got married 20 years ago. When fighting with your wife, he said, never apologize too early. Angry people need time to vent, he explained; apologize too quickly and your wife won't get what's made her mad off her chest. Pacing is just common sense. Euphemism annoys me on principle; I am a writer, after all. But our chip-on-the-shoulder culture has come to demand it. Partnership is easy to overdo (call an irate person "buddy," and he may punch you in the nose). Getting personal is all right if the purpose is to say I'm a person too, damn it! Treat me like one! But using the customer's name can be tricky if you first have to ask for it. That feels invasive. (I've always felt sorry for waitresses who have to wear name tags.)
None of these techniques would have helped me in Venice Beach back in 1978 when that drunk started waving that hunk of plywood. I therefore offer one additional option: Quit your job and get another one. This is not, alas, easy to do in the current economy.
Stupid Drug Story of the Week
The nutmeg scare.
By Jack ShaferPosted Tuesday, Dec. 14, 2010, at 5:51 PM ET
Lock up your children! Incinerate the contents of your spice rack! A new drug menace is sweeping the land, and its name is nutmeg!
We know this because the press, which thinks its duty is to keep you cowering in fright, has discovered that teens and others are gleaning from the family's spice collection the wretched experience that is a nutmeg high. Newspapers (Atlanta Journal-Constitution; New York Post), television broadcasters (CNN; ABC in Tampa; ABC in Miami), radio (WSB in Atlanta), and the Web have sounded the warning this month with their brief and frenetic pieces. The common theme in the pieces is that "kids" are doing the substance and that it's cheap and readily available, hence the end of the world has come.
Can you reach an altered state of consciousness by eating, snorting, or smoking from a tin of nutmeg? You betcha. The medical literature ("Nutmeg Intoxication," New England Journal of Medicine, July 4, 1963; "Nutmeg as a Narcotic," Angewandte Chemie International Edition, June 1971) has long respected the psychoactive powers of this compound.
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Peter Stafford's Psychedelics Encyclopedia uncovers an 1883 report from Mumbai noting that "the Hindus of West India take [nutmeg] as an intoxicant." Stafford continues, "Nutmeg has been used for centuries as a snuff in rural eastern Indonesia; in India, the same practice appears, but often the ground seed is first mixed with betel and other kinds of snuff." In 1829, a Czech physiologist named Jan Evangelista Purkinje washed down three ground nutmegs with a glass of wine and experienced headaches, nausea, euphoria, and hallucinations that lasted several days, which remain a good description of today's average nutmeg binge. One anecdotal report: A drug-savvy friend of mine compares his one nutmeg high to being keelhauled by a freight train on a transcontinental run. He didn't like it, but the substance has its enthusiasts.
Harvard ethnobotanist Richard Evans Schultes and chemist Albert Hofmann (father of LSD) wrote of nutmeg's ubiquity in Western culture in their 1980 book The Botany and Chemistry of Hallucinogens. "Confirmed reports of its use by students, prisoners, sailors, alcoholics, marijuana smokers, and other deprived of their preferred drugs are many and clear. Especially frequent is the taking of nutmeg in prisons, notwithstanding the usual denials by prison officials." (Malcolm X speaks of getting high on nutmeg "and the other semi-drugs" while serving time in prison in The Autobiography of Malcolm X.) It has been used as medicine since at least the seventh century and was employed as an abortifacient at the end of the 19th century, which resulted in numerous cases of nutmeg poisoning, according to medical journals. Although used as a folk treatment for other ailments, nutmeg has no proven medicinal value today.
Related in Slate See these previous stupid drug stories of the week by Jack Shafer about booze, "deadly, ultra-pure heroin," mothballs, nicotine, "huffing," meth, and morning glory seeds.
According to the Angewandte Chemie International Edition article, nutmeg became popular among young people, bohemians, and prisoners in the post-World War II period, "and this use was mainly, if not exclusively, confined to the USA." A 1966 New York Times piece (subscription required) named it along with morning glory seeds, diet aids, cleaning fluids, cough medicine, and others substances as alternative highs on college campuses.
As you skim your way through Nexis, nutmeg intoxication pops up again and again—not so much because users become reacquainted with its drug properties, but because the press does. Its current media bump probably has as much to do with the plethora of nutmeg testimonials now running on YouTube as anything. (The current press accounts usually mention the YouTube connection.)
How prevalent is nutmeg use? This sensible if incomplete ABC News piece undercuts the idea that nutmeg use is rampant: Only 67 cases of nutmeg exposure have been recorded by the American Association of Poison Control Centers this year, compared with 5,000 phone calls for marijuana. Aside from the drumroll of nutmeg press reports, I can find no evidence that its use is actually increasing.
How dangerous is nutmeg use? It's hard to tell from reading the popular press. The only place in the medical literature that I found statistics on death by nutmeg intoxication was the March 2005 edition of Emergency Medicine Journal, which cited another journal: An 8-year-old died from nutmeg at the beginning of the 20th century and a 55-year-old died similarly at the beginning of the 21st century.
The authors of the Emergency Medicine Journal assume—correctly, I think—that nutmeg deaths have been underreported. So nobody should seize on these two lone deaths to prove the "safety" of nutmeg use. But at the same time, the recent wave of nutmeg reporting brings us no substantive study about the temporary or lasting damage it does to users. (I am, however, curious to know more about how nutmeg smokers are fairing. Until the most recent reports surfaced, I had never heard of nutmeg smoking. When drugs that were previously swallowed or inhaled start to be smoked, catastrophe can occur. I see nothing on smoking nutmeg in the medical database PubMed. Editors: Please assign this piece!)
Historically, the biggest brake on the use of nutmeg has been the overwhelming unpleasantness of the experience. As the July 1988 Journal of Accident & Emergency Medicine puts it, when nutmeg is taken in excess "a typical and unpleasant clinical syndrome ensues."
"This," the Journal authors conclude, "is why nutmeg abuse is virtually unheard of nowadays, with teenagers more likely to encounter it at the dinner table than on the street corner."
******
Thanks to Joel Hruska and all the other readers who pelted me with cans of nutmeg encouraging me to write about this topic. Send you nutmeg confessionals to slate.pressbox@gmail.com and pour me an eggnog at my Twitter feed. (E-mail may be quoted by name in "The Fray," Slate's readers' forum; in a future article; or elsewhere unless the writer stipulates otherwise. Permanent disclosure: Slate is owned by the Washington Post Co.)
Track my errors: This hand-built RSS feed will ring every time Slate runs a "Press Box" correction. For e-mail notification of errors in this specific column, type the word nutmeg in the subject head of an e-mail message, and send it to slate.pressbox@gmail.com.
How to Test What Really Happened After the Big Bang
· By Lisa Grossman mailto:ligrossman@gmail.commailto:ligrossman@gmail.com
· December 14, 2010 |
· 1:42 pm |
· Categories: Astronomy, Physics
· http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/12/testing-inflation/cmb_timeline/http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/12/testing-inflation/cmb_timeline/
A new test that takes data from several realms of physics could explain what really happened in the first sliver of a second after the Big Bang.
Most cosmologists believe the universe burst from an extremely dense, hot state around 13.7 billion years ago, and has been expanding and cooling ever since. The universe ballooned ridiculously fast in its first moments, doubling in size thousands of times in less than a trillionth of a trillionth of a second.
"That would take a region the size of an atomic nucleus or a proton, and stretch it to a size exponentially greater than our observable universe at present," said cosmologist Paul Steinhardt of Princeton University. "Superlatives are not enough here. Incredible, remarkable, unbelievable amounts of stretching."
This idea, known as inflation, is the most popular theory for explaining why the universe looks the way it does. But so far, no one has proved it.
"At the moment it's our best theory, but it could be literally on the wrong track," said Latham Boyle, a cosmologist at the Perimeter Institute in Canada. "It's important to remember that it's not a fact."
In a paper published Dec. 6 in Physical Review Letters, Boyle and Steinhardt show how a cluster of unrelated observations could clinch the case for inflation.
"You take two completely different sets of measurements," Steinhardt said. "If those two numbers match, either that's a remarkable coincidence, or inflation was the cause. This is the new test that we're introducing."
Cosmologists dreamed up inflation in the 1980s to account for some weird coincidences that the original Big Bang theory, which assumed the universe expanded at a relatively slow, constant rate, couldn't explain. The universe looks nearly the same in every direction, even in regions so distant from each other that they shouldn't know about each other. The time for light to travel from one point to the other is longer than the age of the universe.
"Why would you expect two regions of the universe to have identical properties if they never had a chance to communicate with one another?" said Steinhardt, who was one of the original authors of inflation theory. "Before inflation, the only thing you had to say was, 'I don't know the answer, but we have to suppose it is so.'"
Inflation offered an explanation: Those two distant points in the universe started out next door to each other, but blew apart almost immediately. Later observations of the cosmic microwave background, the subtle glow of the first atoms to release light, fit closely with what cosmologists expected if inflation were true.
Those observations pushed inflation ahead of all the competing theories, but didn't rule the other theories out. Steinhardt himself is working on an alternative theory "where the Big Bang is not the beginning, but it's kind of a bounce." Other theories call on funny features of particle physics or extra dimensions.
In the new study, Boyle and Steinhardt suggest a way to show that inflation was really responsible for the universe's unlikely uniformity.
The key, they say, is to compare two different times when the universe stretched out: the extremely rapid stretching that happened during inflation, and the slower stretching that has been going on ever since.
During inflation, space expanded so quickly even light couldn't keep up. That means two particles sitting right next to each other before inflation would vanish from view once inflation began.
After inflation ended, though, light started to catch up. The universe kept expanding, but slowly enough that light could start making its way across the universe. Eventually, the light from those two particles traveled far enough for the particles to see each other again.
The amount of stretching the universe suffered from the instant those particles lost sight of each other until inflation ended should be exactly equal to the amount of stretching from the end of inflation until the particles were reunited, Boyle and Steinhardt point out. Otherwise, the particles would remain hidden from each other.
Conveniently, cosmologists can calculate the different amounts of stretching "using different bits of information that seem to have nothing to do with each other," Steinhardt said.
Knowing the amount of matter, radiation and dark energy in the universe gives a good estimate of the amount of expansion the universe has gone through since inflation ended.
"Once you know what it is in the present, you can extrapolate back to any time you like, and ask how much expansion has there been from then to now," Steinhardt said.
Observations of the cosmic microwave background plus data on gravitational waves (ripples in space-time predicted by general relativity) give a close sense of how much the universe expanded during inflation. Astronomers haven't detected gravity waves yet, but several observatories are already searching for them.
If the amounts of stretching turn out to be equal, "you declare victory," Steinhardt said. "Then you've really proven that inflation was the cause in a way that would be virtually impossible to explain by any other idea."
If they're not equal, though, that doesn't mean inflation is wrong. But all the competing theories would still be just as likely.
"If the test succeeds, it would eliminate the alternatives I've been thinking of, and seal the case," Steinhardt said. "If it fails, it's wide open."
"I think in retrospect these predictions will become very famous," said cosmologist Arthur Kosowsky of the University of Pittsburgh, who was not involved in the new work. "It's not going to shake up theoretical physics in the next year. But I think that in 20 years, if the real model of inflation comes out in this class of models that they write about, it will be looked back on as a very important contribution."
Image: A timeline of the universe, based on data from the WMAP probe. Credit: WMAP/NASA
Did Reflex Training Save Lindsey Vonn's Ski Season?
· http://www.wired.com/playbook/2010/12/vonn-reflex-training/vonn/http://www.wired.com/playbook/2010/12/vonn-reflex-training/vonn/
If American alpine skier and Olympic champion Lindsey Vonn is the queen of speed skiing, she has arguably laid claim to that title at no place more than Lake Louise, the Alberta, Canada, stop on the World Cup circuit. But her last go-around on the course earlier this month nearly saw a catastrophic fall that could've caused serious injury and derailed her bid for a fourth World Cup overall title.
What saved her, she thinks, is not her familiarity with the course (Vonn has won eight World Cup events at the venue since 2004, consistently dominating its demanding downhill) her fitness, or even her innate mental toughness so much as pure reflex, a instantaneous physical response that she credits to a new training regimen this past offseason.
Vonn intended her newfound emphasis on agility to improve performance in technical disciplines like the giant slalom, but it paid off in the downhill in ways she still doesn't fully understand.
Coming into the technical middle of the course on her second run, Vonn was carrying more speed than was safe. As she dove into the turn called "Coaches' Corner" at the top of a precipitous headwall, her outside ski — the one that carries most of the load in a turn — skipped on an unseen bump and slid out (seen here at the :50 mark).
Instantly, Vonn was "basically laid out" on her side, as she describes it, rocketing at 70 miles an hour toward a painful and likely dangerous collision with the snow fence on the side of the course. Then, somehow, she regained her feet and made the turn, recovering for a second-place finish to her close friend and chief rival, Maria Riesch of Germany.
"I don't know how I got back up," Vonn told Wired.com in an exclusive interview about her near-disaster. "I went down so quick, and I remember thinking, Get back up! Get back up!" Normally, even a fierce effort to recover in that situation would be futile.
"Ninety-nine percent of the time you're in the fence and probably injured," she said. "At those speeds, it goes bad really quickly. Somehow I got back on my feet and back in my tuck."
Vonn was saved, she thinks, by pure instinct. "I honestly have no idea" what happened, she says. Vonn doesn't even remember how she got her skis back underneath her.
But Vonn is sure the recovery is linked to what she did this past summer with her coach/husband Thomas Vonn and trainer Martin Hager.
Vonn is formidable in the speed disciplines like downhill, which require superior athleticism and control and a little bit of the gambler's attitude. But the technical disciplines like slalom and giant slalom, where precise lines and reaction times are paramount, have been a vulnerability.
Although she just finished her most successful season ever with a third straight World Cup title and two Olympic medals in Vancouver, including a gold in the downhill, Vonn says she feels more pressure now than ever.
Some of it is external, as rivals like Riesch continue to improve. To defend her World Cup title, Vonn knew she needed to make bigger strides in the slalom and giant slalom. "I needed to improve my quickness and agility," she said of her offseason strategizing. "My reaction time needed to be faster."
Vonn didn't change the bulk of her endurance program: a regimen of core workouts, weight-lifting, and cycling that has made her one of the fittest racers on tour. But at the U.S. Olympic Training Center near San Diego this summer, she added a routine of agility exercises like cone drills, knee-high hurdles, and agility ladders, which encompass a horizontal circuit divided like a ladder and you step between the "rungs."
Combined with explosive power workouts, it was designed to boost her reaction times and reflexes to respond to the kinds of minute but important course corrections needed to excel at events like the slalom.
As Vonn learned, it can pay off elsewhere.
Most of the headlines from Lake Louise — "Riesch topples Vonn at Lake Louise" proclaimed one — missed the significance of Vonn's extraordinary recovery. Ordinarily, Vonn might have been disappointed with second in the downhill, coming on a course that she's excelled on in the past. But under the circumstances, merely finishing was an impressive feat.
And, next to avoiding injury, avoiding a DNF in ski racing is paramount. Had she crashed, even while escaping injury, her campaign for a World Cup title might have been over. "To fail to finish would've been catastrophic," Vonn said. "For the overall title, it's not about the battle, but the war. Just because you don't win that day doesn't mean you haven't done something important for the overall title."
Similarly, at a November slalom in Levi, Finland, Vonn made another near-instant course correction that she says saved a crash. She finished sixth, and now says that "I never would have been able to do that" before her training.
Vonn now heads into the heart of the European circuit, with only Riesch ahead of her in the overall standings. In last Sunday's giant slalom round at Saint Moritz, Switzerland, she notched a seventh-place finish — her best result in that discipline in two seasons — and another indication that her off-season program has improved her all-around abilities. Perhaps more important, she moved up 24 points in the season-long competition on Riesch, who finished an uncharacteristic 19th.
It will be a hard fight to the finals in March: Riesch has a commanding lead of 526 points to Vonn's 381. And with just one win so far this season compared to four at this point last year, Vonn hasn't won many battles, but she's still very much in the war.
Mirror-Image Cells Could Transform Science — or Kill Us All
· By John Bohannon mailto:mailto:gonzo@aaas.orgmailto:mailto:gonzo@aaas.org
· November 29, 2010 |
· 12:00 pm |
· Photo: Spencer Higgins; Buckyballs courtesy getbuckyballs.com
Dmitar Sasselov was at the end of a long day of having his mind blown when the really big idea hit him. Sasselov, an astrophysicist and head of the Origins of Life Initiative at Harvard, was sitting in the front row of a packed lecture hall at the university last spring, listening to the famous human genome sequencer J. Craig Venter talk about his efforts to synthesize new forms of life. Sasselov had introduced the bald, perpetually sunburned biotech entrepreneur at another lecture that morning, and he'd spent the day squiring Venter around campus.
But Sasselov's thoughts were light-years away. Two months earlier, a Delta II rocket had blasted off into the darkness above Cape Canaveral carrying the Kepler space telescope; Sasselov is on the team using Kepler to hunt for Earth-like planets around the Cygnus constellation—looking, ultimately, for extraterrestrial life. And he was frustrated. Because no matter how much data he and his colleagues collect—gases in the atmosphere, a fingerprint of color on the surface—they'll never actually see aliens themselves. And that makes it impossible to answer one of the most basic questions of astrobiology: How diverse is life in the universe? If there is life somewhere other than here, does it look like earthly life, with DNA and protein? Or could it run on something else? Venter's lecture about artisanal bacteria mapped suddenly onto Sasselov's frustration. Why not just do what Venter was doing? If Sasselov wanted to study aliens, why not just make them himself—or at least the next-best thing? He imagined himself looking at synthetic aliens on a lab bench, "gazing at the other," as he puts it, "similar to us but not the same." He uncapped his red pen and scribbled a note: "Arrange a mtg/chat w Jack & GMC," it read. "Chiral E. coli w GMC and put it into a vesicle w Jack & subject two cultures to planetary environments."
Translation: Go to the synthetic biologists Jack Szostak and George Church. Ask them to create a life-form that runs on an operating system different from our own, based on mirror-image versions of earthly proteins and DNA. Let these alien cells grow and mutate, and see how they survive. If it worked, those new cells—Church called them "mirror life"—could answer one of the deepest questions about the origin of life, not just here on Earth but everywhere in the universe. They might also open up new avenues of discovery in materials science, fuel synthesis, and pharmaceutical research. On the down side, though, mirror life wouldn't have any predators or diseases to limit its reproduction. They would have to keep an eye on that.
Four billion years ago was a hellish time on planet Earth. It was the end of the aptly named Hadean eon: Volcanoes spewed lava across rock baked by ultraviolet radiation; asteroids blasted craters into the landscape. But the worst of the bombardment—including the colossal impact that knocked loose the chunk that became our moon—was over. There were oceans of water and plenty of complex organic chemicals. So in some wet place, maybe near an undersea hydrothermal vent, maybe in the clay on the shore of a shallow pond, organic molecules started to replicate. No one knows exactly where or when or how, but life began.
It was nothing fancy at first. But soon those replicating molecules clothed themselves in a skin of fat, a membrane to keep their complex chemistry from diluting away. And with surprising speed, those bubbles of goop gave rise to a living, functioning cell, the Last Universal Common Ancestor of everything alive today—LUCA. Using the genetic differences between today's living things as a molecular clock, we can calculate when that ancestral cell first emerged: about 3.5 billion years ago.
Since then, life has been busy. At last count, there were as many as 100 million species on the planet, and billions more have gone extinct. And yet, at the most basic level of biochemistry, it has just been more of the same. Every organism runs on the same operating system that LUCA invented. Peel back a cell's membrane and you'll find a blur of activity, thousands of chemical reactions taking place all at once. The conductors of this biochemical ballet are the proteins, nano-size building blocks and machines that control the speed and timing of every reaction. From breaking down sugars to clearing waste to repairing the membrane, the unique shape of each protein determines its job, as specifically as a lock to its key.
The LUCA operating system was an ingenious solution to keeping track of all those thousands of proteins. Biochemists call it the central dogma: Genetic material, in the form of a long nucleic acid polymer called DNA, stores a digital record of every protein's design. Another nucleic acid, RNA, carries the information to a molecular machine called a ribosome, which reads the RNA and strings together amino acids to form the protein. Once the string is complete, the protein snaps itself into the right shape and gets to work.
But there is at least one viable alternative to LUCA: the mirror image of the entire system. Biochemistry is the story of shapes, and this is its strange plot twist. Lots of molecules come in multiple conformations—sticking together the same atoms can sometimes yield different three-dimensional structures that are the mirror images of each other, a property called chirality. Indeed, most of the basic molecules of life—from the nucleic acids of the genome to the amino acids of the proteins—have mirror-image versions. And all cells have enzymes called isomerases, which flip certain molecules into their mirror versions. But for some reason, in the machinery of living things on Earth, one side of the mirror goes almost wholly unused. All of us earthlings, from algae to elephants, have proteins made of left-handed amino acids and a genome of right-handed nucleic acids. (When chemists say handed, they're generally referring to the direction that polarized light skews when beamed through a pure solution of the molecule.) No one knows why LUCA picked one side of the mirror and not the other.
Theoretically, a cell could be based on "wrong-handed" molecules. Its biochemistry would work just like ours—DNA to RNA to proteins—but it would be completely incompatible with earthly life, its chiral twin. And now, thanks to recent advances in genomics, cell membrane science, and synthetic biology, an ambitious researcher could go beyond theory and build it from the ground up. The tools are here (well, almost here) to make mirror life from scratch.
Photo: Spencer Higgins
Sasselov is the ultimate talent scout for a problem like this. Because of his job at the Origins of Life Initiative, he knew George Church was already trying to build mirror-flipped molecular machines that could translate genes into proteins, and he knew that Church didn't have anything to put them in. The membranes of earthly cells are built of fat and protein molecules with the wrong chirality. But Sasselov also knew that if there was anyone in the world who could create a membrane that would work, it was Jack Szostak. "They're both pioneers, but in different ways," Sasselov says. "They are my favorite people, and my mentors."
So he brought them both to a café in Cambridge and made his pitch: Build a fully functioning mirror cell made of molecules they themselves would synthesize. Or, to put it another way: Don't just create new branches on the tree of life, as Venter was doing with his tweaks of existing cells. Instead, create an entirely new tree.
Church went for it immediately. He'd been looking at similar ideas for years. But Szostak didn't think it would work. "I'm not saying it's impossible," he says, sitting in his office at Massachusetts General Hospital a year after that first meeting. "I'm just saying it requires a lot of hard steps." Nevertheless, he agreed to support the project.
A soft-spoken 58-year-old Canadian with boyish good looks, Szostak won the Nobel Prize last year for his work on telomeres, the protective end caps of chromosomes. He also created the artificial yeast chromosome, critical to advances in DNA cloning and gene mapping. Lately, Szostak has been working on the origin of those membranes that somehow came to enclose and protect LUCA and every cell since. Inside test tubes in his lab float microscopic, hollow spheres of fat—primitive membrane bubbles. Given the right molecular ingredients, they spontaneously self-assemble, grow, and divide, but they're much simpler than a naturally occurring cell membrane. The fatty acids have no chirality; their mirror image is the same molecule. So if they were injected with, say, the guts of mirror life, there would be no wrong-handedness to get in the way.
And that's where Church comes in. He's 6′5″, with a gnarly beard and a science fiction fan's optimism. It's his job to build the genome and protein infrastructure for mirror life. But … could mirror cells actually survive on Earth? "Everything I know from chemistry and physics says that this should work," he says. Then he gets a little silly: "Hey! I know a great shortcut to get our mirror ribosome! I just need a four-dimensional being to pick me up, rotate me in 4-D, and put me back as my mirror self."
Szostak still says he'd bet against their success. The cautious scientist in him can't see how the mirror cell, once full of chirally flipped molecular machinery, will come to life. "Forget about all the technical issues of making mirror ribosomes, mirror peptides, and mirror DNA," he says. "The complexity of reconstituting a normal cell, or even a simplified cell with 1,000 components, is mind-boggling. You don't just mix these things up and get it to work." Still, he agreed that if Church got his part figured out, they could use his membranes to keep everything in. Szostak hopes that even attempting to make mirror life could lead to a better understanding of how ribosomes work and cells evolved. He doesn't mention the possibility that mirror life could earn someone serious money.
The week that Sasselov met with Szostak and Church to discuss mirror life, a catastrophe was under way across the Charles River at Genzyme, one of the largest biotech companies in the world. Two of its top sellers—medicines for treating the rare genetic disorders Gaucher's disease and Fabry disease—are proteins. In people with these maladies, fats accumulate in the blood, organs, and brain, causing symptoms from burning pain to kidney failure—unless they get the drugs, produced by genetically modified cells suspended in giant nutrient pools called bioreactors. But that week, a virus that disrupts cell reproduction infected one of the bioreactors. The entire plant had to be shut down.
It was a hard summer for Genzyme, as well as for the people who rely on its medications. While the company decontaminated its bioreactors, thousands of patients around the world rationed their drug supplies. Genzyme's stock price dropped 20 percent.
When Church talks about mirror life's quirky advantages, invulnerability to this kind of mishap is high on his list. "Viruses can't touch a mirror cell," he says. No virus has evolved to infect it. And even if a normal virus did figure out how to get past the membrane of a mirror cell—which usually requires a mechanism that would be thwarted by wrong-handed molecules—the mirror genome would be unreadable to the attacker. Viruses work by hijacking their victims' genomes, taking over the cellular machinery for making proteins to build more of themselves; a normal virus wouldn't have any effect on a mirror cell's factory. This makes mirror life a potential workhorse for biotech.
As it happens, the cell that Sasselov ultimately wants to create—a chiral twin of E. coli—couldn't make proteins like Genzyme's cells. It would make the chirally flipped versions, which would almost certainly be useless.
But that's not the sort of mirror cell Church has in mind. The problem, he says, is that billions of years of evolutionary R&D have made today's bacterial cells tough, adaptable, and very good at making more of themselves—but inefficient at spitting out designed-to-order molecules in a bioreactor. Church wants a "minimal mirror cell" to produce specific proteins: mirror, normal, and even mixes of the two but far more efficient than a bioreactor full of finicky, genetically engineered cells.
#mirror_cont { border:5px outset #FEFA9F; margin:20px 0px 16px; width:630px; padding:10px; background-color:#000; color:#fff; } #mirror_cont h2 { font-size:2em; color:#fff; margin-bottom:6px; } #mirror_cont #mirror_intro { margin-bottom:30px; } #content #mirror_cont p { margin:0px; font-size:1.2em; line-height:1.4em; } #mirror_cont .mirror_elem { float:left; width:110px; margin-right:20px; } #mirror_cont .mirror_elem img { display:block; margin:0px auto 6px; } #mirror_cont .mirror_elem.last { margin-right:0px; }
Mirror Life: A Recipe
When scientists set out to invent a new kind of life on Earth—one that runs on DNA and proteins that are chirally "flipped," mirror images, molecularly speaking, of everything already alive—they knew it wouldn't be easy. Some of the ingredients are already in their labs, and some have yet to be invented. Here's how they'll do it.
—J.B.
Find a factory.
The cellular machine that assembles amino acids into proteins is called a ribosome. Biologist George Church's lab is scanning its library of mutant ribosomes, looking for the ones best at connecting wrong-handed amino acids.
Build an assembly line.
Church's lab will feed the mutant ribosome 150 genes—the minimum number believed to be necessary for a living cell—and wrong-handed amino acids. The ribosome will translate these genes into mirror proteins.
Use the assembly line to build a mirror.
With mirror proteins in hand, Church can build a completely mirrored ribosome. If it works, it'll be able to copy itself and make other proteins. In other words: self-replicating mirror biochemistry in a test tube.
Make the packaging.
Mirror-life guts won't survive inside a normal cell membrane. The researchers plan to use a synthetic one made from achiral fatty acids—they don't have all the ingredients of a natural membrane, but they should work.
Put together the final product.
Assuming all those other steps succeed, the researchers will inject Church's mirror biochemistry into protocell membranes. Theoretically, the cell will boot itself up and begin dividing and replicating. Voilà : mirror life!
Illustrations: Luke Shuman
The problem for now is that Church's entire lab is tuned to the wrong chiral setting. Every step on the path to making a mirror cell is blocked by the absence of the right protein tool. The molecule that makes DNA, called DNA polymerase, isn't the right shape to string together wrong-handed nucleic acids. Want to translate those mirror genes into enzymes? The protein machine that makes RNA copies of DNA—it's called RNA polymerase—can't latch onto mirror DNA. And normal ribosomes can't read mirror RNA or string together mirror amino acids.
That's why Church has been hacking the ribosome, the master tool that makes all the rest. His plan is to make one that reads regular RNA transcripts of genes but can string together wrong-handed amino acids to form mirror proteins. "It would be a bridge between our world and the mirror world," Church says. With it, he'd be able to pick a known gene from a library and build mirror protein tools. Chief among them will be a full-on mirror ribosome—no easy task, since the ribosome is a mountain of a molecule, protein and RNA, dating from a time before LUCA. But with a set of mirror proteins, Church thinks he could build one.
None of this will be easy. Messing with the ribosomes inside a living cell can kill it, so Church is going to make ribosomes self-assemble and function in a test tube. And then he'll have to find mutant versions that will accept wrong-handed amino acids. Think of it as switching the sockets on a wrench from standard to metric.
Church and his team have cracked the first step. Though they haven't published their results yet, last year his team got a synthetic ribosome to self-assemble and produce luciferase, the protein that makes fireflies glow. And he has a library of mutant ribosomes that have the right kind of sockets—they'll accept mirror amino acids.
This is where the money comes in. Some of the most valuable drugs are actually tiny proteins that include wrong-handed amino acids—like the immunosuppressant cyclosporine. To manufacture it, pharmaceutical companies have to rely on an inefficient and expensive fungus. A hacked ribosome modified to handle both normal and mirror amino acids could crank out the stuff on an industrial scale. And why stop at what we already know? Being able to produce unnatural proteins cheaply means you could synthesize billions of them and then test them in parallel for antitumor and antibiotic properties. Once you got a hit, Szostak says, you could generate trillions of variations on that molecule, "figure out which are the good ones, and evolve them."
Church thinks even bigger. A manufacturing ribosome would be great, but a fully domesticated mirror cell—able to synthesize more-complicated stuff—would change everything. "All production will be biological," he says. In that science fiction future, vats of virus-proof mirror cells could pump out biofuel, lay down nano-size organic circuitry, and even extrude organic cement foundations for skyscrapers.
Of course, mirror life could also kill us all. Synthetic biologists like Church have been thinking about doomsday scenarios for years—the idea that some synthetic super-pathogen will jump a fence. "But that's the beauty of mirror life," Church says. "It can't infect us." Just as viruses from our side of the mirror can't infect it, mirror pathogens can't infect us.
They might be poisonous, though. "I am reluctant to say that the mirror cells or their contents would be nontoxic," says Jerry Kasting, a researcher at the University of Cincinnati who studies the way chemicals interact with human physiology. "But nor would I expect them to be highly toxic." It took evolution millions of years to come up with snake venom proteins that shut down mammal organs. The same goes for microbes that produce toxins like anthrax and botulinum. Mirror molecules aren't tuned to our biochemistry. That's why the 1960s controversy over the antinausea drug thalidomide was such a surprise—the right-handed version calmed morning sickness in pregnant women, but the left-handed version caused birth defects. Usually, though, the mirror image of biological molecules are weaker or have no effect. They can't shake hands with our proteins. And that would be one of the safety features of mirror life. To a mirror cell, Earth's environment is mostly the equivalent of Olestra, the synthetic fat that human enzymes can't break down. There's just not enough nutrition for them in the wild.
On the other hand, if mirror cells somehow evolved—or were engineered—to consume normal fats, sugars, and proteins, we might have a problem. If a mirror cell got the right set of isomerases to break down these nutrients, that would be a mess. Mirror cells would slowly convert edible matter into more of themselves. Anything that ate them wouldn't be able to digest the mirrored molecules—they'd pass right through predators' guts. And as the mirror cells excreted waste and died, the accumulating material would be like a self-generating oil spill with nothing to clean it up.
It gets worse: If mirror cells acquired the ability to photosynthesize, we'd be screwed. "I suspect that all hell would break loose," says Jim Kasting, a climate scientist at Penn State University and an expert on the global carbon cycle. (He is also Jerry Kasting's chiral twin brother; Jim is right-handed, Jerry is left.) All it would take would be a droplet of mirror cyanobacteria squirted into the ocean. Cyanobacteria are at the base of the ocean's food pyramid, converting sunlight and carbon dioxide into more of themselves. After doing some rough calculations on the effects of a mirror cyanobacteria invasion, Jim Kasting isn't sure which would kill us first—the global famine or the ice age. "It would quickly consume all the available nutrients," he says. "This would leave fewer or perhaps no nutrients for normal organisms." That would wipe out the global ocean ecology and starve a significant portion of the human population. As the CO2 in the ocean was incorporated into inedible mirror cells, they would "draw down" CO2 from the atmosphere, Kasting says. For a decade or two, you would have a cure for global warming. But Kasting predicts that in about 300 years the bugs would suck down half of Earth's atmospheric CO2. Photosynthesis of most land plants would fail. "All agricultural crops other than corn and sugar cane would die," he says. (They do photosynthesis a little differently.) "People might be able to subsist for a few hundred years, but things would be getting pretty grim much more quickly than that." After 600 years, we'd be in the midst of a global ice age. It would be a total evolutionary reboot—both Kasting and Church think mirror predators would evolve, but whatever life existed on Earth by that point wouldn't include us.
"I would be the first to say that we shouldn't make a photosynthetic mirror cell," Church says. "But I'm reluctant to have a moratorium on something that doesn't exist yet." He says he'd build safeguards into his mirror cells so they'd perish without constant care. And the advances in synthetic biology required to transform those first delicate mirror cells into anything that could survive in the wild are even more remote.
Early Earth seems to have been covered in a soup of organic molecules with no chiral preference. One plausible theory for where they came from: space. In 1969, a meteorite fell on Murchison, Australia. The 4.6 billion-year-old rock is a sample of the solar system from before the birth of our planet. Not only does it carry both right- and left-handed versions of normal amino acids; it also contains dozens of exotic amino acids that life ended up not using at all. This material was pummeling the surface of Earth right through the Hadean era. But that doesn't explain why LUCA chose our side of the mirror.
It could be that the primordial soup wasn't equally spiced with both versions of the molecules. Stars sometimes emit polarized light that selectively breaks apart one version or the other of a chiral molecule. In fact, the Murchison meteorite contains a slight imbalance between the right- and left-handed amino acids, with an excess of the kind that got used by LUCA. (Scientists are convinced that it isn't due to earthly contamination.) So it's possible that the sun destroyed the wrong-handed amino acids, denying mirror life its construction materials before it could get a toehold on this planet.
Or the game may be rigged. There might be something more fundamental about our universe that prefers our side of the mirror. But if so—a possibility that thrills Sasselov—the physics behind it is unknown. His new cells will provide the test bed for that hypothesis. "We'll use the mirror cells as the basis of the assay," he says. "We can use them as an amplifier." He'll grow colonies of normal cells and mirror cells under the same conditions. If the mirror cells aren't exactly as healthy or fertile as the normal ones, he'll know something weird is going on. Even the tiniest bias in physics will show up as a big difference after thousands of generations.
Sasselov has another, even stranger experiment planned. If it works, it will ruin Church's hopes for virus-free biotechnology but might earn all three researchers the Nobel Prize. "It'll be a revolution in our understanding of life and its place in the cosmos," Sasselov says. The short version: He's going to try to find mirror life that's already living on Earth.
In the traditional story of the origin of life, the chances of evolution producing a living cell are vanishingly small. LUCA was a lottery winner. But it could just as well be that life is easy—something that just happens in environments like those of early Earth. In this version of the story, the primordial soup was a party. There were plenty of resources, few rules, and all manner of bizarre cellular characters. LUCA was there—and so was LUCA's mirror twin. And maybe even stranger versions of life, too.
We know how the party ended. LUCA went on to become the dominant colonizer of the planet, evolving into billions of species great and small, including a midsize naked ape that likes to read magazines. But what if some of those other partygoers stuck around? Strange life-forms might be living undetected because we've never thought to look for their chemical traces. They might live in extreme places, at the bottom of the ocean or inside the pores of rocks—a "shadow biosphere" that's been here all along, eking out a quiet living. Just as Sasselov worries that astronomers have defined the signs of life too narrowly, maybe we don't know what to look for right here at home.
If mirror life-forms do exist, Sasselov knows one thing for sure. "They must have their own viruses," he says. "That's just a fact of life." And that's how he'll trap the shadow biosphere. "We can use mirror cells as a honeypot," he says. Earthly mirror viruses might mistake synthetic mirror cells for their usual prey, come out of hiding to infect them, and then snap! He'd close the lid of the petri dish. Rather than going hunting for mirror life, Sasselov would coax it into the light.
Kepler has already spotted hundreds of Earth-like planets—Sasselov estimates that there are 100 million habitable worlds in our galaxy. Odds are we'll never visit them. But if Sasselov is right, then the "aliens" could be here already, and they might be older than LUCA. If so, mirror life isn't just here. It's us.
John Bohannon (gonzo@aaas.org) wrote about a protein-folding game in issue 17.05
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