A fourth all a rail traffic in the U.S. touches Chicago at some point, leading to congestion point that slows the entire system down.
John Schwartz in The New York Times:
Shippers complain that a load of freight can make its way from Los Angeles to Chicago in 48 hours, then take 30 hours to travel across the city. A recent trainload of sulfur took some 27 hours to pass through Chicago — an average speed of 1.13 miles per hour, or about a quarter the pace of many electric wheelchairs.
Part of the reason it takes so long is that many of the freight trains need to be sorted for their final destinations after making their way inland. PBS’ America Revealed series took a look at Chicago’s hump classification facility, a manmade set of hills where rail workers essentially sort train cars by hand.
Before California lawmakers last year, the noted burn surgeon drew gasps from the crowd as he described a 7-week-old baby girl who was burned in a fire started by a candle while she lay on a pillow that lacked flame retardant chemicals.
[…]
Heimbach’s passionate testimony about the baby’s death made the long-term health concerns about flame retardants voiced by doctors, environmentalists and even firefighters sound abstract and petty.
But there was a problem with his testimony: It wasn’t true.
The flame retardant lobby has been pushing the use of their toxic chemicals for decades with distorted science for decades. The chemicals don’t even work.
Still one of my favorite things I’ve ever written, I think, is the opening line to The Poets. Under the name The New Antiques a rag-tag band of bandmates played this tune one time publicly, as the first act at Troop-a-palooza. As you can see, our set was very sparsely attended.
The poets have all fallen on hard times
Off-beat mean streaks mean each finds bleak times for hard rhymes
Spring sprung, and naturally1 it was time to get my plant on. My lovely sister and her boyfriend gave me a Woolly Pocket2 for Christmas. It’s fantastic.
I split a couple of my bromeliads, grabbed a chunk of purple and lavender phlox, added a couple more plants and it’s off to a good start.
Wayne Hale, a 32-year veteran of NASA, describes in the first shuttle flight after the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster, Discovery experienced a similar foam separation incident.
John Muratore, my good friend, fellow flight director, and then the head of the shuttle program Systems Engineering and Integration office informed me in very flat terms that he was in the JSC video lab with head photo interpreter Cindy Evans who had uncovered evidence of a large foam liberation during the critical mach number regime which appeared to have impacted the left wing of Discovery. Just like Columbia.
It’s a great story about mistakes, crisis and apologies. And a story, thankfully, with a happy ending.
At the dawn of the electric age, George Westinghouse and Thomas Edison worked to popularize competing standards for transmitting electricity, alternating current (AC) and direct current (DC), respectively.
Both men knew there was room for but one American electricity system, and Edison set out to ruin Westinghouse in “a great political, legal and marketing game” that saw the famous inventor stage publicity events where dogs, horses and even an elephant were killed using Westinghouse’s alternating current. The two men would play out their battle on the front pages of newspapers and in the Supreme Court, in the country’s first attempt to execute a human being with electricity.
Neiman Lab has a great write up of Politico’s Pro service, a pricey subscription for Capitol Hill insiders and political movers. Knowing they’re target audience, they’ve been able to do away with a lot of the stuff that a typical news article would include:
“One of the things I tell reporters every day is: When you get to that point of the story, four or five paragraphs in, and [you write] ‘the move comes amid…’ — stop,” Grieve said. “Anybody who is reading Politico Pro knows what ‘the move comes amid.’ That 300 words of new essential information can be a 300-word story. The traditional approach would be a 1,000-word story, but the second part of that story would be the blah blah blah that everybody already knows…It’s very liberating for reporters, but it’s pretty damn liberating for readers too. No one has time to read stuff they already know. Take your time with the stuff that’s going to grab them by the jacket lapels and say, ‘Whoa, this is new.’”
Between 1980 and 2000, the share of late-twenty-somethings owning homes had declined from 43% to 38%. The share of early-thirty-something home owners slipped from 61% to 55% in that time. After the boom and bust were over, both rates kept falling. The rate of young people getting their first mortgage between 2009 and 2011 was chopped in half from just 10 years ago, according to a recent study from the Federal Reserve.
It’s tough to pull a single quote from Andy Ihnatko’s breathless retelling of coloratura soprano Rachele Gilmore’s Metropolitan Opera debut. It’s just such a great read, even if you know absolutely nothing about the opera.
Gilmore made her debut with three hours notice after the principal performer falls ill.
This second video is an example of what happens when a highly technical role is performed by a talented, hardworking person who knows that:
(1) This next performance is a huge moment in any singer’s career;
(2) This is an aria in which the singer is actually supposed to showboat during the reprise;
and maybe most importantly
(3) She doesn’t necessarily need to protect her voice for the next two weeks of performances.
On February 5, 1945, with World War II in its last desperate months, a German train made its way to the city of Linz. Suddenly, Allied planes swooped in, dropping bombs and derailing it. As the train’s cargo—mail bound for several northern Austrian towns—scattered over the area, a second wave of bombers flew in with a strange payload.
Eight mail bags hit the ground around the train with a thud. Inside each bag were 800 propaganda letters, all addressed to homes and businesses along the train’s route and appropriately stamped. When the train was discovered, German postal workers recovered the bags and delivered the letters without being any wiser about their contents or origins.
Notice how the bottom row of numbers is a bit brighter compared to the other rows? Neat, huh?
While error level analysis is not an absolute guarantee of forgery or fraud, it is one of a set of tools that can be used. I’m no photo forensics expert, but that sure does look suspicious to me. (And I suppose it helps that we know it was a joke, too.)
There I was, at work, minding my own business — well, my employer’s business, technically — when that familiar bzzzzt of a new text message reverberated across the conference room table.
Some outfit called “IQQuiz Fun Facts” was enticing me to signup for their “fun facts”. I immediately replied with “Stop”, which is supposed to be the universal SMS command for “leave me alone”.
Instead, this sleazy outfit operating under the short code 90323 sent me a Fun Fact, and put a $9.99 monthly subscription on my monthly cell phone bill.
Txt spam just turned into a txt scam. Just great.
This type of fraud is known as cramming, and it’s not a new problem. What surprised me, and several other people who’ve now told me they found similar charges, is just how easy it is for these scammers to get their hooks into your account. In a video posted last year, Hamid Shojaee makes the case that the carriers, if not complicit, are at least guilty by association for allowing these scammers companies to attach charges to their own customer’s bills.
Getting my money back
I immediately called AT&T. I had them remove the $9.99 charge and block my number from signing up for any future subscriptions. In the course my chat with the AT&T representative, who was exceedingly nice, she discovered another $9.99 charge back in January, one I hadn’t noticed from some other scummy text message outfit. She graciously reversed that charge as well.
The lesson here is: check your mobile bill especially if it varies by more than a few pennies.
I called the 888 number listed on one of the text messages and was greeted with an automated “Thank you for calling mobile support” followed by three-fold menu options for ‘support’, ‘billing’ or to ‘talk to a representative’. I choose option 3, and after a brief wait, was connected to ‘Mark’, a polite-sounding man with an accent sitting in a very crowded room, presumably filled with lots of other ‘Mark’s and ‘Sarah’s and ‘John’s.
“For me to further check on our system we need your mobile number,” he said.
“Sorry,” I said. “I’ve already unsubscribed to your text messages and I don’t want to give you my number again. I don’t know how you got ahold of it in the first place — I don’t sign up for those text message things.”
“I’ll need your mobile number to determine how to help you with our services.”
“So there’s no way you can tell me how you ended up with my mobile number?”
“I’m sorry. To further check I’ll need to check your mobile number in our system.”
“Well. Have a good day then.”
At that was that. At least I got my $20 back.
If you’ve gotten one of these text messages and call your mobile provider to check for any rogue charges, be sure to tell them the short code — the five or six digit number the text came from — and let them know that you are absolutely not an idiot and wouldn’t even think about signing up for one of these “services” ever in a million and one years.
Update: Again with the charges!
3/30 — I looked at our AT&T account again today to see if we picked up any data or messaging charges while abroad and lo and behold… another scam subscription.
Here’s the latest offender, something called Pictavision from the Cellfish Media, which we are alleged to have picked up from the AT&T AppCenter. We both have iPhones. We don’t have AT&T AppCenter. Cellfish bills itself as a “mobile marketing and mobile publishing” company, and they’re known for such hits as NBA Fancam and surreptitiously attaching $3.99 subscriptions to your wireless bill.
Here’s where it starts to get a little (more) goofy. This scam was associated with my wife’s number, which we apparently didn’t check when I called AT&T the first time. This subscription goes back a while, further than AT&T’s online records will dig into.
The AT&T representative I spoke to this time was not as concerned about the subscription, or refunding my money, since it predated any recent scam text message activity.
Here’s where I start to get a little angry with AT&T
The section that holds the information about these phone charges is several levels deep in their online account management, and even then it’s only listed as the un-itemized line item “Mobile Purchases & Downloads Charges”. This is followed by this addendum…
(See the Mobile Purchases & Downloads Charges section of the bill for a list of individual charges.)
… with no link.
By the way, the best place to check all of these subscriptions out is at http://att.com/db, although I’ve since lost the place on the AT&T website where I originally found that link.1
The representative then directed me to call the 800 number listed on the subscription line item. Wary of ringing up another dingy call center, I declined that offer, asking if anything could be done on AT&T’s end. She said no, not beyond making sure there was indeed a subscription block on the second number. Then as we were finishing up our conversation, and the representative again told me that I needed to contact that 800 number to cancel the subscription, I stumbled upon another small bit of text: Dial 611 from your mobile phone or call 1-800-331-0500…
AT&T’s own customer service number is listed as the contact point on that subscription. Sigh.
The bottom line
In a perfect world, AT&T would be more interested in keeping customers happy than scraping a few extra dollars off of unwitting customers. I certainly take responsibility for not knowing about that subscription, especially since it’s more than a year old. However, the carrier doesn’t make it very obvious where these subscriptions are while viewing your wireless bill online, something they practically beg you do you exclusively by “going paperless”.
The practice is by no means a new one, and its a small pittance for the company to pay to keep a customer service rep around to issue the odd refund.
That said, the right things for AT&T to do, along with every other carrier, are to:
Immediately suspend any company’s short code if they engage in cramming. And, while you’re at it, stop cramming your own products down your own customer’s bills. Ten days ago, Verizon agreed to end third-party charges for its landline customers, a $2 billion industry, according to Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.).
During the past five years, phone companies billed more than $10 billion in third-party charges, and a large percentage appeared to be unauthorized, the committee found.
Make third-party subscriptions very visible and very descriptive on your account statement.
Act as the customer’s advocate. Imagine if someone called you out of the blue and said, “Hey, we’ve found a way for you to cut your phone bill by $5. There’s a subscription on your account that you haven’t been using and we wanted to make sure you knew about it.” Instant goodwill.
Bottom line, check your phone bill, report the text messages as spam, double check that your number is on the National Do Not Call Registry, and if you discover one of these charges, don’t hesitate to call your carrier and ask for your money back.
Daredevil Felix Baumgartner is aiming to break the record for the highest skydive. He jumped from 13.6 miles up today, with his sights set on 23 miles.
That would break the record of 19.5 miles set by retired Air Force pilot Joseph Kittinger, set in 1960.1
Kittinger also holds the record for being in one of the coolest photos ever.
The Information Age is just getting started. Welcome to Big Data.
A massive project at the Obama campaign is mining data to target potential voters in very detailed ways, linking “once completely separate repositories of information so that every fact gathered about a voter is available to every arm of the campaign.” The campaign also has a text analysis project to help determine voters’ hopes and fears.
Minority Report much? Santa Cruz, Calif. is among a number of cities using data to reduce crime, an approach called predictive policing.
Dutch airline KLM has begun testing a program that allows passengers to upload details from the Facebook or LinkedIn profiles, and then use that data to choose more compatible seat mates. (via NextDraft)
And finally, Target can tell when you’re pregnant based on a massive analysis of purchase data. Why? Pregnancies — along with some other major life events — are among the few times that one’s shopping habits become a little more flexible.
Falu red (pronounced “FAH-loo”, in Swedish it’s Falu rödfärg) is the name of a Swedish, deep red paint well known for its use on wooden cottages and barns for preservation. The paint originated from the copper mine at Falun in Dalarna, Sweden and consists of water, rye flour, linseed oil and tailings from the copper mines of Falun which contain silicates iron oxides, copper compounds and zinc. Falu red is still widely used in the Swedish countryside.
When I was but a wee lad, my dad had a Macintosh Plus. My first memory of computing was playing a “clicking” game, which, in fact, was the tutorial that came with the Mac to teach its new owners how to use a mouse.1 It was great fun, or seemed like it when you’re three or four years old and that’s about all you can remember, that there was a mouse clicking program.
My second computing memory is playing Hardball!
Gosh I loved this game.2 Even after I’d moved along to more complicated fare like Hellcats Over the Pacific3 or SimCity4 , I’d still pull out that Mac Plus — tucked away in the garage’s cold storage, comfortably resting in the plush carrying case, because it deserved it, you know — and dig out the Hardball! disk, hope that the 800K floppy drive wasn’t going to act up, and play in the big leagues for an afternoon.
The Champs! The All-Stars! 5 Moose Lorenzen! The flag jerkily waving in the wind just beyond the scoreboard.
Hardball! was developed by Bob Whitehead and published by Accolade in 1985 on a remarkable number of platforms,6 but the Mac only saw the first two versions.
The original Hardball! was greyscale pixel art at its finest. The texture of the brick fall faded from left to right, the sun shining brighter on the coach hanging out in the dugout and I tried to deduce the location of the pitch quick enough, following the catcher’s disembodied hand.
It was 330’ to the foul poles and 400’ to straight-away center. Man, could Moose hit the ball hard. If the ball leapt of Moose’s bat and only had time for three frames of animation before the game switched to the field view, you knew it was certainly a home run.
Being the geeky kid I was, I remember setting out some printer paper and building my own imaginary, professional baseball league, myself as commissioner-manager of the Lake Vermilion Walleyes, probably. I played my team’s games live, Hardball! as the proxy, while the rest of the league was determined by opposing rolls of dice. I’m pretty sure I took home the pennant that season. I distinctly remember one game, I was down two runs in the bottom of the ninth, two men on, two outs — a classic scenario, to be sure — except this time the pitcher was at the plate. All seemed lost, at least until the pitcher connected on fastball and hit a dinger that would’ve made Moose blush. Crack! Outta here! Game over. The fat lady has sung.
I ran out of the garage office and screamed a few laps around house in excitement.
I might have to see if that Mac Plus is still tucked away in the attic7 the next time I visit home.
Dr. Stephen Wolfram has been collecting data about hit activity for a long time.1 More evidence that we are what we collect.
Every day—in an effort at “self awareness”—I have automated systems send me a few emails about the day before. But even though I’ve been accumulating data for years—and always meant to analyze it—I’ve never actually gotten around to doing it. But with Mathematica and the automated data analysis capabilities we just released in Wolfram|Alpha Pro, I thought now would be a good time to finally try taking a look—and to use myself as an experimental subject for studying what one might call “personal analytics”.
The image below is one of many in the full post that illustrates Wolfram’s life through data points.
This very long, anonymous answer on Quora is fascinating. Here are a couple of bullet points:
To me, the biggest misconception that non-mathematicians have about how mathematicians think is that there is some mysterious mental faculty that is used to crack a problem all at once. In reality, one can ever think only a few moves ahead, trying out possible attacks from one’s arsenal on simple examples relating to the problem, trying to establish partial results, or looking to make analogies with other ideas one understands.
You develop a strong aesthetic preference for powerful and general ideas that connect hundreds of difficult questions, as opposed to resolutions of particular puzzles. Mathematicians don’t really care about “the answer” to any particular question; even the most sought-after theorems, like Fermat’s Last Theorem are only tantalizing because their difficulty tells us that we have to develop very good tools and understand very new things to have a shot at proving them.
You are easily annoyed by imprecision in talking about the quantitative or logical. This is mostly because you are trained to quickly think about counterexamples that make an imprecise claim seem obviously false.
On the other hand, you are very comfortable with intentional imprecision or “hand-waving” in areas you know, because you know how to fill in the details.
Between the news of Houston’s death and the performed commemoration of it, in other words, less than two full days have passed. And yet the time for mourning – a mourning not necessarily of grief, but of communal nostalgia, the kind we reserve for a Jobs or a Jackson – is fading. Instead of four years or seven days, we’re giving ourselves a moment, a burst, to commiserate and commemorate before we shed our widows’ weeds and move on.
What if I told the wine bar owner that I have a great band and we are going to play at my house. I need someone to provide and pour wine while we play. I can’t pay much, just $75 and you must bring at least 25 people who are willing to pay a $10 cover charge at the door. Now wouldn’t they look at you like you are crazy? “Why would I do that” they would ask? Well because it’s great exposure for you and your wine bar. The people there would see how well you pour wine and see how good your wine is. Then they would come out to your wine bar sometime. “But I brought all the people myself, I already know them?” they would say. Well maybe you could make up some professional looking flyers, pass them out, and get people you don’t know to come on out. “But you are only paying me $75, How can I afford to make up flyers?”
You see how absurd this sounds, but musicians do this all the time.
