The Theory of Inflation
Astronomers have found evidence to support the theory of inflation, which explains how the universe expanded so uniformly and so quickly in the instant after the Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago.
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Back in 2008, I created a theory called the Guitar Hero Curve of Impressiveness. It holds that others’ admiration for your gaming skills follows a bell curve: rising, rising, rising — until it crests over into a loathsome drop.
At some point, it becomes clear the time investment required by your mastery could have been better spent elsewhere. Attention shifts from your skill to the decisions that allowed you to attain that skill. Reactions change from “Wow, you’re good at that” to “Wow, you do not manage your life well.”
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The judge, Sterling Johnson Jr., sent staff members to visit several Brooklyn businesses that were sued by Mike Costello, a paraplegic man, and found that most if not all were never made more accessible to disabled people.
The judge used the observation as part of a strident ruling last year denying more than $15,000 in legal fees to Mr. Costello’s lawyers, Ben-Zion Bradley Weitz and Adam Shore, finding that their lawsuits did nothing to ensure that Mr. Costello or any other disabled person had better access to the businesses.
But this week the appellate court reversed Judge Johnson’s decision and took the rare move of ordering that the case be assigned to a different judge. The appellate panel found that while Judge Johnson may have been correct in his observations that the businesses had not been repaired, and while most of the arguments in the appeal “lack merit,” judges are not permitted to observe, or take “judicial notice,” of facts that are subject to dispute.
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If Amazon can already study your history, predict your purchases and ship them before you even place an order – the online retailer’s “anticipatory shipping” technique – imagine what predictions other data-heavy companies could make.
For example, in a year or two, Google will be present in your car (thanks to its self-driving vehicles but also to the Android operating system that powers other models); in your bedroom (thanks to its acquisition of Nest, which manufactures smart thermostats and smoke detectors); in your pocket (through Android-powered smartphones); and in your entire visual field (via Google Glass, the wearable camera and screen).
In knowing your routes, your daily patterns and your contacts, Google has a far better picture of risk – for example, the odds that you will have an accident or default on a mortgage – than any insurance company or bank. And, in having unmediated access to you via your phone, Google can also sell you insurance or make you an offer for your personal data on the go, using a price point that you are most likely to accept.
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The concentration of income and wealth is deepening around the world, driven by more than rising paychecks for top American financiers and chief executives. Returns to invested capital are outstripping economic growth across advanced countries, directing a growing share of economic rewards into the hands of the wealthy.
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The most water-thirsty “crops” are industrially produced meat and dairy and the food needed to sustain them. Livestock guzzle water and produce a double-digit percentage of our greenhouse gases. Other crops, like almonds (California grows 82 percent of the world’s supply), are mostly exported.
But the state can’t dictate what landowners grow. (We can help by eating fewer animal products.) It can, however, price water more fairly and make profligate water use unprofitable.
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OVER the next decade, approximately five billion people will become connected to the Internet. The biggest increases will be in societies that, according to the human rights group Freedom House, are severely censored: places where clicking on an objectionable article can get your entire extended family thrown in prison, or worse.
The details aren’t pretty. In Russia, the government has blocked tens of thousands of dissident sites; at times, all WordPress blogs and Russian Wikipedia have been blocked. In Vietnam, a new law called Decree 72 makes it illegal to digitally distribute content that opposes the government, or even to share news stories on social media. And in Pakistan, sites that were available only two years ago — like Tumblr, Wikipedia and YouTube — are increasingly replaced by unconvincing messages to “Surf Safely.”
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Americans have lost faith in the high politics of global affairs. They have lost faith in the idea that American political and military institutions can do much to shape the world. American opinion is marked by an amazing sense of limitation — that there are severe restrictions on what political and military efforts can do.
This sense of limits is shared equally among Democrats and Republicans, polls show. There has been surprisingly little outcry against the proposed defense cuts, which would reduce the size of the U.S. Army to its lowest levels since 1940. That’s because people are no longer sure military might gets you very much.
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There’s an argument to be made that T-Pain should have just stopped using Auto-Tune and figured out some other way to stand out—that, sometimes, it’s worth listening to the haters. But what has made T-Pain most resentful since his fall from the top was seeing certain artists use Auto-Tune and not get criticized; rather, they were celebrated as innovators in a way that T-Pain never was. Chief among these were Kanye West, who employed Auto-Tune to great acclaim on his 2008 album, “808s and Heartbreaks,” and, more recently, the Atlanta-based rapper/singer Future, whose use of Auto-Tune has won him the adoration of critics as well as incredible success on the charts.
In an interview this past January with Vladimir Lyubovny, a d.j. whose popular YouTube channel VladTV is sort of like rap’s “Larry King Live,” T-Pain talked about being brought in as a consultant during the recording of “808s and Heartbreaks.” At one point during the session, Kanye wrote a song about how dumb all of T-Pain’s ideas were. He then proceeded, T-Pain said, to make “everybody in the studio join in with him to sing, like, ‘T-Pain’s shit is weak.’ ” In the same interview, T-Pain recalled encountering Future’s brother at a Thanksgiving fundraiser and telling him he was eager to collaborate with Future. But instead of offering to pass on the message, the guy looked at T-Pain and said to him, “My brother would never fucking work with you. Fuck you and everything you stand for.”
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The growing intellectual currency of television has altered the cultural conversation in fundamental ways. Water cooler chatter is now a high-minded pursuit, not just a way to pass the time at work. The three-camera sitcom with a laugh track has been replaced by television shows that are much more like books — intricate narratives full of text, subtext and clues.
On the sidelines of the children’s soccer game, or at dinner with friends, you can set your watch on how long it takes before everyone finds a show in common. In the short span of five years, table talk has shifted, at least among the people I socialize with, from books and movies to television. The idiot box gained heft and intellectual credibility to the point where you seem dumb if you are not watching it.
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shaun james bockert 