Новости за 01.08.2016

Our built world is full of placebo buttons whose purpose is to absorb our impatience and give us an illusory sense of control. Crosswalk buttons to change traffic lights in Manhattan are a prime example: “Citywide, there are around 100 crosswalk buttons that still work in NYC but close to 1,000 more that do nothing at all.” Around 90% of office thermostats are “non-functional”, just there to be fiddled with. Some are connected to noise generators which simulate the hum of a fan

Workers talk about life in Chinese factories. “Today’s factories are more humane than before. The first reason is that the government changed a bit. Second, there’s been some changes in publicizing legal knowledge. Third, workers are starting to wake up. In the past there were bosses who would beat workers, you would see this quite often, but in the end they learned that it would only come back to them: when they came out of the factory, they would be attacked by gangsters”

The practical and moral arguments for legalising drugs in sport. “With doping bans, we’re not just comparing effort, we’re comparing luck. Having the good luck to inherit good genes, and to be born into a wealthy, sports-oriented family. Having access to the best coaches. An enormous amount of accomplishment is due to those factors. Doping could be seen as a way of levelling this playing field. Why not let people who are not so lucky in the game of genetic roulette dope?”

The American Civil War was a catastrophe for the states, and a windfall for their trading rivals. “It took just a couple of weeks for farmers the world over to realize the scope of the bounty that had landed in their lap. From Australia and India to the West Indies they ditched wheat and other food staples and hastily planted up their fields with cotton”. In this new trade war, Egypt won a Pyrrhic victory. It became so prosperous, as the world’s top cotton exporter, that the British colonised it

The concept of the “individual” in biology is quite different from our everyday use of the term. For biologists, the individual is the “unit of selection” or “replicator”. Charles Darwin argued that a beehive was an individual because it pursued a unitary interest; Richard Dawkins follows the same logic in The Selfish Gene. For biologists, the world’s largest organism is not the blue whale, but a fungus in Oregon whose filaments extend more than three kilometres underground

A community college dean visits Stanford, and loves the place — then tries to imagine what his own college could do with a fraction of Stanford’s endowment. “Stanford has about 7,000 under­graduates and about 8,000 grad students. Brookdale has about 13,000 students. We could go to free for every student, for less than a twentieth of Stanford’s annual rentier income. It would affect roughly the same number of people. The key difference is that the Brookdale students have fewer other options”

Market research report on Saudi Arabian consumer culture. “The call to prayer, athan, challenges the seamless retail experience. Although the time spent praying is only 3 to 6 minutes (double for someone who is devout), shops close for 15 to 30 minutes before and after prayers”. For the male, the car is the great enabler; for the female, it is the mobile telephone. Skype is “acceptable for mixed communication when you’re about to get married”. (A big PDF, but worth the inconvenience)

Intriguing account of the Frankfurt School, where Richard Sorge and Georg Lukács rubbed shoulders with Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin between the world wars. Were ever so many great minds combined to so little outward effect? They debated nuances in Marx and Freud while Europe descended into bar­barism. Sorge was the outlier. He wanted to change the world, not merely to understand it. He spied for the Soviet Union, stole Japan’s wartime secrets, and was hanged in Tokyo