This year sees the 500th anniversary of the moment when Martin Luther sparked the Reformation by - tradition has it - nailing his 95 theses to a church door in Wittenberg. Ernie Rea and guests discuss what led Luther to take this step, how his thought and personality affected the course of the Reformation and whether - were he to walk into the 21st century - he might actually find himself to be a good Catholic.
10 January 2017
The School of Life: The Purpose of Friendship
Our desire to build good and lasting friendships is often undermined by a lack of focus on what friendship should really be about. Getting clear about what friendship is for isn’t cynical; it provides the foundation for genuine bonds.
Motherboard: Before There Was Netflix, Hong Kong Had the First On-Demand Streaming Service
The reason for this was that too many people were skeptical about whether such a service was still necessary. It absolutely, totally is, and I’ll give you one reason why: Netflix’s DVD service has roughly 93,000 options, while its streaming service (between shows and movies) has fewer than 8,000 options—ensuring that DVDs will have a reason to exist for quite a while.
Why such a big difference? Well, it’s because running a streaming service and sussing out the contracts is really freaking hard. (Hollywood is a tough negotiator.) And, by the way, Netflix wasn’t the first to do video-on-demand in this way. [...]
Among the reasons the telecom firm was so willing to spend $200 million to test the idea: The autonomous territory has one of the world’s highest per-capita incomes; the relatively small size of the region made it easy to cover the territory with fiber-optic cable; and consumers in Hong Kong had a clear taste for both technology and entertainment. Cable television, which only came to Hong Kong in 1993, had saturated 25 percent of the market at the time iTV launched. No matter the case, making iTV happen wasn’t cheap: The company reportedly invested $1.5 billion in the entire project before it had served a single customer.
The piece, featuring an interview from Hongkong Telecom’s Lo, spoke of the concept (already being tested in trials at the time of the piece) in bold terms, including implying that the set-top box would bring impressive levels of interactivity to homes. Banking services were planned. In other words, this wasn’t just a prototype for Netflix, which wasn’t even mailing DVDs by this point, but a juiced-up WebTV.
Motherboard: Six Men Spent 520 Days Locked in a Room to See If We Could Live on Mars
As it turns out, one needn’t travel to the endless darkness of Antarctica in order to carry out a space analog study on isolation. In fact, the longest running isolation study took place in a warehouse in the middle of the 8th largest city in the world. For 520 days, six test subjects from Russia, France, Italy, and China were locked in a module in Moscow to test the effects of isolation on small group dynamics and individual psychology. [...]
Diego Urbina, an engineer from Italy, was one of these finalists, and on June 3, 2010, he was locked in the Russian module with five other crew members. They would have little contact with the outside world, with the exception of placing urine and blood samples through a hatch in the front door for the mission directors. For the first and last month of the simulation, the crew was allotted radio contact with mission control and video messages, which became subject to increasing delay as the crew “approached” Mars.
Outside of that, there was no internet, no phone calls, and a twice-a-day file upload that could be forwarded by mission support to the participants’ families. [...]
Perhaps one of the most successful aspects of the simulation were a number of dietary experiments sponsored by Erlangen University. Producing accurate results from experiments which involve manipulating subjects’ diets is often very difficult as it usually requires weeks of monitoring eating habits and extensive follow-up testing, which can mean that the data derived from these experiments is often unreliable. This is where Mars500 participants were able to offer some solutions: their inability to leave the module provided a perfect sample group for monitoring the effects of dietary manipulation.
The Conversation: The archaeology of polite society
Although they are ubiquitous, Japanese people rarely notice the grooved lines on their pavements. Every footpath that is wide enough seems to have these extruding lines. They inhibit the smooth movement of prams, wheelchairs and trolleys. In the rain or snow, they can be a hazard for the cyclists who share pavements with pedestrians. They are expensive to maintain.
But these lines serve a purpose. With their prominently raised grooves they provide a means for blind people to traverse the city. They can feel these footpath guides with their feet or follow them with walking canes.
These pavement guides are symbols of a polite society – material evidence of a culture that accepts small inconveniences to the majority to help a few. What other material manifestations of these values exist in Japan? [...]
What is politeness in Japan? It is caring for the safety and convenience of others, guiding people to avoid unpleasant surprises and helping others to keep themselves, their loved ones and their possessions clean. The material world of Japan reflects and reinforces these values.
Slate: Should a Greek Island Reconstruct One of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World?
Now a team of young European architects has concocted an immodest proposal to resurrect a supersized 21st-century version of the original statue, considered one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.
The team behind the Colossus of Rhodes Project developed the idea in the aftermath of Greece’s ongoing economic crisis as a way “to make Rhodes a new point of reference for the whole world, to follow a new path and find a solution to the issues that caused such a big sorrow to thousands of people, forced to flee abroad,” they write in a mission statement.
They aren’t seeking to copy the original, they say, but to create jobs to help prop up the faltering Greek economy and national spirit with a 500-foot-tall sustainable structure covered in solar panels and built to withstand earthquakes. If constructed, it would also serve as a cultural center, library, exhibition hall, and a lighthouse.
They argue that the project, which they estimate would cost up to $283 million, a sum they believe could be raised by private investments or international crowdfunding, would create jobs and revenue once built by attracting visitors that would lengthen Rhodes’ tourist season.
CityLab: Can Sharing Rides Cut NYC's Fleet of 14,000 Taxis to 3,000?
There are nearly 14,000 taxis in New York City, and sometimes that doesn’t seem like enough. But in a new study from MIT, researchers suggest that just 3,000 ride-sharing vehicles—be it a traditional taxi, an Uber/Lyft car, or a future autonomous robo-cab—could do the same job if each accepted up to four passengers. And if all passengers were willing to share their rides with nine other strangers in return for less traffic and lower cost, the city would need just 2,000 of such vehicles. [...]
MIT’s “secret sauce,” as lead researcher Daniela Rus puts it in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is an algorithm her team developed to find the most efficient routes for carpooling vehicles to pick up and ferry multiple passengers to their destinations in a single trip. It first lays out all the requests and available vehicles on a map in real time. Then it analyzes all possible trip combinations to find the best one before assigning passengers each vehicle. If a new request appears during the initial trip, the system calculates whether a cab should pick up that new party. It will also send idling cars to places with high demand based on historical information. [...]
While the math might check out, David King, a urban planning professor at Arizona State University, is doubtful that the numbers would play out that dramatically in the real world—if they play out at all. For starters, the researchers assume that each taxi trip in that dataset carries one passenger (the data doesn’t specify this) when in reality, a lot of cabs are already shared by a party of multiple passengers. “Families get in them, or a couple is going out to dinner, so it’s not just a matter of once this vehicle picks up Person 1, it can then pick up Persons 2, 3, 4, and 5,” because the first party may have already filled up half of the seats, he says. His own research indicates that the average occupancy number is 1.6, which means the 430,000 trips made in one day during that week in 2013 could have carried as many as 688,000 passengers. (For her part, Rus says the parameters of the algorithm can be adjusted and would be tested over time to find that optimal solution.)
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