Nautilus Magazine: Famous For Being Indianapolis

The same is true of cities. San Francisco and Boston have natural harbors, and New York is built on the Hudson, but you don’t need good geology to attain geographic celebrity. Indianapolis, for instance, is the metropolitan equivalent of Kim Kardashian. Just as Kardashian can’t act in the traditional sense, the nation’s 13th most populous city is devoid of conventional geographic merits, such as a major waterway or safe harbor. The city came into prominence for reasons nobody could have predicted, any more than Moshe Adler could have guessed that he was describing the future life of Kim Kardashian. Famous for being famous, Indianapolis provides an opportunity to appreciate why cities in general are so special. [...]

Of course the former Fall Creek settlement also called for a grand new plan. To lay out the town, the legislature appointed Alexander Ralston, who’d previously assisted Pierre L’Enfant to design Washington D.C. As L’Enfant had planned D.C. to resemble Versailles, Ralston planned Indianapolis to resemble Washington. Four avenues radiated from a central circle, intersecting a grid of 18 streets at a 90-degree diagonal. One of these, named in honor of George Washington, was designated to convey the new National Road from Cumberland, Md., through the middle of town. [...]

In 1968, Andy Warhol famously predicted that in the future everyone would be famous for 15 minutes. Last year some researchers at McGill University and Stony Brook University decided to find out if he was right. To rigorously test whether fame is fleeting, they compiled a database of approximately 100,000 names appearing in 2,200 English-language newspapers between 2004 and 2009 and looked for patterns of recurrence over that five-year period. They also looked at patterns in The New York Times between 1988 and 2008. What they found in both cases is that the famous stay famous. For instance, 96 percent of names with 100 or more mentions were already garnering newspaper attention three years before reaching 100 mentions per year. According to co-author Eran Shor, “even the Kim Kardashians of this world stay famous for a long time. It doesn’t come and go.” In that respect, fame (even in the realm of tabloid celebrity) is equivalent to other systems in which status is extremely pronounced, from the military to the classical musical canon. Just as Moshe Adler argued in the ’80s, there’s a positive feedback loop that keeps on looping, ensuring a few big winners and many, many losers.

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The Conversation: Are our busy doctors and nurses losing empathy for patients?

Empathy is different to sympathy which is described as feeling sorry for another person. This does not require us to understand the other person’s point of view, but is an automatic, emotional response. In health care, feeling sympathy for another person can overwhelm us with sorrow and often preclude us from helping.

In recent times, poor communication, including lack of empathetic and caring behaviours, has resulted in an increasing number of complaints against health professionals in Australia.

Shocking cases of maltreatment at a United Kingdom public hospital between 2005 and 2009 reveal the extreme consequences of negligence, poor communication and lack of empathy in health care. Incidents ranged from patients being forced to drink from flower vases to lying in their own excrement. More than 300 deaths were directly linked to this neglect. [...]

Technology has greatly contributed to health professionals’ diminishing levels of empathy.

It has come at the cost of changing the way doctors and nurses interact with their patients. Because there are fewer opportunities for direct patient contact, it hinders the ability to develop a rapport with patients, monitor their non-verbal communication and elicit feedback on the interaction. [...]

The disruptiveness of technology may also be a factor affecting the ability of nurses and doctors to be empathetic and compassionate. Technology encourages multitasking, which is good for efficiency, but can distract health care professionals from important interpersonal interaction with patients.

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Quartz: A strange new theory may finally solve the mystery of an “alien megastructure” that has confounded scientists for months

What are these patterns? Between 1890 and 1989, the mystery star lost about 14% of its brightness. In cosmological terms, that’s far too quick for any known natural dimming. Stranger still, over the few years before 2011, the Kepler space telescope caught the light from the star dipping for periods of just a few days, some times by as much as 22%. [...]

Brian Metzger of Columbia University and his colleagues have instead put up the planet-gobbling theory. Planets don’t usually fall into their stars, but one could if, say, a large body like a comet knocked the planet out of its orbit and sent it to its doom. They reason that when a star swallows something as large as a planet, for a cosmologically short period, between 200 years and 10,000 years, its brightness increases as it burns away the planet’s matter. Then it would decline again. So if we happen to have started watching the star towards the end of such a period, it might explain the 14% fall in brightness over 100 years.

Also, an eaten-up planet could leave behind large debris, such as its moon or large pieces of the planet that for some reason weren’t sucked in. These large bodies could be passing in front of the star in orbit, blocking some of its light and causing the brief dips seen by the Kepler space telescope.

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Foreign Policy: Leftie Germans for … Merkel?

According to Der Tagesspiegel on Thursday, 20 percent of Germans are considering voting for the center-right CDU/CSU for the first time in this year’s elections. Why? For 19.1 percent of Green Party and 11 percent of SDP voters considering the switch, the reason is the woman known as Mutti.

With a center-left SDP that many think has no chance of winning even by forming a coalition, a rising far-right, a populist far-left, and identity as the central issue for German politics and people, for many, Merkel is not one more choice. She’s the only choice.

Left-leaning Germans aren’t running down the street proclaiming their allegiance to a woman whose party they’ve long opposed. Raphael Peter, a young German in Marburg, says that even though he considers Merkel “the one chance we have,” he still won’t vote for her, though he understands why other left-leaning voters would. “Many are disappointed with the Social Democrats, the Green Party is caught up in discussions on how to react, the Liberal Party is trying to reinvent themselves, and the Left Party is torn apart to some extent,” he explained to Foreign Policy. But he still isn’t sure how he, as a left-leaning German, should vote. [...]

Indeed, the chance for a coalition — and the structure of the German political system — is one reason that Merkel has gained support from the center left. Some voters see her as having moved the party more to the middle. And while that means she’s facing the threat of defection from the Christian Social Union — Bavaria’s variant of the CDU, more conservative and arguably nativist than the CDU — it also means she’s made the CDU a more palatable option for those who couldn’t imagine voting for it 10 years ago.

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The Washington Post: Japan’s trains are in a league of their own. Japan’s subculture of train fanatics is no different.

This country, where a 20-second delay leads to profuse apologies on the platforms and conductors bow to passengers as they enter the train car, has taken train nerd-dom to a new level.

Sure, there are the vanilla trainspotters who take photos of various trains around the country. They’re called tori-tetsu. (Tori means to take, and tetsu means train.)

But there are also nori-tetsu, people who enjoy traveling on trains; yomi-tetsu, those who love to read about trains, especially train schedules; oto-tetsu, the people who record the sound of trains; sharyo-tetsu, fans of train design; eki-tetsu, people who study stations; and even ekiben-tetsu, aficionados of the exquisite bento lunchboxes sold at stations.  [...]

Take Tetsuya Suzuki, a 48-year-old yomi-tetsu who has more than 660 volumes of train timetable books dating back to April 1980. He uses the latest edition — yes, Japan still prints phone-book-size schedules — to map out imaginary journeys just for fun. [...]

In Japan, there are the famous bullet trains that whiz the length of the country in about the same time it takes Amtrak to get from the District to New York, and the slightly slower but perfectly punctual commuter trains. But there are the special trains: the retro, 1950s-style cars, the  cars festooned with leaves in fall or cartoon characters like Hello Kitty and Pokémon, the trains with indoor playrooms or foot spas. 

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Atlas Obscura: The World's Most Beautiful and Unusual Chess Sets

In 1923, the year after the founding of the Soviet Union, the Lomonosov Porcelain Factory in Petrograd (now St. Petersburg) produced a unique chess set. Since originating in sixth-century India, chess designs had been inspired by military battles, royalty, even nature; now, the inspiration was ideology.

The chess set produced in Lomonosov had two very distinct sides. For the pieces in white, the king is a skeleton, wielding a femur bone as a scepter. The queen unashamedly displays an abundance of riches. The bishops are the tsar’s imperial guards, and the pawns are bound in chains. These are the pieces for the capitalist side.

The communist side—in red, naturally—is led by the king, who is a blacksmith, and queen, who carries wheat. The pawns are female farm workers and the bishops, red army colonels. The message wasn’t subtle, but it was evidently popular: the Communist Propaganda Set became one of the most copied in the world.

This extraordinary set is just one example of the designs featured in Master Works: Rare and Beautiful Chess Sets. As the book shows, even with the apparent limitations of structure—32 pieces across 64 squares—there is capacity for unusual and inspired design. 

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Al Jazeera: Camerawoman Petra Laszlo sentenced for kicking refugees

A Hungarian camerawoman who caused global outrage after being filmed kicking and tripping up refugees near the country's border with Serbia has been sentenced to three years' probation for disorderly conduct.

Petra Laszlo, who appeared via video link at a court in the southern city of Szeged on Thursday, mounted a tearful defence and said she would appeal. [...]

Judge Illes Nanasi said Laszlo's behaviour "ran counter to societal norms" and said the facts of the case did not support her self-defence claim. [...]

Laszlo, who had earlier said she would sue one of the refugees she tripped, was fired from her job at N1TV, a private right-wing television station in Hungary.

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Al Jazeera: How far is Russia willing to go in Syria?

Russia has arguably sought a political settlement from the outset of its military intervention in Syria as a means both of securing a return on its investment in the Assad regime and of consolidating its claim to global power status. With Turkey now on board and bringing most of Syria's political and armed opposition with it, the main obstacle to Russian aims is the Assad regime and, behind it, Iran.

Visibly buoyed by its success in taking full control of Aleppo, the regime appears determined to subdue remaining opposition enclaves around Damascus. This prompted the armed opposition groups that had signed on to the latest ceasefire to announce it at an end on January 9, 2017. For its part, Iran refrained from sponsoring the ceasefire, although it had joined Russia and Turkey just nine days earlier in the "Moscow Declaration" calling for a truce and peace talks. [...]

But Russia has signalled a potentially important shift simply by endorsing the idea of enforcement, as well as agreeing to joint monitoring on the ground by Turkish and Russian observers. Its air strikes supporting the Turkish-backed Euphrates Shield force battling the Islamic State in al-Bab on December 30, 2016, were also significant: although clearly intended as a positive gesture towards Turkey, they are the only instance in the entire Syrian conflict of direct air support by any power for the armed opposition.

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