to set a mood: • • •
Dirty lies: how the car industry hid the truth about diesel emissions
The ‘Dieselgate’ scandal was suppressed for years – while we should have been driving electric cars.
John German had not been looking to make a splash when he commissioned an examination of pollution from diesel cars back in 2013. The exam compared what came out of their exhaust pipes, during the lab tests that were required by law, with emissions on the road under real driving conditions. German and his colleagues at the International Council on Clean Transportation (ICCT) in the US just wanted to tie up the last loose ends in a big report, and thought the research would give them something positive to say about diesel. They might even be able to offer tips to Europe from the US’s experience in getting the dirty fuel to run a little cleaner.
But that was not how it turned out. They chose a Volkswagen Jetta as their first test subject, and a VW Passat next. Regulators in California agreed to do the routine certification test for them, and the council hired researchers from West Virginia University to then drive the same cars through cities, along highways and into the mountains, using equipment that tests emissions straight from the cars’ exhausts.
It was clear right away that something was off. At first, German wondered if the cars might be malfunctioning, and he asked if a dashboard light had come on. That didn’t really make sense, though – the cars had just passed the California regulators’ test. His partners thought there might be a problem with their equipment, and they recalibrated it again and again. But the results didn’t change. Nitrogen oxide (NOx) pollution from the Jetta’s tailpipe was 15 times the allowed limit, shooting up to 35 times under some conditions; the Passat varied between five and 20 times the limit. German had been around the auto industry all his life, so he had a pretty good idea what was going on. This had to be a “defeat device” – a deliberate effort to evade the rules.
“It was just so outrageous. If they were like three to five times the standards, you could say: ‘Oh, maybe they’re having much higher NOx emissions because of the high loads,’” or some other external factor. “But when it’s 15 to 30 times the standards, there is no other explanation,” he says. “It’s a malfunction or it’s a defeat device. There’s nothing else that could possibly get anywhere close.”
German wasn’t ready to level such a serious accusation against a huge company such as Volkswagen, so he kept quiet while the research moved forward. Much later, his boss was surprised to learn how early he had suspected the truth. “He said: ‘You knew there was a defeat device? Why didn’t you tell me?’” The answer was simple. “We’re an $8m organisation. VW could have squashed us like a bug.” …
PREPARE TO SPEND A WHILE: It’s The Long Read.
The word “kludge” keeps coming up when pilots and engineers discuss Boeing’s 737 Max
NOT FOR AMATEURS
Inelegant solutions.
Again and again, in discussions of what has gone wrong with Boeing’s 737 Max plane in two deadly crashes within five months, an unusual word keeps coming up: kludge.
Merriam-Webster defines kludge—sometimes spelled kluge—as “a haphazard or makeshift solution to a problem and especially to a computer or programming problem.” Oxford defines it as, in computing, “A machine, system, or program that has been badly put together, especially a clumsy but temporarily effective solution to a particular fault or problem.”
More commonly found in 737 Max discussions on tech or pilot forums, the word has popped up in news reports, too (including a Quartz newsletter).
“My concern is that Boeing may have developed the MCAS software as a profit-driven kludge to mitigate the Max 8’s degraded flight characteristics due to the engine relocation required to maintain ground clearance,” commented Philip Wheelockon a New York Times story about the plane’s certification process this week. “Not convinced that software is an acceptable solution for an older design that has been pushed to its inherent aeronautical design limits.”
The roots of the word are possibly Scottish or Germanic, or even Danish. It appears to have come into common parlance—in the computer engineering and systems-design communities—with its use in a 1962 Datamation article by computer pioneer Jackson Granholm, who spent a large chunk of his life working for Boeing. …
Stepping Into the Uncanny, Unsettling World of Shen Yun
Does the ubiquitous dance troupe really present five thousand years of civilization reborn?
Just as it is impossible for me to articulate with any certainty the moment I entered adulthood or began to believe that human life on Earth would not last past the twenty-second century, I cannot tell you when I first became aware of Shen Yun. The most pervasive forms of local advertising often feel like this—like nursery rhymes or urban legends, or something implanted in your most tender consciousness by a social version of natural law. When Texans hear the name Jim Adler, their souls reply with “Texas Hammer.” Michiganders know that God filled the sky around the Detroit airport with clouds and with billboards for Joumana Kayrouz. New Yorkers know the Cellino & Barnes hotline better than they know their Social Security numbers. And, for many Americans who live in or around the ninety-six cities where the Shen Yun Performing Arts troupe is set to perform this year, the words “Shen Yun” conjure an indelible yet incomprehensible image: a flat, bright shade of lilac, a woman leaping in the sky with a fan-shaped white skirt and billowing pink sleeves, and the enigmatic phrase “5,000 Years of Civilization Reborn.”
Shen Yun has lived in the pink fluffy insulation of my mind for a while now. Last year, the ads were goldenrod yellow, like dehydrated urine, and they said “Reviving 5,000 Years of Civilization.” The year before that, the ads (“Experience a Divine Culture”) were green. The year before that, the Shen Yun poster featured two women dancing, wearing birthday-cake-frosting colors, and for months I sat in the subway reading but in no way processing the phrase “Absolutely the No. 1 show in the world.” These posters were so uncanny and contentless that the easiest explanation for their existence was that my brain had simply glitched and invented Shen Yun the way John Nash invented his roommate in “A Beautiful Mind.” Shen Yun was a Baader-Meinhof object: once I saw it, I started to see it everywhere. Shen Yun greeted me silently at the bus stop and loomed over highway exits, following me around on the physical plane of existence the way anything you shop for on the Internet starts to follow you around online.
Then, over the holidays, I went home to Houston, where my parents live. On Christmas Day, my dad told me that he had something special planned for the family. “It’s this show,” he said. “It’s supposed to be spectacular. It’s called Shen Yun.”
“What?!” I said.
“Mike and Lilly saw it,” my dad said. “They said it was beautiful.”
“It’s real?” I said. “What is it?”
“Oh,” my dad said. “It’s dancing. Beautiful . . . dancing. Really fabulous, traditional dancing.” …
DEGREE OF DIFFICULTY: “I was seeing a lot of search results that involved the word cult“.
4 Bizarre Ways You Can Predict The Weather (That Work)
If you grew up out in the country, you were surrounded by old-timers insisting they could magically predict the weather, usually based on some ancient rhyming phrase like “Red sky in morning, sailors take warning” or “If small is the dick, the snow will be thick.” This folksy rural wisdom dates back to a time before we had things like “science” to tell us what was coming. But sometimes the science just confirmed what those old-timers already knew. For example …
4. You Can Determine The Exact Temperature By Listening To Crickets
The Farmers’ Almanac was first published in 1818, and has a weather-predicting algorithm based on tides, astrology, and other assorted not-science. It claims that crickets can tell you how hot it is. The insects are so precise, they say, that there’s even a formula: “To figure out the exact temperature in degrees Fahrenheit, count the number of chirps in 14 seconds and add 40.” Well that’s obviously nuts. Crickets are about as good at math as they are at keeping wooden schoolboys out of the bellies of whales. How the hell would a cricket even understand the concept of a numbered and quantified temperature?
The Arrhenius equation, that’s how. Yep, this absolutely works. The guiding science behind turtle heartbeats and firefly butt glows, the Arrhenius equation states that the rate of a chemical reaction “depends on the exponential of a constant quantity, – Ea/R, divided by the absolute temperature.” Which, for anyone who doesn’t speak goddamn nerd, means that the warmer it gets, the more crickets chirp, down to the exact degree.
This cricket math is so exact, in fact, that it’s straight up science law. First proposed in 1897, Dolbear’s law laid down the formula above. Also, let’s give credit to the first man or woman who got bored enough to notice this. …
How I Almost Became Tomi Lahren
If my conscience hadn’t stopped me, I could’ve become another bitchy blonde right-wing pundit.
The first time I realized I was a brand was in 1998. It was after I filmed the MTV reality show, Road Rules (or as I like to call it, The Wheel World). MTV had partnered with a company and they wanted to use me as the voice of the product. I was asked to read a first person script that said I was from a “small town in Pennsylvania.” Problem was, I’m not from a small town in Pennsylvania. I’m from Pittsburgh, and while it sometimes feels like a small town, it certainly doesn’t match the image they were trying to convey. When I mentioned the inaccuracy, they said, “It doesn’t matter as long as people think you’re from a small town. It makes you more relatable. We just need you to say the line.” So I did.
I thought the script was supposed to be about Susie, the person, but it was actually about Susie, the brand. The blonde, naive, virginal Christian character they had cast couldn’t be from a city. She had to be from a small town. And MTV wasn’t about to let facts get in the way of a stereotype.
Because I was on a reality show before the genre’s boom, I bought into the notion that the shows were about real, if highly edited, people. They aren’t. They’re about brands. People are complicated, but brands are simple. Follow the proverbial script, and you can make money. And I did for a while as I continued to appear on the shows as a means of bankrolling my education.
My character changed over time in many subtle ways, but this mattered less in a post-Survivor reality world in which the producers emphasized wild stunts over character development. In this changed context, I proved to be a successful player, but all my successes came before online social media fandom for The Challenge had truly exploded (roughly around the time stories like this longread in BuzzFeed, for which I was interviewed, began appearing). In other words, I was a winner, but not quite a winning brand. …
The Fertility Doctor’s Secret
Donald Cline must have thought no one would ever know. Then DNA testing came along.
The first Facebook message arrived when Heather Woock was packing for vacation, in August 2017. It was from a stranger claiming to be her half sibling. She assumed the message was some kind of scam; her parents had never told her she might have siblings. But the message contained one detail that spooked her. The sender mentioned a doctor, Donald Cline. Woock knew that name; her mother had gone to Cline for fertility treatments before she was born. Had this person somehow gotten her mother’s medical history?
Her mom said not to worry. So Woock, who is 33 and lives just outside Indianapolis, flew to the West Coast for her vacation. She got a couple more messages from other supposed half siblings while she was away. Their persistence was strange. But then her phone broke, and she spent the next week and a half outdoors in Seattle and Vancouver, blissfully disconnected.
Her mom said not to worry. So Woock, who is 33 and lives just outside Indianapolis, flew to the West Coast for her vacation. She got a couple more messages from other supposed half siblings while she was away. Their persistence was strange. But then her phone broke, and she spent the next week and a half outdoors in Seattle and Vancouver, blissfully disconnected.
According to her DNA, Woock, too, was one of his children. …
Video Goodnesses
and not-so-goodnesses
and not-so-goodnesses
Bill recaps the top stories of the week, including the release of the Mueller Report and President Trump’s feud with deceased Senator John McCain.
In his editorial New Rule, Bill calls on companies to stop making “upgrades” to popular products that nobody wants, needs, or likes.
THANKS to HBO and Real Time with Bill Maher for making this program available on YouTube.
Donald Trump’s ambitious project to beef up barriers at the Mexican border hits a major snag in Tijuana, where residents have been stealing razor wire from border fencing.
THANKS to Comedy Central and The Daily Show with Trevor Noah for making this program available on YouTube.
久しぶりに牛さんで寛ぐまる。Maru loves the cow!
FINALLY . . .
Logan Paul’s satirical flat Earth doc gets to the heart of YouTube’s recommendation issue
The real time effect of a recommendation algorithm at play.
Logan Paul’s 50-minute satirical documentary exploring flat earth conspiracy theories demonstrates how someone open to an idea can become indoctrinated into believing something that isn’t real. Paul’s video is entirely facetious, but the underlying parallels between his journey into flat earth conspiracy theories and the way conspiracies spread on YouTube isn’t.
The majority of Paul’s video takes place at the Flat Earth International Conference, a convention hosted by Robbie Davidson, a self-described “enclosed creationist,” who believes God created a flat earth. At the bequest of his best friend, Paul goes around from booth to booth, talking to theorists about their beliefs. He begins his tour of the convention floor mocking their theories, but by the end of the first day — and a conversation with a charismatic Davidson — finds himself questioning everything. By the very end of the documentary, after “falling in love” with a flat earth theorist and “coming out of the flat earth closet,” Paul admits that the conspiracy is the “stupidest thing” he’s ever heard.
Watching Paul absorb information is like seeing YouTube’s recommendation algorithm in real time. He starts out learning about flat earth theories as entertainment, but soon, he’s inundated with conspiratorial beliefs, with no experts in sight. Paul traveled to Colorado for the convention, but all of the information presented is easily found on YouTube. Davidson’s channel dedicated to promoting flat earth conspiracy videos has more than 130,000 subscribers, and it recommends other conspiracy theorists who were present at the convention.
YouTube has been accused of being a source of radicalization through spread of misinformation. The company has started to address the spread by instituting fact boxes and preventing some videos from appearing in search, but popular videos can still send people down a rabbit hole of conspiracies. …
Ed. More tomorrow? Probably. Possibly. Maybe. Not?