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A Little Perspective: Finding your art double and hops on Mars

 
Published Jan. 18, 2018

The Google Arts and Culture app became the most downloaded mobile app last weekend, enabling users to compare a selfie to a database of art and find the closest match. Art aficionados, dabblers, narcissists and soul searchers pondering a cosmic connection to distant humans have been searching for their art twins, a long-gone, sometimes fictional or unknown doppelgänger encased in oil, sculpture or ceramics. Some of them did so on their own, accidentally. Ross W. Duffin was wandering through a museum in Pasadena, Calif., last summer when he paused before a 17th-century painting of a bearded warrior in armor. "I thought, 'Wow, that is really funny. He looks just like me,' " Duffin recalled.

Duffin had found his art twin. Now millions of people have discovered a new way to interact with art — something that has exploded in popularity in recent weeks thanks to a new feature in a Google museums app. As anyone who regularly looks at a social media feed knows by now, millions more need never leave home or cross a border to find that uniquely familiar face on some obscure etching. They just upload a selfie and let technology do the sleuthing.

The app was available in 2015, but its arts matching feature was introduced in mid-December. Its popularity has surged, and Instagram, Twitter and YouTube users have widely shared photos of both their art twins and those of celebrities, from William Shatner to Taylor Swift. Google estimates more than 20 million selfies have been uploaded using the new feature.

If human beings are obsessed with selfies, then the Google Arts and Culture app is the addiction's enabler for the art world. But the app has mixed results, particularly when it comes to race, gender and age. "My grandmother got Ronald Reagan's presidential portrait," said Patrick Lenihan, a spokesman for Google.

Christine Hauser, New York Times

It's not Apple's fault that you feel enslaved by your phone. But the company that gave the world the modern smartphone has a perfect opportunity this year to create a brave and groundbreaking new take on that device: a phone that encourages you to use it more thoughtfully, more deliberately — and a lot less.

If Apple took on tech addiction, it would probably do an elegant job of addressing the problem. Apple could curb some of the worst excesses in how apps monitor and notify you to keep you hooked (as it has done, for instance, by allowing ad blockers in its mobile devices). And because other smartphone makers tend to copy Apple's best inventions, whatever it did to curb our dependence on our phones would be widely emulated.

For starters, Apple could give people a lot more feedback about how they're using their devices. Imagine if, once a week, your phone gave you a report on how you spent your time, similar to how your activity tracker tells you how sedentary you were last week. It could also needle you: "Farhad, you spent half your week scrolling through Twitter. Do you really feel proud of that?" It could offer to help: "If I notice you spending too much time on Snapchat next week, would you like me to remind you?"

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Another idea is to let you impose more fine-grained controls over notifications. Today, when you let an app send you mobile alerts, it's usually an all-or-nothing proposition — you say yes to letting it buzz you, and suddenly it's buzzing you all the time.

Done right, a full-fledged campaign pushing the benefits of a more deliberative approach to tech wouldn't come off as self-interest, but in keeping with Apple's best vision of itself — as a company that looks out for the interests of humanity in an otherwise cold and sometimes inhumane industry.

Farhad Manjoo, New York Times

For the first time in history, more people suffer from eating too many calories than too few. Improving global health is no longer primarily about combating infectious diseases. We now need to address the enormous and growing health and economic burden of noncommunicable diseases — cancer, cardiovascular disease, chronic lung disease and diabetes — in lower- and middle-income countries. The statistics on the big three are staggering:

• Tobacco use contributes to 7 million deaths annually.

• Obesity contributes to 4 million deaths annually.

• Alcohol consumption contributes to 3.3 million deaths annually.

Taxes are underused, yet we know they work for two important reasons. First, prices on goods matter, especially to the younger and poorer populations. People, particularly the poor, will buy less if it's more expensive. Second, taxes on certain goods can be educative and signal disapproval. Nothing illustrates this more than gains we have seen from taxing tobacco over the past 50 years in our country and others.

Behavioral economic considerations have indicated that taxes are more potent than we otherwise may have supposed. Beyond the direct effects of higher prices in discouraging consumption, taxes send a signal of social disapproval. No one wants to be the only one eating dessert after a group restaurant meal. So through social multipliers, higher taxes discourage emulation of risky behaviors.

Taxes are what makes a government function. Taxing "bads" like tobacco and sugar over "goods" like savings and income is as close to a free lunch as you can get in economics.

Lawrence Summers, former Treasury secretary, in the Washington Post

Hops — the flowers used to add a pleasant bitterness to beer — grow well in Martian soil. "I don't know if it's a practical plant, but it's doing fairly well," said Edward F. Guinan, a professor of astronomy and astrophysics at Villanova University. Last semester, 25 students took Guinan's class on astrobiology, about the possibility of life elsewhere in the universe.

For the laboratory part of the course, the students became farmers, experimenting to see which crops might grow in Martian soil and feed future travelers there. Based on measurements taken by probes on Mars of its soil, scientists have come up with a reasonably good reproduction on Earth — crushed basalt from an ancient volcano in the Mojave Desert. Martian soil is very dense and dries out quickly. For the experiments, the students had a small patch of a greenhouse, with a mesh screen reducing the sunlight to mimic Mars' greater distance from the sun.

For the most part, the students chose practical, nutritious plants like soy beans and kale in addition to potatoes. And one group chose hops. "Because they're students," Guinan said. "Martian beer."

Kenneth Chang, New York Times