Spot the sniper

Given the unbelievable opening weekend box office of American Sniper, this photo series titled Camouflage is timely. Simon Menner worked with German military to stage scenes in which a sniper or soldier camouflages themselves. Can you spot the sniper in these without any clues? In every photo, the sniper is taking aim at the viewer/camera.

If you click through to Menner's site you get clues to help you find the sniper, but even with those I really couldn't spot them that cleanly. The most visible element is usually the round end of the rifle barrel, but without a red circle over them I have no idea if I've spotted the right thing.

In the movies like Blackhat or American Sniper, the telltale giveaway is always a brief flare when the sun hits the scope on the rifle or binoculars, but without that I have no idea how you spot them short of superhuman vision.

Element of smart teams

Instead, the smartest teams were distinguished by three characteristics.

First, their members contributed more equally to the team’s discussions, rather than letting one or two people dominate the group.

Second, their members scored higher on a test called Reading the Mind in the Eyes, which measures how well people can read complex emotional states from images of faces with only the eyes visible.

Finally, teams with more women outperformed teams with more men. Indeed, it appeared that it was not “diversity” (having equal numbers of men and women) that mattered for a team’s intelligence, but simply having more women. This last effect, however, was partly explained by the fact that women, on average, were better at “mindreading” than men.

Results from a study of what makes some teams smarter than others.

The first feels intuitive; one thing that distinguishes good leaders, it's been said, is getting the most from a team, drawing out dissenting views from those who might otherwise be silenced by group dynamics.

The other two elements are more intriguing. I wish the article spent more time discussing how and why those two contributed to a team's superior performance. Is it in maximizing effort from everyone involved? Improved teamwork? Increased comfort in dissent or just greater honesty in general?

SimCity's homelessness problem

SimCity's homeless people are represented as yellow, two-dimensional, ungendered figures with bags in tow. Their presence makes SimCity residents unhappy, and reduces land value. Like many other players, Bittanti discovered the online discussions when he was searching for a way to deal with them.

At first, players wondered if they were having so much problems with the homeless in their cities because of a bug in the game. Like many of 2014's big-budget games that launched in broken or barely-functional states, SimCity originally would only work if players connected to EA's servers, which repeatedly crashed under the load of players. It seemed possible that the homeless problem in SimCity was simply a mistake.

"Has anyone figured out a easy way to handle the homeless ruining those beautiful parks you spend so much money on?" asks one player on EA' site. "Create jobs, either through zoning or upgrading road density near industry, that helped me a lot," another player suggests.

Amazing. Professor Matteo Bittanti has collected online discussions about how to eradicate homelessness in 2013 SimCity in a two volume book called How to get rid of homeless. Volume 1 costs $150, Volume 2 $70.

Since Simcity is a game simulation of urban planning, it's impossible not to regard it as a standard bearer for the arrogance of Silicon Valley technological solutionism and difficult not to invoke Baudrillard. Given the income inequality of the Bay Area and its own notable homelessness problems, this is the most Silicon Valley-ish story I've read in weeks, I'm surprised I didn't read it in Valleywag or Gawker.

The on-demand economy

Karl Marx said that the world would be divided into people who owned the means of production—the idle rich—and people who worked for them. In fact it is increasingly being divided between people who have money but no time and people who have time but no money. The on-demand economy provides a way for these two groups to trade with each other.

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The “transaction cost” of using an outsider to fix something (as opposed to keeping that function within your company) is falling. Rather than controlling fixed resources, on-demand companies are middle-men, arranging connections and overseeing quality. They don’t employ full-time lawyers and accountants with guaranteed pay and benefits. Uber drivers get paid only when they work and are responsible for their own pensions and health care. Risks borne by companies are being pushed back on to individuals—and that has consequences for everybody.

Good piece from The Economist on the implications of the on-demand economy. It's given workers more flexibility at the cost of stability, and an increasingly freelance workforce means delivery of so much of welfare (like health insurance) through employers is more and more inefficient.

Free Climbing the Dawn Wall

Climbers Tommy Caldwell and Kevin Jorgeson have spent seven years studying, planning, and practicing to be the first people to ever free climb El Capitan's Dawn Wall, a 3,000 foot vertical wall that's about as smooth and difficult a free climb as exists in the world. Anticipation is that they'll complete this climb of historic significance in the next few days, perhaps as early as Wednesday.

Some background for non-climbers like myself:

After a week of living on the wall in portaledges—dodging falling blocks of ice each morning and sustaining frigid winter conditions with nighttime temperatures plummeting below freezing—Kevin and Tommy are more than halfway there. As of Friday, January 2, both climbers have freed each of the route’s first 14 pitches, which constitute the bulk of the hardest climbing.

A long “multi-pitch” rock climb, such as the Dawn Wall, is broken down by the belays—the places on the wall that provide good stances on ledges where climbers can stop and belay each other. The individual pitches are the paths that link these points of belay, and this is where the actual rock climbing takes place. On this ascent of the Dawn Wall, Tommy and Kevin have the goal to climb each pitch, in succession, without falling and without returning to the ground in between. If a climber does fall, he must return to the previous belay, pull the rope down with him, and try again to complete the pitch without falling.

The reason it's taken seven years of planning is that the climb is so difficult that Caldwell has had to study the wall in minute detail to find features in the contour to serve as handholds or footholds and then link them together in a possible path up. This video gives you an idea of that process, including many gnarly falls and slips that left my palms sweaty (and yes, knees weak, arms are heavy).

Tommy Caldwell has spent six years working to free climb The Dawn Wall, on the 3,000 foot El Capitan, in Yosemite National Park, CA. Along with his partner, Kevin Jorgeson, Caldwell is currently half way up the wall, hoping to succeed on the hardest big wall free climb in the world.

Reading about and watching the planning in action reminded me of the hit book from last year The Martian. I'm about a third of the way through the book, and it, too chronicles feats of long and intensive planning, long-term goals of such complexity that the only way to attain them is by breaking the task down into a series of smaller, concrete problems, each of manageable if extreme difficulty.

Here's one excerpt of their plan for this ascent:

Pitches 14, 15, and 16 are the three hardest pitches. Pitch 16 is the infamous “Dyno Pitch,” in which the climber has to make a jump (dyno) six feet horizontally, and latch onto a downward sloping edge of rock and hold on while controlling the swinging momentum. Thus far Kevin has had the most success in sticking this rowdy move; Tommy, however, has had less success. On this push, Kevin plans to do the dyno.

Tommy, however, plans to circumnavigate the dyno with a 5.14a variation. He will climb in a “loop”—reversing 20 feet of the last pitch, down-climbing 50 feet from the belay, and then coming back up to join a point above the dyno.

Here's an Instagram photo indicating just how tiny some of the holds are. These aren't handholds, these are fingerholds.

The fear of plunging to one's death would be enough lunacy for most people, but Caldwell is no stranger to danger of a variety of forms: in 2000, Caldwell and three other climbers were taken hostage by armed rebels at war with the Kyrgyzstan government. It's worth reading just to see what Caldwell does to save himself and his companions; it's something straight out of an action movie, I'm surprised it hasn't been optioned for a movie adaptation.

Also, Caldwell is missing his left index finger. He's climbing a mountain with tiny handholds and he's missing a finger!?!

In 2001 while working with a table saw, he accidentally cut off his left index finger-a debilitating loss when your life's passion involves hanging by your fingertips.

Doctors were able to reattach the finger, but told Caldwell that with its diminished mobility he'd never climb again. At first he was devastated, but then his determination kicked in, and he had the finger removed so as not to hinder him. Five months later, he free climbed the 3,000-foot (914-meter) Salathé Wall, another route on El Capitan, in less than 24 hours.

(h/t Hang Up and Listen)