Spanning its world

Gleanings from Sunday's Times.

Idolastic
It's interesting that Ed Wyatt, in his look at the impact of the writer's strike on TV programming come the new year--You Couldn’t Write This Stuff: TV Reality Sets In-- doesn't mention the most obvious outcome: Viewers itching for non-reruns are likely to turn to American Idol in astonishing numbers. If FOX can find a few contestants as talented as the Chris Daughtry/Taylor Hicks/Elliott Yamin/Paris Bennett year, watch out.

Of the new reality shows Wyatt profiles, only this caught my eye:

Among the new reality offerings is “Oprah’s Big Give,” a contest on ABC sponsored by Oprah Winfrey to see who can give away large sums of money to society’s greatest benefit. ABC has long planned to have the series premiere in early 2008, but its potential effect on the network’s ratings is now more important than ever, given that the network’s most successful shows will be appearing in reruns.

False Idols
It struck me as odd that Ted Leonsis, an AOL executive who I previously knew only as an odd owner of the Washington Capitals and part-owner of the Washington Wizards, had made Nanking, a documentary about the mass rape and massacre of Chinese civilians in Nanking by the Japanese shortly before the beginning of WWII.

Why is Ted interested in this topic?

Is he married to an Asian-American? Not that I could find.

Does he have business interests in China, that he's hoping to further by doing the bidding of the Chinese government in the U.S.--like Rupert Murdoch does? Not that I could find.

Hmm, maybe he's an enlightened soul, interested in exposing Americans to Chinese history so we can understand key things about the second most important country in the world, like why the Chinese government, in a series of pre-Olympic programs, needs to make four major points:

Don't insult former wartime enemy Japan; don't swear; respect the referee; and don't snap indiscriminate photos.

Or, it could just be a form of self-worship.

“Nanking,” directed by Bill Guttentag and Dan Sturman and scheduled for release on Wednesday, recounts the Nanking massacre, or the Rape of Nanking, a months-long siege on the former Chinese capital by the Japanese Army that began in December 1937. Despite the efforts of a handful of Americans and Germans to create a safety zone for the protection of Nanking’s civilian population, the Japanese soldiers showed scant mercy. By the end of the occupation in March 1938, it is estimated that some 300,000 civilians and prisoners of war were killed and more than 20,000 women raped.

Like many Americans Mr. Leonsis was unaware of these events for much of his life. Three years ago he read an obituary of Iris Chang, author of “The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II,” who committed suicide in November 2004. Haunted by the account, Mr. Leonsis bought her book, as well as two others about the Westerners who attempted to protect the citizens of Nanking, and set out to make a film about the events.

“At a time when Americans are not looked at fondly around the world,” he said, “here’s people that are called gods and goddesses. But their memories haven’t echoed through history, and I wanted to tell that story.”

Jingle jangle
There's an interesting article about interfaith marriages around the holidays... well, interfaith if, as the Times does, you define it to mean Christian/Jewish:

It is a familiar problem, widely known as the December dilemma: the annual conflict faced by millions of adults in interfaith marriages over how to decorate homes, how and when to give gifts, and which rituals to celebrate.

As of 2001, more than 28 million Americans lived in mixed-religion households, according to the American Religious Identification Survey, which is widely viewed as providing some of the best data on the subject. Of those households, the largest group of interfaith marriages (distinct from interdenominational Christian ones) was Christian-Jewish, and few types of couples seem to experience the December dilemma as acutely as they do.

Anyway, there's this interesting paragraph about a third of the way through, which really would seem to warrant its own article:

But even sultry jazz versions of Christmas standards can alienate someone who does not celebrate the holiday, a concern frequently overlooked by those who grow up Christian and never experience the isolation of being part of a religious minority.

I think you can use a stronger word than overlooked--like dismissed.

English teachers rejoice
It's often surprising what people know, what sticks in their brain, what comes out at unexpected moments. Here's a quote from a friend of Sean Taylor, the Washington Redskins player who was so tragically slain in his home recently, from Taylor’s Heart of Kindness Might Have Left Him Vulnerable :

“To me, Sean was like Achilles, because he was this incredible warrior who could run through a brick wall, but these small things brought him down,” said Matt Sinnreich, 21, one of Taylor’s close friends since high school. “He was shot in the leg, not the heart or the head or anything. And he was just too nice. That ended up to be a huge weakness. We learned that the hard way.”

Juliet Macur's piece has lots of other nice touches, like this:

In school, Taylor was a star, though he never acted like one, friends and coaches said. And there, he fell in love. The day he met Garcia, a soccer standout, he ran home and told his grandmother that he had to learn Spanish to impress a girl. He came to enjoy the company of her large, tight-knit Cuban family. ...

Caught his eye
The thing about the Times is you never know what kind of article you'll find in its myriad Sunday sections. There's a profile of Kevin Sessums in the Real Estate pages, A Crisis Sent Him Away; Another Drew Him Home, for example, that really could've been in Book Review, Arts--or a political page.

Two interesting things stick out from the piece:

Mr. Sessums was pleased that he had pulled off a hat trick. He had three small apartments instead of one big one. “And I was paying about the same amount of money,” he said. “I set up my closets so I could just get on a plane and arrive and not have to carry a suitcase. Everything was set up everywhere. I did that for almost two years. It was like a fairy tale, and the fairy tale came crashing down on Sept. 11.”

He was in Paris on that day when an old boyfriend in New York, the AIDS activist Peter Staley, called and told him to turn on CNN. “I sat there for 48 hours; I had real separation anxiety,” he said. “That experience sent a lot of people away from the city, but it brought me back. Within 48 hours, I had decided to give up my apartment in Paris and come home. I was very homesick.” ...

Shortly after returning to New York, Mr. Sessums volunteered to be a buddy to Brandon Gonzalez, an 8-year-old boy from Brooklyn, through the Family Center, which specializes in helping children whose parents have life-threatening illnesses.

“I’m a mentor, not a tutor, so we do things like go to museums and the theater, and he spends a week with me in Provincetown every summer,” he said.

“I never thought I would be a 51-year-old homosexual in New York, and the two most important relationships in my life would be with a 13-year-old Puerto Rican kid and a 3-year-old Chihuahua,” said Mr. Sessums, a wide grin spreading across his devilishly handsome face.

8, 13; boy, dog; whatever... clearly Sessums isn't good with certain things, but there's something about him as profiled that's very likeable.

Timesian
We close with what could be the archetypical NYTimes feature--the magazine's yearly roundup of some of the best 'idea's of the year.

How arrogant, how ill-defined, how silly, how interesting.

80%?! Where were the reporters then?!
The Death of Checkers: This July, Jonathan Schaeffer, a computer scientist at the University of Alberta in Canada, announced that after running a computer program almost nonstop for 18 years, he had calculated the result of every possible endgame that could be played, all 39 trillion of them. He also revealed a sober fact about the game: checkers is a draw. As with tic-tac-toe, if both players never make a mistake, every match will end in a deadlock.

Schaeffer did not solve checkers by replicating human intuition or game-playing ability. Rather, he employed what’s known as a “brute force” attack. He programmed a cluster of computers to play out every possible position involving 10 or fewer pieces. At the peak of his labors, he had 200 computers working around the clock on the problem, both in Alberta and down in California. (The data requirements were so high that for a while in the early ’90s, more than 80 percent of the Internet traffic in western North America was checkers data being shipped between two research institutions.)

So why did they eliminate pants?
Left-Hand-Turn Elimination : It seems that sitting in the left lane, engine idling, waiting for oncoming traffic to clear so you can make a left-hand turn, is minutely wasteful — of time and peace of mind, for sure, but also of gas and therefore money. Not a ton of gas and money if we’re talking about just you and your Windstar, say, but immensely wasteful if we’re talking about more than 95,000 big square brown trucks delivering packages every day. And this realization — that when you operate a gigantic fleet of vehicles, tiny improvements in the efficiency of each one will translate to huge savings overall — is what led U.P.S. to limit further the number of left-hand turns its drivers make.

The company employs what it calls a “package flow” software program, which among other hyperefficient practices involving the packing and sorting of its cargo, maps out routes for every one of its drivers, drastically reducing the number of left-hand turns they make (taking into consideration, of course, those instances where not to make the left-hand turn would result in a ridiculously circuitous route).

Last year, according to Heather Robinson, a U.P.S. spokeswoman, the software helped the company shave 28.5 million miles off its delivery routes, which has resulted in savings of roughly three million gallons of gas and has reduced CO2 emissions by 31,000 metric tons.

Can I buy this?
Self-Righting Object: The Gomboc is a result of a long mathematical quest. In 1995, the Russian mathematician Vladimir Arnold mused that it would be possible to create a “mono-monostatic” object — a three-dimensional thingy that purely by dint of its geometry had only one possible way to balance upright.

The challenge intrigued two scientists — Gabor Domokos and Peter Varkonyi, both of the Budapest University of Technology and Economics. They spent a few years doing the math, and it seemed as if a mono-monostatic object could, in fact, exist. They began looking to see if they could find a naturally occurring example; at one point, Domokos was so obsessed that he spent hours testing 2,000 pebbles on a beach to see if they could right themselves. (None could.)

After several more years of scratching their heads, they finally hit upon a shape that looked promising. They designed it on a computer, and when it came back from the manufacturer, they nervously tipped it over, wondering if all their work would be for naught. Nope: the Gomboc performed perfectly. “It’s a very nice mathematical problem because you can hold the proof in your hands — and it’s quite beautiful,” Varkonyi says.

Yet the scientists now say that Mother Nature may have beaten them in the race after all. They have noticed that the Gomboc closely resembles the shell of a tortoise or a beetle, creatures whose round-shelled backs help them right themselves when flipped over. “We discovered it with mathematics,” Domokos notes, “but evolution got there first.”

Don't let Rep. Peter King hear about this
24/7 Alibi: Nine months after 9/11, Hasan Elahi, an art professor at Rutgers University, was detained at the Detroit airport after the F.B.I. received a bogus tip that he had stockpiled explosives in a storage locker. Six months of interrogations and nine polygraph tests later, the F.B.I. let him go. (The F.B.I. declined to comment.) But Elahi wasn’t ready to let go of the F.B.I. In a sly swipe at the surveillance system that botched his case, Elahi has self-consciously, if a bit ostentatiously, surrendered his privacy via a personal Web site. He has an alibi now — a perpetual one.

The project — part performance art, part post-trauma therapy — began as a practical matter. After his release, Elahi, who travels frequently as part of his job, contacted the F.B.I., letting it know his plans in advance. After a few months of this, he had an idea. “Why not share this information with everyone?” he remembers thinking. He began posting logs of his phone calls and pictures of his whereabouts. Up went his banking statements. He took to revealing the coordinates of his exact location on his Web site in real time. He snaps time-stamped digital images and uploads them.

Does everyone leave?
Unadapted Theatrical Adaptation: This year, John Collins, the cerebral leader of the experimental New York theater company Elevator Repair Service, offered a radical solution: adapt without adapting.

Collins mounted a production of “The Great Gatsby” without cutting a single word. “Gatz,” which refers to Jay Gatsby’s original name, is the most faithful version of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s book ever produced.

Despite the low-tech production and lack of period details, the show does not seem like a stunt, although it is at least partly inspired by the anticomedian Andy Kaufman’s stand-up routine in which he read “Gatsby” until everyone left.