Thursday, March 6, 2014
Tuesday, March 4, 2014
Tuesday, February 18, 2014
How The Wrong Artist Got Credit For Inspiring The Macintosh Logo
THE LOGO OF THE ORIGINAL 1984 MACINTOSH IS USUALLY REFERRED TO AS THE PICASSO LOGO, BUT IN REALITY, IT WAS INSPIRED BY ANOTHER FAMOUS ARTIST.
When the original Macintosh first shipped to customers in 1984, it came with a whimsical line drawing of a rainbow-hued Macintosh on front. Drawn with just a few sinuous strokes of a colored crayon, the logo is often referred to as the original Macintosh's Picasso logo. But that's a misnomer. As it turns out, the Macintosh's Picasso logo was inspired by another artist entirely.
John Casado and Tom Hughes, who were art directors on the original Macintosh development team, designed the so-called Picasso logo. Tasked with finding an appropriately winsome and approachable logo for the Macintosh, Casado and Hughes drew inspiration from the line drawings of one of Picasso's contemporaries: .
“The inspiration for the drawing style was Matisse, whom I so admired as an artist," Casado tells Adam Rosen at Cult of Mac. "The idea of the graphics being ‘Picasso style’ was, as I remember, a journalist’s description at the time of the launch. I think since no one ever asked me or Tom where the influence came from, it became fact."
Intriguingly, Casado and Hughes were never actually supposed to do the Macintosh logo at all. Instead, the original task of coming up with a logo for the Mac was meant to fall to Jean-Michel Folon, a famous Belgian cartoonist and painter. Steve Jobs seems to have been quite eager to give Folon some work, having previously tasked the artist to design a little cartoon man inside every Mac, but sadly, Folon never did get a chance to design the Mac's official logo.
Once you know that the Macintosh "Picasso" logo was inspired by Matisse, you can't help but think it's completely, head-thunkingly obvious. Picasso's cubist artwork looks nothing like the Macintosh logo's fluid, colorful draughtsmanship. Matisse as muse makes far more sense. All it took was one art-blind journalist to get it wrong to put Picasso as a signature to it forever. Funny how that goes.
Thursday, February 13, 2014
You Gotta Fight For Your Right to Repair Your Car
Fixing modern cars requires special diagnostic tools and official service information—information that some manufacturers don’t share with independent technicians.
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Reuters
In a dusty, industrial corner of Sacramento, a married couple say their prayers and open up their own business—a little car repair garage. It's something they've always dreamed of doing together, and they name the shop after Eve, the better-half of this husband-wife duo.
But a couple months after opening, Eve runs into a problem. While the shop is both willing and able enough to fix modern cars, they can’t get the service manuals they need from automakers to actually perform some repairs.
And they’re not the only ones.
Modern luxury cars have more code in them than fighter jets. Most new cars—luxury or otherwise—come equipped with on-board computers, complicated diagnostic systems, and software that controls everything from the radio to the navigation system.
You can’t fix a computer with a wrench. Instead, fixing modern cars requires special diagnostic tools and official service information—information that some manufacturers don’t share with independent repair techs like Eve.
But all that might be changing. Automotive Right to Repair just became a nationwide policy, thanks almost exclusively to voters in the state of Massachusetts.
At its heart, Automotive Right to Repair is about consumer choice. As an owner, you should have the right to repair your car wherever you want: at the manufacturer repair center, at the trusty corner mechanic, or in your driveway.
At least, that’s what voters in Massachusetts thought. Back in 2012, they passed the first Automotive Right to Repair Bill in the nation—a law designed to level the playing field between dealers and independent repair shops in Massachusetts. Last month, the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers, the Association of Global Automakers, the Automotive Aftermarket Industry Association (AAIA), and theCoalition for Automotive Repair Equality (CARE) announced the Massachusetts law would become the basis of a national right to repair policy.
The announcement (or MOU, as they are calling it) is unexpected, but it’s not exactly surprising. Right to Repair is a hugely populist issue. When it came in front of Massachusetts voters as a direct ballot measure, Right to Repair passed with 86 percent of the vote. Manufacturers likely saw which way the wind was blowing and decided to go national—while they could still hammer out a deal on their terms.
The result: Beginning in model year 2018, all automakers will be required to use a standard, non-proprietary interface so mechanics can access a car’s service data. Manufacturers must also sell both repair tools and service information at a “fair and reasonable price.” Of course, there are some caveats: Information that manufacturers deem to be a trade secret or proprietary is exempt from the agreement. A five-person panel will settle disputes between parties, should a manufacturer overcharge or refuse information.
The agreement “will ensure that independent repair professionals and interested consumers have access to the tools and information required to repair increasingly high-tech cars,” said State Rep. Garrett Bradley, the Massachusetts lawmaker most vocal on Right to Repair.
As part of the agreement, CARE and AIAA—both Right to Repair advocates—will stand-down on the issue. They won’t lobby and they won’t support Right to Repair legislation in other states. For them, the fight is over.
“A patchwork of 50 differing state bills, each with its own interpretations and compliance parameters doesn’t make sense,” said Mike Stanton, president of Global Automakers. “This agreement provides the uniform clarity our industry needs and a nationwide platform to move on.”
But the argument isn’t quite settled yet. The MOU isn’t a law, and it can’t be enforced like a law—even with a five-person regulatory panel. Plus, individual auto companies—all 23 of them— still need to endorse the agreement. Until then, it’s just words on a sheet of paper.
The MOU also failed to garner the support of AAA, a longtime advocate of repair. Unlike the Massachusetts law, the new MOU excludes information about telematics—like navigation, vehicle location technologies, and wireless communication technologies.
“When you look at where telematics is going, you can start to diagnose problems before they occur,” John Nielsen of AAA told Car and Driver. “That’s really the future of repair.”
Ultimately, the agreement is a step in the right direction—but it certainly isn’t future proof. The exemption of telematic systems will likely prove problematic as automakers integrate more “connected” features into cars. Without stronger Right to Repair provisions, independent repair techs could once again be left out in the cold.
And Right to Repair doesn't stop with cars. This MOU is just one small moving piece in the greater repair puzzle.
Consumers should have the right to repair everything they own. Manufacturer claims of proprietary information and intellectual property have plagued every repair industry. They’ve kept farmers from repairing their tractors, owners from repairing Apple products, and even tinkerers from modifying the software on their calculators. But as with cars, those are rights consumers will have to fight for.
Thursday, February 6, 2014
The Rise and Fall of Orange Juice as a Health Drink
How U.S. consumers came to believe that oranges, in any form, were an important part of a healthy diet.
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Orange juice’s fresh and healthy reputation lies in the balance today, but it was once America’s healing elixir around which an entire industry staked its hopes. Orange juice’s fabled health benefits were promoted by nutritionists, fruit producers, marketers, and the government, who credited orange juice with curing everything from scurvy to listlessness, and even a rare blood condition called acidosis. But orange juice did not always have a place at the American breakfast table, mostly because for years it was either too expensive, or just didn’t taste very good.
Here’s a taste experiment for the adventurous and historically inclined drinker: Boil some orange juice, place it in a can, and leave it on a shelf for several weeks. This is what most people knew as orange juice in the 1920’s. In lieu of pricey fresh-squeezed, average Americans enjoyed what the latest preservation technology offered: canned juice, which was essentially boiled to death. Unsurprisingly, its flavor was…somewhat lacking.
At the time, most people ate oranges rather than drinking their fruit. Coffee was the primary morning beverage. But consuming oranges in any form became an increasingly important part of a healthy diet largely because of the efforts of advertisers and an ambitious biochemist named Elmer McCollum. According to Harvey Levenstein’s book Fear of Food: A History of Why We Worry about What We Eat, McCollum became the unofficial nutritionist of the nation beginning in the early 1920’s when he heavily promoted the life-extending and healing capabilities of vitamins and warned against the deadly effects of a vitamin-deficient diet. This “Vitamania” gave producers the perfect marketing opportunity. The National Fruit Growers Exchange, under the Sunkist brand, created a national campaign promoting drinking daily doses of orange juice for its “health giving vitamins and rare salts and acids.” But McCollum soon cast aside vitamins in favor of acid.
McCollum ignited a panic over a nebulous condition called acidosis: an excess of acid in the bloodstream which supposedly caused fatigue and lassitude. He claimed the ailment was brought on by consuming meat, eggs and bread, which were acid producers. His advice: Eat lots of citrus fruit and lettuce. These foods rather counterintuitively were transformed from acid into alkaline in the stomach. Unsurprisingly, citrus producers seized upon this new health scare.
During World War II the U.S. Department of Agriculture encouraged Florida citizens to do their wartime duty and increase production of food staples such as oranges. But the government soon recognized a larger problem: American soldiers were rejecting the vitamin C-packed lemon crystals included in their food rations—they simply didn’t taste very good. The government needed to fulfill the nutritional needs of soldiers and ward off scurvy with a tasty and transportable vitamin C product. With the support of the federal government and the Florida Department of Citrus, a group of scientists went to work developing something superior to canned orange juice in the name of science and country. In 1948, three years after the war had ended and after nearly a decade of research, frozen concentrated orange juice was born. It was heralded as a symbol of American innovation and determination, and it arrived just in time.
Despite marketing campaigns promoting the consumption of oranges as a cure for everything from singlehood to the common cold, Florida’s fertile groves were producing too many oranges. The push for production during the war was now threatening the survival of the entire Florida orange industry. The arrival of frozen concentrated juice provided mass market potential for oranges for the first time. By 1949, Florida’s orange processing plants were churning out 10 million gallons of concentrated orange juice which was, rather deceptively, marketed as “fresh-frozen.” Consumers finally had an affordable, “tasty,” convenient and vitamin-C rich product, and they gulped it down.
The post-war American Dream was an image of domestic serenity in which the national talent for creating labor-saving technology was realized. Americans were eating better for less money and in less time. “Fresh-frozen” orange juice was concentrated health stuffed into a can and its only preparation requirements were thawing, adding water, and stirring. In Paradox of Plenty: A Social History of Eating in Modern America, Harvey Levenstein argues that such convenience foods became an essential part of the post-war housewife’s duty to build a healthy and happy American home. In 1952, the American Can Company advertised that frozen orange juice had saved housewives the equivalent of 14,000 years of “drudgery” that year.
Alissa Hamilton points out in Squeezed: What You Don’t Know About Orange Juice, that with the rapid growth of convenience foods a larger question emerged around the very notion of what normal food was: processed or untouched? People ate one alongside the other without thinking too much about it. In the 1950’s, chemists developed more than 400 new additives to aid in processing and preserving food (taste was an afterthought, at best). Canned meals, powdered foods, frozen seasonal and exotic produce were now readily available year-round. Women’s magazines extolled these “new” foods and their miraculous time-saving attributes. But the idea that something processed could also be “fresh,” was provoking questions. By 1960 the FDA was becoming concerned with the misrepresentative “fresh” labeling of commercial orange juice. Not only was it far from fresh, but sugar and water were being added. Federal standards and regulation ensued.
Frozen concentrated orange juice remained the breakfast drink of choice until the mid-1980’s when technology finally got closer to quenching consumer’s thirst for fresh-tasting juice with the creation of reconstituted "Ready to Serve" juice. Portraying orange juice as practically fresh-squeezed was now the primary pursuit of marketers, like this Tropicana commercial with the enticing “squeeze me a glass” jingle. In the 1990’s “not from concentrate” orange juice hit the shelves and blew everything else away. Rather than vitamins in a can, we now had freshness and purity in a carton.
But as Hamilton details in her book, there is practically nothing fresh or pure about it. Most commercial orange juice is so heavily processed that it would be undrinkable if not for the addition of something called flavor packs. This is the latest technological innovation in the industry’s perpetual quest to mimic the simplicity of fresh juice. Oils and essences are extracted from the oranges and then sold to a flavor manufacturer who concocts a carefully composed flavor pack customized to the company’s flavor specifications. The juice, which has been patiently sitting in storage sometimes for more than a year, is then pumped with these packs to restore its aroma and taste, which by this point have been thoroughly annihilated. You’re welcome.
Recently there has been a series of lawsuits against PepsiCo, Tropicana’s parent company, disputing its “all-natural” labeling, in part because of Hamilton’s exposure of industry practices. Meanwhile, growers plan to roll out a marketing campaign to address some of these health concerns by promoting drinking smaller glasses of juice. “The industry is trying to revive its healthy reputation against all odds,” says Hamilton. “Not only is orange juice heavily processed, but it’s straight sugar which today people recognize as contributing to obesity and diabetes.” Hamilton admits that orange juice is low on the FDA’s list of priorities, but the British government is taking action by calling for a tax on fruit juice and warning consumers that it has as much sugar as Coke and should be consumed sparingly. In the meantime, though the acidosis scare may be long forgotten, most of us still like to think we can find health in a glass of orange juice—at least more health than in a can of soda. Maybe that classic breakfast isn’t so balanced after all.
Wednesday, February 5, 2014
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