Wednesday, June 25, 2014

Why Are We Still Calling the Things in Our Pockets ‘Cell Phones’?

This is a texting machine, not a phone.

Last week, when Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos took to a Seattle stage to announce a new smartphone called the Amazon Fire, he spent an hour and a half describing feature after feature: unlimited photo storage, 24/7 video support, 13-megapixel camera, a 3-D-like "dynamic perspective" display, a visual-recognition shopping button called Firefly, and dozens more bells and whistles.

But there was one question Bezos left unanswered about his new device's feature set. Namely: Could it, you know, make phone calls?

Several years ago, Bezos's neglect of the Fire's phone capabilities would have seemed like a huge, glaring omission. (Remember the raging debateover the iPhone 4's poor reception?) But these days, smartphones are phones in name only. For many of us, the green, phone-shaped icon on our home screens has become just another minor feature – like a stopwatch or a stock ticker. And for others, it's completely irrelevant.

“I haven’t made a phone call on my phone in a long time,” Bezos later told the Times. “But I know people still make phone calls.”

Not so much. In fact, the use of voice calls – which has been dropping since 2007, the year Apple introduced the original iPhone – has fallen off a cliff lately. As of last year, cell providers in the U.S. are now making more money per user from data use than voice calling. (The U.S. is only the seventh nation to reach the data-voice tipping point — it happened in countries like Japan as early as 2011.) A recent survey of 7,000 U.S. high-school seniors found that only 34 percent made phone calls every day — far fewer than the number who texted or used apps like Snapchat, Facebook, and Instagram. And companies like AT&T and Verizon, which saw the data boom coming years ago, have been spending more and moreon new, bigger LTE data networks, while essentially giving away their voice plans for free.

Graph courtesy of Chetan Sharma Consulting

In the app age, old-fashioned phone calls have become not only passé, but ominous. Today, when I get a call outside of work hours, I think: Who died? Who's trapped on a mountain? What awful global calamity is unfolding? I use apps and text messages for everything – ordering dinner, hailing cabs, telling friends I'm running late – and I rarely check my voice mail. I don't have any friends who regularly call me; even my parents have switched to texts.

All of which raises a question: Why are we still calling these things phones?

This isn't just a semantic issue. It's a marketing one. Wireless companieswant us to think of our rectangular gadgets first and foremost as phones, since what their plans give us in the phone department (unlimited minutes and texting, on most carriers) is much better than what they give us in the data department (tiered caps on data use, with charges for overage). In fact, these companies make millions of dollars a year from our tendency to overestimate the number of calls we'll make in a given month, and underestimate the amount of data we'll use.

For example, take my case. For several years, I paid about $100 a month for a phone plan that gave me 900 minutes per month and allotted me two gigabytes of data. That suited me fine – I rarely went over my allowances – but this year, I found a "loyalty" plan from Verizon that cost only $60 a month, and had unlimited talking and texting with the same two gigabyte data cap. Great news, right?

Not exactly. Like most Americans, my data use has skyrocketed – from less than two gigabytes a month to more than five gigabytes on average – and as a result, I end up spending $30 or $40 each month on overage charges. The upshot is that I'm still paying Verizon about $100 a month to use my phone, even though I nominally have a better, cheaper plan. And if I wanted a plan with a bigger data allotment, I'd have to pay much more – in fact, at my current levels, it costs less to pay the penalties than move up a notch.

I'm not alone in my frustration; a 2013 study by Cisco estimated that, by 2017, the average North American mobile user will use six gigabytes of data per month. It's not wrong, necessarily, for carriers to charge more for all that extra data, which taxes their networks in a way voice calls don't. But it is opportunistic of them to encourage us to focus on the bold print in smartphone plans – the "unlimited talk and text" part – while distracting us from the more important matter of how much data we're allowed to guzzle before we're charged extra. (An exception among big carriers is T-Mobile, which doesn't charge data overage fees, though it does slow down users' data after they exceed their plans.)

Regardless of its implications on wireless carriers, it's odd to refer to these vast, all-encompassing gadgets merely as "phones." It would be like calling a car a "radio box," or a microwave a "popcorn maker." All smartphones can make calls, sure, but what makes one device different from another is how well it can do everything else.

So let's call these devices something that more accurately reflects how we use them. One idea would be to take a cue from the British and start referring to them simply as "mobiles." We could even call them "Handys," as the Germans do, or "mini-tablets," which is essentially what they are. Or we could coin another neologism, like "pocket computer." ("Pock-comp" for short.)

All of these words sound more awkward to our unaccustomed American ears than "phone" or "cell phone." But they're better descriptors of what these devices are. And when we accept the fact that our iPhones are being used for apps, rather than calls, perhaps providers will be convinced to create more customer-friendly data plans. Now that would be news worth calling home about on your mobile, Handy, or pock-comp – if you can still remember how, that is.

www.mohanvamsi.com

How to Write 225 Words Per Minute With a Pen

How to Write 225 Words Per MinuteWith a Pen

A lesson in the lost technology of shorthand

Students in the shorthand class at Broken Bow College, 1903. ( Nebraska State Historical Society )

As a journalist, I begin most interviews by holding up my pen and asking, “Have you ever seen one of these?” No one ever has.

It’s not an ordinary pen, of course. It’s a Sky wifi smartpen, a piece of gee-whiz technology from a company called Livescribe. Basically, the smartpen replaces all your standard reporter’s tools. To start with, it’s an old-fashioned pen for old-fashioned paper, so I can still scribble my notes the way I always have. The smartpen is also a high-quality digital recorder, creating an audio file of the interview as we go along. Finally, a tiny camera near the tip of the pen simultaneously takes pictures of my notes as I write.

All of that information is then pulled together by a microprocessor housed in the barrel of the pen. And because the smartpen is really a computer, it’s able to sync up the picture of my handwritten notes with the audio file. That means I can tap the tip of the pen anywhere in my notebook, and the pen will instantly replay the audio of whatever was being said when I took that note. And since it’s WiFi enabled, the whole interview—audio file, notes, and all—is automatically uploaded to my Evernote account. It’s a little like magic.

There’s one other feature I like to point out. It’s possible, I tell people, to get optical character recognition software to go with the pen. If you write like a normal person, the OCR will automatically convert your handwritten notes into a text file that you can then copy and paste into your word processor. For many reporters, this is the best feature, obviating the painful task of transcribing long interviews. But it doesn’t work for me, I explain, because even though I’m recording this interview with the latest model Sky wifi smartpen, I’m taking notes using a 19th Century technology called Gregg shorthand.

In many respects, Gregg is even more ingenious than the smartpen. And, although no electronics or gizmos were involved, it was a tremendously powerful and influential technology for nearly 100 years. Now, it’s become the key to my workflow in the Internet age.

Gregg is a way of compressing language. You are the machine that does the encoding and decoding. And your brain can do it in real time at very, very high speeds. To understand why, you have to know a little about how it works.

Gregg is basically a much simpler and more efficient writing system than longhand English. This starts with the letters themselves. The Roman alphabet, which we use to write English, is much more complicated than is strictly necessary to distinguish one letter from another. To print a lower-case “b”, for example, requires a long, downward stroke with a clockwise loop at the base. Then, you have to pick up your pen to move to the next letter, an extraneous step that takes up almost as much time as the writing itself. Cursive (when was the last time you heard that word?) may seem a little faster, but it actually requires additional strokes, short ligatures at the beginning and the end of each letter. That’s a lot of wasted motion, which is why cursive is actually only about 10 percent faster than print.

In contrast, Gregg’s “letters” are much simpler shapes. Here's the first paragraph of this article written in shorthand:

Consonants are either shallow curves or straight lines; vowels are either loops or small hooks. The Gregg “b”, for example, is an uncomplicated downward stroke of the pen—a long, forward-leaning curve that faces to the right, like an open parenthesis in italics. If you measure the complexity of writing in the number of strokes, the Gregg “b” requires just one stroke compared to the four or five that comprise the Roman “b.” Gregg letters also require no ligatures; each letter blends seamlessly into the others. In the combination “b-r”, for instance, the long, downward curve of a “b” joins the short, horizontal curve of an “r” to form a sort of right-handed fishhook.

Here, you can see the Gregg letter "b," then "r," and a combination of the two, which would represent "bring" (more on that abbreviation in a minute):

In Gregg, the simplification of the forms of letters reaches its apogee in a process called “blending”. The individual strokes of many frequently combined letter pairs are written with a single blended stroke. The short, straight, horizontal dash of an “n” and the long, diagonal, upward stroke of the “d” join to become a long, upward curve that represents “nd”. This not only reduces the number of strokes, it eliminates the momentary pause necessary to form an angle between the “n” and the “d”. This simplicity of design—the absence of superfluous strokes—accounts for about 10 percent of the speed of Gregg.

Here's "n," "d," then the "nd" combo:

Another advantage of Gregg is that it’s phonetic. The word “bay”, for example, is written “b-a”—the simple downward curve of the “b”, finished with the large, counter-clockwise loop of an “a”, so that the whole word, three letters in longhand, looks pretty much like a single sloping version of the Roman “b”. Gregg eschews the parade of silent letters, like the “y” in “bay” that make English so difficult to learn as a second language.

Here a sequence showing "b," "a," then "ba" for "bay:"

Some letters, like “c” and “q”, are completely absent from Gregg; there is no sound for “c” besides those already represented by “k” and “s”. On the other hand, there are common phonemes in English—“sh”, “th”, “ch”—that require a combination of letters in the Roman alphabet, but can each be written with a single letter in Gregg. “Though,” which, in longhand, requires six complex symbols strung together with seven short ligatures, is rendered with two short strokes in Gregg: “th-o.” But Gregg goes even further, eliding unstressed vowels and unvoiced consonants to get to the phonetic nugget of the word: “bed” is written as “b-d”; “act” as “a-k”; “done” as “d-n”. This economy of spelling saves another 10 percent of the note-taker’s time.

But the biggest impact from Gregg shorthand comes from its systematic approach to abbreviation. For instance, almost every letter in Gregg, written by itself, represents a common word. Some are used for several different words, depending on the context. Our Gregg friend “b” can mean “be”, “by”, or “but”. The Gregg letter “r” can mean “are”, “our”, or “hour.” The Gregg letter “t” can mean “it” or “at.” In this way, nearly 100 of the most common words in English can be rendered in a single stroke. Similarly, most common English words have an abbreviated spelling of one or two strokes. The elegant Gregg version of “b-r,” for example, is short for “bring” and is written in an instant. Here it is again:

And, since 60 percent of spoken English is comprised of about 600 of these common words, brief forms play a huge role is speeding up Gregg. “Brief form” is actually a technical term in Gregg. Anyone can learn the Gregg alphabet in an afternoon and probably double their writing speed; but to become truly fast—like the remaining handful of Gregg-powered court reporters in the federal courts who take down testimony at more than 200 words per minute—you have to memorize dozens or hundreds of common abbreviations.

That sounds hard until you remember that your head is chock-a-block with common English abbreviations, most of which you learned organically as you needed them. Gregg is no different. And the Gregg versions are at least more systematic, so they accrue quickly.

But the brief form is more than a simple abbreviation, it’s the distillation of the basic premise of shorthand: Never write more than is necessary to understand it later. Using this principle, thousands of long, Latinate words are shortened to three or four letters in Gregg: “a-b-a-nd” for “abandon,” “h-u-nd” for hundred, “n-a-sh” for “nation.” Short forms were especially important in the polysyllabic lexicons of medicine and law—fields that, not coincidentally, were also epicenters of shorthand in Gregg’s heyday.

One especially fertile approach to abbreviation in Gregg is the use of single letters as stand-ins for common prefixes or suffixes, depending on whether they’re written before or after the words they modify. As prefixes, these letters can be either attached to or detached from the word. For example, a detached “g,” written just before and above a word represents “grand,” as in “grandmother,” but also as in “grandiloquent,” or even “granular” (which can be written “g” above “l-r.”)

On the other hand, an attached “k” at the beginning of a word can be the prefixes “con,” “com,” or “count;” so “k-g” is pronounced “cong,” and is the short form for Congress. But a detached “k” written above a word is the prefix “counter” or “contra”; so “k” written over a “b”, for example, is read “contrib” and is the short form for “contribute” or “contribution.”

It’s much the same with suffixes. A detached “g” at the end of a word stands for “gram,” as in “program.” A detached “k” stands for “ical,” as in “medical.” And a detached “o” takes the place of “ology,” as in “biology.”

These forms can also be added together to create longer words. “Biological” is written “b-i” followed by a detached “o-k.” In this way, long, complex words are reduced to two or three quick flicks of the pen, and yet remain completely legible to anyone who knows the Gregg system. Combined, the brief forms and the abbreviation principle account for about half of Gregg’s advantage over longhand. Not only are the letters uncomplicated and simply joined, there are fewer of them to write.

The final element that makes Gregg so blazingly fast is a technique called “phrasing.” Using this method, many common expressions can be dashed off in a few strokes without ever lifting the pen from the page. For example, the phrase “it will be” is composed of three common words, each of which can be written separately with a single letter: “i,” written with a short, straight, upward stroke that slopes to the right, represents “it;” “l,” a long, horizontal, upward-facing curve, represents “will;” and, as we’ve seen, “b,” the long, downward curving stroke, represents “be.” Phrasing allows you to join all three of these letters in one elegant, continuous form—“i-l-b”—that takes less than a quarter-second to write.

Here's "it will be" on the first line, with "I have been" below it:

And there are literally thousands of these phrases in Gregg shorthand. Most importantly, unlike short forms, they don’t require much memorization; they’re the product of a few simple rules.

* * *

There you have it: a short course in the technology that made the Irishman John Robert Gregg an American tycoon in the first half of the 20th Century. By the time he died, in 1949, Gregg presided over an empire that reached from his headquarters on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan into almost every school, business and courthouse in the country. While he was fundamentally a publishing magnate—Gregg Publishing put out hundreds of textbooks, dictionaries, study guides, magazines, and shorthand versions of classical literature—John Robert Gregg also oversaw a national infrastructure of certification agencies, business schools, and testing facilities that endorsed the skills of all professional shorthand writers. If you wanted to be an executive secretary, you needed a certificate from Gregg saying you qualified at 150 words per minute. If you wanted to be a court reporter, you had to demonstrate you could write an astonishing 225 words per minute with better than 98 percent accuracy. Altogether, millions of people passed through Gregg training and the Gregg certification system.

For nearly a century, Gregg was an essential part of American society. As recently as the 1970s, almost every high school in the country taught Gregg. Certainly, every business school and most colleges offered Gregg-certified shorthand courses. But Gregg’s decline began when McGraw-Hill bought Gregg Publishing, shortly after John Robert Gregg’s death. The rise of stenography machines in the 1940s and 1950s steadily drove shorthand from the courtroom (though there are still a handful of “pen writers” in the federal court system). The Dictaphone and other recording devices made verbatim note taking less and less important in the office. And some people say improvements in women’s rights also played a role in the decline of Gregg. In a time when they were denied careers in fields like the law or medicine, the smartest, most talented women often ended up as secretaries or executive assistants and became gifted shorthand practitioners. In the 1960s and 1970s, as these women began to move on to better opportunities, those left behind never became quite as fast or skilled at the complexities of Gregg.

The real death knell for Gregg, though, was the arrival of the personal computer in the 1980s. Even high-level executives no longer dictated letters to their secretaries; they wrote them themselves on their desktop computers. Companies that used to have scores of skilled shorthand writers eliminated their steno pools entirely. Today, I'm not aware of any high school that teaches Gregg. It's almost impossible to find it taught in colleges—with two exceptions in Kingsborough and Queensborough community colleges in New York City, where Gregg writers are still prized by some white glove law firms. The only book still published by the Gregg Division of McGraw-Hill is The Gregg Manual, an office reference that contains no mention of shorthand.

But, as a technology for writing fast with pen and paper—still a fundamental skill for reporters like me—Gregg shorthand has never been surpassed. Nowadays, you may have to buy an old Gregg manual on e-Bay and teach yourself, but even if you just learn the basics, Gregg will probably double your note taking speed. With practice and daily use, it’s not uncommon to reach speeds of 100 words a minute or more. And, paradoxically, shorthand is the perfect complement to the 21st Century technology of the smartpen.

After all, shorthand—at least my shorthand—isn’t foolproof. Even though, for short stretches, I can write 120 words per minute, the average American now speaks at more than 150 words a minute, so something is inevitably lost in the translation. With my trusty Sky smartpen, though, I don’t have to worry. Most of the time, when I get around to writing the story, I can rely on my handwritten notes for short quotes and background information. But when I need a longer, verbatim quote, I can use my notes as a kind of index to find the right part of the interview, and tap there with my pen to hear the playback. No more of the forward/reverse dance with a digital recorder when it’s time to transcribe. It’s an almost flawless system.

But whenever I get a little too smug about my clever use of this hybrid technology, I like to think about the great court reporting contests of the late 1920s when legends of shorthand, like Charles Swem and Martin Dupraw,competed head-to-head against one another. They took dictation in categories like “jury charge” and “testimony.”

By 1927, the last of the National Speed Contests just between pen writers, the testimony category was conducted at 280 words a minute. That’s more than four words a second, fast even with a smartpen.

Dupraw won, for the third year in a row, with a fountain pen.

The 1919 National Speed Contest (Internet Archive)

www.mohanvamsi.com

A Sunken Kingdom Re-emerges

BORTH, WALES — There is a poem children in Wales learn about the sunken kingdom of Cantre’r Gwaelod, swallowed by the sea and drowned forever after. On a quiet night, legend has it, one can hear the kingdom’s church bells ringing.

When the sea swallowed part of Britain’s western coastline this year and then spat it out again, leaving homes and livelihoods destroyed but also a dense forest of prehistoric tree stumps more exposed than ever, it was as if one had caught a faint glimpse of that Welsh Atlantis.

The submerged forest of Borth is not new. First flooded some 5,000 years ago by rising sea levels after the last ice age, it has been there as long as locals remember, coming and going with the tides and occasionally disappearing under the sand for years on end. Butthe floods and storms that battered Britain earlier this year radically changed the way archaeologists interpret the landscape: A quarter-mile-long saltwater channel cutting through the trees, revealed by erosion for the first time, provided a trove of clues to where human life may have been concentrated and where its traces may yet be found.

Ancient animal footprints on a beach near Borth, Wales. Archaeologists have had to race against time to study and preserve such remains before the sea further eroded them.CreditLuke Wolagiewicz for The New York Times

“We used to think of this as just as an impenetrable forest — actually this was a complex human environment,” said Martin Bates, a geoarchaeologist at the University of Wales Trinity St. David, who oversees the excavation work in Borth on a beach he played on as a toddler. “The floods have opened our eyes as to what’s really out there.”

Scanning the army of ghostly spikes protruding from the sand here one recent morning, Dr. Bates said it was as if nature were making a point: The recent torrential rains, linked by a growing number of climatologists to human-induced climate change, have provided an ancient laboratory to study how humans coped with catastrophic climate change in the past.

Indeed, across Britain, two consecutive years of exceptional winter weather have left in their wake some equally exceptional discoveries: fromunexploded wartime bombs and Victorian shipwrecks to archaeological finds that are nearly a million years old. Scientists have barely kept up. Last winter was the wettest on record, according to the Met Office, the national weather service.

Dog walkers and amateur archaeologists are being sought in ever-greater numbers to help record new sites. In some areas hit especially hard by erosion, locals are equipped with cameras that log digital images with geocoordinates so the artifacts they find on beach walks can be added to national databases.

“Archaeologists can’t be everywhere, but locals can,” said Erin Kavanagh, Dr. Bates’s partner and a fellow archaeologist.

Nicholas Ashton, the curator of Paleolithic and Mesolithic collections at theBritish Museum, has been organizing “fossil road shows” in which he invites civilians to bring in any potential archaeological finds and have them identified. (One man recently showed up with a six-inch-long hippo tusk and a well-preserved ax, both found locally and both more than half a million years old.)

Having those extra eyes on the ground can make all the difference in coastal areas, Dr. Ashton said, for what the sea reveals, it tends to reclaim almost as soon. He learned this lesson firsthand.

In May 2013, shortly after the first set of storms, Dr. Ashton commissioned Dr. Bates, an old university friend, to work on Britain’s east coast in Norfolk. The beach near Happisburgh (pronounced hays-boro), a longstanding archaeological site, had suffered severe erosion. Dr. Ashton, an expert in early humans, wanted a geophysical survey to map any channels or rivers that might lie beneath about 30 feet of sediment. Some of these channels, he reckoned, might contain evidence of early humans because sources of freshwater would have been natural gathering spots.

It was on their second visit, on May 10, that Dr. Bates noticed some indentions on the otherwise flat horizons of the laminated silts recently laid bare on the beach. The humps and bumps looked familiar. He told Dr. Ashton: “They’re just like the human footprints in Borth.”

Footprints of humans and animals in Borth had been dated to about 6,000 years ago. The site in Happisburgh was 900,000 years old, a time when mammoths and hippos still roamed in these parts. No human bones or prints that old had ever been found in Britain.

Could this be possible?

A frantic race against time began. Every day, the shape of the prints would blur a little more as the coming tide eroded the contours of heels, toes and arches. A team led by Sarah Duffy from the University of York arrived to apply a technique called multi-image photogrammetry, taking about 150 digital photographs of the surface area containing the prints and feeding it into a program that created a three-dimensional model. By the time another team had come to do some laser scanning, it was too late: The prints were barely visible.

Panicked, scientists lifted from the site a 130-pound block of sediment with one faint print on top, to have it analyzed at the National Oceanography Center. It is the only remaining physical evidence of the footprints: Before the month was out, all traces of them had vanished. It was a powerful reminder of both the resilience and the fragility of human life.

“What had been preserved for nearly one million years was taken back by the sea in the space of 10 days,” Dr. Ashton said.

Initially skeptical, he said he knew the footprints were real when Dr. Duffy’s computer images landed in his inbox sometime last June. “I thought, bloody hell, we are dealing with something quite extraordinary here,” he said.

The footprints, the oldest known outside Africa, probably belonged to a family group of Homo antecessor, a cousin of Homo erectus that possibly became extinct when Homo heidelbergensis from Africa settled in Britain about 500,000 years ago, he said. Using foot-length-to-stature ratios, scientists estimate that the male was perhaps 5 feet 9 inches tall, and the smallest child a little less than 37 inches.

Little is known about this early human species. Fossil skeletons in Atapuerca, Spain, from around the same time suggest that they walked upright and looked much like modern humans, though their brains were smaller. If they had language, it was primitive. Living at the tail end of an interglacial era, as winters were growing colder, they may have had functional body hair. So far, there is no evidence that they used clothes, shelter, fire or tools more complex than simple stone flakes.

But despite their elusiveness, the human ancestors in whose footsteps modern-day Britons walk — literally — have fascinated the nation. Before some basic tools were found here in 2010, it had been believed that humans had entered Britain much later, about 700,000 years ago, Dr. Ashton said. (Before 2005, when another set of tools was discovered in Suffolk, the presumed date was 500,000 years ago.)

Martin Bates, right, and a colleague used an auger to gather samples of layers of peat, wood and sand from the submerged forest in Borth that eroded and shifted in recent storms.CreditLuke Wolagiewicz for The New York Times

“British civilization started in Norfolk,” a headline in The Times of London put it at the time. A blog post by Dr. Ashton on the British Museum website on Feb. 7, when the paper he co-wrote about the footprints appeared, had more hits than any other post on the museum’s site before or since.

“We can reconstruct the climate and climate change nearly one million years ago,” Dr. Ashton said. “The big lesson is, we have to adapt. Whether we like it or not, the climate will change — it always has — and today we are accelerating that change.”

Standing on the ridge above Cardigan Bay in Borth, Dr. Bates described what the area would have looked like at the height of the last ice age some 20,000 years ago: more than half a mile of ice overhead and dry land stretching across today’s North Sea. The sea level was 400 feet lower than it is today.

“You could have walked from Denmark to Yorkshire in those days,” he said.

About 10,000 years ago, temperatures warmed sharply, by eight to 10 degrees Fahrenheit. By that time, the European ice sheets had melted, but the much thicker North American sheets took much longer. While the climate had warmed to today’s levels, allowing mixed oak woodland to grow and humans to recolonize Britain, the sea level remained some 130 feet lower for another 3,000 years.

When it did rise, it would have been traumatic for the population, wiping out whatever settlement there was, and eventually the forest of Borth. The displaced humans of the time, Dr. Bates said, were prehistoric refugees from climate change.

“Even in the reduced life span of the day, the coastline would have advanced dramatically,” said Dr. Bates, who is convinced that stories like Cantre’r Gwaelod originated in this period.

Similar tales abound on the western European seaboard: There are Cornish and Breton versions, and variations of the theme exist in Jersey and the Orkney Islands. The ultimate legend, of course, is Atlantis, which Plato placed somewhere in the North Atlantic.

“It was a traumatic geological event, and people turned it into a story to make sense of it,” said Gerald Morgan, a retired head teacher and local historian in nearby Aberystwyth.

The same thing is happening again today, as Britons survey the damage of the past couple of years of flooding and storms and ponder the future. The submerged forest in Borth, little known outside a small radius here, has once again become part of local lore. Its haunting shapes are featured in poetry slams and in storytelling evenings, and modern-day performances of Cantre’r Gwaelod have been staged on the beach, said Mr. Morgan and his wife, Enid.

Have they ever heard the bells?

Mrs. Morgan smiled. “I knew someone who did.”

www.mohanvamsi.com

Burger Place Geography

As before, the map above shows the nearest burger chain out of the selected seven. I chugged along every twenty miles, checked within a 10-mile radius, and then colored each dot accordingly.

With pizza places you saw a lot of regionality despite the national coverage of Pizza Hut. You saw a lot of Domino's on the east, Little Caesar's in California, and Godfather's in the midwest. Similarly, with coffee, Dunkin' Donuts reigned in the east and Caribou is popular in the midwest.

However, more than a handful of burger chains cover the country somewhat evenly, which gets you this map that resembles sprinkles on a cupcake, save a couple areas of interest. In the Oklahoma and Arkansas areas Sonic Drive-in dominates, and Jack in the Box established itself well in California. We saw a similar geographic pattern in Stephen Von Worley's burger map a few years ago.

But still, McDonald's is sprinkled throughout, which shouldn't surprise since it has more than twice the locations than its nearest competitor Burger King. Keep in mind this includes all the Golden Arches in Wal-Marts, airports, and college food courts.

Because of this expansive burger coverage by McDonald's and the other major chains, it's more useful to look at the locations separately, shown below. I also included all the other chains with at least a hundred locations.

As you expect, it looks like population density in the beginning. Chains are gonna open where the people are. Once you get past Wendy's though, you start to see region-specific chains.

I'd say Dairy Queen is well-established nationally, but it's interesting to see a gap with Oklahoma, Arkansas, Mississippi, and Louisiana. Do the folks there not like Dairy Queen? Maybe Sonic has a stronghold on the states in an epic battle for burger supremacy. Or it's just a totally mundane reason like Dairy Queen started in Illinois, expanded east, and then saw growth opportunity in Texas.

In any case, the separation is more obvious when you look at just Dairy Queen versus a competitor like Sonic, using the same distance formula as the first map.

The rest of the chains kind of have their regional pockets: Whataburger in Texas, Checkers in Florida, and of course, In-N-Out in California.

Then there's all the local joints, which I didn't even touch on yet. I'll have to leave that for another day though. In case someone is interested, Yelp seems like a good place to start. I poked around the review data for a bit, and it was interesting that the local places almost always reigned review-wise, and profiles for chains basically serve as somewhere for people to complain.