Sam Dean | The Verge

The Docx games: three days at the Microsoft Office World Championship

2017-08-16T10:10:09-04:00

On a Sunday night two weeks back, in the Rose Court Garden of the Disneyland Hotel in Anaheim, California, 150 antsy competitors between the ages of 13 and 22 milled around eating miniature whoopie pies by the light of the Moon, sizing up their global rivals in the efficient use of Excel, PowerPoint, and Word.

It was as if the Olympics opening ceremony was replaced by a networking event: teens were decked out in national T-shirts, while others handed out business cards specially made for the event. At one table off by the bar, two chaperones nudged their folding chairs closer together and taught each other how to say hello (“Yassas,” “Ciao”) in their respective mother tongues. In the distance, through the palms, the tiki torches of Trader Sam’s, the hotel’s poolside lounge, were flickering into the black sky.

This marked the first night of the 16th Microsoft Office Specialist (MOS) World Championship, in which teens and young 20-somethings compete for the title of World Champion in their chosen professional application. It’s an event put on annually by Certiport, a Utah-based subsidiary of standardized testing giant Pearson VUE. It’s also a marketing stunt, pure and simple, devised to promote Certiport’s line of Microsoft Office certifications. This allows the certified to confirm the line on their resume that claims “proficiency in MS Office” is backed up by some solid knowledge of deep formatting and presentation design.

It sounds incredibly dull, yes, but the teens — surrounded by their administratively adept peers, a short monorail ride away from the Magic Kingdom — were downright giddy.

It was as if the Olympics opening ceremony was replaced by a networking event

By one standing table, a crew from all over — Mexico, the Dominican Republic, Morocco, Greece, Panama, Romania — were kvelling over their good luck to even get here. Ayman Ben Souira (16, competing in Word), from a small town outside of Marrakech, Morocco, had never left his country before but spoke English and some anime Japanese like an Angeleno. “The first time people came to our school to give out fliers about the competition,” Ayman said, “I thought it was really just a scam. We’re gonna go to LA? It felt so farfetched, this is the craziest first place to go.”

Ruth Tom Lin (17, Word) from Panama (“I’m the only one!”) had been led to MOS through an interest in studying computer science in college, but she had a problem: “I don’t know if you know about Asian parents, but I have to do the doctor test, whether I want to or not. If I don’t pass, I can study something else.”

Tiberiu Danciu (18, Word), the sole Romanian representative, already had his head in the game. He had come last year, too, but failed to place in the top three. He was learning C++ in school.

And Kyriakos Chatziefthymiadis (16, Excel), an Athenian with a stature to match his colossal name, was overcome with emotion. “When I won in my nation I was so… I was gonna cry,” he said. “I was very sad in that period of my life.”

Before Excel, Kyriakos had relied on Zumba as a source of joy. “I have participated in many zumbathons,” he said, “I have danced onstage. I love Zumba because it brings color to my life.” But when he won the national competition in Excel, he said, “It instantly created a more happy life for me.”

It was his first time in the US, too, and he had just spent the day touring LA with his two compatriots and their chaperones. Besides some drama with his Frappuccino (“I wanted almond milk, and they put in the full fat milk with sugar inside and everything”), he loved the city. “Hollywood, it’s my — let’s say my dream, I’m always acting like a person from Hollywood.”

"It instantly created a more happy life for me."

Team USA was spread throughout the crowd, gamely asking their jet-lagged peers how they liked America. There was Anirudh Narayanan, a Carnegie Mellon-bound Delawarean who liked making AP subject tutoring YouTube videos in his free time “to relax,” and Joshua Garrelts, an aspiring programmer from the Wichita suburbs in Kansas who kept chitchat to a minimum. John “Jack” Dumoulin III, an Eagle Scout and center fielder from Dumfries, Virginia, has a firm handshake and a fair grasp of conversational Korean from his childhood at an army base in Daegu, South Korea. He was the natural diplomat of the bunch, schmoozing and beaming in a Dodger’s jersey. Dominic Allain, a 15-year-old from Slidell, Louisiana, told me he was using the free trip to check out SoCal schools with good game design programs.

And then there were the North Carolina kids — Forrest Liu and Dheya Madhani — coming in with a legacy to protect. If America has a Microsoft Office powerhouse, it’s Green Hope, a high school in the tiny Raleigh suburb of Cary, a town essentially carved out of the woods by software giant SAS to serve as a leafy tech employee enclave. This team always sweeps the state and takes nationals by storm, and the students have placed in the global competition four out of the past five years.

If America has a Microsoft Office powerhouse, it’s Green Hope

Green Hope is so recognized as an MOS institution, that Certiport flew in a former world champ, Ryan Catalfu (who Jack Dumoulin III beat out in Excel 2016 at nationals this year), to serve as their first-ever student ambassador — a kind of all-purpose camp counselor for other competitors to go to with questions. It also flew in the architect of Green Hope’s dominance, the retired teacher Marty Roettgen, to give a motivational speech.

An hour after the reception was set to end, a last chant of “Mexico, Mexico” went around from its energetic delegation, who had collectively stashed pieces of a giant posterboard printed with the Mexican Flag into their carry-on bags, to be assembled at the hotel for Mexico-themed photo ops. One by one, kids reluctantly began walking off into the night, to get some sleep before the following day’s competition.

If you’re over 25 and had no idea that this was a thing: you are not alone. The certifications only came into being at the turn of the century, a year before the MOS competition began. They have slowly grown in popularity as school districts across the US adopted more STEM-focused curricula, including practical courses in how to use the humdrum IT that undergirds our global economy. North Carolina has made a deal with Certiport to guarantee every student in the state unlimited free testing, which goes a long way toward explaining Green Hope’s winning streak. (The test costs $96 retail in the US, but academic discounts can drop that to $75 or less.) Florida actually pays its teachers a bounty for every certified child under their tutelage, a legacy of Jeb Bush’s enthusiasm for tests.

No matter where they are, every kid that takes a certification exam is entered into the competition automatically, and then gets informed if they happen to rank highest in their region, whether they knew they were competing or not. The proficient and willing are then sent to national competitions — the US nationals happened in Orlando in June this year — where the true American macromeisters emerge to compete on the global level.

Even though any human can take as many certifications in as many versions of Microsoft Office applications as they desire, each student can only go to nationals and worlds for one particular version of one particular program — Word 2013, for example, or PowerPoint 2016. The standard certification test asks takers to follow a series of prompts to complete specific tasks like renaming a slideshow or using the Excel COUNTIF function correctly. In most countries, the national competition consists of students retaking the same standard test they took to qualify in the first place.

Most of the students in Anaheim had managed to house the standard certification test in about five minutes (out of an allowed 50) to qualify, but the test in Anaheim used a different format. At the world competition — and the nationals of more developed testing nations like the US and the UK — instead of following a test step by step, the students are given a bunch of assets (like datasets or images), a sheet of basic instructions, and a finished document, which they then have to exactly re-create. This shift, according to Certiport, rewards true fluency with the program, rather than rote memorization of the basic test.

And the stakes are high: at the global level, first place in a program is worth $7,000 and a free Xbox. Second place gets you $3,500 and an Asus Transformer Mini. Third, awards $1,500 and a NuVision Solo 10 Draw tablet.

Plus all that glory.

Testing began the next morning, following a series of pep talks in one of the conference center ballrooms. Kids went down to the testing room in clutches of 30 or so, leaving the rest of their peers to hang and anxiously socialize in the designated “student lounge” — a pair of large conference rooms kitted out with ping-pong tables, air hockey, foosball, and an array of Xboxes.

This year, 560,000 kids in the world took an MOS test: 320,000 of them were in the US; 124 made it to Orlando after beating the rest of the kids in their states; and only six Americans made it to the worlds. Forty-eight other countries sent teams of varying sizes. Certiport’s global test-administering franchises have to put up the cash to get their kids and chaperones to Disney. Like the US, China sent a full slate of six: one kid per edition, 2013 and 2016, of Excel, PowerPoint, and Word. Guatemala and Japan both sent teams of three, while Cameroon and Romania each sent one.

New Zealand, relatively new to the Certiport program, sent a team sourced entirely from one high school: Avondale College, in Auckland. The team wore all black, with kiwi bird badges on the breasts of their matching polo shirts. The delegation from Jordan was chaperoned by Fareed Ghanim, Certiport’s Jordanian partner, who had only started working with the company two years earlier. After calling to ask about how he could take a test as part of some market research, he said he had spent three hours a day on the phone with the parents of two of his young charges to convince them that letting their son and daughter fly across the world to Anaheim to compete in office software was not a horrible idea. Ayman, from Morocco, had been compulsively eating candy all morning. The Greeks seemed to be having the best time, skipping the unceasing AC indoors for some sunny cafe tables by the pool.

This year, 560,000 kids in the world took an MOS test

I followed the contingent scheduled to compete at 11:30 down to the bowels of the conference center, to the hall outside testing room — Monorail B — where their laptops waited. Despite the mix of languages spoken by all the students, many opted to take their tests in English, citing the bad translations that Certiport used for their instructions and Microsoft used for its menus, which only made working in their mother tongues more confusing.

While we waited for test time to come, Certiport staff made sure everyone was there, stumbling through the international array of names and lining the competitors up against the wall outside the room. Ryan Catalfu performed his student ambassadorial duties before everyone entered the chamber, doing a little patter (“Whose flight to get here was the longest?”) and leading the anxious assembled in low-key calisthenics. He relished the role, and at least half the kids took his suggestions seriously, vigorously wiggling their arms to limber up for the test.

Finally, the kids filed in and sat in their assigned spots. Earlier, each had the chance to test the keyboards of their preferred language and make sure everything was in high-performing order. Manila envelopes containing the instructions and documents to emulate covered each laptop’s keyboard. Certiport staff gathered up everyone’s cellphones and stacked them on a table in the center of the room, where a cluster of multilingual translators sat, ready to troubleshoot any crises. The test envelopes were opened, and I was shuffled out of the room, to let the teens accurately replicate Microsoft Office documents in peace.

In the cavernous lunch ballroom, I found Marty Roettgen, Green Hope’s IT impresario, to ask how (and why) she’d forged a world-class Microsoft Office program in North Carolina. She came to teaching after a 28-year career in PC supply chain management — first at IBM and then Lenovo — and still wears the belt-mounted cellphone to prove it.

“I am a firm believer in the certification. I’d call it passion,” Roettgen told me. “I ran my classroom like a business. I don’t expect you to work 100 percent of the time. You can goof 10 percent of the time — that’s nine minutes — and I let them go at their own pace.”

"I am a firm believer in the certification. I'd call it passion."

Counter to the cutthroat competition that most people have in mind when they say something should be “run like a business,” Roettgen sees the certifications as an opportunity to foster cooperation and a rare source of external validation for everyone. Just like when she was a manager at IBM, she sets goals for her students — like getting 28 out of 30 kids in the class to pass a certification test — and then gives them a bonus if they hit their marks. “I’d chip in 20 bucks and we’d have a celebration in class.” That had the effect of motivating the A students to help their struggling classmates. “And what’s even neater, is that kid who was the 28th kid — they’ve never been celebrated for anything in the classroom — but they’re the ones who got the whole class the party.”

“The type-A kids who come here? All their lives they’ve gotten As. It means nothing to them, but the certification is outside of that,” Roettgen says. “Take a B or C student, they’ve done alright, but they’re marginal on their self-image. A little confidence is missing: certification is what grown-ups get, and for them it means a lot. But you take that D or F student, and get them to pass? It can change their life. Somebody’s just got to tell them they’re worth something.”

Disneyland Hotel workers wandered through the ballroom, playing a series of tones on handheld xylophones; lunch was over. As the afternoon wore on and more competitors finished their tests, the lounge cleared out, leaving the unfortunate nervous wrecks of the 3:30 slot to play air hockey while their minds furiously ran through keyboard shortcuts.

Tiberiu, from Romania, had gone light on lunch, with the theory that too much food slowed down his brain. He and Filip Nowakowski (17, Word), the lone competitor from Poland, played Jenga while they waited to be tested. Rosario Ruiz (16, Excel), Paraguay’s delegate, chatted calmly about her experiences at worlds in Orlando last year, her plans to become a renewable energy engineer, and how the iced tea she was offering everyone she met was first invented in the bloody 19th century Paraguayan War.

The hotel staff wheeled out tables of popcorn and tortilla chips with tureens of queso into the central lobby, in preparation for the screening of Cool Runnings playing at 6PM for the truly stranded teens. The next day, after some more motivational speeches, the competitors were given free passes to Disneyland and let loose, unmarred by pre-test stress or post-awards letdowns.

Then Wednesday: the awards.

As one might expect at a competition in which children mimic the workday tasks of people who would probably rather be doing something else, yet another round of motivational speakers had a chance to talk before the ceremony could get underway. These speakers were clearly the motivational B Team, sent out for a low-impact day of dispensing chestnuts at the podium. One Microsoft employee exhorted the assembled teens to focus on the destination, not the journey, before stammering out a correction.

The kids, of course, were barely listening. As soon as the speeches ended and the beginning of the “student parade” was announced, all hell broke loose, and every student in the house jumped out of their seats to assemble into an entirely self-ordered line. One by one, they all went onstage holding their country’s flag, stated their name and nation, and posed for a picture with the corporate reps. Students from delegations that had only brought one flag to share would walk offstage, amble to the table where they picked up their “official participant” certificate, and break into a flat-out sprint across the ballroom to hand the flag off to their waiting comrades.

His feet seemed to barely touch the ground

As the standard American soundtrack to inspiration, Aaron Copland’s “Fanfare for the Common Man,” played on an endless loop, chaperones with tight flight schedules for their crews rolled hardshell suitcases into the ballroom entryway. Fast friends who would probably never see each other again, or at least not all in one place, took turns sneaking out for group photos in front of the official MOS backdrops in the lobby.

Everyone settled down as the awards announcements began, starting with third place in Word 2013. As each winner was named, their delegations and new friends erupted with cheers and applause, each kid fighting their way to the stage with out-of-control energy. Tiberiu, the lone Romanian, won gold, and as he ran through the crowd and up the steps holding his flag and pumping his fists to gather his trophy, Xbox, and giant novelty check, his feet seemed to barely touch the ground.

PowerPoint 2013 came next, with Hong Kong’s full delegation whooping for their gold winner. Then came Excel 2013. Anticipation was high: the spreadsheet program was widely acknowledged as the elite competition within the competition, even if 2013 was seen as a slightly lesser cousin to the shiny new 2016 version. I was watching alongside one of the Greek chaperones, a teacher with an incredible bedazzled manicure and new shoes. (The whole delegation had hit the outlets on Monday afternoon.) When Kyriakos bounded onstage to accept his bronze, attempting a running high-five of the lined-up officials in the process, his teacher turned to me with tears of joy in her eyes and said, “He should have gotten more, no?”

China’s Jiaxi Dai took gold in Excel 2013, and somehow managed to rocket himself vertically out of his chair, deep in the middle of a cluster, when his name was read aloud. Word 2016 saw Nigeria’s two-time competitor Eta Katherine take bronze, and another Hong Konger win top honors.

In PowerPoint 2016, Green Hope’s own Dheya Madhani won silver, salvaging the school’s rep and putting the US on the board.

That left Excel 2016, the creme de la creme of Microsoft Office Suite and America’s last chance at an Xbox. In third, Jayden Cook, a 20-year-old member of the New Zealand Avondale All Blacks. In second, Serawut Khamset, another big get for the Thai team. And in first, Mr. USA himself, John “Jack” Dumoulin III, took home the final gold.

Jack strode across the stage in a presidential suit, firmly shook hands with the officials, and collected the spoils of his Excel-lence. As the hubbub increased, Certiport aired an ad for its testing portal, showing teen actors so excited about the idea of becoming certified in Microsoft Office that they spontaneously broke into Stomp-like improvised dance in the library. The press descended on the golden boy. An event organizer told me that two other US competitors had come in close fourths, and that Jack’s win had come down to a faster few seconds.

Despite the fact that Jack had beat Green Hope’s Ryan Catalfu, too, at nationals, Ryan was magnanimous in the face of this possibly bittersweet victory for Team USA. Dheya marveled at the fact that she hadn’t even wanted to compete in nationals, since an older boy at school was going up against her, but was glad that her mom had encouraged her to go, and win. “I just wanted to place, because the competition is quite tough,” she said. I asked how the less-victorious Americans were holding up. “It’s Team USA. We’re all happy for each other and happy for our achievements.”

As teams began filtering out to catch flights back home, competitors started saying tearful goodbyes to their new friends, promising to meet next year in Orlando — if they could make it. (Test-takers can return to the world championships to compete in a different program or version, depending on national rules.) “Of course I’ll come again next year,” Tiberiu said. “I met a lot of people, and made an awesome friend from Morocco, Ayman.”

Ayman was less sure of his future: “In Morocco, it’s just for 10th grade, but I hope. I’ll tell them we can do it a second time,” he said. He offered me a Moroccan coin as a keepsake and asked me to sign his memento card, already covered in names and greetings, a yearbook’s worth of teen intensity wrung out of four short days. Then he headed off to take more last-chance group photos with competitors being hustled out the hotel’s sliding doors.

I walked up to Jack, after his scrum died down; he was actually thanking members of the Vietnamese delegation for beating him at ping-pong on Monday. He had a photograph of his grandmother, who passed away last year, tucked into his badge holder, “for good luck,” he said. “It worked.”

“I did not know about this competition when I took the certification test, back in December,” he added. “It’s been a wild ride, and an honor just to be here.”

“I’m gonna go back and get the whole county going,” Jack said. “We’re big into computer stuff in Boy Scouts, so I’m hoping to get them started, and also some of my athletic friends. I normally hang out with athletes.” Jack paused.

“Or, I’m used to both sides. I like the baseball competition crowd and the Microsoft competition crowd. It’s a great atmosphere.”

The design behind Hatchimals, the hit toy of the season — and YouTube

2016-12-22T09:30:01-05:00

If you are not a child, don’t have a child, or don’t know anyone with kids, there’s a chance you’ve never heard of a Hatchimal, the must-have toy for Christmas this year.

Allow me to introduce you: the Hatchimal is a plush little robot that comes trapped in a sealed, football-sized plastic egg. As soon as you take it out of its packaging, it comes to life — you can see its eyes glow through the shell, and hear it make cooing sounds. After you warm it up, move it around, and knock on the shell (and it knocks back), the Hatchimal starts to peck its way free with its spring-loaded beak. And then it asks you to play.

With Hatchimals, Spin Master, the Toronto-based company behind the toys, has had a surprise hit. They sold out (at $59.99 MSRP) almost as soon as they reached shelves in October of this year. Smart parents smelled the oncoming craze and snagged one early. Evil geniuses, like the Zappa brothers from Arizona, cashed in on the hype by stockpiling Hatchimals (before stores started limiting sales to one per customer) then reselling them for more than $150 a pop on eBay. Evil un-geniuses, like the woman who wrote *Water for Elephants*, bet tens of thousands of dollars on aftermarket Hatchimals in hopes of flipping them for even higher prices, only to run up against the new restrictions placed on the toys by resale sites.

A plush robot that comes trapped in an egg

Spin Master has become one of the major players in the toy industry since its founding in the mid-’90s. On the one hand, they create blockbuster TV show tie-ins (like the PAW Patrol line of canine first responders) and buy up vintage brands like Erector Set and Etch A Sketch. On the other, they build complicated, technical toys for older kids like Air Hogs, a line of flying toy planes and helicopters, and the voice-activated Zoomers menagerie, some of the most advanced toy robots on the market. Hatchimals are the ingenious combination of those two worlds — innovative tech combined with an interface and look designed to appeal to younger kids.

The signature design element is (per the name) the act of hatching. Some Spin Master employees who worked on the project have said that the whole toy was inspired by the freakish popularity of unboxing videos for kids on YouTube — children apparently love watching other kids or adults opening new toys and playing with them, so here’s a toy that can actually unbox itself.

However David McDonald, one of the dedicated designers on Spin Masters’ advanced concepts team that came up with the Hatchimal idea, says that the toy’s origin story is a little less cynical.

“I had always wanted to do something that hatches,” McDonald says. “I always thought that Tamagotchi had dropped the ball — they had a neat idea, but never took it any further, into the real world.”

While researching a whole slate of designs based on biomimicry, McDonald says he saw how a toy could break its way free from an imitation egg: it needed to spin around inside, and then peck like crazy. That presented a materials challenge — how to make an eggshell that a robot could slowly chip its way out of, like a baby chick poking its way out. The team eventually came up with a design that mimics the way that a real egg breaks, piece by piece, by finding the right mix between brittle and bendy plastic, and building a band of structural weaknesses inside of the egg.

But this early Hatchimal was a very different beast. Following the bird biomimicry line of logic, McDonald was trying to come up with a Hatchimal that could actually fly, drawing on Spin Master’s expertise with its flying Air Hogs.

But if this toy was hatching out of its own egg, he thought, then that meant it was a baby. And what do babies do? They cry, they play, they babble, they grow — they need nurturing. So the early-stage Hatchimal lost its functional wings (they still have cute little stubs) and started to get bigger, to be able to fit all the sensors and motors inside necessary to make a lovable, interactive, playful robot pet.

Here’s a toy that can unbox itself

“The mechanism is an odd thing, and takes up a lot of space,” McDonald says. “The character has to power itself to rotate in the egg and peck, and then when you pull it out it has to engage the wheels and start flapping.”

By the time they jammed that all in, they had a roughly Furby-sized chunk of whirring plastic and light-up eyes. But if the point is to get kids to take care of the thing, it has to be adorable and cuddly. Or, as McDonald sees it, a little pathetic.

“We really just draped some fabric over the mechanism, but I think it actually came out brilliant,” McDonald says. Counterintuitively, even though they tested out different levels of plushness, they ended up settling on a shorter, somewhat gnarlier covering for their robot, and designed the eyes to have a slightly sad, worried-looking cast. Even the way it moves when fresh out of the egg is meant to seem helpless and a little lost. “When I look at the poor thing, I want to pick it up,” McDonald says. “It’s like a newborn, and, like a baby, it doesn’t matter if it’s really ugly — you gave birth to it, so you instantly love it.”

“When I look at the poor thing, I want to pick it up.”

To make it seem like it’s truly coming to life in your arms, the team also integrated a secret on switch into the packaging, based on an idea that came from Spin Master’s Hong Kong design team. To remove it from the cardboard and plastic case it’s sold in, you have to take out a few pegs from the bottom of the egg — as soon as they’re out, the Hatchimal’s eyes light up and it starts speaking through the shell.

“We didn’t really think about what it would end up being ahead of time,” McDonald says. “It just sort of appeared as we got deeper into the project.”

On paper, the Hatchimal’s design seems too ambitious for its own good. There’s the IP problem — no one knew what a Hatchimal was before this year, and kids weren’t already smitten with the characters. Then there’s the “blind pack” problem — putting your toy inside an opaque egg is a proven “collect ‘em all” tactic for smaller items, but a $60 (and up) toy that you can’t actually see could deter casual shoppers. And worst of all, there’s the battery life problem — if a Hatchimal sits around on a shelf for a year, there’s a chance its batteries will kick the bucket before the toy has a chance to come to life.

“It doesn’t matter if it’s really ugly — you gave birth to it, so you instantly love it.”

“There were so many reasons not to do it,” McDonald says. But the shelf life of batteries stops being a problem if your product flies off the shelves.

The intense demand and booming secondary market for Hatchimals has prompted some to wonder if the toy’s scarcity is also by design, and speculate that Spin Master is manipulating the supply precisely to drive parents insane. But Sandra Shatilla, the marketing director for the company’s robotics unit, insists that that’s a bug, not a feature. More shipments will keep coming in through January.

And if you can’t wait, you can watch other people take their Hatchimals out of the box, cuddle with it, and see it hatch in their arms — naturally, these things are pretty popular on YouTube.

Cloud seeding returns to LA, but no one is sure if it works

2016-04-29T13:27:24-04:00

Early last month, a tentacle of warm, wet air began to stretch across thousands of miles of the Pacific. This was the famous “Pineapple Express,” a band of weather so saturated with water vapor that meteorologists call it an “atmospheric river” flowing through the sky. Forecasters had predicted that much-needed rains would come from these systems, spit out by a supersized El Niño, but an unusual bubble of high pressure had sat over Southern California all winter, keeping January and February sunny and dry.

This time, though, the river was breaking through. As the clouds swept over the LA Basin and east over the San Gabriel Mountains, 10 Automatic High Output Generators (AHOGS) contracted by the LA County Department of Public Works began to fire. An AHOG is basically a remote-controlled fireworks stand; 10 feet tall, loaded up with 16 canisters of silver iodide dissolved in acetone, which when set on fire by a propane pilot light, fizzle like giant sparklers. When the canisters started hissing, winds sweeping up the canyons pulled the smoke — mostly silver iodide crystals — up into the water-rich Pineapple clouds. Once airborne, the silver iodide began to collect ice.

Basically a remote-controlled fireworks stand

When the weather’s warm enough (in high summer, or almost anytime in the tropics), rain comes when the water droplets that make up clouds start to randomly collide, glom together, then get heavy enough for gravity to take over. But in the chillier months of the year, especially when the moisture is pushed up over mountains into the colder reaches of the atmosphere, most rain begins its life as snow. Silver iodide has a crystalline structure remarkably similar to that of ice — up in the supercooled water of the cloud, molecules of water vapor are drawn to that crystalline structure then freeze as they come in contact with the snowflake forming around the silver seed.

So then it rained in the foothills, and it snowed further up in the mountains, and the drought-stricken county captured as much of that water as it could. According to the DPW, and the dozens of other state and county agencies across the Western US that have invested in cloud-seeding programs, the seeded clouds gave up a little more water than they would have on their own. According to the science? It’s complicated.

Weather modification has a long history in perennially dry Southern California. In the early days of the 20th century, LA and other cities in the Southland famously paid “rainmakers” — mostly con men with almanacs — for their feats of weather control. Los Angeles County has run more scientific cloud-seeding operations as far back as the 1950s, soon after two researchers named Vincent Schaefer and Bernard Vonnegut (Kurt’s brother) first discovered that silver iodide and dry ice could both, through different mechanisms, trigger precipitation in cooling clouds.

This year’s seeding was the county’s first since 2002. It had planned to reboot the program in 2009, but the massive Station Fire burned up over 160,000 acres of the San Gabriel Mountains that year, increasing the risk for mudslides and flash floods in the areas most directly affected by the cloud-seeding efforts, so the operation was called off.

And LA County is hardly alone in its weather-modification efforts. LA County’s neighbor to the north, Santa Barbara County, has been cloud seeding with both ground-based machines and a dedicated cloud-seeding airplanes since the ‘80s, and there are active cloud-seeding programs in nine states west of the Mississippi. Some programs try to increase precipitation to boost the local water supply, while others shoot for thicker snowpack at local ski resorts. And some even use seeding to bust up cloud cover over agricultural areas that need more sunlight, or modify hailstorms to decrease hail damage — more condensation nuclei theoretically means that more hailstones form, but each individual ice pellet is a little smaller, and therefore less damaging to crops and property. Further afield, Canada, China, Israel, India, Australia, and many other countries also try to modify their weather on a regular basis. As population growth and climate change increases pressure on water sources, government agencies and water companies are increasingly willing to try anything to boost local supply.

The official line from the LA DWP is that cloud seeding can boost the precipitation from a storm by 15 to 20 percent, but meteorology research is almost impossible to verify by the same standards as laboratory science. When you’re dealing with an infinitely variable set of real-world atmospheric systems, there are just no consistent controls to measure against. That hasn’t stopped researchers from trying.

LA’s current cloud-seeding operation is run by the Sandy, Utah-based North American Weather Consultants, Inc. Don Griffith, the head honcho at NAWC, has been in the weather-modification business since 1968, and pointed to a recent research project in Santa Barbara County that found similar storm systems called convection bands, when coming in over the coast, yielded 19 to 21 percent more rain when seeded.

Patrick Chuang, a Professor of earth and planetary sciences at UC Santa Cruz who specializes in cloud physics and climate research, struck a more skeptical note. “A cloud itself is a really hard thing to forecast, because it’s fundamentally very sensitive,” Chuang says. Slight variations in the amount of water vapor, temperature, or wind speed in a given parcel of air can make a cloud disappear or reform as its droplets evaporate or coalesce. Then within that tenuous system, only a small fraction of those drops grow large enough to form precipitation. That chaos makes determining statistically significant cause and effect extremely difficult.

“It’s basically taking a pencil balanced on its point, then hitting a gong in a building a block over. Did that make any difference? Who the hell knows—you’re going to have to do this a million times to make sure all the other factors relevant to the problem are beat down by statistics,” Chuang says.

"It’s basically taking a pencil balanced on its point, then hitting a gong in a building a block over."

In 2003, the National Academies convened a panel to investigate the effectiveness of weather modification. They found that there was “still no convincing scientific proof” that it worked, but called for increased research in the field. Two years later, scientists began a research project in Wyoming to study the effectiveness of cloud seeding by comparing precipitation from a storm system as it hit two adjacent mountain ranges — one range would be the control, the other would be outfitted with seeding machines.

After nine years, they came up with an answer: cloud seeding is “a viable technology to augment existing water supplies,” and has the potential to boost the output of a storm by 5 to 15 percent — kind of. Even though it lines up with a similarly ambitious four-year study carried out in Australia, that final number came after a certain amount of statistical massaging, and even nine years isn’t long enough to get consistent data when you’re studying something as complicated as a storm cloud.

"A type of insurance"

But even if the research isn’t quite there, Griffith at NAWC says that it makes more sense to think of weather modification as “a type of insurance — if it has a 70 or 80 percent chance of working, then it’s worth investing in to get a better outcome. All these water managers and state utilities that invest money year after year, these people are not dumb.”

In a drought like California’s, where water costs are high and climbing, every bit helps. For its first-year $550,000 contract with NAWC, the county estimates that they’ll recoup an extra 1.5 billion gallons of precipitation in its watersheds — enough to provide a year’s worth of drinking water for 36,000 people, and an amount that would cost $3.2 million on the local water market. The science may not be perfect, but if cloud seeding works even 20 percent as well as DWP says it does, that’s still a good bet for the thirsty taxpayers of LA.

Correction: an earlier draft referred to Don Griffith of NAWC as Bob Griffith.

This tool lets real drums play any kind of electronic beat

2015-07-19T12:00:02-04:00

Early in the evening on Wednesday last week, a crowd packed into the pink-and-blue confines of the Elvis Guesthouse, a narrow basement bar in New York’s East Village. They were there to hear some drums.

The kit had been set up in the far back corner, adjacent to the disco ball. Each drum — snare, bass, two toms, hi-hat, ride — had a small, glowing piece of plastic clamped onto its rim, and each of those clamps was hooked up to a laptop nearby. Otherwise, it seemed like any normal drum set.

Then the show began, and Kiran Gandhi, a drummer who’s toured with M.I.A. (and just graduated from Harvard Business School), started to play. Too many sounds — way too many sounds — began coming out of those drums. The snare crashed with a digital fizz, the tom sounded like an 808, the bass drum like a mallet bonging on the side of a grand piano. It sounded like a free jazz solo version of the beat behind a studio-produced dance banger, and it looked like magic.

The snare crashed with a digital fizz

This was the Kickstarter launch party for a new drum system called Sensory Percussion, created by a drummer and programmer named Tlacael Esparza who, along with his brother Tenoch, founded a company called Sunhouse to develop this technology.

“We’re trying to bring back the intuitive physicality of music making,” Tlacael said, “but bring those skills to electronic music.” In other words, he wants to make it so that a drummer hitting real drums can play any kind of electronic beat out there, no matter how complicated, just with the sticks in their hands.

Tlacael came up with the idea when he found himself confronted with one very particular challenge: “There’s this Nicolas Jaar song called ‘Why Didn’t You Save Me‘ that has this just amazing drum part,” Tlacael said, “and when I heard it I thought: I want to do that.”

But he knew it was impossible with the existing technology. Jaar is a producer and a DJ, and that drum part was the product of complex sampling, pitch shifting, and other radical changes in the basic sounds being played, none of which a drummer can do while playing, sticks in hand. “All of that desire fed into building this,” Tlacael said, “to just allow for that kind of control over sound.”

Drummers are stuck with technology that doesn’t match their skills

The gap between the beats coming out of studios and the physical capability of drummers has been growing for decades. Drummers today are stuck with technology that doesn’t match their skills: fiddling with knobs and laptops and sample pads doesn’t draw on any of their training as real drummers. Meanwhile, electronic drumkits lack the nuanced sound of real drums. They are essentially buttons that trigger preset sounds. They’ll play louder or softer depending on how hard you hit them, but that’s the limit of their expressivity.

“I love electronic music, but playing a keyboard or a pad to make a drum beat does not make any sense to me,” said Kiran Gandhi, who’s been beta testing Sensory Percussion since she encountered it at Sunhouse’s demo studio during South By Southwest this spring. “To able to sit down and write a beat using my drum set is revolutionary.”

Unlike electronic drums, Sensory Percussion picks up on the actual sound coming out of acoustic drums, and then uses that to form its digital output. It allows drummers to capture all the subtleties that analog drums can produce while playing digital music.

The process transforms physical drums into virtual spaces

Here’s how it works: those glowing clamps contain two small microphones that pick up the analog audio signal from the drums, and the Sensory Percussion software translates the sound into a manipulable digital signal in real time. After a brief training session in which you teach the program what different parts of your drum sound like when played, the program’s audio processing and machine learning algorithms can tell where and how you’re is hitting the drum, whether that’s in the middle of the drum head, the edge, or somewhere in between, or if you’re hitting the rim with the tip of the stick or the middle of the shaft — all told, it can separate the sound coming out of the drum into eight separate zones. You can then assign different samples or effects to each zone, and blend between them (by physically playing somewhere between the center of those zones) with as much nuance as the analog acoustics of the drum allow.

This is easier to grok when you see it in action, but that process transforms physical drums into virtual spaces, capable of playing effects and sounds on the fly. You could make one zone control reverb, another play a drum sample, and the rest play sounds you recorded around your house, all on one drum. Technically, the sensors can process any sound input as a “zone,” so you could tell the program to use your laptop’s built-in mic as the sensor input, and play your desk like a drum kit. The program can also record all the information on where you’ve hit the drum during a session, and you can then swap out the samples and effects assigned to each zone after the fact, keeping the same underlying performance intact while changing the sound completely.

“You’re always kind of envious of a guitar player.”

Sterling Campbell, a drummer who’s played for David Bowie and David Byrne and who got a chance to test out Sensory Percussion at Sunhouse’s office in Queens, compared it to an electric guitar. “Just from a creative side, you’re always kind of envious of a guitar player, because there’s so much you can do with pedals, looping, an iPad — you can sonically do anything on a guitar. So playing with this system was really like, ‘Wow, now I can do all that.'”

“The possibilities are pretty insane,” said Ian Chang, the drummer for Son Lux, who’s also gotten a chance to beta test Sensory Percussion. “It makes me think about playing the drums differently and how the whole kit can interact. It’s like playing with a different part of the brain; it’s totally crazy.”

Those possibilities do come with a learning curve, though. Sensory Percussion is not for the weekend DJ, unless that DJ is already a drummer. Tlacael mentioned the possibility of using it to help teach the drums to newbies, by giving more feedback on how their hits are landing, but for the most part his system adds complexity. The initial setup process — training the program to recognize the different sounds of your own drums, slotting in some samples and effects, and starting to play — isn’t particularly time-consuming, but the potential for customization and miniscule tweaking could lead to hours (or more realistically, days) lost down experimental rabbit holes.

These possibilities do come with a learning curve

A week in, the Kickstarter campaign has raised over $60,000 of its $80,000 goal, and the Esparzas say that the first wave of production units should ship by January of 2016. Right now, the program can feed into MIDI-capable production software like Ableton Live to control samples, but by the time it ships it will come bundled with its own sampler system that doesn’t rely on MIDI, since, as Tenoch says, “we have to kind of dumb the signal down to go through MIDI, so we can do a more sophisticated kind of signal processing with our own protocol.”

And already, Tlacael has gotten to prove that his invention works like he originally intended — earlier this spring, he brought the Sensory Percussion prototype on a short tour with Nicolas Jaar and got a chance to test out his invention live.

“He was able to do everything,” Jaar said. “It feels like cheating, honestly, because a huge part of what I do live was taken off my shoulders. It was basically a dream come true.”

How an artificial language from 1887 is finding new life online

2015-05-29T10:03:46-04:00

On a recent Friday evening, the Esperanto Society of New York convened in a rowhouse on Manhattan’s East 35th Street. The upper floors of the building seemed to house a bilingual preschool, going by the many large surfaces covered in multicolored paint handprints, while the ground floor was made up of multipurpose meeting rooms administered by the Unitarian Universalist church down the block.

How an artificial language from 1887 is finding new life online

By Sam Dean

On a recent Friday evening, the Esperanto Society of New York convened in a rowhouse on Manhattan’s East 35th Street. The upper floors of the building seemed to house a bilingual preschool, going by the many large surfaces covered in multicolored paint handprints; the ground floor was made up of multipurpose meeting rooms administered by the Unitarian Universalist church down the block.

Four people had been listed as “attending” on the Facebook page for the event, but by the time the meeting began, eight Esperantists were sitting in a rough semicircle of dormroom couches and hard plastic chairs. The exuberantly mustached Neil Blonstein, president of the Society, was presiding behind a folding banquet table, wearing a white T-shirt printed with the word “ESPERANTO” and a photo of a group of Esperantists at a convention. There were grapes and crackers by the door.

That night, the Society consisted of seven men, including Neil, and one woman (though Neil’s girlfriend, also an Esperantist, did show up later). Some were young, most were not. The agenda for the evening included two speeches, each followed by discussion. The talks were difficult to follow if you didn’t know any Esperanto, but a rusty background in French allowed for an understanding of the broad strokes.

Tech was in the air. A bearded Brooklyn College junior read an account of a conference he’d gone to the previous weekend called Organizing 2.0, peppered with the untranslated names of apps, and followed by a discussion of the uses and meaning of MailChimp. Then, a composer and member of Mensa gave a speech on Wikipedia, specifically the problems that crowdsourcing presents for smaller languages. He compared Esperanto to Bislama, the language of the Pacific Island nation of Vanuatu. Despite having 250,000 native speakers, Bislama Wikipedia only has 444 pages. Esperanto Wikipedia has over 215,000.

Like its vastly more successful digital cousins — C++, HTML, Python — Esperanto is an artificial language, designed to have perfectly regular grammar, with none of the messy exceptions of natural tongues. Out loud, all that regularity creates strange cadences, like someone speaking Italian slowly while chewing gum. William Auld, the Modernist Scottish poet who wrote his greatest work in Esperanto, was nominated for the Nobel Prize multiple times, but never won. But it is supremely easy to learn, like a puzzle piece formed to fit into the human brain.

Invented at the end of the 19th century, in many ways it presaged the early online society that the web would bring to life at the end of the 20th. It’s only ever been spoken by an assortment of fans and true believers spread across the globe, but to speak Esperanto is to become an automatic citizen in the most welcoming non-nation on Earth.

Decades before Couchsurfing became a website (or the word website existed), Esperantists had an international homestay service called Pasporta Servo, in which friendly hosts around the world listed their phone numbers and home addresses in a central directory available to traveling Esperantists. It may be a small, widely dispersed, and self-selected diaspora, but wherever you go, there are Esperantists who are excited that you exist.

It sounds hokey, but this is the central appeal of Esperanto. It’s as if the initial utopian vibes of the World Wide Web had never reached a wider audience. There’s no money, no power, no marketing, no prestige — Esperanto speakers speak Esperanto because they believe in it, and because it’s fun to speak a foreign language almost instantly, after a couple months of rolling the words around in your mouth.

The internet, though, has been a mixed blessing for Esperanto. While providing a place for Esperantists to convene without the hassle of traveling to conventions or local club meetings, some Esperantists believe those meatspace meet ups were what held the community together. The Esperanto Society of New York has 214 members on Facebook, but only eight of them showed up for the meeting. The shift to the web, meanwhile, has been haphazard, consisting mostly of message boards, listservs, and scattered blogs. A website called Lernu! — Esperanto for the imperative “learn!” — is the center of the Esperanto internet, with online classes and an active forum. But it’s stuck with a Web 1.0 aesthetic, and the forum is prone to trolls, a byproduct of Esperanto’s culture of openness to almost any conversation as long as it’s conducted in — or even tangentially related to — Esperanto.

But there’s hope that the internet can give the language new life. Wikipedia and its 215,000 pages was a first step, and yesterday, Esperanto debuted on Duolingo, a virtual learning app with 20 million active users — far more people than have ever spoken Esperanto since its invention.

“Strangers in the Night,” sung in Esperanto

The assembled Esperantists in that scuffed room on East 35th Street knew the Duolingo course was coming, and they were optimistic. The word Esperanto, after all, means “one who hopes.”

But the final item on the meeting’s agenda underscored what all those virtual Esperantists were missing. After the speeches, Neil got up and passed out sheets printed with the lyrics to “Fremdaj en la Nokt,” the Esperanto version of the Sinatra hit “Strangers in the Night.” He explained that a particular Italian Esperantist had an extensive YouTube presence and a habit of jumping into worldwide Esperanto forums and Facebook groups to plug his singing. This was one of his better songs.

Neil settled back down behind his banquet table, counted out the time, and the eight attending members of the New York Esperanto Society started to sing.

Esperanto was invented in 1887 by a Polish ophthalmologist named L.L. Zamenhof, who hoped his creation would bring about world peace. Zamenhof saw a turbulent world divided by language, and concluded that the situation was too complicated, essentially unfair, and ultimately doomed. He believed that the languages people already spoke were oversaturated with history, politics, and power, making it impossible to communicate clearly. Esperanto was a fresh start, a technology that would allow its speakers to sidestep the difficulties of natural languages altogether.

He made it as easy to learn as possible, with no irregular verbs, a vocabulary adapted from Romance language roots, and a simple, genderless, almost caseless grammar. The late 19th century was the heyday of the artificial language, and before Esperanto, an artificial language called Volapük was all the rage, with almost a million speakers across Europe. Zamenhof dismissed it as too difficult to speak (the Esperanto word for “gibberish” is still volapukaĵo), and by the late 1880s, it was starting to unravel.

Zamenhof wrote his first book describing Esperanto in Russian, and he called the language the studiously dull Lingvo Internacia, or “International Language.” But he published it under the pen name “Doktoro Esperanto,” meaning “Doctor Hoper” in his new idiom, and like Doctor Frankenstein before him, soon found that people were calling his creation by the name of its creator. With its simplicity and supposed neutrality, he was hoping his language would make it to the Fina Venko, the “Final Victory,” his term for the Esperanto rapture: the day when the whole world would speak his invention as a second language, facilitating clear, neutral, and ultimately peaceful dialogue among all humanity. Babel, basically, be gone.

Progress was slow in the early days. Zamenhof and his buddies started publishing a magazine in Esperanto, and word trickled out over the continent. Eighteen years after the first book describing Esperanto was published, there were 27 Esperanto magazines in regular production, and Zamenhof decided it was time to mark a new phase in the movement by doing what nerdy subcultures do best: he organized a convention.

This was 1905, so they called it a “world congress,” and 688 people showed up to discuss their new language in their new language. At least one convention has been held every year since, save the cumulative 10 years of World Wars, and conventions are still the major feature of the Esperanto social calendar.

As the movement grew, it started attracting notice from powerful places, not all of it positive. The League of Nations almost adopted Esperanto, but the idea was shot down by the French delegate. Zamenhof was Jewish, so Adolf Hitler denounced Esperanto as a language designed to unify the Jewish diaspora, and the Nazis were officially anti-Esperanto. Joseph Stalin was reportedly an Esperantist, but he turned on the language in the late ’30s, calling it a “language of spies,” and started purging people who spoke it.

Ayatolla Khomeini, too, waffled on Esperanto. Shortly after the Iranian Revolution, he urged his people to learn the language as an anti-imperialist counterpoint to English, and an official translation of the Qur’an followed. But adherents of the Baha’i faith had been fans of Esperanto for decades, and Khomeini was definitely not a fan of Baha’i, so his enthusiasm dimmed.

And Baha’i’s not the only smaller religion that’s embraced Esperanto as a liturgical language. In Brazil, which has one of the world’s largest populations of Esperantists, the language is intimately associated with the séance-centric Spiritist movement, and many followers of the neo-Shinto Japanese religion Oomoto have studied some Esperanto.

Mao Zedong liked Esperanto too. The Communist Party of China has published an Esperanto magazine, El Popola Ĉinio, since 1950, and state radio stations still regularly broadcast in the language.

And perhaps most famously, George Soros grew up speaking Esperanto, though his public involvement with the language hasn’t gone beyond getting his father’s Esperanto memoirs translated into English.

Mostly, though, Esperanto survived the 20th century on the strength of the local clubs and spread by chance encounters and word of mouth. This culture created hundreds of books, dozens of publications, and at least four known full-length feature films.

Today, nobody has any good idea how many people have even heard of Esperanto, let alone speak it fluently. Some estimate that millions can “parolas Esperanton,” but a Finnish linguist who’s studied the 1,000 or so native Esperanto speakers in the world came up with more reasonable ballpark numbers: around 100,000 can speak it to some degree, and only 10,000 are totally fluent. There’s no federal Esperanto government to pay for a census, and the decline of the local clubs and societies has made any kind of headcount nearly impossible. It’s not easy being artificial.

This would be great for computers to learn, was the first thought that Chuck Smith had about Esperanto. It was 2001, and he was in college, taking a class called Models of Mind. With its logical structure, Smith thought Esperanto could work as a bridge language for translation, especially between two languages like Finnish and Turkish, that are unlikely to have a large overlapping dataset that a machine translation program could use. Just as Zamenhof intended, Esperanto would be the metamedium of communication across tongues.

Smith didn’t pursue that idea beyond the class, but he did pursue Esperanto. The summer after Models of Mind, he went to Esperanto meetings in New York and San Francisco. Like every Esperantist I spoke with, the radiant chumminess of the Esperanto world drew Smith in. The following fall, he tapped the Esperanto network to find a place to stay during a board game fair in Essen, Germany. He was hooked, and he had a new angle: he wanted to use computers to help people learn Esperanto.

So he started Vikipedio, the Esperanto Wikipedia. This was 2001, and Esperanto was only the 11th language to have its own version. The first article, “Modernismo,” was imported from an extant online Esperanto encyclopedia called La Enciklopedio Kalblanda, or “The Kalb Land Encyclopedia,” which a guy named Stefano Kalb had been slowly writing since 1995.

The radiant chumminess of the Esperanto world drew Smith in

Lernu! launched a year later. More people visit Vikipedia, but this is the site that first posted free Esperanto classes online that were more advanced than email versions of the pen-and-paper correspondence courses that had existed for decades. It made learning the language easier, but some in the community believe that the popularity of its forums also sped the decline of the Esperanto clubs — instead of being a quiet member at a meeting, you could just lurk on the Lernu! forums.

While Esperanto became more digital, Smith dug deeper into Esperanto’s real-world organizations. He attended conferences, backpacked across Europe and stayed only with Esperantists, and started working at various Esperanto organizations in Europe and Canada. He landed in Berlin, and started a company, Ludisto (Esperanto for “player”), that makes iOS games.

So when Duolingo launched in 2012, Smith was one of the thousands who requested Esperanto for the new, free, and intentionally addictive language learning program. Duolingo eventually tapped Smith to be Team Leader for the development of the Esperanto course that went live yesterday.

He’s the public face of tech Esperanto in many ways, serving time as a guest on podcasts and logging many thousands of words on his own Esperanto-centric blog on Transparent Language. But the actual work of making the Duolingo course for Esperanto has largely fallen to a relative newcomer to the language: Ruth Kevess-Cohen, a DC-area doctor in her 50s specializing in internal medicine and geriatrics.

“It would be unusual to start from zero and, after two years, be able to develop a course in any other language,” Kevess-Cohen told me. “Maybe some geniuses, you know, but I’m just doing it in my spare time.”

She heard of Esperanto first as a possibility for a new Duolingo course, and then sought it out elsewhere. First she looked up the course on Lernu, but ultimately learned the language through the oldest method available: a correspondence course. After practicing the regular grammar with pen and paper, she spent a couple weeks at an intensive Esperanto immersion camp in Raleigh, North Carolina, and found that she could already understand what longtime Esperantists were saying. The community was welcoming, and the ability to suddenly speak a new language was practically addictive. Ruth, just like Chuck, was in.

That sense of empowerment has drawn the growing language hacking community to Esperanto, too. Benny Lewis, a man better known as Benny the Irish Polyglot, has built a career on telling people how to learn languages as quickly as humanly possible. His website, fluentinthreemonths.com, is the center of his business, and he’s written a book with the same name. If you ask where he lives, he says that he’s been traveling for 12 years. He claims to be fluent in 7 languages, and proficient in many more.

Benny first encountered Esperanto through couchsurfing (he says he’s hosted over 2,000 people on his own couches), and was immediately intrigued. His core language learning principle is confidence — the trick to being fluent in three months, he says, isn’t any kind of drug or special flashcard system, but a willingness to be humiliated by speaking a language poorly as soon as you know a single word.

And Esperanto is the ideal language for shamelessness: it’s simple, and almost everyone is a relative newcomer. Many studies, most of them conducted in the first half of the 20th century, found that Esperanto had a marked propaedeutic effect on language learning, which is a fancy Latinate way to say that, if you take college Esperanto classes for a year and college French classes for three years after that, you’ll know more French than if you took four straight years of college French. The hyper-regularity of Esperanto makes it supremely easy to learn, and its newness, its foreignness, primes the monolingual brain to learn more complicated newness even more quickly.

“Your brain starts to accept how to say words in another language without having to worry about complexity,” is how Benny puts it. He believes in Esperanto as a springboard to other languages so much that he convinced his girlfriend to learn Esperanto as her first foreign language, and filmed every minute of her progress.

“Your brain starts to accept how to say words in another language without having to worry about complexity.”

As a language hacker, Benny scoffs at the slow pace of academic language learning — he doesn’t recommend six months or a year of Esperanto, followed by years of French, but rather two weeks, just two weeks, of intensive Esperanto training, followed by a couple more months of anything else you’d like to learn.

“Ultimately it’s an easy language,” he said, “and it’s not intimidating.” He remembered his first attempts to learn German and Spanish, and being cowed in the face of all their particular grammatical rules and irregularities. Esperanto, on the other hand, is pure self-esteem. Plus, there’s a whole world of Esperanto speakers who are happy to hop on Skype to help out a neophyte — good luck finding a friendly francophone to do the same for free.

Esperantists like to talk about logic: Zamenhof made the grammar to be logical; Chuck Smith found that logicality intriguing; Benny the Irish Polyglot finds that the language’s logic makes it a logical choice for language hacking; and Duolingo chose Chuck Smith as the logical person to create its Esperanto course.

But by what logic did Duolingo decide to make an Esperanto class at all? Over 30 million English speakers have signed up to learn Spanish on Duolingo, and even more Spanish speakers have signed up to learn English. Anglophones also have French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, Irish, Swedish, Danish, Turkish, Norwegian, and Ukrainian, in descending order of popularity, available to learn for free. Esperanto is the 13th language to be offered, chosen over many others with speaking populations 10 times larger.

Esperanto, though, has enthusiasm. When Duolingo first launched, Luis von Ahn, its founder, was surprised to find that Esperanto was the number one most requested new language for the program.

“Speakers and supporters of Esperanto are very hardcore,” von Ahn said over email, “and vocal!”

“Speakers and supporters of Esperanto are very hardcore.”

Esperantists are linguistic evangelists — the community saw an opportunity for expansion, and pounced. Two of the other languages available on Duolingo fit a similar bill, though by dint of history rather than original intent; Irish and Ukrainian are both associated with strong nationalist movements. Irish was the first of many languages that English would violently suppress, and Ukrainian is shoring up its ramparts to avoid the same fate from Russian regional control. Esperanto, of course, was designed precisely to transcend linguistic nationalism and ultimately avoid conflict, but the end result is similar: a small group of people intensely invested in seeing their language spread.

But Esperanto on Duolingo makes sense in a deeper way, as well. Both the language and the app were created, at least in part, to solve the same problem: the world is divided by language, and more importantly, the majority is often forced to learn the native tongue of a powerful minority in order to get by. In Zamenhof’s time, Yiddish or Polish speakers in his hometown of Bialystok had to learn Russian to interact with the ruling state. Today, anyone who doesn’t speak English is born at a disadvantage, and probably can’t afford Rosetta Stone.

Von Ahn didn’t just create Duolingo to give Anglophones a fun, free way to learn new languages — he created it for the non-Anglophone majority that’s stuck with the burden of learning English. There might be 13 languages available for English speakers on Duolingo, but English courses are available in 22 world languages. Zamenhof saw the same problem and took a more radical tack. Instead of starting a network of free, worldwide language schools, he invented a free, worldwide language.

Instead of starting a network of free, worldwide language schools, he invented a free, worldwide language

Twenty-five thousand people have signed up to be notified when the Esperanto Duolingo course goes live. If just those people complete the course, that would qualify as an Esperanto baby boom. But Chuck Smith is thinking bigger: “I keep saying that, by the end of the year, over 200,000 people will be learning Esperanto on Duolingo.”

The world will probably never see the Fina Venko, but the internet does have a way of hypercharging communities that never could have existed before it. Who could have imagined that more than one Brony would ever exist, or that Americans would want to write thousands of pages of Harry Potter slash fiction. And soon, Esperanto might not even be the least likely artificial language to get a signal boost from Duolingo: the Klingon course is on track to debut in 2016. Linguistically, the language is the exact opposite of Esperanto. Its grammar was designed to be as difficult to learn as possible, and its vocabulary is strongest when discussing the warlike and brutal traditions of Klingon culture.

“Many who try it will drop it later,” admitted André Müller, the German PhD student who’s creating the Klingon course. “But some might enjoy the challenge, a very Klingon thing to do.”

Given the language’s difficulty, he considers himself to be only a “conversational” Klingon speaker. He is also fluent in Esperanto.

Correction: An earlier version included Linux in a list of coding languages. It’s an operating system.

* *

Illustration by Caitlin Foster

Edited by Josh Dzieza