New Jersey Shore, ravaged by Sandy, might never be the same

Sandy, the aurora is rising behind us; the pier lights our carnival life forever.

— Bruce Springsteen

POINT PLEASANT, N.J. — There were all of 21 homes on the little cul-de-sac. There wasn't much space between them and nobody much cared — after all, Riviera Court was surrounded on three sides by water, and everybody's "yard" was a dock, a boat and a route to the sea, which seemed like such a nice thing just a week ago.

Lori Rebimbas was at home when Hurricane Sandy arrived with sinister clouds, then shrieking wind. It was the water that chased her out, rising to her knees in 10 minutes. As she drove into the darkness, trees tumbled and electrical wires lashed and sparked behind her.

When she made it back, Rebimbas found that the tidal surge from Bay Head Harbor had flooded her neighbors' homes and crashed through her front door. She stepped inside, onto shattered glass that squished in the carpet. Her bobbed hair fell limp around her face. She lighted a candle in what used to be the living room, and wept.

"I just want a home," she said.

Sandy was 1,000 miles wide and blew through 13 states. Within that immense strike zone, there were places that were shaken, places that were inconvenienced, places that sustained damage and death. Then there were places that may never be the same.

The Jersey Shore had seen its share of bad weather. A winter storm in 1846 wrecked nine ships, and is still known as the Day of Terror. In 1962, a nor'easter washed a Navy destroyer up on the beach in Holgate. But nobody ever saw anything like this, and this time, some aren't sure they can come back.

In Seaside Heights, a roller coaster fell into the ocean, where it remained Saturday, half submerged, undulating above the waves like the skeleton of a slain sea serpent. A tiny '57 Chevy was ripped from an old-timey carnival ride and cast far down the beach. Casino Pier, Funtown Pier, Freeman's Carousel — all gone.

"We lost everything. Every single thing," said Peter Smith, whose family ran several businesses on the century-old boardwalk.

No one has yet tallied up the damage along the coast, partly because the crisis is still unfolding because of power outages, fuel leaks and gas shortages. But Sandy did not discriminate; it took mansions in Mantoloking, fishermen's cottages in Union Beach, and part of the boardwalk in Atlantic City. The storm, Smith said, grabbed the Shore's heart, "ripped it out and threw it away."

The world thought it knew this place. There was a reality TV show that caught fire a few years back, leaning into Italian American stereotypes and documenting the "Guidos" and "Guidettes" who tanned and drank and brawled. But "Jersey Shore" was not the Jersey Shore.

The Shore was 127 miles of white-sand nostalgia. For almost 150 years, people went "down the shore," leaving crowded, hot cities in New Jersey, New York and Pennsylvania for boarding houses, second homes and rentals by the cool ocean.

It was a place of miniature golf and fortune tellers, frozen custard and saltwater taffy. Locals poked fun at the visitors — they called the loud ones "Bennies," an acronym for Bayonne, Elizabeth, Newark and New York — but they appreciated the business. And many of the towns boomed, at least in summer.

This was where a lot of people first saw the sea, or shared their first kiss. There were a lot of churches, and a lot of bars. It was by no means perfect: The Shore had its seedy side, with economic stagnation, corruption scandals, racial tension. Being "timeless" can also mean stuck in a rut.

But there was something, or some place, for everyone. Soldiers stationed up north started skinny dipping at Gunnison Beach in the 1960s; it's now the state's only legal nude beach. In Ocean City, officials banned liquor sales in 1879; that never changed either.

The first Miss America was crowned in Atlantic City in 1921 — she was 16 and won $100 — to keep tourists after Labor Day. Nearly half a century later, activists protested the beauty contest by crowning their own pageant winner — a sheep.

The "Jersey Shore sound" paired Italian accordion with Motown lyricism. By the 1970s the sound had a face. Bruce Springsteen grew up in Freehold, and his second album featured "4th of July, Asbury Park (Sandy)," which is quoted above and was a valentine to the Shore — and a girl named Sandy. That took on a new meaning last week.

There were beaches for new money, for old money, for no money. The working class owned tiny bungalows built on a grid; the gentry lived in gingerbread Victorians that looked like giant doll houses. No matter your station, nobody looked sideways if you told your "daurghter" to wash the sand off in the "warter."

It wasn't unusual for generations of a family to head to the same stretch of beach, for children to play in the same neon-lighted arcades that once entertained their grandparents.

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A Google-a-Day Puzzle for Nov. 4

Our good friends at Google run a daily puzzle challenge and asked us to help get them out to the geeky masses. Each day’s puzzle will task your googling skills a little more, leading you to Google mastery. Each morning at 12:01 a.m. Eastern time you’ll see a new puzzle posted here.

SPOILER WARNING:
We leave the comments on so people can work together to find the answer. As such, if you want to figure it out all by yourself, DON’T READ THE COMMENTS!

Also, with the knowledge that because others may publish their answers before you do, if you want to be able to search for information without accidentally seeing the answer somewhere, you can use the Google-a-Day site’s search tool, which will automatically filter out published answers, to give you a spoiler-free experience.

And now, without further ado, we give you…

TODAY’S PUZZLE:

Note: Ad-blocking software may prevent display of the puzzle widget.

Ken is a husband and father from the San Francisco Bay Area, where he works as a civil engineer. He also wrote the NYT bestselling book "Geek Dad: Awesomely Geeky Projects for Dads and Kids to Share."

Read more by Ken Denmead

Follow @fitzwillie and @wiredgeekdad on Twitter.

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“Breaking Bad” to get the “MythBusters” treatment

LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) – Finally, the world might find out if it’s truly a bad idea to dissolve a body with hydrofluoric acid in a bathtub.

Discovery Channel‘s reality show “MythBusters” – which re-enacts scenarios from movies, TV and urban legend to test their accuracy with scientific methodology – is filming a “Breaking Bad”-themed episode, a spokesman for the cable network told TheWrap on Friday.

“Breaking Bad” creator Vince Gilligan and star Aaron Paul – who plays meth manufacturer Jesse Pinkman on the series — will be on hand as “MythBusters” stars Jamie Hyneman and Adam Savage put the logic of the hit AMC drama.

No other details, such as when the episode will air, were available.

Back in June, Gilligan said in an interview that he’d like to do a “Breaking Bad”/”MythBusters” crossover.

“I’d dig seeing those guys prove or disprove some of the crazy stuff we’ve done on ‘Breaking Bad,’” Gilligan enthused.

While they’re at it, perhaps they can get to the bottom of whether that electromagnet episode would have been possible in the real world.

EW.com first reported the news of the “Breaking Bad”/”MythBusters” crossover.

TV News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Opinion: Seeing Things? Hearing Things? Many of Us Do

HALLUCINATIONS are very startling and frightening: you suddenly see, or hear or smell something — something that is not there. Your immediate, bewildered feeling is, what is going on? Where is this coming from? The hallucination is convincingly real, produced by the same neural pathways as actual perception, and yet no one else seems to see it. And then you are forced to the conclusion that something — something unprecedented — is happening in your own brain or mind. Are you going insane, getting dementia, having a stroke?

In other cultures, hallucinations have been regarded as gifts from the gods or the Muses, but in modern times they seem to carry an ominous significance in the public (and also the medical) mind, as portents of severe mental or neurological disorders. Having hallucinations is a fearful secret for many people — millions of people — never to be mentioned, hardly to be acknowledged to oneself, and yet far from uncommon. The vast majority are benign — and, indeed, in many circumstances, perfectly normal. Most of us have experienced them from time to time, during a fever or with the sensory monotony of a desert or empty road, or sometimes, seemingly, out of the blue.

Many of us, as we lie in bed with closed eyes, awaiting sleep, have so-called hypnagogic hallucinations — geometric patterns, or faces, sometimes landscapes. Such patterns or scenes may be almost too faint to notice, or they may be very elaborate, brilliantly colored and rapidly changing — people used to compare them to slide shows.

At the other end of sleep are hypnopompic hallucinations, seen with open eyes, upon first waking. These may be ordinary (an intensification of color perhaps, or someone calling your name) or terrifying (especially if combined with sleep paralysis) — a vast spider, a pterodactyl above the bed, poised to strike.

Hallucinations (of sight, sound, smell or other sensations) can be associated with migraine or seizures, with fever or delirium. In chronic disease hospitals, nursing homes, and I.C.U.’s, hallucinations are often a result of too many medications and interactions between them, compounded by illness, anxiety and unfamiliar surroundings.

But hallucinations can have a positive and comforting role, too — this is especially true with bereavement hallucinations, seeing the face or hearing the voice of one’s deceased spouse, siblings, parents or child — and may play an important part in the mourning process. Such bereavement hallucinations frequently occur in the first year or two of bereavement, when they are most “needed.”

Working in old-age homes for many years, I have been struck by how many elderly people with impaired hearing are prone to auditory and, even more commonly, musical hallucinations — involuntary music in their minds that seems so real that at first they may think it is a neighbor’s stereo.

People with impaired sight, similarly, may start to have strange, visual hallucinations, sometimes just of patterns but often more elaborate visions of complex scenes or ranks of people in exotic dress. Perhaps 20 percent of those losing their vision or hearing may have such hallucinations.

I was called in to see one patient, Rosalie, a blind lady in her 90s, when she started to have visual hallucinations; the staff psychiatrist was also summoned. Rosalie was concerned that she might be having a stroke or getting Alzheimer’s or reacting to some medication. But I was able to reassure her that nothing was amiss neurologically. I explained to her that if the visual parts of the brain are deprived of actual input, they are hungry for stimulation and may concoct images of their own. Rosalie was greatly relieved by this, and delighted to know that there was even a name for her condition: Charles Bonnet syndrome. “Tell the nurses,” she said, drawing herself up in her chair, “that I have Charles Bonnet syndrome!”

Rosalie asked me how many people had C.B.S., and I told her hundreds of thousands, perhaps, in the United States alone. I told her that many people were afraid to mention their hallucinations. I described a recent study of elderly blind patients in the Netherlands which found that only a quarter of people with C.B.S. mentioned it to their doctors — the others were too afraid or too ashamed. It is only when physicians gently inquire (often avoiding the word “hallucination”) that people feel free to admit seeing things that are not there — despite their blindness.

Rosalie was indignant at this, and said, “You must write about it — tell my story!” I do tell her story, at length, in my book on hallucinations, along with the stories of many others. Most of these people have been reluctant to admit to their hallucinations. Often, when they do, they are misdiagnosed or undiagnosed — told that it’s nothing, or that their condition has no explanation.

Misdiagnosis is especially common if people admit to “hearing voices.” In a famous 1973 study by the Stanford psychologist David Rosenhan, eight “pseudopatients” presented themselves at various hospitals across the country, saying that they “heard voices.” All behaved normally otherwise, but were nonetheless determined to be (and treated as) schizophrenic (apart from one, who was given the diagnosis of “manic-depressive psychosis”). In this and follow-up studies, Professor Rosenhan demonstrated convincingly that auditory hallucinations and schizophrenia were synonymous in the medical mind.

WHILE many people with schizophrenia do hear voices at certain times in their lives, the inverse is not true: most people who hear voices (as much as 10 percent of the population) are not mentally ill. For them, hearing voices is a normal mode of experience.

My patients tell me about their hallucinations because I am open to hearing about them, because they know me and trust that I can usually run down the cause of their hallucinations. For the most part, these experiences are unthreatening and, once accommodated, even mildly diverting.

David Stewart, a Charles Bonnet syndrome patient with whom I corresponded, writes of his hallucinations as being “altogether friendly,” and imagines his eyes saying: “Sorry to have let you down. We recognize that blindness is no fun, so we’ve organized this small syndrome, a sort of coda to your sighted life. It’s not much, but it’s the best we can manage.”

Mr. Stewart has been able to take his hallucinations in good humor, since he knows they are not a sign of mental decline or madness. For too many patients, though, the shame, the secrecy, the stigma, persists.

Oliver Sacks is a professor of neurology at the N.Y.U. School of Medicine and the author, most recently, of the forthcoming book “Hallucinations.”

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Google Casts a Big Shadow on Smaller Web Sites

Annie Tritt for The New York Times

Jeffrey G. Katz, the chief executive of Wize Commerce, seen with employees. He says that about 60 percent of the traffic for the company’s Nextag comparison-shopping site comes from Google.

In a geeky fire drill, engineers and outside consultants at Nextag scrambled to see if the problem was its own fault. Maybe some inadvertent change had prompted Google’s algorithm to demote Nextag when a person typed in shopping-related search terms like “kitchen table” or “lawn mower.”

But no, the engineers determined. And traffic from Google’s search engine continued to decline, by half.

Nextag’s response? It doubled its spending on Google paid search advertising in the last five months.

The move was costly but necessary to retain shoppers, Mr. Katz says, because an estimated 60 percent of Nextag’s traffic comes from Google, both from free search and paid search ads, which are ads that are related to search results and appear next to them. “We had to do it,” says Mr. Katz, chief executive of Wize Commerce, owner of Nextag. “We’re living in Google’s world.”

Regulators in the United States and Europe are conducting sweeping inquiries of Google, the dominant Internet search and advertising company. Google rose by technological innovation and business acumen; in the United States, it has 67 percent of the search market and collects 75 percent of search ad dollars. Being big is no crime, but if a powerful company uses market muscle to stifle competition, that is an antitrust violation.

So the government is focusing on life in Google’s world for the sprawling economic ecosystem of Web sites that depend on their ranking in search results. What is it like to live this way, in a giant’s shadow? The experience of its inhabitants is nuanced and complex, a blend of admiration and fear.

The relationship between Google and Web sites, publishers and advertisers often seems lopsided, if not unfair. Yet Google has also provided and nurtured a landscape of opportunity. Its ecosystem generates $80 billion a year in revenue for 1.8 million businesses, Web sites and nonprofit organizations in the United States alone, it estimates.

The government’s scrutiny of Google is the most exhaustive investigation of a major corporation since the pursuit of Microsoft in the late 1990s.

The staff of the Federal Trade Commission has recommended preparing an antitrust suit against Google, according to people briefed on the inquiry, who spoke on the condition they not be identified. But the commissioners must vote to proceed. Even if they do, the government and Google could settle.

Google has drawn the attention of antitrust officials as it has moved aggressively beyond its dominant product — search and search advertising — into fields like online commerce and local reviews. The antitrust issue is whether Google uses its search engine to favor its offerings like Google Shopping and Google Plus Local over rivals.

For policy makers, Google is a tough call.

“What to do with an attractive monopolist, like Google, is a really challenging issue for antitrust,” says Tim Wu, a professor at Columbia Law School and a former senior adviser to the F.T.C. “The goal is to encourage them to stay in power by continuing to innovate instead of excluding competitors.”

SPEAKING at a Google Zeitgeist conference in Arizona last month, Larry Page, the company’s co-founder and chief executive, said he understood the government scrutiny of his company, given Google’s size and reach. “There’s very many decisions we make that really impact a lot of people,” he acknowledged.

The main reason is that Google is continually adjusting its search algorithm — the smart software that determines the relevance, ranking and presentation of search results, typically links to other Web sites.

Google says it makes the changes to improve its service, and has long maintained that its algorithm weeds out low-quality sites and shows the most useful results, whether or not they link to Google products.

“Our first and highest goal has to be to get the user the information they want as quickly and easily as possible,” says Matt Cutts, leader of the Web spam team at Google.

But Google’s algorithm is secret, and changes can leave Web sites scrambling.

Consider Vote-USA.org, a nonprofit group started in 2003. It provides online information for voters to avoid the frustration of arriving at a polling booth and barely recognizing half the names on the ballot. The site posts free sample ballots for federal, state and local elections with candidates’ pictures, biographies and views on issues.

In the 2004 and 2006 elections, users created tens of thousands of sample ballots. By 2008, traffic had fallen sharply, says Ron Kahlow, who runs Vote-USA.org, because “we dropped off the face of the map on Google.”

As founder of a search-engine optimization company and a recipient of grants that Google gives nonprofits to advertise free, Mr. Kahlow knows a thing or two about how to operate in Google’s world. He pored over Google’s guidelines for Web sites, made changes and e-mailed Google. Yet he received no response.

“I lost all donations to support the operation,” he said. “It was very, very painful.”

A breakthrough came through a personal connection. A friend of Mr. Kahlow knew Ed Black, chief executive of the Computer & Communications Industry Association, whose members include Google. Mr. Black made an inquiry on Mr. Kahlow’s behalf, and a Google engineer investigated.

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