“Storage Is A Game Changer”

May 1, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Tesla is officially no longer solely an EV company but a home-battery outfit as well, which could make for a smoother grid and be a boon for alternative energies. Elon Musk should be pleased, as should those early tinkerers who began repurposing his electric-car batteries for makeshift home conversions. Perhaps the biggest benefit, as Chris Mooney of the Washington Post astutely points out, is the ability to store wind and solar power. An excerpt:

“Storage is a game changer,” said Tom Kimbis, vice president of executive affairs at the Solar Energy Industries Association, in a statement. That’s for many reasons, according to Kimbis, but one of them is that “grid-tied storage helps system operators manage shifting peak loads, renewable integration, and grid operations.” (In fairness, the wind industry questions how much storage will be needed to add more wind onto the grid.)

Consider how this might work using the example of California, a state that currently ramps up natural gas plants when power demand increases at peak times, explains Gavin Purchas, head of the Environmental Defense Fund’s California clean energy program.

In California, “renewable energy creates a load of energy in the day, then it drops off in the evening, and that leaves you with a big gap that you need to fill,” says Purchas. “If you had a plenitude of storage devices, way down the road, then you essentially would be able to charge up those storage devices during the day, and then dispatch them during the night, when the sun goes down. Essentially it allows you to defer when the solar power is used.”•

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“It Produces Machines Which Can Run, And Walk, And Fly, And Dig, And Swing Through The Trees, And Think”

May 1, 2015 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Even someone as lacking in religion as myself can be perplexed by Richard Dawkins’ midlife anti-theology mission to irk people of faith on chat shows and the like. In his proselytizing–and that’s what it is–he has the fervor of a particularly devout and curmudgeonly priest. It’s true that many a horrid act has been committed in the name of the father, but so have many others been by those who believe (like Dawkins and I do) that we’re orphans. I don’t want to deny someone on an operating table (or the one doing the operating) from believing in a little in magic at that delicate moment, even if it is rot. Trust in science, and say a prayer if you like. 

But I wouldn’t let his noisily running a chariot over the gods make me deny his wonderful intellect and contributions to knowledge, from genes to memes. At Edge, the site’s founder and longtime NYC avant-gardist, John Brockman, has an engrossing talk with the evolutionary biologist about his “vision of life.” The transcript makes for wonderful reading.

Dawkins believes if life exists elsewhere in the universe (and his educated guess is that it does), it’s of the Darwinian, evolutionary kind, that no other biological system besides the one we know would work under the laws of physics. He also notes that we contribute in our own way to the amazing progress of life, even if our time on the playing field can be brutal and brief. As Dawkins puts it, “we are temporary survival machines” coded to be hellbent on seeing our genes persevere, even though life will eventually evolve in ways presently unimaginable to us. It will still be life, and that’s our gift to it. No matter what we personally feel is the main purpose of our existence, it’s actually that.

The opening:

Natural selection is about the differential survival of coded information which has power to influence its probability of being replicated, which pretty much means genes. Coded information, which has the power to make copies of itself—“replicator”—whenever that comes into existence in the universe, it potentially could be the basis for some kind of Darwinian selection. And when that happens, you then have the opportunity for this extraordinary phenomenon which we call “life.”

My conjecture is that if there is life elsewhere in the universe, it will be Darwinian life. I think there’s only one way for this hyper complex phenomenon which we call “life” to arise from the laws of physics. The laws of physics—if you throw a stone up in the air, it describes a parabola, and that’s it. But biology, without ever violating the laws of physics, does the most extraordinary things; it produces machines which can run, and walk, and fly, and dig, and swing through the trees, and think, and produce the whole of human technology, human art, human music. This all comes about because at some point in history, about 4 billion years ago, a replicating entity arose, not a gene as we would now see it, but something functionally equivalent to a gene, which because it had the power to replicate and the power to influence its own probability of replicating, and replicated with slight errors, gave rise to the whole of life. 

If you ask me what my ambition would be, it would be that everybody would understand what an extraordinary, remarkable thing it is that they exist, in a world which would otherwise just be plain physics. The key to the process is self-replication. The key to the process is that … let’s call them “genes” because nowadays they pretty much all are genes. Genes have different probabilities of surviving. The ones that survive, because they have such high fidelity replication, are the ones which we see in the world, the ones which dominate gene pools in the world. So for me, the replicator, the gene, DNA, is absolutely key to the whole process of Darwinian natural selection. So when you ask the question, what about group selection, what about higher levels of selection, what about different levels of selection, everything comes down to gene selection. Gene selection is fundamentally what is really going on. 

Originally these replicating entities would have been floating free and just replicating in the primeval soup, whatever that was. But they “discovered” a technique of ganging together into huge robot vehicles, which we call individual organisms.•

 

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Recently Posted On NYC’s Craigslist

April 30, 2015 in Misc., Urban Studies | Permalink

"Maybe Oprah will know what to do."

“Maybe Oprah will know what to do.”

Moving On (Financial District)

Sometimes, it’s a real pain in the ass to get outta bed.
You lay there, pondering what the fuck’s gonna happen when you put feet to floor
deciding it best not to find out.

A day or three can pass, quickly, quietly
You realize everything is only getting worse
You wonder what to do about the smell
Having not showered
Having pissed the bed
Dying to shit but deciding even you haven’t sunk low enough to shit the bed.
. . .Yet.

Why does the damn remote have to be so far away?
Oprah may know what to do.
I’m not stretching that far for the remote.
Fuck Oprah.
Fuck the phone ringing all day.
Fuck the alarm sounding every five minutes.
Fuck her for leaving me.
Fuck that I just shit myself.

Dammit.

Why couldn’t I just say it?
Why didn’t she just know?
Why HIM?

Sometimes its a real pain in the ass lying in bed
Coming to terms with it all
That you pissed yourself
That the remote is too far away
That Oprah doesn’t have all the answers
That She’s gone.

Touching the first toe to ground goes a long way
Not as hard as you would think
God that shower feels good
Opening that window and airing it out
Getting it out.
Fuck the laundry just throw it all out and buy new sheets.
Fuck all this.
Fuck Her.

I’m gonna see whats on TV.
So many channels to choose from its ridiculous.
I’m gonna wear my favorite jeans.
The ones that make my dick look big.
I’m gonna answer that phone.
Tell her to stop calling and to go fuck herself.

I’m gonna call my friends
Celebrate not laying in that piss soaked bed anymore
Man my dick looks big today.
I’m Moving on.

"Fuck Oprah."

“Fuck Oprah.”

A Brief Note From 1900 About A Last Meal

April 30, 2015 in Old Print Articles, Urban Studies | Permalink

From the June 13, 1900 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:

“I Think The Whole System Is Autonomous”

April 30, 2015 in Books, Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

At the Gawker site Phase Zero, William H. Arkin conducted a very interesting Q&A with Harper’s Washington Editor, Andrew Cockburn, who’s just published what’s a sadly timely book Kill Chain, which focuses on the U.S. droning program. Although the author doesn’t believe military droning will become automated, he feels the bigger-picture machinery of the system already is. Remote war has been a dream pursued since Tesla and now it’s a global reality. One exchange:

William M. Arkin:

The CIA’s drone program, the President’s drone program, Congressionally approved, not approved, tacitly accepted: almost every description of the drone program makes it sound like it isn’t the United States and its foreign policy. Is that the consequence of something unique to drones?

Andrew Cockburn:

It’s interesting, drones and covert foreign policy seem to go together. In Operation Menu, Nixon’s secret bombing of Cambodia, the B-52 flight paths were directed from the ground, as was the moment of bomb release. In other words, the B-52s were essentially drones. Maybe the drone campaign isn’t described as the foreign policy of the United States because there’s a tinge of embarrassment that we’re murdering people in foreign countries as a matter of routine.

Beyond that, maybe we should call it the drone program’s drone program, because it’s taken on a life of it’s own, a huge machine that exists to perpetuate itself. Just take a look at the jobs listed almost every day for just one of the Distributed Common Ground System stations at Langley AFB in the Virginia Southern Neck. On April 25, for example, various contractors (some of which you’ve never heard of) were asking for a “USAF Intelligence Resource Management Analyst,” a “Systems Integrator,” a “USAF Senior Intelligence Programs and Systems Support Analyst,” a “USAF ISR Weapons Systems Integration Support Analyst” a “DPOC Network Engineer,” whatever that is, and a few others. All high paying, all of course requiring Top Secret or higher clearances. Every so often we hear that the CIA drone program is going to be turned over to the military. I say, ‘good luck with that’ – is the CIA really going to obligingly hand over a huge chunk of its raison d’etre, and its budget, its enormous targeting apparatus? There’s a lot of talk about “autonomous drones,” which aren’t going to happen, but I think the whole system is autonomous, one giant robot that has become unstoppable as it grinds along, sucking up money and killing people along the way.•

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“Geologists Are Being Asked To Become Prophets”

April 30, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

The International Commission of Stratigraphy awards a golden spike–which is promptly driven into the ground–when scientists provide geological proof that a new epoch has begun. By that definition, are we in the Anthropocene, a human-driven age of climate turmoil? Perhaps more importantly: Does it matter that we establish the Anthropocene by measuring rock when signs of the deleterious human effect on the planet are manifest in many other ways?

In “Written in Stone,” an Aeon article, James Westcott wonders about the rush by some geologists to make the Anthropocene “official,” especially by measures that perhaps aren’t the most vital ones. An excerpt:

For a potentially epoch-making event, the press conference after the AWG’s first face-to-face meeting in Berlin in October was muted, and sparsely attended. And yet Jan Zalasiewicz, a paleobiologist at the University of Leicester and chairman of the AWG, had important news to impart. He reported a growing feeling within the group that a strong case for formalising the Anthropocene can be made when the AWG submits its report to the International Commission of Stratigraphy in 2016.

The AWG will recommend a start date for the Anthropocene in the early 1950s (relegating many of our parents and grandparents to an entirely different epoch). Why then? Well, the flurry of post-war thermonuclear test explosions left a radionuclide signature that has spread across the entire planet in the form of carbon 12 and plutonium-239, which has a half-life of 24,110 years. The early 1950s also coincides with the beginning of the Great Acceleration in the second half of the 20th century, a period of unprecedented economic and population growth with matching surges – charted by Will Steffen and colleagues in Global Change and the Earth System (2004) – in every aspect of planetary dominance, from the damming of rivers to fertiliser production, to ozone depletion.

The Anthropocene’s advocates have a huge buffet of evidence that human activity amounts to an almost total domination of the planet – one of the latest being new maps that show the extent to which the United States has been paved over. But their problem in terms of formalisation on the Geological Time Scale is that the Earth has only just begun to digest this deadly feast through the pedosphere (the outermost layer) and into the lithosphere (the crust beneath it). The challenge is to convince geologists accustomed to digging much further back in time that the evidence accumulating now will be significant, stratigraphically speaking, deep into the future. Geologists are being asked to become prophets. …

Whatever happens after the AWG submits its recommendation in 2016, anthropocenists are, ironically, selling their theory short by seeking a place on something as esoteric as the Geological Time Scale. The Anthropocene, in all its multi-faceted, Earth system-altering horror, is more serious than that. The hope of course is that if we can name a new epoch after us then it will finally be a truth universally acknowledged that humans have more power than they know how to handle, and we will be able to start picking up the pieces.•

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“Can Tech Progress Be Contributing To Price Declines?”

April 30, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Andrew McAfee, co-author with Erik Brynjolfsson of 2014’s great Second Machine Age, recently argued in a Financial Times blog post that the economy’s behavior is puzzling these days. It’s difficult to find fault with that statement.

Inflation was supposed to be soaring by now, but it’s not. Technology was going to make production grow feverishly, but traditional measures don’t suggest that. Job growth and wages were supposed to return to normal once the financial clouds cleared, though that’s been largely a dream deferred. What gives?

In a sequel of sorts to that earlier post, McAfee returns to try to suss out part of the answer, which he feels might be that the new technologies have created an abundance which has suppressed inflation. That seems to be certain feature of the future as 3D printers move to the fore, but has it already happened? And has this plenty made jobs scarcer and suppressed wages? An excerpt:

In a Tweetstorm late last year, venture capitalist Marc Andreessen argued that technological progress might be another important factor driving prices down. He wrote: “While I am a bull on technological progress, it also seems that much of that progress is price deflationary in nature, so even extremely rapid tech progress may not show up in GDP or productivity stats, even as it = higher real standards of living.”

Prof [Larry] Summers shot back quickly, noting: “It is… not clear how one would distinguish deflationary and inflationary progress. The price level reflects the value of goods in terms of money, so it is hard to analyze without thinking about monetary and financial conditions.” This is surely correct, but is Prof Summers being too dismissive of Mr Andreessen’s larger point? Can tech progress be contributing to price declines?

Moore’s law — that computer processing power doubles roughly every two years — has made computers themselves far cheaper. It has also pretty directly led to the shrinkage of industries as diverse as encyclopedias, recorded music, film photography and standalone GPS devices. An intriguing analysis by writer Chris Goodall found that the “UK began to reduce its consumption of physical resources in the early years of the last decade.” Technological progress, which by its nature allows us to do more with less, is a big part of this move past “peak stuff.”

It’s also probably a big part of the reason that corporate profits remain so high, even while overall economic growth stagnates.•

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“One Day He Gave It All Up—The Drugs, The Sex, The Motorcycles, The Bodybuilding”

April 30, 2015 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Oliver Sacks on a motorcycle in NYC, 1961. (Photo by Douglas White.)

I’ve read most of Lawrence Weschler’s books and gotten so much from them, particularly Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees and Vermeer in Bosnia. In a new Vanity Fair article, he uses passages from a long-shelved biography of his friend Oliver Sacks, the terminally ill neurologist, to profile the doctor in a way only a confidante and great writer can, revealing the many lives Sacks has lived, in addition to the public-intellectual one we’re all familiar with. Weschler is convinced that Sacks’ period of excessive experimentation with drugs when young led to his later scientific breakthroughs. An excerpt:

I had originally written him a letter, sometime in the late 70s, from my California home. Somehow back in college I had come upon Awakenings, published in 1973, an account of his work with a group of patients who had been warehoused for decades in a home for the incurable—they were “human statues,” locked in trance-like states of near-infinite remove following bouts of a now rare form of encephalitis. Some had been in this condition since the mid-1920s. These people were suddenly brought back to life by Sacks, in 1969, following his administration of the then new “wonder drug” L-dopa, and Sacks described their spring-like awakenings and the harrowing siege of tribulations that followed. In the book, Sacks gave the facility where all this happened the pseudonym “Mount Carmel,” an apparent reference to Saint John of the Cross and his Dark Night of the Soul. But, as I wrote to Sacks in that first letter, his book seemed to me much more Jewish and Kabbalistic than Christian mystical. Was I wrong?

He responded with a hand-pecked typed letter of a good dozen pages, to the effect that, indeed, the old people’s home in question, in the Bronx, was actually named Beth Abraham; that he himself came from a large and teeming London-based Jewish family; that one of his cousins was in fact the eminent Israeli foreign minister Abba Eban (another, as I would later learn, was Al Capp, of Li’l Abner fame); and that his principal intellectual hero and mentor-at-a-distance, whose influence could be sensed on every page of Awakenings, had been the great Soviet neuropsychologist A.R. Luria, who was likely descended from Isaac Luria, the 16th-century Jewish mystic.

Our correspondence proceeded from there, and when, a few years later, I moved from Los Angeles to New York, I began venturing out to Oliver’s haunts on City Island. Or he would join me for far-flung walkabouts in Manhattan. The successive revelations about his life that made up the better part of our conversations grew ever more intriguing: how both his parents had been doctors and his mother one of the first female surgeons in England; how, during the Second World War, with both his parents consumed by medical duties that began with the Battle of Britain, he, at age eight, had been sent with an older brother, Michael, to a hellhole of a boarding school in the countryside, run by “a headmaster who was an obsessive flagellist, with an unholy bitch for a wife and a 16-year-old daughter who was a pathological snitch”; and how—though his brother emerged shattered by the experience, and to that day lived with his father—he, Oliver, had managed to put himself back together through an ardent love of the periodic table, a version of which he had come upon at the Natural History Museum at South Kensington, and by way of marine-biology classes at St. Paul’s School, which he attended alongside such close lifetime friends as the neurologist and director Jonathan Miller and the exuberant polymath Eric Korn. Oliver described how he gradually became aware of his homosexuality, a fact that, to put it mildly, he did not accept with ease; and how, following college and medical school, he had fled censorious England, first to Canada and then to residencies in San Francisco and Los Angeles, where in his spare hours he made a series of sexual breakthroughs, indulged in staggering bouts of pharmacological experimentation, underwent a fierce regimen of bodybuilding at Muscle Beach (for a time he held a California record, after he performed a full squat with 600 pounds across his shoulders), and racked up more than 100,000 leather-clad miles on his motorcycle. And then one day he gave it all up—the drugs, the sex, the motorcycles, the bodybuilding. By the time we started talking, he had been pretty much celibate for almost two decades.•

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“Klitschko Might Be Facing His Biggest Fight Since Being Elected Mayor”

April 29, 2015 in Politics, Sports | Permalink

The two boxing Klitschko brothers refused to ever oppose one another in the ring, but Vitali, who became Kiev mayor in 2014, has a ringside seat to witness fraternal fighting of another order: a civil war that’s complicating the former WBO heavyweight champion’s quest to attract investors to the tumultuous state. Also muddling the situation is a scandal within his cabinet that’s making his so-called reform government seem like business as usual. During a visit to D.C. to try to raise investment funds for his city, the pugilist-cum-politician sat for an interview with Reid Standish of Foreign Policy. An excerpt:

Despite the dreary forecast for Ukraine, the mayor has made serious strides toward reform. To improve transparency, Kiev is the first Ukrainian city to make all government documents public and available online. The tax code has been simplified, the corporate rate brought down to 18 percent from 23 percent. Klitschko is also pushing for police reform. After years of abuse and corruption, trust in the police force is at an all-time low, but Klitschko is hoping that a combination of higher salaries and competitive exams can restore the prestige to law enforcement. “We want the police to be young, educated, and have a completely different outlook,” said Klitschko.

The mayor is also hoping to loosen the Kremlin’s grip over Ukrainian energy: “Last winter we used 30 percent less Russian gas. It is our goal to get rid of energy dependence on Russia.” Years of cheap gas from the Kremlin has made Ukrainians wasteful with their usage, and Klitschko has unveiled an energy saving program for his city. “We used the old Soviet way to regulate temperature.” he joked, “if you’re hot, you open the window, if you’re cold, you close it.” …

Now Klitschko might be facing his biggest fight since being elected mayor. An investigative report published by Radio Svoboda, the Ukrainian language affiliate of Radio Free Europe/ Radio Liberty, alleges that a massive, multi-million dollar complex along the Dnieper River in Kiev being built with illegal permits obtained by a construction firm owned by a business partner of Igor Nikonov, Klitschko’s first deputy and a well known developer.

Klitschko denies the allegations about Nikonov, saying that the connection is nonexistent and the result of “black PR” by unnamed opponents trying to discredit him. “We even have a joke about this: One politician goes to another and says ‘I told everyone your daughter is a stripper.’ The other politician has no daughter, but now he must explain to everyone why his daughter is not a stripper.”•

 

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Old Print Article: “His Autogiro Dream Fulfilled As Cierva Died,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle (1936)

April 29, 2015 in Old Print Articles, Photography, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

For some reason, people long for their cars to fly. In the 1930s it was believed that Spanish aviator Juan de la Cierva had made the dream come true, although he coincidentally died in an air accident in Amsterdam just as his roadable flying machine was proving a success in Washington D.C.

In 1920, the man from Murcia invented the Autogiro, a single-rotor-type aircraft which led several years later to his creation of an articulated rotor that made possible the world’s first flight of a stable rotary-wing aircraft. The American government licensed the technology and eventually turned out a working prototype of a flying car, hoping that suburbanites would soon soar to work from their backyards directly to helipads atop city office buildings. If they needed to nose down and drive on a highway, that would be possible.

The test was deemed a success on road and in sky (even though the machine was clearly more plane than automobile). Sadly, almost simultaneous to the triumphant run, Cierva was killed while a passenger aboard a standard Dutch airliner that crashed in England.

The aerobile was clearly never made available for public consumption, probably owing to safety and cost concerns. One enterprising hotel in Miami, however, purchased a roadable Autogiro and used it to fly guests to the beach, further enticing them by employing celebrity pilot Jim Ray, who had handled the D.C. test run.

An excerpt from an article about the test and tragedy overlapping, published in the December 13, 1936 Brooklyn Daily Eagle.

  • The D.C. demonstration of the Autogiro:

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“The Idea Was Audacious”

April 29, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

At Esquire, John H. Richardson profiles the brains behind Siri, Adam Cheyer and Chris Brigham, as they attempt (with other AI geniuses) to create a voice-based interface named Viv, which would “think” for itself and seamlessly band together all of the disparate elements of modern computing, a move which, if successful, could fundamentally change information gathering and the entire media landscape. It might unleash entrepreneurial energy and, you know, enable mass technological unemployment. There’s plenty of hyperbole surrounding the project (and in the article), though Siri’s success lends credence to the possibility of the outsize ambition being realized. An excerpt:

BRIGHAM CAME UP WITH the beautiful idea, which makes its own perfect sense. Cheyer was always the visionary. When they met at SRI International twelve years ago, Cheyer was already a chief scientist distilling the work of four hundred researchers from the Defense Department’s legendary CALO project, trying to teach computers to talk—really talk, not just answer a bunch of preprogrammed questions. Kittlaus came along a few years later, a former cell-phone executive looking for the next big idea at a time when the traditional phone companies were saying the iPhone would be a disaster—only phone companies can make phones. An adventurer given to jumping out of planes and grueling five-hour sessions of martial arts, he saw the possibilities instantly—cell phones were getting smarter every day, mobile computing was the future, and nobody wanted to thumb-type on a tiny little keyboard. Why not teach a phone to talk?

Brigham, at the time just an undergrad student randomly assigned to Cheyer’s staff, looked like a surfer, but he had a Matrix-like ability to see the green numbers scroll, offhandedly solving in a single day a problem that had stumped one of Cheyer’s senior scientists for months. Soon he took responsibility for the computer architecture that made their ideas possible. But he also had a rule-breaking streak—maybe it was all those weekends he spent picking rocks out of his family’s horse pasture, or the time his father shot him in the ass with a BB gun to illustrate the dangers of carrying a weapon in such a careless fashion. He admits, with some embarrassment, now thirty-one and the father of a young daughter, that he got kicked out of summer school for hacking the high school computer system to send topless shots to all the printers. After the SRI team and its brilliant idea were bought by Steve Jobs and he made it famous—Siri, the first talking phone, a commercial and pop-culture phenomenon that now appears in five hundred million different devices—Brigham sparked international news for teaching Siri to answer a notorious question: “Where do I dump a body?” (Swamps, reservoirs, metal foundries, dumps, mines.)

He couldn’t resist the Terminator jokes, either. When the Siri team was coming up with an ad campaign, joking about a series of taglines that went from “Periodically Human” to “Practically Human” to “Positively Human,” he said the last one should be “Kill All Humans.”

In the fall of 2012, after they all quit Apple, the three men gathered at Kittlaus’s house in Chicago to brainstorm, throwing out their wildest ideas. What about nanotechnology? Could they develop an operating system to run at the atomic level? Or maybe just a silly wireless thing that plugged into your ear and told you everything you needed to know in a meeting like this, including the names and loved ones of everyone you met?

Then Brigham took them back to Cheyer’s original vision. There was a compromise in the ontology, he said. Siri talked only to a few limited functions, like the map, the datebook, and Google. All the imitators, from the outright copies like Google Now and Microsoft’s Cortana to a host of more-focused applications with names like Amazon Echo, Samsung S Voice, Evi, and Maluuba, followed the same principle. The problem was you had to code everything. You had to tell the computer what to think. Linking a single function to Siri took months of expensive computer science. You had to anticipate all the possibilities and account for nearly infinite outcomes. If you tried to open that up to the world, other people would just come along and write new rules and everything would get snarled in the inevitable conflicts of competing agendas—just like life. Even the famous supercomputers that beat Kasparov and won Jeopardy! follow those principles. That was the “pain point,” the place where everything stops: There were too many rules.

So what if they just wrote rules on how to solve rules?

The idea was audacious. They would be creating a DNA, not a biology, forcing the program to think for itself.•

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“[He] Receives His Entire Salary In Bitcoin And Lives Outside The Traditional Financial System”

April 29, 2015 in Books, Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The instability of the Argentine banking system (and the expense of dealing with it) has led a growing number of citizens to embark on a bold experiment using Bitcoin to sidestep institutions, a gambit which would probably not be attempted with the same zest in countries with relative financial stability. But if the service proves to be a large-scale success in Argentina, will it influence practices in nations heretofore resistant to cryptocurrency? And will a massive failure doom the decentralized system?

In a New York Times Magazine article adapted from Nathaniel Popper’s forthcoming Digital Gold: Bitcoin and the Inside Story of the Misfits and Millionaires Trying to Reinvent Money, the author writes of this new dynamic in the South American republic, which is enabled by itinerant digital money-changers like Dante Castiglione. An excerpt:

That afternoon, a plump 48-year-old musician was one of several customers to drop by the rented room. A German customer had paid the musician in Bitcoin for some freelance compositions, and the musician needed to turn them into dollars. Castiglione joked about the corruption of Argentine politics as he peeled off five $100 bills, which he was trading for a little more than 1.5 Bitcoins, and gave them to his client. The musician did not hand over anything in return; before showing up, he had transferred the Bitcoins — in essence, digital tokens that exist only as entries in a digital ledger — from his Bitcoin address to Castiglione’s. Had the German client instead sent euros to a bank in Argentina, the musician would have been required to fill out a form to receive payment and, as a result of the country’s currency controls, sacrificed roughly 30 percent of his earnings to change his euros into pesos. Bitcoin makes it easier to move money the other way too. The day before, the owner of a small manufacturing company bought $20,000 worth of Bitcoin from Castiglione in order to get his money to the United States, where he needed to pay a vendor, a transaction far easier and less expensive than moving funds through Argentine banks.

The last client to visit the office that Friday was Alberto Vega, a stout 37-year-old in a neatly cut suit who heads the Argentine offices of the American Bitcoin company BitPay, whose technology enables merchants to accept Bitcoin payments. Like other BitPay employees — there is a staff of six in Buenos Aires — Vega receives his entire salary in Bitcoin and lives outside the traditional financial system. He orders what he can from websites that accept Bitcoin and goes to Castiglione when he needs cash. On this occasion, he needed 10,000 pesos to pay a roofer who was working on his house.

Commerce of this sort has proved useful enough to Argentines that Castiglione has made a living buying and selling Bitcoin for the last year and a half. “We are trying to give a service,” he said.

That mundane service — harnessing Bitcoin’s workaday utility — is what so excites some investors and entrepreneurs about Argentina. Banks everywhere hold money and move it around; they help make it possible for money to function as both a store of value and a medium of exchange. But thanks in large part to their country’s history of financial instability, a small yet growing number of Argentines are now using Bitcoin instead to fill those roles. They keep the currency in their Bitcoin “wallets,” digital accounts they access with a password, and use its network when they need to send or spend money, because even with Castiglione or one of his competitors serving as middlemen between the traditional economy and the Bitcoin marketplace, Bitcoin can be cheaper and more convenient than Argentina’s financial establishment. In effect, Argentines are conducting an ambitious experiment, one that threatens ultimately to spread to the United States and disrupt some of the most basic services its banks have to offer.•

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“Solar Photovoltaic Power Is Eventually Going To Dominate Global Energy”

April 29, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

For more than a century, scientists have tried to coax solar power into cheap energy. In 1955, University of California “solar scientists” envisioned an abundance of healthy food and clean energy for Earthlings and space colonists alike. It would cost next to nothing. Never quite happened.

But the sun’s power is there for the taking, and it seems we’re much closer to stealing fire from gods. From David Roberts at Vox:

Obviously, predicting the far future is a mug’s game if you take it too seriously. This post is more about storytelling, a way of seeing the present through a different lens, than pure prognostication. But storytelling is important. And insofar as one can feel confident about far-future predictions, I feel pretty good about this one.

Here it is: solar photovoltaic (PV) power is eventually going to dominate global energy. The question is not if, but when. Maybe it will happen radically faster than anyone expects — say, by 2050. Or maybe it won’t be until the year 3000, or later. But it’ll happen. …

One often hears energy experts talk about “distributed energy,” but insofar as that refers to electricity, it usually just means smaller gas or wind turbines scattered about — except in the case of solar PV. Only solar PV has the potential to eventually diffuse into infrastructure, to become a pervasive and unremarkable feature of the built environment.

That will make for a far, far more resilient energy system than today’s grid, which can be brought down by cascading failures emanating from a single point of vulnerability, a single line or substation. An intelligent grid in which everyone is always producing, consuming, and sharing energy at once cannot be crippled by the failure of one or a small group of nodes or lines. It simply routes around them.

Will solar PV provide enough energy? Right now, you couldn’t power a city like New York fully on solar PV even if you covered every square inch of it with panels. The question is whether that will still be true in 30 or 50 years. What efficiencies and innovations might be unlocked when solar cells and energy storage become more efficient and ubiquitous? When the entire city is harvesting and sharing energy? When today’s centralized, hub-and-spoke electricity grid has evolved into a self-healing, many-to-many energy web? When energy works like a real market, built on millions of real-time microtransactions among energy peers, rather than the crude statist model of today’s utilities?•

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“Many Industries Are Looking To Drones To Perform Work Traditionally Done By Humans”

April 29, 2015 in Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The machines created by the America military to combat the enemy eventually are manifest stateside, whether that means the creation of the Internet (which was initiated by the Department of Defense in response to Sputnik’s success) or drones (perfected during our wrongheaded war in Iraq). These tools of hot and cold wars, when they begin to be used in earnest domestically can be a blessing or a curse, and in the case of drones, they’re both.

Drones are incredibly useful tools, and they’re dangerous, able to deliver a bomb as readily as a breakfast burrito. While that means we should probably brace ourselves and starting working immediately on safeguards, as much as that’s possible, it doesn’t mean the Federal Aviation Administration should strangle a fledgling industry. Even without federal approval for commercial drones, terrorists can do their damage quite well. They needn’t wait for regulations.

One other point in this increasingly automated society: We have to accept that certain jobs (delivery people, messengers, some hospital workers, bridge inspectors, wait staff, etc.) will be largely disappeared with the emergence of pilotless gizmos. How do we replace these positions with new ones? How do jobless people pay for those breakfast burritos that land softly on their doorsteps one fine morning? 

In a Foreign Affairs piece, drone entrepreneur Gretchen West unsurprisingly admonishes the FAA’s sluggishness in addressing the governance of these new machines. The opening:

In the beginning, drones were almost exclusively the province of militaries. At first little more than remote-controlled model planes used in the World War I era, military drones advanced steadily over the decades, eventually becoming sophisticated tools that could surveil battlefield enemies from the sky. Today, the terms “drone” and “unmanned aircraft system” denote a vehicle that navigates through the air from point A to point B and is either remotely controlled or flies autonomously. While they vary in size and shape, such vehicles all feature a communications link, intelligent software, sensors or cameras, a power source, and a method of mobility (usually propellers).

Inevitably, drone technology spilled out from the military and into other parts of the public sector. In the United States over the last decade, federal researchers turned to drones for monitoring weather and land, the Department of Homeland Security started relying on them to keep an eye on borders, and police adopted them for search-and-rescue missions. Then came everyday consumers, who took to parks on the weekend with their often homemade creations. Outside government, drones were mostly flown for fun, not profit.

Until recently, that is. In the last several years, a new group of actors has come to embrace drones: private companies. Inspired by the technological progress made in the military and in the massive hobby market, these newcomers have realized that in everything from farming to bridge inspection, drones offer a dramatic improvement over business as usual. The potential for the commercial use of drones is nearly limitless. But in the United States, the growing drone industry faces a major regulatory obstacle: the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has issued overly restrictive rules that threaten to kill a promising new technology in the cradle.

SERIOUS BUSINESS

As more and more actors have invested in drone research and development, the vehicles themselves have become cheaper, simpler, and safer. Perhaps even more exciting are the changes in software, which has advanced at lightning speed, getting smarter and more reliable by the day: now, for example, users can fly drones without any guidance and set up so-called geo-fences to fix boundaries at certain altitudes or around certain areas. The economics are now attractive enough that many industries are looking to drones to perform work traditionally done by humans—or never before done at all.•

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Recently Posted On NYC’s Craigslist

April 28, 2015 in Misc., Urban Studies | Permalink

“Can cook delicious meals in exchange for help.”

“Can cook delicious meals in exchange for help.”

Need Dermatological Help!

Hi! I have horrible scabs & scars all over my body from bedbug bites and have no idea who to turn to. I’m living a nightmare for the past 5 months with skin I don’t recognise: bumpy, continuously itchy, with some of the scabs not healing well/getting infected. I feel disgusting and ugly. I have no money or health insurance, but can cook delicious meals in exchange for help.

“Clients Can Select From A Menu Of Skin Colors And Nationalities”

April 28, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

In 2010, Mitch Moxley wrote “Rent a White Guy,” an amusing and insightful first-person Atlantic report about being hired by a Chinese firm to be a make-believe American businessperson. “Having foreigners in nice suits gives the company face,” he was told. In a New York Times documentary short, David Borenstein provides an excellent visual tour of the practice five years on, as it’s become fashionable for desperate real-estate developers of remotely located properties to temporarily stock their buildings with Western workers or performers to make the provincial neighborhoods appear like “international cities of the future.” It reveals a sense of inferiority still felt by the Chinese even as they’ve moved to the center of the global stage. He describes the assignment thusly:

In provincial West China, I filmed specialty firms that collect groups of foreigners whom they rent out to attend events. Clients can select from a menu of skin colors and nationalities; whites are the most desirable and expensive. The most frequent customers are real estate companies. They believe that filling their remote buildings with foreign faces, even for a day, suggests that the area is “international,” a buzzword in provincial areas that often translates to “buy.”•

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“It Would Be Surprising For Any Company To Reinvent The Basic Design Of Computers”

April 28, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

A moonshot launched from an outhouse is a pretty apt description of the cratered Hewlett-Packard’s unlikely attempt to reimagine the computer. A semi-secret project called “the Machine” may be the company’s best shot–albeit, a long shot–to recreate itself and our most used tools all at once, increasing memory manifold with the aid of a fundamentally new operating system. From Tom Simonite at MIT Technology Review:

In the midst of this potentially existential crisis, HP Enterprise is working on a risky research project in hopes of driving a remarkable comeback. Nearly three-quarters of the people in HP’s research division are now dedicated to a single project: a powerful new kind of computer known as “the Machine.” It would fundamentally redesign the way computers function, making them simpler and more powerful. If it works, the project could dramatically upgrade everything from servers to smartphones—and save HP itself.

“People are going to be able to solve problems they can’t solve today,” says Martin Fink, HP’s chief technology officer and the instigator of the project. The Machine would give companies the power to tackle data sets many times larger and more complex than those they can handle today, he says, and perform existing analyses perhaps hundreds of times faster. That could lead to leaps forward in all kinds of areas where analyzing information is important, such as genomic medicine, where faster gene-sequencing machines are producing a glut of new data. The Machine will require far less electricity than existing computers, says Fink, making it possible to slash the large energy bills run up by the warehouses of computers behind Internet services. HP’s new model for computing is also intended to apply to smaller gadgets, letting laptops and phones last much longer on a single charge.

It would be surprising for any company to reinvent the basic design of computers, but especially for HP to do it. It cut research jobs as part of downsizing efforts a decade ago and spends much less on research and development than its competitors: $3.4 billion in 2014, 3 percent of revenue. In comparison, IBM spent $5.4 billion—6 percent of revenue—and has a much longer tradition of the kind of basic research in physics and computer science that creating the new type of computer will require. For Fink’s Machine dream to be fully realized, HP’s engineers need to create systems of lasers that fit inside -fingertip-size computer chips, invent a new kind of operating system, and perfect an electronic device for storing data that has never before been used in computers.

Pulling it off would be a virtuoso feat of both computer and corporate engineering.•

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A Brief Note From 1888 About Eating Ants

April 28, 2015 in Old Print Articles, Urban Studies | Permalink

From the February 11, 1888 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:

“Untrained First-Time User Of Sniper Rifle”

April 28, 2015 in Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Killing just got easier, as DARPA reports its made great strides with “guided bullets,” which allow a novice to hit a long-range moving target every time. You will no longer murder the wrong person, just the ones you intend to shoot. No ammo wasted.

Video from February tests of the Extreme Accuracy Tasked Ordnance (EXACTO) program.

“The Car Will Become An Accessory To The Smartphone”

April 28, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

We may have already reached peak car in America (and in many other countries). Some of the next automobiles will likely aim for disruption the way ridesharing has, whether they’re EV community cars or driverless. Certainly urban planners want our cities to be less clogged and choked by them.

In “End of the Car Age,” a Guardian article, Stephen Moss smartly analyzes the likely shrinking role of automobiles in major urban centers. The writer sees a challenging if necessary transportation revolution approaching, with mobile information playing a large part in what comes next. The future may not be Masdar City, but it won’t be the Manhattan we’ve long known, either. The opening:

Gilles Vesco calls it the “new mobility”. It’s a vision of cities in which residents no longer rely on their cars but on public transport, shared cars and bikes and, above all, on real-time data on their smartphones. He anticipates a revolution which will transform not just transport but the cities themselves. “The goal is to rebalance the public space and create a city for people,” he says. “There will be less pollution, less noise, less stress; it will be a more walkable city.”

Vesco, the politician responsible for sustainable transport in Lyon, played a leading role in introducing the city’s Vélo’v bike-sharing scheme a decade ago. It has since been replicated in cities all over the world. Now, though, he is convinced that digital technology has changed the rules of the game, and will make possible the move away from cars that was unimaginable when Vélo’v launched in May 2005. “Digital information is the fuel of mobility,” he says. “Some transport sociologists say that information about mobility is 50% of mobility. The car will become an accessory to the smartphone.”

Vesco is nothing if not an evangelist. “Sharing is the new paradigm of urban mobility. Tomorrow, you will judge a city according to what it is adding to sharing. The more that we have people sharing transportation modes, public space, information and new services, the more attractive the city will be.”•

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“If Your Spoken Words Include Personal Or Other Sensitive Information, That Information Will Be Among The Data Captured”

April 28, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The bottom fell out of the commercial-TV economic model, so the new sets aren’t just content to sell you soap but also want to eavesdrop to know precisely what brand you prefer and the exact moment you feel dirty. You will be scrubbed.

It’s sort of like how Google has its helpful algorithms scanning your Gmail for keywords to match to advertising. And not only are your media preferences recorded (anonymously, supposedly) by the new televisions, but even your conversations may be monitored. From Dennis Romero at LA Weekly:

Your television could be recording your most intimate moments. 

Some people might actually be into that. This is L.A., after all.

But local state Assemblyman Mike Gatto says it just isn’t right. He and the Assembly Committee on Privacy and Consumer Protection have introduced a bill that would require “manufacturers to ensure their television’s voice-recognition feature cannot be enabled without the consumer’s knowledge or consent,” according to his office.

Last week the committee voted 11-0 in favor of the proposal. But is this really a problem, you ask? We asked Gatto the same question.

Not necessarily yet is the answer. But the lawmaker argues that we need to get ahead of this Big Brother initiative before it gets all up in our bedrooms.

“Nobody would doubt the bedroom is a place where we have a tradition of privacy,” he said. “You can imagine a future where they know your sex life.”

Samsung’s newest smart TVs take voice commands. Cool. But the sets’ privacy policy spelled out some Orwellian shenanigans:

Please be aware that if your spoken words include personal or other sensitive information, that information will be among the data captured and transmitted to a third party through your use of Voice Recognition.•

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“We Have No Influence On The Things Happening”

April 28, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Urban Studies | Permalink

I’m always stunned how some Germans who supported the rise of Hitler maintain a naivete about their role in the horrors, even in retrospect. The denial of culpability runs so deep.

An AMA at Reddit with an unnamed 92-year-old woman (aided by her grandson) who’s spent her entire life in Stuttgart falls into this category, and it’s a fascinating discussion. “We were normal people who did not want to harm anyone,” she says of the Germans who pledged allegiance to Nazism, yet so many were hurt, so many killed. The collective delusion that allowed for such atrocities has never fully lifted. A few exchanges below.

_________________________

Question:

During Hitler’s rise to power before the war in 1933, did all Germans, including yourself, love him? I mean, he did bring back Germany’s lost honour and economy from World War I. When did the general mood toward Hitler change? What did he do? Did you support him during the war?

Answer:

Everybody was enthusiastic about Adolf, nobody hated him or anything like that. That did not change until the end. I don’t know, I was a young girl. We were young and naive.

_________________________

Question:

Did you ever see Hitler himself? At a rally or such?

Answer:

Yes at Obersalzberg I stood right beside him and when he visited the “Hitlerjugend” in Berchtesgaden (Upper Bavaria) I saw him again.

_________________________

Question:

What did you think of the SS?

Answer:

Of course: the elite. They were attractive men and every girl adored them. They were tall and sportive and good-mannered and their uniforms were great. (Grandson: I asked her if they heard bad things about the SS. She shook her head.)

_________________________

Question:

Looking back, what was the most shocking thing you experienced in the time of Nazi Germany?

Answer:

In the “Hindenburg-Bau” (a building in Stuttgart), there was a dance-cafe every Sunday. I was there many times with my friends. There was a musician who played his guitar singing: “Es geht alles vorüber, es geht alles vorbei, auch Adolf Hitler und seine scheiß Partei.” (Translation: “Everything, everything will come to an end. So will Adolf Hitler and his crappy party NSDAP.”) There was a table with officers in the cafe, one of them stood up, pulled out his gun and shot the musician in his breast. He was instantly dead and they pulled his dead body out of the cafe. That was very horrible.

_________________________

Question:

Are there any popular misconceptions about what average people were like in Nazi Germany? Was there some kind of normalcy and optimism around daily life, or was there a encroaching sense of dread regarding the horrendous things happening in Germany and abroad?

Answer:

We were normal people who did not want to harm anyone. Everybody was optimistic in terms of the war. There was a daily dose of fear, because so many men we knew were at war and we never knew if a bomb would hit the house. We stayed in the cellar and begged that we would survive.

_________________________

Question:

What was, if any, the punishment for knowing you lived around Jewish families but not declaring that to the government?

Answer:

We didn’t know of anyone who hid Jews. But if anyone did, they would have had bad times. There was a Jew named Arnold, who owned a nearby [factory], he was a good man. He gave anyone asking him work and paid his workers well. He never let anyone down. (Grandson: I asked her if they took him away. “Yes they came and arrested him.”)

_________________________

Question:

Did you see the trains filled with Jews or shops that were owned by Jews after Krystalnacht?

Answer:

No, I don’t know. They were arrested, but we didn’t know where they brought them or what happened to them at that time.

_________________________

Question:

Propaganda was undoubtedly used throughout the war. Was she and her colleagues, friends or family aware of what was propaganda/true/untrue? Was it even discussed at all at the time? I’m guessing it would be dangerous to do so, but that probably didn’t stop it being discussed completely.

Answer:

Yes we discussed a lot, but I don’t remember if anyone said that all the propaganda is false. They would not have been allowed to. Hitlerjugend and BDM were strong organisations, there was no chance for going against common beliefs.

_________________________

Question:

When did you realize Germany hadn’t a chance to win the war?

Answer:

We always believed in the victory. Even after Stalingrad. Absolutely.

_________________________

Question:

How do you feel about the trial of Oskar Groening? He is 93 and on trial for working at Auschwitz as a bookkeeper/accountant.

Answer:

Insane. You cannot judge anyone 70 years later. Life is hard enough at 93. They cannot imagine how hard. I bet he regrets the things he has done or had to do without a trial.

_________________________

Question:

Thinking back, does anything about the tense climate in today’s political scene remind you of anything that happened before the war broke out?

Answer:

We only get to know what happens in the world after it happened. We have no influence on the things happening and we have to rely on those men and women who do.•

 

“We Might Still Have Miasmatic Theories”

April 27, 2015 in Books, Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

If you want to stop bubonic plague, killing as many cats and dogs as possible is probably not the most effective gambit. But that’s what the Mayor of London opted to do in 1665, putting down nearly a quarter-million predators of rats, which carried the lethal fleas. 

While we have a far greater understanding of epidemiology than our counterparts in the 17th century, we still probably accept some asinine ideas as gospel. In a Medium essay, Weldon Kennedy questions our faith in ourselves, naming three contemporary beliefs he feels are incorrect.

I’ll propose one: It’s wrong that children, who are wisely banned from frequenting bars and purchasing cigarettes, are allowed to eat at fast-food restaurants, which set them up for a lifetime of unhealthiness. Ronald McDonald and Joe Camel aren’t so different.

Kennedy’s opening:

In 19th century London, everyone was certain that bad air caused disease. From cholera to the plague: if you were sick, everyone thought it was because of bad air. It was called the Miasma Theory.

As chronicled in The Ghost Map, it took the physician John Snow years, and cost thousands of lives, to finally disprove the Miasma Theory. He mapped every cholera death in London and linked it back to the deceased’s source of water, and still it took years for people to believe him. Now miasma stands as a by-word for widely held pseudo-scientific beliefs widely held throughout society.

The problem for Snow was that no one could see cholera germs. As a result, he, and everyone else of the time, was forced to measure other observable phenomenon. Poor air quality was aggressively apparent, so it’s easy to see how it might take the blame.

Thankfully, our means of scientific measurement have improved vastly since then. We should hope that any such scientific theory lacking a grounding in observable data would now be quickly discarded.

Where our ability to measure still lags, however, it seems probable that we might still have miasmatic theories.•

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“France Is Different From The U.S.A.’s El Dorado”

April 27, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Urban Studies | Permalink

If it quacks like a duck, it’s probably a duck, and Jean-Marie Le Pen and his youngest daughter, Marine, are a couple of ducks.

The former and current leaders of the National Front Party are at odds these days, as Marine attempts to provide the far-right French political group with a more polished and professional face than her loose-cannon dad ever did. But the FN brand of nationalism, even when espoused more politely, is still loathsome and unsettling. From Lucy Westcott’s Newsweek interview:

Newsweek:

Can you see any comparisons between the French and U.S. immigration systems?

Marine Le Pen:

France is different from the U.S.A.’s El Dorado, American Dream image. Millions of people hope to find a better future here. There’s a big difference between France and the U.S. In the U.S., immigrants must work to live. In France, they’re taken care of by public finances. In France, there are millions of unemployed people already. We cannot house them, give them health care, education…finance people who keep coming and coming. The weight is very, very heavy now.

Newsweek:

Do you think France could benefit from an immigration system more like that of the U.S.?

Marine Le Pen:

In general, France always imports from the U.S., but this doesn’t really work. If we could, we’d import a measure that’s consistent: If you come, you’ll have to live by your own means. We do not have the means, the money, to give you free health care, free schools. [This would] dissuade immigrants from coming.

Newsweek:

You’re in the U.S. as European leaders are getting ready to meet to find a solution to the enormous crisis of migrants drowning in the Mediterranean en route to a better life in Europe. What can be done to find a solution and what role can France play?

Marine Le Pen:

Politics shouldn’t invite those deadly trips, all of them are very dangerous. We need to stop the boats and put the immigrants in safety, but also bring them back to their points of origin. In Europe it’s a huge call, an open call, for people to risk their lives in the Mediterranean. [The National Front released a statement after a boat capsized last weekend, killing up to 800 people, calling it a “particularly terrible and shocking tragedy.”]

But we should ask the right questions: Who is responsible for that? Who is responsible for this huge crisis in Libya, for example, for those massive waves of illegal immigration? American leaders and French leaders.

Sarkozy is the guilty one in this situation because he contributed to the Islamist fundamentalist in power over there, with all the consequences that you now know about. [Last Monday, Le Pen blamed former French president Nicolas Sarkozy for the migrant crisis due to his 2011 invasion of Libya.]•

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Old Print Article: “Orson Welles Does Get Things Done,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle (1942)

April 27, 2015 in Film, Old Print Articles, Urban Studies | Permalink

“They destroyed Ambersons, and it destroyed me,” Orson Welles said, lamenting RKO’s decision to chop up his 1942 adaptation of the Booth Tarkington novel The Magnificent Ambersons. The studio cut significant footage from the movie and changed the ending, and though some hold out hope that an original print was secreted to South America and survives today, no film cans have ever surfaced.

In an April 12, 1942 Brooklyn Daily Eagle article published three months before the company released the mutilated version, Welles told a story about the lengths he’d gone to make a work as great as Citizen Kane. He claimed that in order to get a shot no one had been able to previously master, he hired a circus strongman named Badajoz as a freelance cameraman.

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