Ideas and technology and politics and journalism and history and humor and some other stuff.
People:
What do I have to do to find a working Coolatta machine in this city????
There are three Dunkin’ Donuts relatively close to where I live.
How are all of the machines broken????
We are a metro area of over umteen million people.
WTF????
Been downhearted – so don’t annoy me.
“A rumor flashed through the city’s schools that a ‘vampire with iron teeth’ had strangled and eaten two small boys.”
The boogeyman in the Queens neighborhood I grew up in was “Charlie Chop-Chop” (or “Chop-Chop Charlie“), a supposed shadowy slayer of small children whose coup de grâce involved the business end of an axe. It seemed an urban legend concocted to scare kids from being lured away by strangers, but when I was an adult I learned it was at least partly fact: A Manhattan serial murderer called “Charlie Chop-off” really did kill five African-American children in the 1970s. (He may have been Erno Soto, a mentally ill man who confessed to one of the murders but was deemed unfit for trial and institutionalized.)
I can only guess that in the aftermath of these crimes, a few facts traveled to the outer boroughs, probably melded with details of some actual local lawlessness and became larger and larger in the minds of schoolchildren, who needed no vampire comic book nor slasher film to draw the face of evil in their fertile minds. Such a thing seemed innate and viral.
Of course, that’s not to say that children won’t dip into the culture to help them create their stories. At the same time that comic books were considered a 10-cent plague in America, they were apparently causing “vampire riots” in Scottish graveyards. An article in the September 26, 1954 Brooklyn Daily Eagle recalls just such a mad scene. The story:
“Glasgow–Outraged education authorities today blamed horror comics for the action of hundreds of children who swarmed through a cemetery looking for a ‘bloodthirsty vampire with iron teeth.’
The shouting mobs of children rampaged through the cemetery in suburban Hutchesontown in what police called a ‘vampire riot.’
H.K. MacKintosh, city education officer, charged that ‘horror’ comics were responsible and said they ‘have now gone beyond the bounds of license. I hope the government will take active steps in this very real problem facing us.’
Police Constable Alex Deeprose gave the account of the ‘riots’:
‘When school finished, hundreds of children massed in Hutchesontown and prepared to march on the cemetery after a rumor flashed through the city’s schools that a ‘vampire with iron teeth’ had strangled and eaten two small boys there.
‘Shouting and waving pocket knives, carrying sticks and stones, the children swarmed over the cemetery wall and began a hunt among the gravestones.’
Witnesses said they appeared to be ‘deadly serious.’
Police called by the local residents managed to disperse the shouting throng but bands of children continued to roam the streets until dusk.”
Donald Trump stinks, so it’s no surprise he relishes the privilege of serf-like labor to build his garish Dubai developments. He was recently confronted about his low-wage UAE workforce by the aptly pseudonymed Vice correspondent Molly Crabapple. An excerpt:
“On stage, Trump praises his Dubai. He is effusive—and sincere. Trump is one sort of Westerner who loves the UAE. They find here a throwback to colonialism’s heyday. No matter how much you’ve shat the bed at home, here your whiteness will get you a job, money, servants from the Global South. Help is so affordable when migrant workers make $200 a month. In police states, there is little crime.
‘The world has so many problems and so many failures, and you come here and it’s so beautiful,’ Trump says. ‘Why can’t we have that in New York?’
Trump does not mention that, like Dubai, New York is morphing into the no-place of multi-national capitalism. He does not mention that this is partially his fault.
The floor opens to questions.
I stand up.
‘Mr. Trump,’ I ask, ‘the workers who build your villas make less than $200 a month. Are you satisfied?’
The room gasps, then goes silent. The security tenses towards me. In two hours I am scheduled to interview Ahmed Mansoor, who spent eight months in jail for signing a pro-democracy petition. I think about Nick McGeehan, a researcher from Human Rights Watch who was deported a few months ago for investigating the same migrant issues I am.
I think about the web of professional coercion that keeps journalists in the US from asking real questions at press conferences. I wonder if the rules in Dubai are the same.
Trump says nothing.
‘That’s not an appropriate question,’ the publicist barks.”
Tags: Donald Trump, Molly Crabapple
I’m not on any social media even though I acknowledge there are a great many wonderful things about it. I just don’t know how healthy it is to live inside that machine. And that’s what it seems like to me–a machine. In fact, it probably most resembles a retro one, a pinball machine. The glass is transparent, there’s a lot of jarring noise and the likely outcomes are TILT and GAME OVER. At the end, you’re a little poorer and unnerved by the cheap titillation and the spent adrenaline. I think it’s particularly questionable whether we should be so linked to our past, that every day could be a high-school reunion. Sure, there’s comfort in it, but maybe comfort is what we want but not what we need. And, of course, being virtual isn’t being actual. Like an actor who goes too deeply into a role, it’s hard to disconnect ourselves from the unreality.
In stepping away for a spell from social media and his neverending Twitter wars, Patton Oswalt shared a quote he loves: “For fear of becoming dinosaurs we are turned into sheep.” It comes from Garret Keizer’s 2010 Harper’s essay, “Why Dogs Go After Mail Carriers.” Here’s the fuller passage from the piece:
“More than the unionization of its carriers or the federal oversight of its operations, the most bemoaned evil of the US mail is its slowness {1}. No surprise there, given our culture’s worship of speed. I would guess that when the average American hears the word socialism the first image to appear in his or her mind is that of a slow-moving queue, like they have down in Cuba, where people have been known to take a whole morning just to buy a chicken and a whole night just to make love. Unfortunately, the costs of our haste do not admit to hasty calculation. As Eva Hoffman notes in her 2009 book Time, ‘New levels of speed … are altering both our inner and outer worlds in ways we have yet to grasp, or fully understand.’
The influence of speed upon what Hoffman aptly calls ‘the very character and materiality of lived time’ [my emphasis] has been a topic of discussion for decades now, though its bourgeois construction typically leans toward issues of personal health and lifestyle aesthetics. Speed alters our brain chemistry; it leaves us too little time to smell the roses – a favorite trope among those who would do better to smell their own exhaust. In essence, the speed of a capitalistic society is about leaving others behind, the losers in the race, the ‘pedestrians’ at the side of the road, the people with obsolete computers and junker cars and slow-yield investments. An obsession with speed is also the fear of being left behind oneself – which drives the compulsion to buy the new car, the faster laptop, the inflated stock. For fear of becoming dinosaurs we are turned into sheep.'”
Tags: Eva Hoffman, Garret Keizer, Patton Oswalt
I don’t always agree with Malcolm Gladwell, but I always enjoy reading him for his ideas and because he’s a miraculously lucid writer. He just did an Ask Me Anything at Reddit. A few exchanges follow.
____________________________
Question:
Tags: Malcolm Gladwell, Peter Thiel, Steve Jobs
The three historical things I’ve hoped to see in my life are an African-American President (done), a female U.S. President (soon, perhaps?) and a new-wave, large-scale women’s movement. The last decade there’s seemed to be a growing tide of feminist consciousness in America. And, no, there’s no way I can quantify that, but it seems to be happening. Will it coalesce into an organized movement?
Because I’m not on social media, I didn’t see the #YesAllWomen insta-campaign until a couple days after it happened, but I thought it was a great sign. Of course, the Digital Age is a double-edged sword for any movement: The connectedness has great utility, but the diffuse nature of culture makes it more difficult for a real movement to form. In our long-tail world, it’s hard for people, even connected ones, to be truly close together.
Here’s a really good New York-centric documentary that focuses on American feminism in the mid-1970s, featuring Rita Mae Brown, Betty Friedan and Margo Jefferson, among many other women.
“A rat done bit my sister Nell (with Wi-Fi on the moon)” is the new lyric.
There are rural parts of America that still depend on dial-up, but the moon now has Wi-Fi. Perhaps that’s because Earth is an inhabited planet where everyone has politics and a profit motive, and the moon knows no such barriers. From Timothy McGrath at Global Post:
“Life on the moon just got a whole lot more awesome. Sure, you’ve got to wear a spacesuit and there’s not much to do in the way of recreation and nightlife.
But that’s all okay now, because there’s Wi-Fi.
Researchers at NASA and MIT have figured out how to beam wireless connectivity from a ground base in New Mexico to the moon using telescopes and lasers.
It’s as cool as it sounds.
Here’s how it works. The transmission utilizes four separate telescopes connected to a laser transmitter that feeds coded pulses of infrared light through it. Those signals travel toward a satellite orbiting the moon. Researchers have managed to make a connection and transfer data at a speed approximating slower Wi-Fi speeds on Earth.”
Tags: Timothy McGrath
A 1981 motorcycle wreck destroyed both of Kent Cochrane’s hippocampuses, leaving him an amnesiac at 30. What was bane for the individual was boon for science: In good part through his travails, we learned that the brain separates factual and personal memories and were able to identify which parts control these functions. Cochrane, who recently passed away, was further plagued in that he didn’t just lose much of the past but also all of the future. He was a man of the moment, always. From Sam Kean at Slate:
“K.C.’s memory loss also had the profound and paradoxical effect of wiping out his future. For the last three decades of his life, he couldn’t have told you what he planned to do over the next hour, the next day, the next year. He couldn’t even imagine those things.
It’s not entirely clear why, but it probably runs deeper than K.C.’s inability to remember his plans. It’s possible that the hippocampus is necessary to project yourself into the future and imagine personally experiencing things in the same way that the hippocampus allows you to put yourself back in time and re-experience the sights, sounds, and emotions of past memories. That’s what your personal memories are really all about.
This loss of his future didn’t pain K.C.; he didn’t suffer or rue his fate. But in some ways that lack of suffering seems sad in itself.” (Thanks 3 Quarks Daily.)
Tags: Kent "K.C." Cochrane, Sam Kean
Ray Kurzweil believes humans will be immortal one day, and it will be sooner than you or I might imagine. And he doesn’t worry about brain implants or the like altering our identity since identity is fluid already naturally. From some of his thoughts about a path to forever in a new Wall Street Journal article by Alexandra Wolfe:
“He thinks that humans will one day be able to live indefinitely, but first we must cross three ‘bridges.’
The first of these is staying healthy much longer. To that end, the smooth-skinned and youthful Mr. Kurzweil consumes 120 vitamins and supplements every day, takes nutrients intravenously (so that his body can absorb them better), drinks green tea and exercises regularly. That regimen keeps his ‘real age’ in the 40s, he says.
The second bridge is reprogramming our biology, which began with the Human Genome Project and includes, he says, the regeneration of tissue through stem-cell therapies and the 3-D printing of new organs.
We will cross the third and final bridge, he says, when we embed nanobots in our brains that will affect our intelligence and ability to experience virtual environments. Nanobots in our bodies will act as an extension of our immune system, he says, to identify and destroy pathogens our own biological cells can’t.
Mr. Kurzweil projects that the 2030s will be a ‘golden era,’ a time of revolution in how medicine is practiced. He compares the human body to a car. ‘Isn’t there a natural limit to how long an automobile lasts?’ he asks. ‘However, if you take care of it and if anything goes wrong, you fix it and maybe replace it, it can go on forever.’ He sees no reason that technology can’t do the same with human parts. The body is constantly changing already, he says, with cells replacing themselves every few days to months.
His vision of the future raises the question of what it means to be human. Yet he believes that adding technology to our bodies doesn’t change our essence. ‘The philosophical issue of identity is, Am I the same person as I was six months ago?’ he says. ‘There’s a continuity of identity.'”
Tags: Alexandra Wolfe, Ray Kurzweil
One of the quiet losses as print magazines have declined because of technological shifts and because they’ve been focus-grouped to death, is the dwindling of panel cartooning. From Bruce Handy’s New York Times Book Review piece about New Yorker cartoon editor Bob Mankoff’s just-published memoir:
“I should note, as Mankoff does, that The New Yorker didn’t invent the captioned, single-panel cartoon, but under the magazine’s auspices the form was modernized and perfected; [Peter] Arno, for one, ought to be as celebrated as Picasso and Matisse, or at least Ernst Lubitsch. But if The New Yorker has long been the pinnacle, ‘the Everest of magazine cartooning,’ as Mankoff puts it, the surrounding landscape has become more of a game preserve, with a sad, thinned herd of outlets. In olden days, when rejected drawings could be pawned off on, among many others, The Saturday Evening Post, Esquire, Ladies’ Home Journal or National Lampoon, a young cartoonist could afford the years it might take to breach The New Yorker — Mankoff himself made some 2,000 total submissions before he sold his first drawing to the magazine, in 1977. Today there are probably more people alive who speak Gullah or know how to thatch a roof than there are first-rate panel cartoonists.”
Tags: Bob Mankoff, Bruce Handy, Peter Arno
When the computer is in everything, everything can be hacked. No doubt Google and others are building serious safety features into their driverless-car software because the new vandalism, not to mention terrorism, could be turning an autonomous car the wrong way down a one-way street. From Alex Hern at the Guardian:
“Wil Rockall, a director at KPMG, warns that ‘the industry will need to be very alert to the risk of cyber manipulation and attack.’
‘Self-drive cars will probably work through internet connectivity and, just as large volumes of electronic traffic can be routed to overwhelm websites, the opportunity for self-drive traffic being routed to create ‘spam jams’ or disruption is a very real prospect.’
Rockall suggests that manufacturers could build safety features in to lessen the risk of this happening. ‘The industry takes safety and security incredibly seriously. Doubtless, overrides could be built in so that drivers could shut down many of the car’s capabilities if hacked. That way, humans will still be able to ensure their cars don’t route them on the road to nowhere.’
But Google’s prototype self-driving car, revealed on Tuesday, is largely controlled using an app, and has just two physical buttons: stop, and go. The company has taken a very different approach to firms like Audi and Volvo, who market the driverless features as an addition to, rather than replacement for, a traditional driver.”
_______________________
“Cars without steering wheels,” 1950s:
Tags: Alex Hern, Wil Rockall
From the November 19, 1909 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:
“Prof. Wilfred E. Wheeler, first assistant in chemistry in the engineering experiment station in the University of Illinois, committed suicide on the university campus yesterday. He took his life because he could not stand the petty annoyances of married life and because he disliked his baby.”
Tags: Prof. Wilfred E. Wheeler
At the Philosopher’s Beard, the whiskered one wonders whether capitalism as we know it has a future in an automated society, arguing for a universal basic income based on human decency, not employment status. An excerpt:
“Unless we intervene, the same economic system that has produced this astonishing prosperity will return us to the Dickensian world of winners and losers that characterised the beginning of capitalism, or worse. The problem is this, how will ordinary people earn a claim on the material prosperity of the capitalist economy if that economy doesn’t need our labour anymore?
The Crisis
The original industrial revolution was basically an energy revolution that replaced puny human brawn with fossil fuel powered machines that were orders of magnitude faster and stronger. Human workers were displaced into the new jobs created by this prosperity, some managing and servicing the machines that made actual things, but most into ‘services’, producing intangible goods such as education by cognitive efforts that the technological revolution in productivity couldn’t reach. We are now living through a second industrial revolution that is replacing puny human brains with machine intelligence. Any kind of work that can be routinised can be translated into instructions for computers to do, generally more cheaply and reliably than human employees can. That includes increasingly sophisticated cognitive labour like driving, legal discovery, medicine, and document translation. Even university lecturers are at risk of being replaced by technology, in the form of Massive Open Online Courses [previously], while the digital cloning of actors promises to allow filmmakers to cheaply manufacture whatever cast they please.
Just like the original industrial revolution this is creating large numbers of losers whose skills are no longer valued by the market. But this time it is not clear that new jobs will appear for these people to move into, for this time the machines can follow us nearly anywhere we try to go. This time technological unemployment may become a permanent fact that we have to deal with by changing how capitalism works. Our birthright as humans – the ability to produce things by our labour that others find valuable – may become economically worthless.”
In a Popular Science piece, Erik Sofge offers a smackdown of the Singularity, thinking it less science than fiction. An excerpt:
“The most urgent feature of the Singularity is its near-term certainty. [Vernor] Vinge believed it would appear by 2023, or 2030 at the absolute latest. Ray Kurzweil, an accomplished futurist, author (his 2006 book The Singularity is Near popularized the theory) and recent Google hire, has pegged 2029 as the year when computers with match and exceed human intelligence. Depending on which luminary you agree with, that gives humans somewhere between 9 and 16 good years, before a pantheon of machine deities gets to decide what to do with us.
If you’re wondering why the human race is handling the news of its impending irrelevance with such quiet composure, its possible that the species is simply in denial. Maybe we’re unwilling to accept the hard truths preached by Vinge, Kurzweil and other bright minds.
Just as possible, though, is another form of denial. Maybe no one in power cares about the Singularity, because they recognize it as science fiction. It’s a theory that was proposed by a SF writer. Its ramifications are couched in the imagery and language of SF. To believe in the Singularity, you have to believe in one of the greatest myths ever told by SF—that robots are smart, and always on the verge of becoming smarter than us.
More than 60 years of AI research indicates otherwise.”
Tags: Erik Sofge, Ray Kurzweil, Vernor Vinge
B. Spears makes millions with little talent. People who sing about killing each other are millionaires. I would like to take care of my family. I’ll do just about anything for a million dollars. If you want me to cut off a finger while you tape it, I’ll do it.
I’ve already posted the video of the “fight” between Muhammad Ali and Rocky Marciano, which was filmed scenes of the two then-undefeated heavyweight champions (the latter a long-retired one) with a computer supposedly scientifically deciding the winner. Ali needed a paycheck while living in exile in his own country during his military holdout, and Marciano wanted one more glow of warmth from the spotlight. It was to be his very last hurrah, as it turned out, as the older fighter died in a plane crash soon after the filming concluded. The sadness over his sudden death, the antipathy by some toward Ali during the Vietnam War, and the race of those feeding “expertise” into the computers, probably gave Marciano the hypothetical victory more than science did. In both boxers’ primes, I think Ali would have won convincingly. Here’s the brief copy from a 1970 Life magazine article that ran with photos from the film the week after it played in theaters:
“The only two heavyweight champions who never lost a professional fight are Rocky Marciano and Cassius (Muhammad Ali) Clay, and this has provoked many a nonprofessional fight among their fans. So Miami Promoter Murray Woroner decided to make a hypothetical ‘Super Fight’ of it, using a computer. First he matched the two champions and filmed 75 rounds of Hollywood-style fighting, finishing three weeks before Marciano’s death in a plane crash last summer. Then the skills and weaknesses of each fighter–as diagnosed by 1,500 sportswriters, fighters and managers–were programmed. The computer punched out a blow-by-blow reading and selected film segments were matched to it.
Seven possible endings were shot: a knockout, TKO and decisions for each man, and a draw. To foil any gambling capers, the seven endings were held in bonded secrecy until the last minute. When the film was shown at 750 theaters and arenas around the country last week, the result was dramatically uncomputerlike. Cut to simulated ribbons and even floored once, Marciano came back to knock Clay out in the 13th round. ‘It takes a good champion to lose like that,’ Clay smiled afterwards.”
Tags: Muhammad Ali, Murray Woroner, Rocky Marciano
This prime 1972 episode of the Mike Douglas Show features John & Yoko as co-hosts. At the 34:20 mark, there’s an appearance by consumer advocate Ralph Nader, who has been right about so many things (airbags, corporate greed, conservation, etc.) and so wrong about one–the 2000 American Presidential election.
There was no difference between the two major-party candidates, Nader said, staying in the race until the end, which turned out to be very bitter for the country. The difference between Dubya and Al Gore was 4,500 U.S. troops dying or not, a 100,000 Iraqis dead or alive, a focus on environmentalism or business as usual as the clock kept running out. For some–perhaps for all–it was the difference between life and death. Adults who can’t see shades of gray always stun me, but it was the same impulses that drove Nader’s righteous career which led him to be the spoiler in 2000.
Tags: John Lennon, Louis Nye, Mike Douglas, Ralph Nader, The Chambers Brothers, Yoko Ono
“Within such containers…man could live as comfortably as he does at home.”
We were aware, more than seven decades ago, that the moon could be a landing pad, a rocket launcher and a nonpareil space observatory. Our failure to execute in this area is one of will, not knowledge. An article about the moon and its uses from the December 29, 1940 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:
“Los Angeles (U.P.)–The moon, not so many centuries hence, probably will the earth’s much-prized ‘airport’ for rocket travel.
When that time comes, if it does, scientists in heavy Man-from-Mars suits probably will flock to the moon and build big telescopes of a size not dreamed of on earth.
Whenever they take off their suits, the rocket men and the scientists will have to live in big, air-tight caverns dug into the surface of the moon.
They will breathe air shipped from the earth, or manufactured chemically from the rocks on the moon.
This peek at the moon’s possibilities as sort of an ‘off-atmosphere’ base for the earth is made by the scientists at Griffith Observatory in their monthly publication. They termed their forecast something between ‘sober scientific description and fantasy.’
Proper Fuel Needed
Rocket travel, in the first place, depends upon discovery of a proper fuel, but they said this problem ‘is not as fantastic as it sounds’ and added:
‘Considering the marvels of scientific inventions during the past century, one is very much tempted to guess that shortly after the time that the human race has gained enough sense to live at peace, our scientists will provide the means of travel, and observatories upon the moon will become realities.’
When men learn to flit from earth to Venus, et cetera, the observatory suggests the moon doubtless will become an ‘intermediate base’ for big rocket ships.
The moon has slight gravity pull compared to the earth; a man could jump like a giant grasshopper, and rocket ships could take off easily. Further the moon has practically no atmosphere, hence there will not be the friction of air slowing down the rockets.
These same two qualities will send astronomer hurrying to the moon, the observatory predicts. Telescopes would be so light in weight that they could be built in sizes dwarfing the 200-incher now under construction in Pasadena, Cal. There would be none of the destruction from ‘boiling air’ as on earth. Astronomers could see much farther, and better. Further, the moon has a black night two weeks long–a paradise for astronomers.
But the lack of air on the moon will present its difficulties, as well. Earthmen going to the moon will have to have something to breathe.
‘Assuming that some day man does make direct use of the moon,’ says the observatory, ‘his protection would probably come in two forms:
‘First, by making great airtight caverns within the surface of the moon. In these caverns the air either would be carried from the earth or much more probably formed chemically from the oxides at the surface of the moon. Within such containers, which might be of very large size, man could live as comfortably as he does at home.
‘Second, outside of these it would be necessary for him to wear some sort of cumbersome suit, the reverse of that used by the diver, and to carry with him in tanks his necessary supply of oxygen.’
Fears have been expressed that earthmen would be in danger of constant bombardments of meteorites on the moon, but the observatory said there is no evidence of this. The bombardments would kick up great clouds of dust on the moon, and no such clouds have been observed through the telescopes.”
10 search-engine keyphrases bringing traffic to Afflictor this week:
This week, Donald Sterling was finally given his punishment for being a racist creep.
From the January 21, 1913 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:
“Enid, Okla.–A kick on the head by a mule was worth $2,800 to John Allen, a farmer living near here. Immediately after Allen was operated on today for a fracture of the skull, which the mule’s hoof had inflicted last Saturday, he remembered where he had buried that amount of money during the financial panic of 1907.”
Tags: John Allen'
From a brief post at Priceonomics, a correction to the oft-quoted Stewart Brand phrase “Information wants to be free”:
“But that’s not what the quote said. Or rather, that’s only half the quote. Here’s the full quote said by Stewart Brand in 1984:
‘On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it’s so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life.
On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time.
So you have these two fighting against each other.”
In a later book, Brand shortened the statement to: ‘Information Wants To Be Free. Information also wants to be expensive…That tension will not go away.'”
Tags: Stewart Brand
At the Financial Times, Tim Harford explains why (almost) nobody saw the financial collapse of 2008 coming and why economic predictions are usually so lacking:
“Why are forecasts so poor? The chief explanation is that the economy is complicated and we don’t understand it well enough to make forecasts. We don’t even fully understand recent economic history.
Ben Chu, economics editor of The Independent, recently took a look at the UK recession of the 1990s in the light of two decades of data revisions. From the vantage point of 1995, the economy in late 1992 was slightly smaller than the economy in early 1988. But today’s best guess is that the economy of late 1992 was almost 6 per cent larger than in early 1988. The Office for National Statistics has substantially revised its view.
Not only is it difficult to forecast the future, then – forecasting the past isn’t straightforward either. What chance does any prognosticator have?
A second explanation for forecasting’s fallibility is that there is little incentive to do better. The kind of institutional chief economist whose pronouncement makes it into Consensus Forecasts will stick to the middle of the road. Most countries, most of the time, are not in recession, so a safe strategy is never to forecast one. Of course there are the mavericks who receive media attention for making provocative predictions and are lionised when they are right. Their incentives are different but it is unclear that their overall track record is any better.”
Tags: Tim Harford
