Ideas and technology and politics and journalism and history and humor and some other stuff.
10 search-engine keyphrase searches bringing traffic to Afflictor this week:
Afflictor: Thinking Megyn Kelly will soon be calling police to report a heavyset, African-American male breaking and entering.
This is what I died for?
Planes may not eventually need pilots, but hijackers likewise may not have to board to perform their machinations. On the former topic, an excerpt from Stephen Pope at Flying:
“Honeywell advanced technology guru Bob Witwer gave an interesting talk in Las Vegas this week in which he discussed the future of air travel and posed the intriguing question of whether airliners, cargo planes and business jets years from now will have a need for pilots or, indeed, even cockpit windows.
If the thought of the captain of your airliner being a software app that lives in the avionics gives you pause, you’re not alone. Still, as we shift to a satellite-based NextGen operating environment where airplanes can be controlled by computers in 4-D – that is, having the capability of hitting a specific point in space at a precise time, every time – will airliners really need two pilots? Will they even need one?
The idea that’s quietly gaining traction is that the ‘pilots’ would sit in an air-conditioned room in some central location on the ground and perform certain necessary flight duties via a comm link. Of course, we’ve already witnessed the rise of unmanned aerial vehicles, which have been used as killing machines in the airspace over foreign nations and for law enforcement and other duties here at home. The next logical step, many say, is to take aircraft that are currently piloted by humans and replace the pilots with computers.
‘It’s kind of hard for me to imagine why we wouldn’t use unmanned vehicles 10 or 20 years from now to carry cargo if the infrastructure allowed us to move aircraft safely without a pilot,’ said Witwer, who is vice president for advanced technology at Honeywell Aerospace.”
Tags: Bob Witwer, Stephen Pope
George Dvorsky of iO9 has a fascinating post about a telemarketing robot programmed to lie and deceive. An excerpt:
“Recently, Time Washington Bureau Chief Michael Scherer received a phone call from an apparently bright and engaging woman asking him if he wanted a deal on his health insurance. But he soon got the feeling something wasn’t quite right.
After asking the telemarketer point blank if she was a real person or a computer-operated robot, she chuckled charmingly and insisted she was real. Looking to press the issue, Scherer asked her a series of questions, which she promptly failed. Such as, ‘What vegetable is found in tomato soup?’ To which she responded by saying she didn’t understand the question. When asked what day of the week it was yesterday, she complained of a bad connection (ah, the oldest trick in the book).”
Tags: George Dvorsky, Michael Scherer
Here, in no particular order, are this year’s 20 selections. These pieces, which made me think or reconsider my opinions or just delighted me, are limited to ungated material that’s only a click away. (I included work from publications such as the New York Times which allow a certain amount of free articles per month.)
Tags: Alex Pappademas, Andrea Elliott, Ariel Levy, David Graeber, David Simon, Evgeny Morozov, Frances Coppola, Jennifer Senior, Judith Shulevitz, Marc Fisher, Martin Scorsese, Martin Wolf, Maxine Swann, Mike Jay, Molly Knight, P.W. Singer, Peter Turchin, Ross Andersen, Thomas Frank, Tyler Cowen
“For six years they lived together happily.”
A strange tale of an unfortunate coupling, which sounds like an urban myth, was presented as fact in an article in the April 28, 1893 New York Times: The story:
“Toledo, Ohio–There lived in the vicinity of this city many years ago a family of the name of Worthington. The father and mother of the household died within a few days of each other, leaving two children, a girl of two years old and boy four. The boy, Jarvis, was adopted by a friend of the family living in Ontario, Canada. Jennie, the daughter, was adopted by a family of the name of Ainsworth, residing in Detroit, Mich.
When Jarvis becomes eighteen he went to work on a boat running between Detroit and Chicago. In June of 1883 Jennie boarded the boat for a trip to Chicago, accompanied by her godmother. At Mackinac Island the vessel stopped for repairs. On the second day of the delay Mrs. Ainsworth asked for a guide and a boat to take them over to the island. The request was granted, and Jarvis was sent as the guide.
On the return trip the boat was dashed to pieces against a rock, and the occupants thrown into the water. Jarvis, who was an expert swimmer, saved the women. This act resulted in a close friendship between himself and Jennie. They saw one another from time to time, became engaged, and one year after at Mrs. Ainsworth’s house, in Detroit, they were married.
For six years they lived together happily. They had two children. The discovery of their true relationship was made while on a visit to Jarvis’s god-parents in Ontario. The shock was so great that a few days later the husband and brother committed suicide.
The wife afterward came to Richmond, where she was married about two years ago to a prominent citizen of that place. They now live in Dayton, and are active in church and social circles.”
Paper is too useful to ever completely disappear–and some think the scenario is even more sanguine than that–but could spying concerns mean a comeback for the dead trees? I think not, but not everyone agrees. From Michael Lewis at the Toronto Star:
“Eugene Kaspersky said governments and corporations had already begun to elevate security concerns but revelations of U.S. spying activity contained in documents leaked over the summer by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden added a new sense of urgency.
‘Big enterprises were even talking about back-to-paper scenarios because of espionage attacks,’ Kaspersky said Wednesday after the company released is 2014 cyber threat forecast.
‘Enterprises, governments — they are really serious about extra levels of security, extra regulation, disconnecting their services from the Internet, maybe even getting some processes back to paper,’ Kaspersky said.
‘It’s a very visible step backward.'”
As often as I’ve criticized Bud Selig and Joe Torre for not acting quickly enough to eliminate home-plate collisions from baseball, I should stop and praise them for finally eradicating the concussion-inducing crashes. It’s time for the sport to progress, and this step is a good one.
Football, on the other hand, like boxing, has no answer for what ails it. No helmet is going to stop brain injuries. Football is in trouble. From Joshua Shepherd’s Practical Ethics post about the moral role parents play in their children participating in contact sports:
“A number of ethical questions arise in connection with this growing awareness. (What should the governing bodies of sports leagues do to protect players? What do teams owe players in such sports? Is the decision to play such a sport, or to continue playing in spite of suffering a concussion, really autonomous? Should fans speak up about player protection, and if not, are they complicit in the harm done to players? And so on.) Here I want to consider one question that has received little attention. It involves the role of parents in fostering participation in high-impact sports.
Without parental encouragement, participation in such sports would dramatically decrease. Certainly, parental encouragement or discouragement can be trumped. In societies which highly value such sports, some adolescents would find a way to participate. But I will not consider here the (vexing) question of how best to respect an adolescent’s budding autonomy. Arguably, if an adolescent wants to participate in a high-impact sport, a parent should acquiesce. Whether that argument is plausible depends, in part, on the risks of playing the sport in question. The question I want to consider is the following: is it morally permissible for parents to encourage their children to play high-impact sports?”
Tags: Bud Selig, Joe Torre, Joshua Shepherd
I don’t know that we needed research to show that observing something and photographing that same thing affects our brains differently. Two distinct acts even from the same perspective will necessarily send disparate bits of information to the brain. Focusing your iPhone is not the same thing as focusing your brain sans iPhone. From Sarah Knapton at the Telegraph:
“Taking photographs at a birthday or a wedding has become as natural as blowing out candles or cutting the cake.
But our obsession with recording every detail of our happiest moments could be damaging our ability to remember them, according to new research.
A study has shown that taking pictures rather than concentrating fully on the events in front of us prevents memories taking hold.
Dr. Linda Henkel, from Fairfield University, Connecticut, described it as the ‘photo-taking impairment effect.’
She said: ‘People so often whip out their cameras almost mindlessly to capture a moment, to the point that they are missing what is happening right in front of them.”•
____________________________________________
Edwin H. Land brings instant gratification to photography, 1948:
Tags: Linda Henkel, Sarah Knapton
I’ve read a thing or two in the Hollywood trades that made the British anthology series, Black Mirror, sound like it’s right up my alley. Charlie Brooker’s Twilight Zone-ish program looks at the dark side of all things digital, which is a favorite topic of mine. (Though the bright side of technology is equally a fascination.) The first two paragraphs from Andy Greenwald’s wonderfully written Grantland consideration of the soul-shattering show and how we now live inside a series of screens, which seem like mirrors until we realize, perhaps too late, that they may be something else:
“Midway through ‘Be Right Back,’ the soul-cleaving fourth episode of the British anthology series Black Mirror, I sought refuge in a second screen. It happens sometimes when I watch TV, usually when things get too emotional, too painful, too intense. The mind can’t wander, so the hands do, fiddling with pens and scraps of paper, drumming on the desk. Eventually — inevitably — I found myself lifting up my iPhone, my thumb moving circles across its screen as if it were a rosary. The mindless swiping of Candy Crush Saga didn’t help me process my feelings about ‘Be Right Back,’ didn’t make it any easier to see Hayley Atwell’s face shattering like a dropped wine glass. But I guess it didn’t hurt much, either. Distancing myself made the experience of watching seem less passive. It restored a flickering feeling of control. I couldn’t handle what was coming at me, so I threw up a wall to stop it.
Modern life is full of little walls like that, tricks we can pull to blunt unwanted or unexpected impact. There’s always a game just a click away. Or a photo. Or a ‘friend.’ It’s actually what ‘Be Right Back’ is about. The episode begins by toying with our natural need to be distracted, placated, and protected from the world before demonstrating, in disturbing ways, how the world is increasingly designed to meet that need. It’s about how we’re willing to submerge ourselves in the comforting warmth of denial right up to the moment reality sidles up beside us and rips our hearts out of our chests. So was it ironic or inevitable the way I was idly crossing striped candies when Atwell yelled at Domnall Gleeson for not being fully present? (Gleeson played her boyfriend, or at least he had earlier in the episode. The specifics are both too confusing and too important to the overall experience to discuss here.) I was hovering on the edge of two screens, fully engaged in neither. Did that make me the viewer or the subject? Which one was the game and which was the drama? Was I consuming media or was the media consuming me?”•
__________________
The entire history of you:
Tags: Andy Greenwald, Charlie Brooker
“Yes, you know what I’m talking about.”
If you have a way for me to either earn cash or make cash weather it be something you can not do your self and need help with or need a stranger to do, or any other way for there are tons of people out there with good tips who know where the golden goose hides their eggs weather it be in cash or product.
if your in need of cash for the holidays as i am email me back and lets talk. if it’s doable your cut in as full partner.
yes, you know what i’m talking about.
Get back to me. i’m discreet, a man of my word, and please no james bond type shit. lets be realisitic. the right info can be a nice pay day for you and me alike.
christmas will be here in 2 weeks. please get back to me if you have a way for me to make cash–the more the better.
happy holidays.
“Happy holidays.”
I remember when listening to a smart Grantland podcast Bill Simmons did with the excellent documentarian Alex Gibney, that the guest pointed out that even if every racer in the Tour de France was using performance-enhancing drugs, that they would all still be guilty. I’m not sure I agree, at least not always.
People who drank during Prohibition may have been technically guilty of a crime, but it was the law that was in error, and there was no way to imprison everyone who was sneaking a drink. The law was impractical because it was antithetical to human nature. It enforced a norm that wasn’t normal.
I think something like that is also true about the age of surveillance. If everyone is spying–individuals, corporations and governments–it will become difficult to fault anyone. And if millions upon millions of people are caught in behavior that is outside the norm–not anything illegal, just embarrassing–maybe the norms are changed. If everyone is guilty, no one is guilty.
But I think the concern that surveillance is going to make humans automatons won’t bear out. It certainly hasn’t so far.
Glenn Greenwald believes that governments can be transparent while individuals can have privacy. While I wish was that was the case, I seriously doubt that scenario occurs. From Edward Moyer’s Cnet interview with Greenwald:
“Question:
Both you and Julian Assange have said it’s crucial for governments to be transparent and for individuals to have privacy. Talk about your views on privacy — how it’s important not just politically but also in terms of creativity and self-exploration.
Glenn Greenwald:
You know, I think it’s interesting because a lot of times people have difficulty understanding why privacy’s important…and so what I try to do is look at human behavior, and what I find, I think, is that the quest for privacy is very pervasive. We do all kinds of things to ensure that we can have a realm in which we can engage in conduct without other people’s judgmental eyes being cast upon us.
And if you look at how tyrannies have used surveillance in the past, they don’t use surveillance in support of their tyranny in the sense that every single person is being watched at all times, because that just logistically hasn’t been able to be done. Even now it can’t be done — I mean, the government can collect everybody’s e-mails and calls, but they don’t have the resources to monitor them all. But what’s important about a surveillance state is that it creates the recognition that your behavior is susceptible to being watched at any time. What that does is radically alter your behavior, because if we can act without other people watching us, we can test all kinds of boundaries, we can explore all kinds of creativity, we can transgress pretty much every limit that we want because nobody’s going to know that we’re doing it. That’s why privacy is so vital to human freedom.
But if we know we’re being watched all the time, then we’re going to engage in behavior that is acceptable to other people, meaning we’re going to conform to orthodoxies and norms. And that’s the real menace of a ubiquitous surveillance state: It breeds conformity; it breeds a kind of obedient citizenry, on both a societal and an individual level. That’s why tyrannies love surveillance, but it’s also why surveillance literally erodes a huge part of what it means to be a free individual.”
Tags: Edward Moyer, Glenn Greenwald
Kevin Kelly’s AMAs on Reddit are always among the best: smart questions and smart answers. Here are a few exchanges from his latest one:
______________________
Question:
It seems you’ve been all over the world. I assume you’re already living in your favorite place to live. But if you couldn’t live there, what would be your second choice?
Kevin Kelly:
Singapore. I am half Asian now and Singapore is one of the few cities in Asia I could imagine living in. It’s vibrant, but still works, and it is far greener than you’d think. It’s not Disneyland with the death penalty.
______________________
Question:
Can you paraphrase your argument against The Singularity?
Kevin Kelly:
In short: Timing. Longer: it will happen but only be visible in retrospect. During the time, it will just seem like incremental change.
______________________
Question:
It seems like you spend a fair bit of time thinking about the future, probably just in general as well. Where’s your day-to-day “thinking time” look like? Do you have a time scheduled during the day to stop writing/beekeeping/whatever and just think? Do you focus on a particular problem or idea to think about or just let your mind run wild? Considering your quantified self connection, have you found any useful tips for finding your most creative moments?
Kevin Kelly:
I block out lots of time to 1) Read (books) 2) Think in silence 3) Sketch and doodle 4) Go for walks.
______________________
Question:
My question is, how do you see automation of the workforce transitioning to post-scarcity(if at all)?
Kevin Kelly:
Automation of work will create new scarcities while filling the world with plentitude in other ways. New scarcities will be such things as human attention, human relations, silence, errors, questions.
______________________
Question:
In a tweet, you once suggested that content we have today, say on Facebook and Twitter, will be gone in 25 or 50 years. Are you confident these companies will not be around and/or transition? Also, are you able to provide brief, clear, simple vision of how laypersons might expect to reliably store data in next 25 years? Thanks for consideration.
Kevin Kelly:
It is very unlikely that ANY company at its peak today will be around in 50 years. They just don’t have long lifespans.
______________________
Question:
Have you read The Circle? If so, what did you think of it?
Kevin Kelly:
I think The Circle is both brilliant and profound. I think the book will take its place alongside 1984 and Brave New World. It doesn’t have much chance of happening, but it is a cautionary tale to keep us honest.
______________________
Question:
What do you think contributed most to your success?
Kevin Kelly:
No TV.•
Tags: Dave Eggers, Kevin Kelly
NASA has created a life-size robot that will protect you unless you say something that hurts its feeling in which case it will eat you. From Rich McCormick at the Verge: “NASA has created a robot for DARPA’s upcoming Robotics Challenge Trials. The Valkyrie is a 6-foot-2-inch humanoid machine with detachable arms, sonar sensors, mounted cameras, and a glowing Tony Stark-esque circle in the middle of its chest. The space agency says it’s mobile and dexterous enough to enter disaster zones to provide search and rescue functions.”
Tags: Rich McCormick
I understand that Jay Leno, the make-believe working-class hero, is just a buffoon with a talk show and that nothing he says to a dwindling late-night television audience really matters. He practices some sort of moral equivalency even when none is deserved because he wants to appeal to the widest viewership possible. He panders. But it is a little infuriating that he continually refers to Obamacare as something that Americans “don’t want.” You know, because the uninsured would rather get sick and die. So much neater that way. Real closure.
There are millions of citizens in this country who want Obamacare. Actually, they desperately need it. Their lives and the lives of their children depend on it.
A deserved shot or even a cheap shot against the President is fair game. But a wealthy person taking a cheap shot against poor, working poor and moderate-income Americans in the service of pandering isn’t.•
Tags: Barack Obama, Jay Leno
I’m going to be doing the “Great 2013 Nonfiction Pieces Online For Free” list either late tonight or more likely tomorrow. Here are the year-end lists from the last two years.
___________________
A bunch of my favorite articles from 2012. (A couple of pieces from December 2011 are included since I do these lists before the absolute end of the year.) All ungated and free.
_________________________
A bunch of great articles from this year that made me rethink assertions, informed me or entertained me. All available for free.
My AC adapter conked out. (Fuck you, Nikola Tesla.) Had to go to three stores before I could find the right one. (Fuck you, Best Buy.) I’ll put up some posts momentarily.–Darren
From the June 16, 1909 New York Times:
“St. Petersburg--Dispatches from Perm, European Russia, say the local police have begun an investigation into the ‘Sect of the Crimson God,’ the members of which are accused of human sacrifices and various other horrible practices. Repeated disappearances of people in the region where members of the sect dwell drew suspicion to the organization, which worships a red wooden idol colored, according to the statements of the country people, with human blood. The police have located a secret grave containing the mutilated body of a man supposed to have been sacrificed, and they expect to find others.
The Ural region, of which Perm is the centre, is a breeding ground for many fanatical cults. It is a meeting place for the Pagan tribes of Asia, as well as persons who flee from Russia on account of religious persecution. These refugees have lived for centuries in the dense forests of the district, and their beliefs have developed along the most fanatical lines.”
Because of the Costas factor, I tend to mute or just block out a lot of NBC’s Olympics commentary, but hiring David Remnick, longtime Russia expert, for its coverage of the Sochi Games was a smart move by the network. Remnick tells Richard Deitsch, in his steadfastly excellent Sports Illustrated “Media Circus” column, what his role will be. An excerpt:
“[Jim] Bell said Remnick’s role for the opening ceremonies will come during what NBC calls the ‘creative part of the broadcast,’ where the host country usually tells a story about itself. Remnick served as a Moscow bureau chief for The Washington Post and earned a Pulitzer Prize in nonfiction and the George Polk Award for excellence in journalism in 1994 for his book Lenin’s Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire.
‘I have an interest in sports and I grew up in a time where the Olympics were highly charged events,’ Remnick said. ‘I’m 55 so I have pretty vivid memories of Mexico City. I remember Bob Beamon, as apolitical an act as there could be, and John Carlos and Tommie Smith. I think that everyone would have benefitted in 1968 from understanding what a gesture of black power meant in the context of a sporting event because not everyone was paying attention to the splits between the Black Panthers and Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. What happens invariably at every Olympics is there is a kind of non-athletic aspect to it that gives it dimension.’
Remnick said he had been given assurances by NBC Sports that he would have editorial independence with his commentary. Among the topics he will surely address: LGBT issues within Russia, the relationship between Russia and the Ukraine and the nature of post-Soviet Russia.
‘There is nothing in the world — and I know they don’t intend to hinder me in this way — where I would not be honest in my analysis,’ Remnick said.”
Tags: David Remnick, Richard Deitsch
James Baldwin, in 1963, examining the N-word to explain that bigotry has just as much to do with projection as power. Essentially, what you hate is what you are.
Tags: james Baldwin
The flip side of the surveillance state is the Darknet–an online space where anything goes–which speaks directly to my contention that greater control and greater anarchy will be increasingly at war in the Digital Age. I wouldn’t even know how to get onto the Darknet if I wanted to and neither would most of you. But a lot of people are there, many innocuously and some to do all manner of harm. The opening paragraph of “Darknet: A Short History,” a Foreign Policy piece by Ty McCormick:
“Beyond the prying eyes of Google and Bing exists a vast cyberfrontier — by some estimates hundreds of times larger than the World Wide Web. This so-called “deepweb” is often more humdrum than sinister, littered with banal data and derelict URLs, but it is also home to an anything-goes commercial underworld, called the ‘darknet,’ that will make your stomach turn. It’s a place where drugs and weapons are openly traded, where terrorists link up, and where assassins bid on contract killings. In recent years, the darknet has found itself in government cross-hairs, with the FBI and National Security Agency (NSA) cracking down on drug merchants and pornographers. Despite a series of high-profile busts, however, this lawless realm continues to hum along, deep beneath the everyday web. “
Tags: Ty McCormick
An excellent interview by Richard Hefner with Mike Wallace in 1984, when the journalist was at the height of his powers with 60 Minutes snaring fifty million viewers some weeks. What’s unsaid here is that Wallace was also at a personal low, depressed and contemplating suicide as the Westmoreland trial proceeded. The interview begins with a discussion about a Wallace profile of Oriana Fallaci.
Tags: Mike Wallace, Richard Hefner
The colorful 19th-century Gravesend clan known as the Moreys loved horses, especially with salad and a baked potato. From an article in the January 13, 1895 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:
“The eccentricities of the Morey family, which for the past ten years have kept the town of Gravesend guessing what was to come next, have given the place another shock of such an entirely different nature from any of the former performances that even the old residents shake their heads and declare themselves beaten. A complaint was made at the police headquarters yesterday that a horse belonging to the Moreys had died and was lying in the yard. An officer was sent over and upon entering the yard found, to his amazement, that the horse had been partially skinned and cut up. When he arrived on the spot, Lena Morey, the 16 year old daughter of Elizabeth Morey, was just finishing the work of skinning the dead horse. Portions of the carcass–the best parts–had been cut out and placed in a tub, awaiting the process of pickling, which would keep it for the future use of the family, while the portions considered poor for eating were being fed to the dogs and the pigs owned by the family.
Mrs. Morey told the policeman that she had a right to do as she pleased with her own, that there was a great deal worse meat eaten every day than horse meat and that she did not propose to starve while she could get anything as good. As to the hide, she said she proposed to make strong leather bags of it.
In spite of her vehement protests and threats, the officer seized upon all of the carcass in sight, as well as the hide, and all was sent to Barren Island for cremation, while the board of health was notified.”
I HAD 2 KIDNEY STONES THAT I PASSED LAST YEAR.
THIS IS FOR PEOPLE WHO COLLECT STRANGE THINGS.
I HAVE HOSPITAL PAPER WORK ON THEM, THEY ARE AUTHENTIC WITH PAPER WORK.
From “How to End Global Income Inequality,” Charles Kenny’s Businessweek article that tries to figure out how we got this way and how we can get better:
“In order to close the gap between the global rich and poor, policymakers need to understand how the rich got that way in the first place. Over the last 20 years, there isn’t much evidence that the countries home to the top of global income distribution started saving so much more (PDF) or working so much harder. The vast majority of the global rich got their outsized portion of increases in planetary consumption because they started off rich in 1990. Many were helped along the way by reduced tax rates and—thanks to globalization—more opportunities to make money off investments in rapidly growing developing countries. It is great that this investment is occurring—without it the world’s poor would be poorer. But the distribution of benefits from that investment isn’t an act of God. It’s a decision of man— and it can be changed.”
Tags: Charles Kenny