“‘Progress is exponential–not just a measure of power of computation, number of Internet nodes, and magnetic spots on a hard disk–the rate of paradigm shift is itself accelerating, doubling every decade. Scientists look at a problem and they intuitively conclude that since we’ve solved 1 percent over the last year, it’ll therefore be one hundred years until the problem is exhausted: but the rate of progress doubles every decade, and the power of the information tools (in price-performance, resolution, bandwidth, and so on) doubles every year. People, even scientists, don’t grasp exponential growth. During the first decade of the human genome project, we only solved 2 percent of the problem, but we solved the remaining 98 percent in five years.’
But Kurzweil doesn’t think that the future will arrive in a rush. As William Gibson observed, ‘The future is here, it’s just not evenly distributed.'” (Thanks Longform.)
•••••••
Kurzweil sits for an interview with that dashing cyborg Charlie Rose, 2007:
Did Steve Jobs being a jerk to underlings help make his products great, or was the meanness something that was withstood because of his genius but unnecessary? Is greatness and kindness a zero-sum game? Can a perfectionist be a nice person? D.B. Grady votes “no” to the latter question with “In Praise of Bad Steve“ in the Atlantic. An excerpt:
“Steve Jobs was a genius, and one of the most important businessmen and inventors of our time. But he was not a kindly, soft-spoken sage who might otherwise live atop a mountain in India, dispatching wisdom to pilgrims. He was a taskmaster who knew how to get things done. ‘Real artists ship’ was an Apple battle cry from the earliest days. Everyone, by now, knows about the Steve Jobs ‘reality distortion field’ — the charismatic Care Bear Stare that compels otherwise reasonable people to spend weeks in line for a slightly faster telephone. In his biography of Jobs, journalist Alan Deutschman described the Apple co-founder’s lesser-known hero-shithead roller coaster. ‘He could be Good Steve or he could be Bad Steve. When he was Bad Steve, he didn’t seem to care about the severe damage he caused to egos or emotions so long as he pushed for greatness.’ When confronted with the full ‘terrifying’ wrath of Bad Steve (even over the slightest of details), the brains at Apple would push themselves beyond all personal limits to find a way to meet Jobs’s exacting demands, and somehow return to his good graces. And the process would repeat itself. ‘Steve was willing to be loved or feared, whatever worked.’ As Bud Tribble, Vice President of Software Technology at Apple explained. ‘It let the engineers know that it wasn’t OK to be sloppy in anything they did, even the 99 percent that Steve would never look at.'”
A tidy encapsulation of the what caused the rift between Edison and Tesla, courtesy of Smithsonian:
‘After Edison developed the first practical incandescent light bulb in 1879, supported by his own direct current electrical system, the rush to build hydroelectric plants to generate DC power in cities across the United States practically guaranteed Edison a fortune in patent royalties. But early on, Edison recognized the limitations of DC power. It was very difficult to transmit over distances without a significant loss of energy, and the inventor turned to a 28-year-old Serbian mathematician and engineer whom he’d recently hired at Edison Machine Works to help solve the problem. Nikola Tesla claimed that Edison even offered him significant compensation if he could design a more practical form of power transmission. Tesla accepted the challenge. With a background in mathematics that his inventor boss did not have, he set out to redesign Edison’s DC generators. The future of electric distribution, Tesla told Edison, was in alternating current—where high-voltage energy could be transmitted over long distances using lower current—miles beyond generating plants, allowing a much more efficient delivery system. Edison dismissed Tesla’s ideas as ‘splendid’ but ‘utterly impractical.’ Tesla was crushed and claimed that Edison not only refused to consider AC power, but also declined to compensate him properly for his work. Tesla left Edison in 1885 and set out to raise capital on his own for Tesla Electric Light & Manufacturing, even digging ditches for the Edison Company to pay his bills in the interim, until the industrialist George Westinghouse at Westinghouse Electric & Manufacturing Company, a believer in AC power, bought some of Tesla’s patents and set about commercializing the system so as to take electric light to something more than an urban luxury service. While Tesla’s ideas and ambitions might be brushed aside, Westinghouse had both ambition and capital, and Edison immediately recognized the threat to his business.”
"The murder stirred up a tremendous excitement among the McCoys and Hatfields."
One brief and bloody tale from the epic Hatfield-McCoy feud was chronicled in the November 13, 1890 edition of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle:
“Charleston, W. Va.–Bud McCoy was waylaid by William Dyer and Ples McCoy on Peter’s Creek, Pike County, Ky., while on his way to the house of John Gostin and killed. The victim spoke pleasantly to the two men and passed them, when they turned in their saddles and shot him through the back, firing several shots into his dead body after he fell from his horse. The murder stirred up a tremendous excitement among the McCoys and Hatfields, and a posse at once started after the murderers, who fled through the Southwest corner of West Virginia into Kentucky. News was received to-day that the posse came up with the fugitives in Buchanan County, Virginia, Monday. Ples McCoy was shot and captured, but Dyer escaped after a running fight. A portion of he posse is in pursuit and he will probably be killed.”
If only it were so. An economic prediction from “The Long Boom,” Wired, 1997:
“But there’s a new, very different meme, a radically optimistic meme: We are watching the beginnings of a global economic boom on a scale never experienced before. We have entered a period of sustained growth that could eventually double the world’s economy every dozen years and bring increasing prosperity for – quite literally – billions of people on the planet. We are riding the early waves of a 25-year run of a greatly expanding economy that will do much to solve seemingly intractable problems like poverty and to ease tensions throughout the world. And we’ll do it without blowing the lid off the environment.
If this holds true, historians will look back on our era as an extraordinary moment. They will chronicle the 40-year period from 1980 to 2020 as the key years of a remarkable transformation. In the developed countries of the West, new technology will lead to big productivity increases that will cause high economic growth – actually, waves of technology will continue to roll out through the early part of the 21st century. And then the relentless process of globalization, the opening up of national economies and the integration of markets, will drive the growth through much of the rest of the world.”
From “The Comfort Zone,” Jonathan Franzen’s great 2004 New Yorker essay about his childhood relationship with Charles Schulz’s Peanuts strip:
“I was unaware of it, but an epidemic had broken out across the country. Late adolescents in suburbs like ours had suddenly gone berserk, running away to other cities to have sex and not attend college, ingesting every substance they could get their hands on, not just clashing with their parents but rejecting and annihilating everything about them. For a while, the parents were so frightened and so mystified and so ashamed that each family, especially mine, quarantined itself and suffered in isolation.
When I went upstairs, my bedroom felt like an overwarm sickroom. The clearest remaining vestige of Tom was the Don’t Look Back poster that he’d taped to a flank of his dresser where Bob Dylan’s psychedelic hair style wouldn’t always be catching my mother’s censorious eye. Tom’s bed, neatly made, was the bed of a kid carried off by an epidemic.
In that unsettled season, as the so-called generation gap was rending the cultural landscape, Charles Schulz’s work was almost uniquely beloved. Fifty-five million Americans had seen A Charlie Brown Christmas the previous December, for a Nielsen share of better than fifty per cent. The musical You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown was in its second sold-out year on Broadway. The astronauts of Apollo X, in their dress rehearsal for the first lunar landing, had christened their orbiter and landing vehicle Charlie Brown and Snoopy. Newspapers carrying Peanuts reached more than a hundred and fifty million readers, Peanuts collections were all over the best-seller lists, and if my own friends were any indication there was hardly a kid’s bedroom in America without a Peanuts wastebasket or Peanuts bedsheets or a Peanuts gift book. Schulz, by a luxurious margin, was the most famous living artist on the planet.”
"You could play a president or secret agent or romantic lead as well as Harrison Ford any day of the week." (Image by Alan Light.)
To Tom Selleck (NYC )
I read your bio on IMDB after being fortunate to participate in an episode of Blue Bloods with you. I just want to say you are an icon and symbol of decency in tv/film, and the role you brought to life on Magnum PI entertained and inspired people to like cops. No one else could have done that role with such finesse. Don’t regret not doing Indiana Jones or the other projects. You could play a president or secret agent or romantic lead as well as Harrison Ford any day of the week. You are more than a movie star. You are a man people respect and listen to, and could easily expand your world to politics. You are larger than some on screen character. That’s why you did not have those parts. You obliged your contract with honor to Magnum PI, and turned a pilot into the top rated detective show of all time. That’s saying alot. I admire and respect you and hope Blue Bloods wins it’s time slot every week and continues for many seasons. You deserve nothing but the best. You are a class act.
-a fan whose dad and brother made her watch Magnum PI every week.
In honor of what would have been animator’s Art Clokey’s 90th birthday, here’s an episode where Gumby goes to the moon. He probably saw Whitey while he was there.
The single best description of a personality type that I have ever read is still “Caring for Your Introvert,” Jonathan Rauch’s 2003 Atlantic article. The opening:
“Do you know someone who needs hours alone every day? Who loves quiet conversations about feelings or ideas, and can give a dynamite presentation to a big audience, but seems awkward in groups and maladroit at small talk? Who has to be dragged to parties and then needs the rest of the day to recuperate? Who growls or scowls or grunts or winces when accosted with pleasantries by people who are just trying to be nice?
If so, do you tell this person he is ‘too serious,’ or ask if he is okay? Regard him as aloof, arrogant, rude? Redouble your efforts to draw him out?
If you answered yes to these questions, chances are that you have an introvert on your hands—and that you aren’t caring for him properly.”
“[Chris] Ellsworth provides a quick demo. On the massive tablet is a map of a hypothetical warzone. Blue icons represent the positioning of Team America assets — ground troops and overhead aircraft. Red icons show the enemy. When a new red diamond pops up, Ellsworth taps his finger on it, and then drags a bluish character over it.
It looks a little bit like a ghost from Ms. Pac-Man. But Ellsworth has just directed a drone — in this (fictional) case, one of AAI’s tiny Aerosonde-1 spy robots — to the enemy position. Whoever’s sitting miles away in an air conditioned Ground Control Station, wielding the joystick that controls the drone, has now received her new orders on an equivalent device — perhaps the smartphone that the Army might one day put in her pocket.
Either way, an IM confirming that the order is understood pops up on an adjacent flatscreen TV repurposed as a computer monitor. The drone above our fictional warzone should be on its way to its new position imminently.”
••••••••••
A piece about the increasing digitization of warfare, featuring AAI:
“The journey started back in the early 1970s. The University of Hawaii had facilities scattered around different islands, but the computers were located at the main campus in Honolulu. Back then, computers weren’t all that portable, but it was still possible to connect to those computers from remote locations by way of a terminal and a telephone connection at the blazing speed of 300 to 1200 bits per second. But the telephone connection was both slow and unreliable.
A small group of networking pioneers led by Norman Abramson felt that they could design a better system to connect their remote terminals to the university’s central computing facilities. The basic idea, later developed into ‘AlohaNET,’ was to use radio communications to transmit the data from the terminals on the remote islands to the central computers and back again. In those days, the well-established approach to sharing radio resources among several stations was to divide the channel either into time slots or into frequency bands, then assign a slot or band to each of the stations. (These two approaches are called time division multiple access [TDMA] and frequency division multiple access [FDMA], respectively.)
Obviously, dividing the initial channel into smaller, fixed-size slots or channels results in several lower-speed channels, so the AlohaNET creators came up with a different system to share the radio bandwidth. AlohaNET was designed with only two high-speed UHF channels: one downlink (from Honolulu) and one uplink (to Honolulu). The uplink channel was to be shared by all the remote locations to transmit to Honolulu. To avoid slicing and dicing into smaller slots or channels, the full channel capacity was available to everyone. But this created the possibility that two remote stations transmit at the same time, making both transmissions impossible to decode in Honolulu. Transmissions might fail, just like any surfer might fall off her board while riding a wave. But hey, nothing prevents her from trying again. This was the fundamental, ground-breaking advance of AlohaNET, reused in all members of the family of protocols collectively known as ‘random access protocols.'”
Very experimental, neurology-centric Jim Henson bit from the Tonight Show in 1974. Johnny, who may have had a few belts before the show, introduces his guest as “Jim Jenson.” Jack Benny is seated next to Henson in the latter part of the video.
Slavoj Žižek, that provocateur and performance artist, gave a speech at Occupy Wall Street. Thankfully, his rhetoric was short on his usual bullshit (smirking apologias for Stalin, for example) and long on common sense. The speech’s opening from thefull transcriptprovided by Sarah Shin at Verso:
“Don’t fall in love with yourselves, with the nice time we are having here. Carnivals come cheap—the true test of their worth is what remains the day after, how our normal daily life will be changed. Fall in love with hard and patient work—we are the beginning, not the end. Our basic message is: the taboo is broken, we do not live in the best possible world, we are allowed and obliged even to think about alternatives. There is a long road ahead, and soon we will have to address the truly difficult questions—questions not about what we do not want, but about what we DO want. What social organization can replace the existing capitalism? What type of new leaders we need? The XXth century alternatives obviously did not work.
So do not blame people and their attitudes: the problem is not corruption or greed, the problem is the system that pushes you to be corrupt. The solution is not ‘Main Street, not Wall Street,’ but to change the system where main street cannot function without Wall street. Beware not only of enemies, but also of false friends who pretend to support us, but are already working hard to dilute our protest. In the same way we get coffee without caffeine, beer without alcohol, ice-cream without fat, they will try to make us into a harmless moral protest. But the reason we are here is that we had enough of the world where to recycle your Coke cans, to give a couple of dollars for charity, or to buy Starbucks cappuccino where 1% goes for the Third World troubles is enough to make us feel good. After outsourcing work and torture, after the marriage agencies started to outsource even our dating, we see that for a long time we were allowing our political engagements also to be outsourced—we want them back.
They will tell us we are un-American. But when conservative fundamentalists tell you that America is a Christian nation, remember what Christianity is: the Holy Spirit, the free egalitarian community of believers united by love. We here are the Holy Spirit, while on Wall Street they are pagans worshipping false idols.
They will tell us we are violent, that our very language is violent: occupation, and so on. Yes we are violent, but only in the sense in which Mahathma Gandhi was violent. We are violent because we want to put a stop on the way things go—but what is this purely symbolic violence compared to the violence needed to sustain the smooth functioning of the global capitalist system?”
••••••••••
Žižek at Occupy Wall Street:
Žižek holding forth in a garbage dump, in Astra Taylor’s Examined Life:
I’ve never fully comprehended people who reject the idea of genetically modified food. I’m not speaking of concerns about corporations producing the food safely or the FDA’s reluctance to have such food labeled–those concerns I understand. I’m talking more about people who out of hand reject the notion that we should be using biotechnology when it comes to our diet. The weather patterns we currently enjoy, which allow for our agrarian culture, have existed for only about 10,000 years. Even if we were treating our environment well, which we’re most definitely not, those weather patterns will eventually shift, and we’ll need new ways to prevent famine. There seems to be a dogged belief that anything natural is good and anything engineered by humans is somehow tainted. But there are plenty of lethal plants which exist in nature. At Singularity Hub,Aaron Saenz brings common senseto the argument over the labeling genetically modified foods:
“We should label GMOs. I don’t see why the FDA and GMO developers are fighting this. I believe in GMO technology. I think it’s one of the most likely paths to cheaply and securely feeding the world. While current incarnations of the technology are still far from perfect, a mature GMO industry may be able to design humanity with the organisms it needs to survive in the 21st Century.
But I still think GMOs should be labeled.
Why the hell not? Let consumers see the benefits of GM crops. Sure, some will definitely switch to competitors products because they are adverse to consuming new forms of food. That’s fine. If GM foods really are cheaper then many more consumers will choose them to save money. If GM foods aren’t cheap enough to compete with non-GMO foods, then their developers should go back to the drawing board and make GMOs that can compete. By keeping consumers in the dark we’re artificially stalling GMO science.”
This 1978 NBC News promo is a real time warp. It’s anchored by the late Jessica Savitch, who was, fleetingly, the golden girl of broadcast journalism, and died young and mysteriously five years after this clip. Following the news brief are an American Express commercial featuring the great tennis player Virginia Wade and a promo for Headliners with David Frost, that show’s star being one of the biggest names in America after going mano-a-mano with disgraced former President Richard Nixon.
Word has arrived already that there will be no Christmas this year because Santa Claus got a job at Goldman Sachs and is involved in all sorts of dishonest shit. It was time for him to look out for number one, and now he’s insanely wealthy. The only snow he’ll see this season will be the lines of coke he does off a ho ho ho’s belly. You’re not getting gifts from him, so fuck your needy kids and your filthy fucking chimney. Oh, and he’s raising your credit card rates, you filthbags.
Don't cry, Abigail. You would have gotten tired of that new dollie after a few years anyway. Oh, and did I mention that Grandma passed? (Image by Sharon Pruitt.)
Nanotechnology may be able to transform air expelled through the nose during respiration into a source of power which could in turn provide the energy for medical devices implanted in the human head. An excerpt from a Science Daily report:
“‘Basically, we are harvesting mechanical energy from biological systems. The airflow of normal human respiration is typically below about two meters per second,’ says Wang. ‘We calculated that if we could make this material thin enough, small vibrations could produce a microwatt of electrical energy that could be useful for sensors or other devices implanted in the face.’
Researchers are taking advantage of advances in nanotechnology and miniaturized electronics to develop a host of biomedical devices that could monitor blood glucose for diabetics or keep a pacemaker battery charged so that it would not need replacing. What’s needed to run these tiny devices is a miniscule power supply. Waste energy in the form or blood flow, motion, heat, or in this case respiration, offers a consistent source of power.”
“A syringe, previously heated, was filled with blood drawn from the jugular vein of a goat.”
Medicine wasn’t quite as advanced 160 years ago as it is today, so sometimes doctors would just inject goat blood into a sick person to see if that voodoo would work. One such example can be gleaned from the following article published in the February 1, 1843 edition of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle:
“A man 38 years of age, says a late member of the Edinburgh Medical and Surgical Journal was seized with haemhptysis, which continued so long, and so violent, that the only means of saving his life appeared to be by supplying the loss of blood by transfusion. On the fifth day after the attack a cannula was introduced into the median vein of his left arm; a syringe, previously heated, was filled with blood drawn from the jugular vein of a goat and about five ounces were injected into the vein of the man. Immediately he complained of a feeling of oppression; but this soon afterwards went off. An attack of phlebitis came on the next day, but was subdued in eight days by means of cold applications alone. His strength from this day returned, and at the end of three months he was able to resume his usual occupation. It is remarked, as the interesting point of this case, that it proves that the injection of the blood of one animal into the veins of another is not necessarily fatal.”
So much paranormal activity in UWS. (Upper West Side)
Actually all over NYC, as I walk at least once a day I pick up all kinds of different energies. Ranging from suddenly feeling drawn to looking up at random windows, to feeling presences.
I used to be my own worst skeptic until coming to NYC. San Diego(home) is very new in comparison.
But thats what I love about here learned more about my gift.
I may sound crazy but I don’t see dead people, nor do I hear voices lol. I just pic up energies that turn into mental images.
Having said that if you think you have something going on in your home, and want confirmation let me know. Will visit for free.
BTW not into personal psychic readings. Just deal with spirits unless I see mortal danger ahead. Please feel free to contact me and share stories.
This month marks the 40th anniversary of the first ARPANET email, which was sent by Ray Tomlinson. A remembrance of that leap forward in communications, via The Next Web:
“As Tomlinson told the Times in 2008, he doesn’t remember what that first email actually said – perhaps ‘QWERTY’ or another string of characters, but whatever it was, it traveled a distance of one meter between two separate computers. One small step for a message, one giant leap for mankind.
Besides inventing email, Tomlinson is also the man to thank for the popularity of the ‘@’ symbol. He established the convention of an email ‘address’ in order to identify the recipient and the computer or network that they were using. To separate these two pieces of information, he chose ‘@’. He told The Times, ‘It conveyed a sense of place, which seemed to suit.'”
