If it wasn’t just so deeply stupid and funny, this 1975 NBC News “special” report about a revival in the popularity of the Three Stooges in the wake of Watergate would be one of the most perplexing wastes of time ever. An emaciated Moe drops by for one of his final interviews. Also on hand: Joe Besser, who was the fifth best Stooge (out of five), and had earlier excelled on the Abbott and Costello Show in the complex role of “Stinky,” a man-child unable to fully adapt to the advances of the Industrial Revolution. Okay, I’ll stop now.
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Tags: Joe Besser, John Chancellor, Moe Howard
In the New York Review of Books, Christian Caryl explains the ramifications of the incredible rise of the drones:
“Drones are not remarkable because of their weaponry. There is nothing especially unusual about the missiles they carry, and even the largest models are relatively lightly armed. They are not fast or nimble. What makes them powerful is their ability to see and think. Most of the bigger drones now operated by the US military can take off, land, and fly by themselves. The operators can program a destination or a desired patrol area and then concentrate on the details of the mission while the aircraft takes care of everything else. Packed with sensors and sophisticated video technology, UAVs can see through clouds or in the dark. They can loiter for hours or even days over a target—just the sort of thing that bores human pilots to tears. Of course, the most significant fact about drones is precisely that they do not have pilots. In the unlikely event that a UAV is shot down, its operator can get up from his or her console and walk away.
So far, so good. But there are also quite a few things about drones that you might not have heard yet. Most Americans are probably unaware, for example, that theUS Air Force now trains more UAV operators each year than traditional pilots. (Indeed, the Air Force insists on referring to drones as “remotely piloted aircraft” in order to dispel any suspicions that it is moving out of the business of putting humans into the air.) As I write this, the US aerospace industry has for all practical purposes ceased research and development work on manned aircraft. All the projects now on the drawing board revolve around pilotless vehicles. Meanwhile, law enforcement agencies around the country eagerly await the moment when they can start operating their own UAVs. The Federal Aviation Administration is considering rules that will allow police departments to start using them within the next few years (perhaps as early as 2014). Soon, much sooner than you realize, your speeding tickets will be issued electronically to your cell phone from a drone hovering somewhere over the interstate. The US Customs Service has already used UAVs to sneak up on drug-smuggling boats that easily evade noisier conventional aircraft.”
Tags: Christian Caryl
A 1978 video that shows how the Chinese language, with it s many symbols, works on a typewriter. (Thanks Reddit.)
Mind and body have long been seen as disparate parts with the former located in the brain. But recent research suggests that the mind operates not just in our gray matter but in all our matter. The eloquent opening of Jonah Lehrer’s new Wall Street Journal piece on the topic:
“One of the deepest mysteries of the human mind is that it doesn’t feel like part of the body. Our consciousness seems to exist in an immaterial realm, distinct from the meat on our bones. We feel like the ghost, not like the machine.
This ancient paradox—it’s known as the mind-body problem—has long perplexed philosophers. It has also interested neuroscientists, who have traditionally argued that the three pounds of our brain are a sufficient explanation for the so-called soul. There is no mystery, just anatomy.
In recent years, however, a spate of research has put an interesting twist on this old conundrum. The problem is even more bewildering than we thought, for it’s not just the coiled cortex that gives rise to the mind—it’s the entire body. As the neuroscientist Antonio Damasio writes, ‘The mind is embodied, not just embrained.'”
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Lehrer addresses concerns over the brain-changing effects of the Internet:
Tags: Jonah Lehrer
Samantha Smith, a Cold War child from Maine, became an international celebrity at age 10 when she wrote a letter in 1982 to Soviet General Secretary Yuri Andropov voicing her concerns about a nuclear war. Andropov replied, invited her on a goodwill trip to the Soviet Union, and her trek there and back became a media sensation. An articulate child who suddenly possessed an off-the-charts Q rating, Smith was cast in the TV drama, Lime Street. When returning to Maine from filming the a segment of the series, Smith, who was 13, and her father, were killed in a plane crash.
Smith on Nightline:
Tags: Samantha Smith, Ted Koppel
Unmentioned in my post on Meek’s Cutoff was that two of its cast members are the great young actors Paul Dano and Zoe Kazan (an off-screen couple as well). Dano came to notice in Little Miss Sunshine and gave a mind-blowing performance in There Will Be Blood. He was the subject of a short profile by Melena Ryzik in the New York Times Magazine in 2009. An excerpt:
“Mr. Dano grew up in Manhattan and Wilton, Conn. He made his Broadway debut at 12 in Inherit the Wind, with George C. Scott and Charles Durning, and a few years later appeared as a troubled teenager preyed upon by a pedophile (played by Brian Cox) in the film L.I.E. Despite the steady work, Mr. Dano wasn’t thinking about building a career. Acting was just fun, he said, on a par with other after-school activities, like basketball.
Little Miss Sunshine, released in 2006, was a turning point. The story of a misfit family’s road trip, it became the toast of Sundance and won two Oscars. Mr. Dano’s character, a misfit among misfits, doesn’t speak for most of the movie, yet manages to be a focal point in a cast including Alan Arkin and Steve Carell.
Mr. Dano auditioned for it two years before it was made. ‘Sometimes when people don’t have a line, they want to mime the line or communicate too much, but he was good at holding it all in,’ Ms. Faris said. ‘His silence was so much more intimidating, in a way, than other actors.'”
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“The devil is in your hands and I will suck it out”:
Tags: Melena Ryzik, Paul Dano, Zoe Kazan
From an MSNBC report about the first time the smiley emoticon was used:
“At 11:44 a.m. on September 19, 1982, a man named Scott Fahlman posted a message to an electronic computer-science department bulletin board at Carnegie Mellon University. And with that simple action he did something wonderful: He became the individual who would later be credited as the inventor of :-), an ASCII-based emoticon.”
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Ten years after the Smiley was born, Jessica Yu captured a different expression in “Sour Death Balls”:
Tags: Jessica Yu, Scott Fahlman
Bret Stephens of the Wall Street Jounral arguing that the recent London riots are only a harbinger of things to come for all of Europe:
“What comes next is the explosion of the European project. Given what European leaders have made of that project over the past 30-odd years, it’s not an altogether bad thing. But it will come at a massive cost. The riots of Athens will become those of Milan, Madrid and Marseilles. Parties of the fringe will gain greater sway. Border checkpoints will return. Currencies will be resurrected, then devalued. Countries will choose decay over reform. It’s a long, likely parade of horribles.” (Thanks Browser.)
Tags: Bret Stephens
Unlike her Dick Cavett interview from the same year, in which she largely seemed bitter and hard, Lucille Ball is her bright self in this 1974 chat with Phil Donahue.
Tags: Lucille Ball, Phil Donahue
"Google wasn't much help." (Image by Coolcaesar.)
What is wrong with me? (33/f)
I’ve been wetting my bed lately. Has anyone been through this? Google wasn’t much help.
From the opening chapter of Thomas Kuhn’s 1957 book, The Copernican Revolution, about the biggest game-changer in science history:
“Even its consequences for science do not exhaust the Revolution’s meanings. Copernicus lived and worked during a period when rapid changes in political, economic, and intellectual life were preparing the bases of modern European and American civilization. His planetary theory and his associated conception of a sun-centered universe were instrumental in the transition from medieval to modern Western society, because they seemed to affect man’s relation to the universe and to God. Initiated as a narrowly technical, highly mathematical revision of classical astronomy, the Copernican theory became one focus for the tremendous controversies in religion, in philosophy, and in social theory, which, during the two centuries following the discovery of America, set the tenor of the modern mind. Men who believed that their terrestrial home was only a planet circulating blindly about one of an infinity of stars evaluated their place in the cosmic scheme quite differently than had their predecessors who saw the earth as the unique and focal center of God’s creation. The Copernican Revolution was therefore also part of a transition in Western Man’s sense of values.”
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Explaining Kuhn’s “Paradigm Shift”:
“All I’m offering is the truth”:
Tags: Copernicus, Thomas Kuhn
This must have been the most insane episode of the Love Boat ever, one with some sort of fashion-world premise. Designers on board: Geoffrey Beene, Halston, Bob Mackie and Gloria Vanderbilt (designer jeans giant and Anderson Cooper’s mom!). Also on the cruise were Cristina Ferrare, the model who was married to a midlife-crisis John DeLorean; and Dick Shawn, most famously of The Producers. I’ve always contended that episodes of the series were written by putting 100 monkeys in front of 100 typewriters and 100 bowls of cocaine.
Tags: Bob Mackie, Cristina Ferrare, Dick Shawn, Geoffrey Beene, Gloria Vanderbilt, Halston
Apple claims that Samsung has ripped off design aspects of its iPad; Samsung has countered by charging Apple with lifting the iPad design from 2001: A Space Odyssey. Odd defense, which I doubt will work. From the legal paperwork, via disinfo:
“Attached hereto as Exhibit D is a true and correct copy of a still image taken from Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey. In a clip from that film lasting about one minute, two astronauts are eating and at the same time using personal tablet computers…As with the design claimed by the D’889 Patent, the tablet disclosed in the clip has an overall rectangular shape with a dominant display screen, narrow borders, a predominately flat front surface, a flat back surface (which is evident because the tablets are lying flat on the table’s surface), and a thin form factor.”
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Eating while using table computers:
Tags: Stanley Kubrick
Trash-sport legend Evel Knievel on kids’ show Wonderama in the 1970s.
Tags: Evel Knievel
"He was an aristocratic pug, accustomed to select society and would not notice them."
I don’t know if dog catchers in 1890s New York were paid for each mutt that they brought back to the pound, but something strange was going on. During that decade, dog catchers had a habit of luring canines off their owners’ properties so that they could be collared and taken into custody. This strategy backfired sometimes, as can be gleaned from the following July 16, 1894 article in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. An excerpt:
“The dog catchers paid another visit to the Twenty-ninth Ward this morning and again got into trouble. The new wards are a harvest for those officers and no matter how they are treated, they reappear smiling. About 4:50 this morning William Robertson, a well known and wealthy resident of Clarkson Street, let his pet pug out in the yard. The pug celebrated his release with a sharp yelp. The dog catchers were in the neighborhood, heard the bark and drove up to the Robertson residence. Seven men jumped from the wagon. They tried to coax the dog outside the yard, but he was an aristocratic pug, accustomed to select society and would not notice them. One catcher then, braver than the others, opened the gate and threw in some meat. The dog did not pay attention to that either. The man then went in the yard, chased the animal and, after some time, caught him on the stoop surrounding the house. The dog squealed and Mrs. Robertson ran out of the house to see what was the matter. She grasped the situation at a glance and told the man to drop the dog. He answered in an insulting manner and Mrs. Robertson called her husband, who also ordered the man to drop the dog. The catcher was impudent to Robertson also and the latter drew a revolver from his pocket and shouted, ‘Drop that dog or I will drop you.’
One of the men in the wagon cried out, ‘Drop it, Bill. He means business.’ The man dropped the dog and ran. His seven companions drove on with thirty-five captive dogs in their wagon. This morning Mr. Robertson appeared before Justice Steers and asked for a warrant for the arrest of the man, whose name he did not know. The justice told him first to complain to the mayor and then he would grant the warrant. Mr. Robertson left the court house for the city hall.
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Pluto encounters a dog catcher, 1932:
Muhammad Ali, long before anyone could imagine an African-American President, sagely suggested that a person of color will hold that office only once the job has become completely undesirable.
From “Ego,” the 1971 Norman Mailer Life article mentioned in the video:
Muhammad Ali begins with the most unsettling ego of all. Having commanded the stage, he never pretends to step back and relinquish his place to other actors–like a six-foot parrot, he keeps screaming at you that he is the center of the stage, ‘Come here, and get me, fool,’ he says. ‘You can’t, ’cause you don’t know who I am. You don’t know where I am. I’m human intelligence and you don’t even know if I’m good or evil.’ This has been his essential message to America all these years. It is intolerable to our American mentality that the figure who is probably most prominent to us after the President is simply not comprehensible, for he could be a demon or a saint. Or both!•
Tags: Barack Obama, Muhammad Ali, Norman Mailer
"Whenever she is around me I get fuzzly wuzzly."
I’m attracted to an older married woman (Midtown West)
She is so amazing.. it is incredible.. her personality is out of this world.. she has the charm of a royal queen, and her gaze just sends thrills through my body. Whenever she is around me I get fuzzly wuzzly. When she looks at me, it’s as if though she is looking into me. Her eyes are so incredibly intense but soft at the same time – it’s amazing. She has the femininity of a little girl but the command of a general – two opposites combined in one, in a way I’ve never seen before. I want to kiss her. I want to hold her in my arms. I want to make love to her. I don’t know how to tell her. I sent her a text saying that I have something to tell her that has been eating at me for awhile, but then four minutes later I sent her another text saying “sorry, I didn’t mean to send that”. Did I just mess up? I feel so stupid right now. What is she going to thank about me right now? I’m a young looking 39. She’s around 45 and 3 months pregnant with his.
In writing about the new Steven Soderbergh film, Contagion, Alex Tabarrok of the Marginal Revolution points out an unintended benefit of the war against bio-terrorism that arose after 9/11:
“That is exactly right. Fortunately, under the umbrella of bio-terrorism, we have invested in the public health system by building more bio-safety level 3 and 4 laboratories including the latest BSL3 at George Mason University, we have expanded the CDC and built up epidemic centers at the WHO and elsewhere and we have improved some local public health centers. Most importantly, a network of experts at the department of defense, the CDC, universities and private firms has been created. All of this has increased the speed at which we can respond to a natural or unnatural pandemic.
In 2009, as H1N1 was spreading rapidly, the Pentagon’s Defense Threat Reduction Agency asked Professor Ian Lipkin, the director of the Center for Infection and Immunity at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, to sequence the virus. Working non-stop and updating other geneticists hourly, Lipkin and his team were able to sequence the virus in 31 hours. (Professor Ian Sussman, played in the movie by Elliott Gould, is based on Lipkin.) As the movie explains, however, sequencing a virus is only the first step to developing a drug or vaccine and the latter steps are more difficult and more filled with paperwork and delay. In the case of H1N1 it took months to even get going on animal studies, in part because of the massive amount of paperwork that is required to work on animals.”
Tags: Alex Tabrrok, Elliott Gould, Ian Lipkin, Ian Sussman, Steven Soderbergh
You are out there and you are waiting to speak.
You’ve seen your country knocked sideways for several years by the worst of its citizens and politicians and media.
You’ve seen a centrist President undermined each and every step by those who wish to bring him down at the expense of the American people. No, he hasn’t done all you desire, but being an adult, you realize that no President will. You’ve seen him accomplish a litany of important things, domestically and internationally, while dealing with a nihilistic Congress. You realize that after our near-Depression, no one was going to make the jobs instantly reappear, no Democrat, no Republican, no Independent.
You know that those who claim to wish the government had no power while they seek that very power themselves are liars. You know that both the government and the free-market system are vital to our interests. That the government nurtured the Internet for decades until it was favorable enough for venture capital to carry it. You know that the stimulus money given to lithium battery factories in Michigan has brought life to a burgeoning industry that would have not otherwise gotten off the ground. You know that the government saved the auto industry at minimal cost by acting decisively and quickly.
You know that when Teapublicans claim that restoring fair tax levels on the wealthy is tantamount to class warfare, that, in fact, class warfare has been waged by the Right on the middle class for three decades, by people who came wrapped in flags and crosses. They claim to love children while their policies have caused the country to fall to 41st in global rankings of infant mortality rate. You’ve seen Teapublicans, so allergic to taxes on those with the most, fighting to remove the President’s payroll tax breaks on working class people. You’ve seen the richest 1% of the country grow ever richer because the system has been rigged.
You know that the Tea Party members are just useful stooges for venal politicans, the way Born Again Christians were before them. You know that a group of white people who realized that Washington was imperfect the moment a black person become President is, at best, dubious.
You’ve seen your country hijacked by the venal, the prejudiced, the loud, the ignorant, the wrongminded, the loony, the corrupt and the monied. And all along they’ve been outnumbered by rational, peaceful, progressive people, greatly outnumbered, but their disgraceful behavior has gone unchallenged, unanswered.
You are out there and you are waiting to speak. You wait and wait to be born, and it continues until the moment you realize that you aren’t just the child of that movement but the parent of it as well.•
The Wave Glider travels via water and solar power. From Liquid Robotics.
Albany, New York, is the site of experimentation that may allow us to control computing devices with minds instead of hands. From a new New York Times article by Pagan Kennedy:
“Now Schalk can get all the human brains he wants within walking distance of his office. In 2007, he discovered that the Albany Medical Center houses an epilepsy center, and he set up shop in his hometown, working closely with Anthony Ritaccio, a professor of neurology and neurosurgery at Albany Medical College.
When I met Ritaccio in front of the hospital, he also talked about the problems with fingers. ‘We’re always interested in doing things faster,’ he said. ‘I remember the transition to an electric typewriter. We’re addicted to speed. But obviously the way we communicate with computers is rather comical. The way we interact with this blazing fast machine is to poke at it with a finger.’
Schalk and Ritaccio’s research has been underwritten by a $2.2 million Department of Defense grant. The project is part of a $6.3 million Army initiative to invent devices for telepathic communication — for instance, a ‘telepathy helmet‘ that would allow soldiers to beam thoughts to one another. Schalk seemed untroubled by the military applications. He said the grant allows him to do research that could, one day, let us all — civilians included — merge with our machines.”
Tags: Gerwin Schalk, Pagan Kennedy
Fun, short 1965 AT&T doc about the history of the transistor.
"Mirror!!!"
A Fat Guy Called Me Fat. (Sad Chubby Guy)
I could not believe a guy fatter than me had the nerve to call me fat. I also always see this happening in TV talk shows. Mirror!!!
As Hollywood’s studio system collapsed in the 1960s and the anti-hero indie Easy Rider showed a new path to riches, mavericks like Dennis Hooper could do anything they wanted. That freedom, of course, wasn’t the best thing for Hopper’s health or sanity. One of the least self-lacerating things he did during that era was to read a Rudyard Kipling poem for Johnny Cash in 1970.
More Dennis Hopper posts:
Tags: Dennis Hopper, Johnny Cash