About the engineering of self-destroying species, from New Scientist:
“IN THE urban jungle of Juazeiro in Brazil, an army is being unleashed. It is an army like no other: the soldiers’ mission is to copulate rather than fight. But they are harbingers of death, not love. Their children appear healthy at first but die just before they reach adulthood, struck down by the killer genes their fathers passed on to them.
These soldiers are the first of a new kind of creature – ‘autocidal’ maniacs genetically modified to wipe out their own kind without harming other creatures. The first animals being targeted with these ‘living pesticides’ are disease-carrying mosquitoes and crop-munching caterpillars, but the approach should work with just about any animal – from invasive fish and frogs to rats and rabbits. If it is successful, it could transform the way we think about genetically engineered animals.”
Kleenex was apparently not originally intended for nose-blowing. From “It’s Spreading,” Jill Lepore’s excellent 2009 New Yorker article about the media feeding frenzy that created the Parrot Flu scare of the 1929-30:
“By the twenties, Americans, and especially housewives, lived in fear of germs. Not only did newspapers and magazines run almost daily stories about newly discovered germs like undulant fever but their pages were filled with advertisements for hygiene products, like Listerine (first sold over the counter in 1914 and, in many ways, the granddaddy of Purell), Lysol (marketed, in 1918, as an anti-flu measure), Kotex (‘feminine hygiene,’ the first menstrual pad, introduced in 1920, a postwar conversion of a surgical dressing developed by Kimberly-Clark), Cellophane (1923), and Kleenex (1924; another Kimberly-Clark product, sold as a towel for removing makeup until a consumer survey revealed that people were using it to blow their noses).” (Thanks Longform.)
Why build a skyscraper or shopping mall in a developing country when you can put up a small private city? That’s the thinking of Russia’s Renaissance Partners, which is currently building an insta-city in Kenya and has announced plans for another in the Congo. A note about the massive projects from the Moscow Times:
“The investment unit of Renaissance Group plans to build a 2,600-hectare city in the Democratic Republic of Congo as it seeks to benefit from Africa’s urbanization.
Renaissance Partners is working on a master plan for the new urban center after securing land outside Lubumbashi, the country’s second-largest city, Arnold Meyer, Renaissance Partners’ managing director for real estate in Africa, said in London.
‘The West has peaked in terms of economic growth and the new markets are in Africa,’ Meyer said. ‘And the main drivers of this growth in Africa are going to be cities.
Renaissance’s Lubumbashi project will be more than double the size of Tatu City, the $5 billion center that the firm is building from scratch outside the Kenyan capital of Nairobi.” (Thanks Marginal Revolution.)
If you’re in NYC in early October, looking for smart entertainment and poor–or perhaps just incredibly cheap–there are going to be free performances of Up From the Stacks, a new musical by Ben Katchor and Mark Mulcahy. I’m a really big fan of Katchor, who sifts through the remnants of cities, finds value in the wreckage and uses it to construct something that isn’t exactly factual but seems truer than what once was. The info:
Set in The New York Public Library at Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street and in the environs of Times Square circa 1970, Up From the Stacks is the story of Lincoln Cabinée, a college student working part-time as a page, retrieving books for readers from the Library’s collection of 43 million items. This routine evening job inadvertently thrusts young Cabinée into the treacherous crossroads of scholarly obsession and the businesses of amusement and vice that then flourished in the 42nd Street area. The intellectual life of the city and the happiness of a young man hang in the balance.
Co-commissioned by the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at The New York Public Library, and Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts for Target Free Thursdays at the David Rubenstein Atrium.
Four performances:
Monday, October 3, 2011 at 6pm at The New York Public LIbrary for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center, 40 Lincoln Center Plaza, Bruno Walter Auditorium
Tuesday, October 4 and Wednesday, October 5, 2011 both at 7pm at The New York Public Library, Fifth Ave. and 42nd St. (Stephen A. Schwarzman Building) South Court Auditorium
This is the 3,000th post in Afflictor history. To put that into perspective, 3,000 posts is a slow morning for Andrew Sullivan. Then again, I didn’t think invading Iraq was a good idea, so maybe slow and steady wins the race. Wow, I really deserve congratulations, or maybe just pity, lots and lots of pity. Thank all of you for reading!
Electricians in the 19th century didn’t always display the best decision-making abilities, as evidenced by the following trio of articles published in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle.
••••••••••
“Tested Currents With His Tongue” (June 26, 1892): “The death of Arthur J. Yeo, an electrician, 27 years old, of 2,181 Eight-Avenue, New York, was reported at the health department of that city yesterday. The cause of death was given as nervous apoplexy. Yeo died yesterday morning. The undertaker who filed the certificate said that Yeo had been killed by electricity. He was in the habit of testing currents by applying the wires to his tongue, and the electricity taken into his system by this means resulted in the nervous apoplexy which caused his death.”
••••••••••
“Quinine Had No Effect On Him” (March 28, 1888): “Paul Grieshnber, a barber and electrician, of Stapleton, S.I., was arrested yesterday in New York, for being drunk and disorderly. He said he was sick and took twenty grains of quinine, but without effect. Then he took schnapps, which had too much effect upon him. Grieshnber had a copy of the Anarchists’ paper, the Freiheil, and Most’s “On the Art of Making Bombs.” In the Essex Market Police Court to-day he was fined $10.”
••••••••••
“Gibson May Live To Get Married” (June 22, 1888): “George H. Gibson, the electrician who shot himself night before last, just before his marriage was to take place, because his tailor disappointed him, is not dead, as reported, and may recover.”
Bill “Spaceman” Lee, a true countculture character who starred in the very button-down sport of baseball from 1969-1982, was an outspoken eccentric who bragged about sprinkling marijuana on his pancakes. In the years before he was blackballed from the sport, Lee was profiled in all his mad glory in a1978 Sports Illustrated articleby Curry Kirkpatrick. An excerpt:
“Much of Lee’s rambling over the years has been about such terrific subjects as pyramid power, zero population growth, the goodness of soyburgers, the badness of sugar, interplanetary creative Zen Buddhism and heavy, heavy, zapped-out karma. But Lee’s philosophy is more out of comic books—to be specific, The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers, which his 8-year-old son Michael shares with his dad—than Nietzsche or Vonnegut or even Paramahansa Yogananda…
The Boston-area public always has been divided along geographical as well as generational lines in its feelings toward Lee. In the blue-collar Irish bars of Southie, Lee was anathema after he defended Judge Arthur Garrity Jr., who ordered the desegregation of Boston schools by busing, as ‘the only guy in this town with any guts.’ On the other hand, the Spaceman was a prince to the city’s hip-liberal college population—largely based in Cambridge—which was thrilled by his outspoken lobbying for decriminalization of marijuana and his open defiance of pot laws.
The Red Sox were left in a quandary as to just what to do with Lee. Possibly the most straitlaced organization in all of pro sports, Boston was one of the first teams to impose a no-liquor rule on team flights and one of the last to dress out in form-fitting knit uniforms. In the matter of race, the Sox signed their first black player—Pumpsie Green—long after every other team in the majors had blacks. Even today only two U.S.-born blacks are on theRed Sox’ roster, Jim Rice and George Scott.
In Lee, team officials saw a flaming radical, junkballing journeyman lefthander with no fastball, no loyalty and no moral values. Yet they also saw a media hero who visited all the sick children, kept the sports talk shows in clover and drew crowds to Fenway Park.”
“Michael Hart, who was widely credited with creating the first e-book when he typed the Declaration of Independence into a computer on July 4, 1971, and in so doing laid the foundations for Project Gutenberg, the oldest and largest digital library, was found dead on Tuesday at his home in Urbana, Ill. He was 64
His death was confirmed by Gregory B. Newby, the chief executive and director of Project Gutenberg, who said that the cause had not yet been determined.
Mr. Hart found his life’s mission when the University of Illinois, where he was a student, gave him a user’s account on a Xerox Sigma V mainframe computerat the school’s Materials Research Lab.
Estimating that the computer time in his possession was worth $100 million, Mr. Hart began thinking of a project that might justify that figure. Data processing, the principal application of computers at the time, did not capture his imagination. Information sharing did.”
From theBulletin of Atonmic Scientists, about one of the lesser costs, the financial one, of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan:
“If the newspapers periodically remind us of these slain American soldiers by showing us the ‘faces of the fallen,’ the injured are less visible, but the cost of caring for them will only increase. Nearly 100,000 American soldiers have been officially wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan, but many injuries, such as post-traumatic-stress disorder, may not manifest until after deployment. More than 522,000 veterans of our Middle Eastern wars have now filed disability claims. Based on prior experience in World War II, Korea, and Vietnam, we know that the health care costs of such veterans do not peak until 30 to 40 years after the wars are over. In other words, we could pull every last soldier out of Iraq and Afghanistan tomorrow, but the costs of caring for them will keep climbing until at least 2040. These costs are expected to total between $600 billion and $1 trillion.”
This classic 1974 NASA photograph shows the Skylab Orbital Workshop in its final orbit before returning to Earth. Skylab became a sensation of sorts behind closed doors in Washington because the astronauts photographed the super-secretive Area 51 (also known as “Groom Lake”), even though they had been ordered not to. Once the mission was complete, there was a scrum among various agencies for control of the photos (which were never released). Dwayne A. Day revealed the brouhaha in 2006 for the Space Review. An excerpt:
“Far out in the Nevada desert, miles from prying eyes, is a secret Air Force facility that has been known by numerous names over the years. It has been called Paradise Ranch, Watertown Strip, Area 51, Dreamland, and Groom Lake. Groom is probably the most mythologized real location that few people have ever seen. According to people with overactive imaginations, it is where the United States government keeps dead aliens, clones them, and reverse-engineers their spacecraft. It is also where NASA filmed the faked Moon landings.
However, for humans whose feet rest on solid ground, Groom is the site of highly secret aircraft development. It is where the U-2 spyplane, the Mach 3 Blackbird, and the F-117 stealth fighter were all developed. It has also probably hosted its own fleet of captured, stolen, or clandestinely acquired Soviet and Russian aircraft. Because of this, the United States government has gone to extraordinary lengths to preserve the area’s secrecy and to prevent people from seeing it.
This secrecy was threatened in early 1974 when the astronauts on Skylab pointed their camera out the window and took pictures of a facility that did not officially exist. They returned to Earth and their photographs quickly became a headache for NASA, the CIA, and the Department of Defense.”
“GPS and the End of the Road“ is Ari N. Schulman’s New Atlantis article about how the technological boom has resulted in a revolution in navigation. Of course, while we know better where we’re headed, other people also know where we’re headed. And reliance on GPS likely diminishes our ability to naturally navigate, making it one more step in the direction of cars that drive themselves. An excerpt:
“If each successive era has closed an old realm of exploration while opening up another, then what are we to make of the innovations in navigational technologies that have just gotten underway in earnest over the last ten years? The rise of digital mapping and the Global Positioning System (GPS) has seemed to come upon us almost as a matter of course, blended in with the general dawning of the digital age, and on its own relatively unremarked — but it has in a blink ushered in the greatest revolution in navigation since the map and compass.
The conception of GPS by the U.S. military began in the 1960s. Satellites with extremely precise onboard clocks constantly send out packets of information containing the time and coordinate at which they were sent; navigation devices here below receive the signal and calculate the transit time and distance. By combining information from several satellites, an accurate and precise coordinate for the navigation device can be calculated. In 1983, a navigational error sent Korean Air Lines Flight 007 into restricted Soviet airspace, where it was shot down, killing all 269 people aboard; subsequently, President Reagan directed that GPS be opened up for civilian use once it had been fully implemented. This occurred in the early 1990s, when a network of satellites was put in place.” (ThanksLongform.)
For whatever reason, I lately find myself thinking about a 2006 Economist obituary for Pink Floyd’s Syd Barrett, who self-medicated his worsening mental illness with massive doses of LSD, extinguishing his great talent by 1968, three years after the group had formed. An excerpt from the obit:
“His weird words and odd, simplistic melodies, sent through an echo-machine, seemed sometimes to be coming from outer space.
Yet there was also something quintessentially English and middle class about Mr Barrett. His songs contained the essence of Cambridge, his home town: bicycles, golden robes, meadows and the river. Startlingly, he sang his hallucinations in the perfect, almost prissy enunciation of the Home Counties. He made it possible to do rock in English rather than American, inspiring David Bowie among others. The band’s first album, ‘The Piper at the Gates of Dawn’ (1967), made Mr Barrett central, plaintively calling up the new age from some distant and precarious place.
Yet the songs were already tipping over into chaos, and by January 1968 Mr Barrett was unable to compose or, almost, to function. Dope, LSD and pills, consumed by the fistful, overwhelmed a psyche that was already fragile and could not bear the pressures of success. At concerts he would simply play the same note over and over, or stand still in a trance. If he played, no one knew where he was going, least of all himself. The band did not want to part with him, but could not cope with him; so he was left behind, or left them, enduring drug terrors in a cupboard under the stairs in his London flat. Casualties of ‘bad trips’ usually recovered, with stark warnings for the unwary. Mr Barrett, famously, went on too many and never came back.”
••••••••••
“Come on you raver, you seer of visions / Come on you painter, you piper, you prisoner”:
Umpiring baseball apparently comes with a degree of ethnic bias, as millions of pitch calls were analyzed and umpires displayed a persistent tendency to call pitches more favorably for members of their own ethnic group. Considering how few African-American baseball players there currently are and the lack of Latin American umpires, I wonder if that sample size had an effect on the study. An excerpt from an article on Ars Technica by John Timmer:
“Several studies have shown that sporting officials have a tendency to exhibit subtle biases in favor of members of their own ethnic group, So, an umpire that’s white might be expected to favor a white pitcher, giving him more favorable calls when pitches are at the edge of the strike zone. This sort of bias might be expected to be subtle, but the research has the sort of statistical power that comes from large numbers: a record of over 3.5 million pitches, and what their outcomes were. (Here, the authors turned to ESPN.com for a pitch-by-pitch record of the game to match up with their computer data.)
After eliminating things like foul balls, swinging strikes, and intentional balls, the authors still had a very impressive collection of data to work with: 1.9 million pitches in which the umpires made a decision. Then came the real drudge work. Using sources such as About.com and web searches, the authors pieced together the ethnic origins of all the major league players and umpires involved. And then they started crunching numbers. And what they found was a subtle bias that went away when the umpires thought someone was watching them.”
Waiting for Elton John as he shows up for a 1975 concert in Los Angeles? A sequined Bob Mackie baseball uniform and a guffawing Charles Nelson Reilly. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
Civilization was encroaching on the Wild West in the 1890s, as cowboys began to trade their trusted steeds for bicycles. At least that’s what was reported in the December 18, 1895 edition of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. An excerpt:
“Kansas and Texas cowboys are now using bicycles in herding, rounding up and driving cattle to pasture, corral or barn. As a lively broncho has more double cussedness bound up in his diminutive carcass than any other animal in existence, the use of the wheel in its stead will destroy the romance which distance lends to the festive cowboy. Imagine a long haired, leather-breeched, sombreroed cowboy, guns, cartridge belt. etc.; cavorting across prairie, canyon and divide, in the effort to round up or rope a frisky long horn or cut out marketable steers from the bunch. Then when the Mescalero, Chiricahua and Yaqui Apache, the hereditary foes of the cowboy, are compelled to steal the bicycles instead of the ponies of the cow punchers, the demoralization of the trail, round-up and drive will have been complete.”
ideas for offensive halloween costume? (Halloweentown)
Need ideas for something messed up…not like a Klansmen or Hitler. Preferably something current events. I thought something like Charlie Sheen, but not sure what I’d do with that. Somethin like Amy Winehouse but I’m a guy…open to suggestions. In the past I’ve done OJ, a suicide bomber, things like that…
