The Stanford and Google genius gives a TED talk. (Thanks IEEE Spectrum.)
You are currently browsing the yearly archive for 2011.
Tags: Sebastian Thrun
“The Real Dr. Frankenstein” reprints strange, old newspaper articles that were originally published in the Westphalia Times of Kansas during the 1880s. They focus on the odd doings of a Dr. Franckinstein, an apparent quack who was secretly working as a bootlegger. An excerpt:
“Dec 17, 1885
Dr. Franckinstein showed us Tuesday, pieces of a frog or snake which he removed from one of his lady patients’ stomachs. The head, like that of a small snake, was lost through carelessness. The doctor thinks there are more such living creatures in the woman’s body, caused by drinking pond water some years ago, when she swallowed some eggs. She has been in poor health some years, doubtless caused by these reptiles being in her body. They can be seen at his drugstore.
December 24, 1885
The doctor informs us his patient is progressing, having discharged great quantities of the remains of dead animals, or animalcule or frogs, lizards, etc.”
Tags: Dr. Franckinstein
Charles Babbage’s 1840’s Difference Engine, which was never actually built during his lifetime. (Thanks Reddit.)
Tags: Charles Babbage
An excerpt from “Obama’s Young Mother Abroad,” Janny Scott’s detailed Sunday Times Magazine piece about Stanley Ann Dunham, who lived an unorthodox and all-too-brief life and was mom to our 44th President:
“To describe Dunham as a white woman from Kansas turns out to be about as illuminating as describing her son as a politician who likes golf. Intentionally or not, the label obscures an extraordinary story — of a girl with a boy’s name who grew up in the years before the women’s movement, the pill and the antiwar movement; who married an African at a time when nearly two dozen states still had laws against interracial marriage; who, at 24, moved to Jakarta with her son in the waning days of an anticommunist bloodbath in which hundreds of thousands of Indonesians were slaughtered; who lived more than half her adult life in a place barely known to most Americans, in the country with the largest Muslim population in the world; who spent years working in villages where a lone Western woman was a rarity; who immersed herself in the study of blacksmithing, a craft long practiced exclusively by men; who, as a working and mostly single mother, brought up two biracial children; who believed her son in particular had the potential to be great; who raised him to be, as he has put it jokingly, a combination of Albert Einstein, Mahatma Gandhi and Harry Belafonte; and then died at 52, never knowing who or what he would become.”
"Trying to get back into my craft." (Image by fictures.)
Wanted: Wig making tools (Brooklyn/NY)
In need of any and all wig making tools and/or supplies. Trying to get back into my craft but in need of some assistance. Need to put 2 teens through college.
I interviewed Werner Herzog once and asked him if Klaus Kinski was his muse. “No, we were collaborators,” he answered immediately. Considering that their turbulent relationship might have ended in a doube homicide, I wasn’t surprised with the director’s response when I asked if he missed Kinski. “No…only very rarely,” he answered calmly. Peter Geyer’s Jesus Christus Erlöser is a chronicle of Kinski’s crazed and doomed 1971 attempt at a spoken-word performance about Jesus Christ. (Thanks Documentarian.)
Tags: Klaus Kinski, Peter Geyer', Werner Herzog
Donald Trump: Using the Republican Party the same way he used Marla Maples. (Image by Michele Sandberg.)
That orange-headed fuckface Donald Trump upped the ante early today in his fake run for the Presidency, bringing his ridiculous unilateral feud with President Obama directly to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Trump sneaked onto the lawn and took an electric razor to First Dog Bo, shaving profanities into his coat, and set fire to the White House, burning to the ground what the homely narcissist dubbed “that old, unclassy dump.”
“I can’t prove that Obama wasn’t born in America if I don’t desecrate his Portuguese Water Dog,” said Trump, as he stood near the charred remains of the Lincoln bedroom. “I’m a very smart man. I went to the best schools. I got very good grades. I know what I’m doing.”
Because President Obama is aloof the way many Kenyans are, he ignored the fire and refused to confront his make-believe rival. That won’t stop Trump, though. He is going forward with a round of debates without Obama, hiring the homeless man with the golden voice Ted Williams as a suitable stand-in for the incumbent. The debate will be moderated by Trump’s fellow NBC celebrity, Guy Fieri, who is both stupid and useful.
Tracking polls are showing that Trump is already drawing strong support from gigantic assholes across the country. Now he can probably add to his constituency arsonists and people who own dogs with the word “cocksucker” etched into their back. Still, it won’t be easy to win the Republican nomination with strong competition from Sarah Palin, the other lady who’s even crazier than Sarah Palin, Mitt Romney, Haley Barbour and Brett Favre’s penis. They’re all equally qualified to run the country. But Republicans are just happy to have a candidate who makes Newt Gingrich look morally upstanding by comparison, even though Trump is actually more liberal than Obama on almost every issue.
For their part, NBC executives love the free publicity that Trump brought the network by burning down the White House, and are only disappointed that he didn’t also defecate into the lap of the Lincoln Memorial.
“Apprentice has nearly doubled its ratings from last season and is now averaging almost 8 million viewers an episode,” said one network exec, pulling his head out of his ass long enough to speak. “It’s one of the very few shows we have that is in the zeitgeist and gets those kinds of numbers. So, we certainly want him back. And we’d also like to develop a sitcom for that cocksucker dog.”
Trump is either using his fake Presidential run to boost his ratings and fame by being an even a bigger whore than usual, or perhaps he’s having a complete mental breakdown as the result of suddenly realizing that he’s spent his life renting wives and somehow losing money on casinos.
Whatever the reason, Trump has vowed that when he becomes President he will build a new White House, which won’t be white but gold, and he will install in each bedroom a slot machine and an Eastern European model who swallows. The new building, it can be sure, will look like a huge bag of shit.•
More Fake Stuff:
- Charlie Sheen attending medical school, aims to become pussy doctor.
- Larry King talking into a breadstick at the Olive Garden.
- Sarah Palin murders, effs a caribou.
- That Dick Cheney sex tape finally surfaces.
- New ESPN program: Lebron James Discusses His Pecker Variety Hour.
- The Pope getting all crunk and nasty.
- Snooki sentenced to death by drowning.
- Why Christmas was cancelled this year.
- Huge changes ahead at American Idol.
- Lady Gaga urinates on home plate at Yankee Stadium.
- Michael Scott to be murdered on The Office.
- Exclusive: Snooki running for Mayor of Wasilla.
- NFL amends rules, football becomes even more reprehensible.
- Environmental disaster worsens as…oh wait, Snooki just crapped her pants!
- Lindsay thinks she’s in a really lousy airport.
- Mr. Trump classes up the Miss Universe pageant.
- Larry King interviews Lady Gaga.
Tags: Barack Obama, Bo the Dog, Brett Favre's Penis, Donald Trump, Guy Fieri, Sarah Palin
Amazing job by UCLA and Emily. Someday it will be routine.
"The man's body was reduced almost to pulp by the fall and it is estimated that every bone in his body was broken." (Image by Joseph Murphy.)
Window cleaning was a perilous endeavor in Old New York, becoming more dangerous as skyscrapers began stretching to the heavens. The harness belt that window cleaners wear today was devised all the way back in 1897, but it wasn’t universally adopted right away nor could it protect against injuries from other unexpected hazards, as these hard-boiled accounts from the Brooklyn Daily Eagle demonstrate.
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“Fell Fourteen Stories” (November 4, 1902): “While cleaning windows on the fourteenth floor of the Broadway-Maiden Lane building, an eighteen story sky scraper, on the southeast corner of Broadway and Maiden Lane, Manhattan, this morning, Daniel Murphy, 32 years old, of 961 Dekalb avenue, Brooklyn, missed his footing and fell to the basement. The man’s body was reduced almost to pulp by the fall and it is estimated that every bone in his body was broken.”
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“Modern Window Cleaning: A New Device to Keep Men From Falling” (March 28, 1897): “With the advent of the sky scraper office building has come a new device to protect window cleaners who have to work at perilous heights. The cleaner wears a belt which is attached to a fastening on either side of the window by means of a rope. This device is a safeguard against danger and prevents all possibility of accident in the heretofore perilous occupation of window cleaning. The responsibility for accidents from falling rests upon the owners of the buildings, and hence the scheme has met with considerable favor. The plan herewith described is one of several devices, now patented, for the protection of window cleaners. Many of the large office buildings in New York and Brooklyn are equipped with one or another of these devices.”
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“A Bootblack Killed By Electricity” (March 18, 1890): “An Italian bootblack named Joe Soleastiani of 47 Mulberry street, New York, while engaged in cleaning windows for the Inter State Bank, at 167 Broadway, late yesterday afternoon placed his hands on an electric light wire that ran into the building.”
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“Killed By a Fall From Window” (November 23, 1902): Minnie Siebert, 10 years old, fell from the window of her home, 515 West Fifty-second street, yesterday afternoon and was instantly killed. Yesterday her mother told her to clean the windows. The little girl bowed the shutters and tying them with a string, stood on the window sill and began to her task. The string broke, however, and the child was dashed to the pavement below. Her mother, who was within a few feet of the window from which the child fell, ran down stairs and picked up the child and endeavored to revive her.”
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“Nearly Three Years Ago” (August 10, 1859): “Nearly three years ago a young woman broke a pane of glass while cleaning a window, and cut her arm near the wrist. Her wound soon healed, but in a few weeks a swelling arose some distance from the cut which at times was painful. Three medical men were consulted at various times, who all advised compression on the part. This for a time was always successful, but a few days ago, having been more than usually painful, she went to Mr. E. Sidebottom, surgeon, who extracted a piece of glass nearly a half inch square, which had been embedded edge downward all this time. It was taken out about an inch and half from where the first wound was.”
The TurtleBot from Willow Garage. Priced at $499.99. (Thanks Singularity Hub.)
Tree-papers are going and gone in the United States, but Ethiopians still require newsprint to find work and lodging. For those too poor to buy papers, so-called “newspaper landlords” have the solution. They rent periodicals at a penny for about 20 minutes. From a CNN report:
“Garum Tesfaye is one of Addis Ababa’s ‘newspaper landlords,’ a group of entrepreneurs in the Ethiopian capital who rent out papers to people too poor to buy them.
Surrounded by worn-out copies of old newspapers, stacks of gossip magazines and the crisp print of the latest news, Tesfaye sits attentively, checking his watch every now and then.
Near him, a pedestrian bridge provides shelter from the sun to dozens of avid readers who quickly, albeit meticulously, get their dose of the latest news.
For 20 to 30 minutes, these readers can get their hands on a newspaper for a fraction of the price of having to buy it. If they keep the paper longer than their allotted rental time, they have to pay extra.
A newspaper in Addis Ababa costs about six birr (35 U.S. cents) to buy. In contrast, it costs only 50 Ethiopian cents (less than one U.S. cent) to rent one.” (Thanks Marginal Revolution.)
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Tags: Garum Tesfaye
Brian Jones apparently wrote this tune. (Thanks Reddit.)
Tags: Brian Jones, Rolling Stones
While still located in India, Rajneesh, far right, receives his followers. (Image by Redheylin.)
Using access to newly declassified government files, Les Zaitz of Oregon Live has written “Rajneeshees in Oregon: The Untold Story,” a chilling account of the mad American experience of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, an Indian guru who relocated to the Beaver State during the 1980s, invited 2,000 of his followers to live on his land, incorporated his parcel into a city, ran afoul of local authorities and became involved in bio-terrorism and assassination plots. An excerpt:
“From time to time, Puja retreated to a laboratory hidden in a cabin up a canyon on the ranch to secretly experiment with viruses and bacteria. Sheela wanted something to sicken people.
In summer 1984, Puja field-tested her work, handing unlabeled vials to those on the secret teams.
The operatives knew, or suspected, the brown liquid was salmonella, which produces severe diarrhea and other symptoms. Over months, they were dispatched to spread the poison in The Dalles. They initially hoped to sicken public officials standing in their way, but then pursued a grander scheme to attack innocent citizens.
Swami Krishna Deva, mayor of Rajneeshpuram, smeared Puja’s mixture onto fixtures in the men’s restroom at the Wasco County Courthouse in The Dalles.
Ma Dhyan Yogini, also known as Alma Peralta, went to town with vials in her purse. She stepped into a local political rally and took a seat. She secreted some of the contaminant on her hand, turned to an elderly man sitting next to her and shook hands. She also made her way into a nursing home in The Dalles, but her plan to contaminate food was disrupted by a suspicious kitchen worker.
Sheela tried her hand at contamination as well, taking a half-dozen Rajneeshees, including Puja, to a grocery store in The Dalles.
‘Let’s have some fun,’ Sheela said.
The group spread across the store with Sheela targeting the produce section, pouring brownish liquid from the vial she had hidden up her sleeve.
When there were no public reports of anyone getting sick, Sheela pushed Puja to find a more toxic solution.
About that time, Hulse and two other Wasco County commissioners arrived at the ranch for a tour. They parked Hulse’s car outside the commune’s welcome center and loaded into a commune van for their visit. When they got back, Hulse’s car had a flat. The Rajneeshees arranged a repair on the spot that would cost Hulse $12.
As the commissioners waited in the hot August sun, Puja approached, offering each a glass of water. Her gesture was odd, for Puja was in her medical whites and had no role as a greeter.
The thirsty men took the water.” (Thanks Longform.)
•••••••
Tags: Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, Les Zaitz
LittleDog, from the University of Southern California.
"Snow Globe with winter carriage scene." (Image by Usien.)
Vials of My Own Urine – $600
Small glass vial suitable for pendant or keychain. Brings luck and great fortune.
1 oz. vial $600
2 oz. vial $850
Snow Globe with winter carriage scene $1800 (Large size contains 4.3 oz.)
Marshall McLuhan entertains Tom Wolfe in the backyard of his Toronto home in 1970. (Thanks Documentarian.)
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From Wolfe’s 1965 essay about McLuhan in the New York Herald Tribune, “What If He Is Right?“: “There are currently hundreds of studs of the business world, breakfast food package designers, television net work creative department vice-presidents, advertising ‘media reps,’ lighting fixture fortune heirs, smiley patent lawyers, industrial spies, we- need vision board chairmen, all sorts of business studs who are all wondering if this man, Marshall McLuhan … is right…. He sits in a little office off on the edge of the University of Toronto that looks like the receiving bin of a second-hand book store, grading papers, grading papers, for days on end, wearing-well, he doesn’t seem to care what he wears. If he feels like it, he just puts on the old striped tie with the plastic neck band. You just snap the plastic band around your neck and there the tie is, hanging down and ready to go, Pree-Tide.
But what if-all sorts of huge world-mover & shaker corporations are trying to put McLuhan in a box or some thing. Valuable! Ours! Suppose he is what he sounds like, the most important thinker since Newton, Darwin, Freud, Einstein, and Pavlov, studs of the intelligentsia game suppose he is the oracle of the modern times – what if he is right? he’ll be in there. It almost seems that way. An ‘undisclosed corporation’ has put a huge ‘undisclosed sum’ into, McLuhan’s Centre for Culture and Technology at the University of Toronto. One of the big American corporations has offered him $5000 to present a closed- circuit-ours!-television lecture on-oracle!-the ways the products in its industry will be used in the future. Even before all this, IBM, General Electric, Bell Telephone were flying McLuhan in from Toronto to New York, Pittsburgh, God knows where else, to talk to their hierarchs about . . . well, about whatever this unseen world of electronic environments that only he sees fully is all about.”
Tags: Marshall McLuhan, Tom Wolfe
Lewis Hine was a schoolteacher, a photographer, a muckraker, and, above all, an artist. His work brought about real changes in American child-labor laws, but his pictures remain brilliant because of his amazing eye for subject and composition. In the above classic photo, an Italian-American immigrant woman on Bleecker Street in New York hauls an enormous dry-cleaning box the best she can. To see more great work by Hine, go here.
Hine’s philosophy on photography: “Whether it be a painting or photograph, the picture is a symbol that brings one immediately into close touch with reality. In fact, it is often more effective than the reality would have been, because, in the picture, the non-essential and conflicting interests have been eliminated.
The average person believes implicitly that the photograph cannot falsify. Of course, you and I know that this unbounded faith in the integrity of the photograph is often rudely shaken, for, while photographs may not lie, liars may photograph.”
Tags: Lewis Hine
Art Linkletter’s daughter plunged to her death from a six-story window in 1969, perhaps influenced to suicide by LSD. Timothy Leary was the most famous proponent of LSD. Talk show host Stanley Siegel thought it would be a good idea in 1977 to have Linkletter and Leary talk by phone on live TV.
The opening of “This Tech Bubble Is Different,” an Ashlee Vance Businessweek article which wonders whether the current media companies with stratospheric valuations will leave behind anything of worth if the market goes bust:
“As a 23-year-old math genius one year out of Harvard, Jeff Hammerbacher arrived at Facebook when the company was still in its infancy. This was in April 2006, and Mark Zuckerberg gave Hammerbacher—one of Facebook’s first 100 employees—the lofty title of research scientist and put him to work analyzing how people used the social networking service. Specifically, he was given the assignment of uncovering why Facebook took off at some universities and flopped at others. The company also wanted to track differences in behavior between high-school-age kids and older, drunker college students. ‘I was there to answer these high-level questions, and they really didn’t have any tools to do that yet,’ he says.
Over the next two years, Hammerbacher assembled a team to build a new class of analytical technology. His crew gathered huge volumes of data, pored over it, and learned much about people’s relationships, tendencies, and desires. Facebook has since turned these insights into precision advertising, the foundation of its business. It offers companies access to a captive pool of people who have effectively volunteered to have their actions monitored like so many lab rats. The hope—as signified by Facebook’s value, now at $65 billion according to research firm Nyppex—is that more data translate into better ads and higher sales.
After a couple years at Facebook, Hammerbacher grew restless. He figured that much of the groundbreaking computer science had been done. Something else gnawed at him. Hammerbacher looked around Silicon Valley at companies like his own, Google (GOOG), and Twitter, and saw his peers wasting their talents. ‘The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads,’ he says. ‘That sucks.'”
Tags: Ashlee Vance, Jeff Hammerbacher
Human augmentations by Sarif Industries. Fake, for now.
Comment posted for this video on Youtube: “I can’t wait until this stuff is real… and only the top 1% can afford it, allowing them to cybernetically stomp on the impoverished underclasses.”
There are stories of people awakening from horrifying head injuries and being able to speak languages that they never knew before. Perhaps these tales are urban legends, but that’s not the case with Mark Hogancamp, the subject of Jeff Malmberg’s amazing documentary, who learned to communicate in a whole new way after barely surviving a savage beating.
Hogancamp was a gifted amateur artist and raging alcoholic who loved women–and wearing their clothes. One night about a decade ago he drunkenly acknowledged to a group of young men in an upstate New York bar that he was a cross-dresser and they battered him into a nine-day coma and caused massive brain damage and memory loss. Medicare cruelly cut Hogancamp off long before his recovery was complete, so he had to create his own therapy.
With hands now unsteady, drawing was no longer possible. So Hogancamp collected junk and made small purchases at the local hobby shop and worked meticulously to create an elaborate hyperrealistic scale version of a fantasy WWII-era Belgian town, called Marwencol, with characters based on himself, his relatives, his friends and his attackers. Into this tableaux he introduced narratives that allowed him to jog his memory and run through his tortured feelings about his victimization. Hogancamp took thousands of photographs of his sprawling installation and serendipitously became a celebrated outsider artist.
Perhaps what’s most interesting is seeing the stunning ways the human brain can compensate for such devastation, not able to completely restore what’s been lost but activating new pathways that have never been utilized before. Marwencol isn’t a simple, life-affirming film. It acknowledges all the rage that still seethes within the artist, but it is an amazing tale of perseverance. Somehow Hogancamp took the loose threads of his memories and weaved a rich tapestry, created something from nothing when nothing was all that seemed to be left inside his head.•
Recent Film Posts:
- Classic Film: The Man in the White Suit (1951)
- Classic Film: 8 1/2 (1963)
- Classic Film: Zelig (1983)
- Classic Film: Fahrenheit 451 (1966)
- Recent Film: Waste Land.
- Classic Film: Woman in the Dunes (1964)
- Classic Film: RoboCop (1987)
- Classic Film: King of Comedy (1982)
- Strange, Small & Forgotten Films: Little Murders (1971)
- Classic Film: The Passenger (1975)
- Recent Film: Dogtooth
- Strange, Small & Forgotten Films: Rivers and Tides (2003)
- Classic Film: F for Fake (1974)
- Recent Film: The Art of the Steal
- Classic Film: The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976)
- Classic Film: Fast, Cheap & Out of Control (1997)
- Classic Film: Umberto D. (1952)
- Classic Film: The Wicker Man (1973)
- Classic Film: Blow-Up (1966)
- Classic Film: Invasion of the Bodysnatchers (1978)
- Classic Film: The Stepford Wives (1975)
- Classic Film: Rollerball (1975)
- Recent Film: Exit Through the Gift Shop
- Strange, Small & Forgotten Films: Stay Hungry (1976)
- Classic Film: Westworld (1973)
- Classic Film: Slacker (1991)
- Strange, Small & Forgotten Films: Decasia: The State of Decay (2002)
- Classic Film: 32 Short Films About Glenn Gould (1993)
Tags: Jeff Malmberg, Mark Hogancamp
"I have collected celebrity hair since the 70's." (Image by Roy Kerwood.)
CELEBRITY HAIR COLLECTION
I am retiring and liquidating my collections over the next few months I have collected celebrity hair since the 70’s and will liquidated in groups.EACH PIECE COMES WITH A CERTIFICATES OF AUTHENTICITY FROM A VERY REPUTABLE AUTOGRAPH DEALER THAT I CHECKED OUT YEARS AGO,,.Mary Surratt.. movie “conspirator”…I have some of her hair possibly taken while she was hanging from the rope..The following lots will be sold 1st John Lennon $300, CIVIL WAR GROUP.. Abraham Lincoln, Mary Todd Lincoln, John Brown William Quantril, Mary Surratt (portrayer in the conspirator movie), Robert E. Lee, and Jefferson Davis.. $2,000.OBO…..PRESIDENT’S COLLECTION: John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixo, Dwight Eisenhower, and Ronald Reagan..$ 2,0000 OBO … Founding fathers collection: George Washington. John Adams (SUPER RARE), Alexander Hamolton $3,000 OBO, Napoleon Buonaparte $300.
Posting recently about Dog Day Afternoon by the late, great Sidney Lumet brought to mind various videos of informant New York cop Frank Serpico, who was immortalized by Lumet and Al Pacino in their 1973 film. From Corey Kilgannon’s 2010 New York Times article about the most famous cop on the force: “Anyone who has seen the celebrated 1973 film Serpico knows that he often dressed up — bum, butcher, rabbi — to catch criminals. His off-duty look was never vintage cop either, with the bushy beard and the beads.
This is the man whose long and loud complaining about widespread corruption in the New York Police Department made him a pariah on the force. The patrolman shot in the face during a 1971 drug bust while screaming for backup from his fellow officers, who then failed to immediately call for an ambulance. The undaunted whistle-blower whose testimony was the centerpiece of the Knapp Commission hearings, which sparked the biggest shakeup in the history of the department.”
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Real Serpico watches Pacino’s Serpico:
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Pacino’s Serpico:
••••••••••
Charlie goes Serpico on the gang on It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia:
Tags: Al Pacino, Charlie Day, Corey Kilgannon, Frank Serpico, Sidney Lumet
"I have no idea what this building is about."
As we fly headlong into a Gutenberg-free future, with tree-based books facing the ax, U.S. libraries are beginning to consider going book-less and reinventing themselves as community centers. But the national library in Brazil, the Biblioteca Nacional de Brasília, has already arrived at this point. There are hardly any books on the shelves, but Internet access and massage chairs are available. See photos of the library’s interior at the Longest Journey blog. An excerpt from the post:
“Biblioteca National de Brasilia Do take the offer of a tour… else you will end up completely baffled (like me). I have no idea what this building is about. It is very pretty… but a national library without books? It is all very Zen (well… there are a couple shelves of books but probably less than your local library…)” (Thanks Marginal Revolution.)
Marijuana now free of grubby human paw prints. (Thanks Singularity Hub.)