2012

You are currently browsing the yearly archive for 2012.

“The U.S. Is Rich In Renewable Energy Resources, And Should Aim At Total Energy Independence”

June 13, 2012 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Rules for remaking society from “The Coming Eco-Industrial Complex” by the late Ernest Callenbach:

* We must create a new renewable-energy system to end our costly need to control the world’s oil militarily. Wind and solar-thermal have become the cheapest new-power-generating technologies, and are also labor-intensive; photovoltaic and battery storage technologies are improving rapidly; geothermal is an enormous resource—and oil companies happen to know how to drill wells. The U.S. is rich in renewable energy resources, and should aim at total energy independence, which will save us vast sums in the long run.

* We must rebuild our cities in the proven, compact forms of the world’s great cities, to reduce our dependence on petroleum-fueled cars. Our sprawling suburbs need to be transformed from cultural wastelands into communities with healthy centers and the creative cultural richness that cities have traditionally offered. A lot of tracks need to be laid and urban and suburban concrete poured. If we walk to transit stops, like New Yorkers, we will even lose weight and live longer. If Bechtel can build mega-airports, civil and military, it can certainly build eco-cities.

* We must develop a universal recycling system, so that all major materials (steel, paper, glass, aluminum, wood, plastic, even water) will be in steady and predictable supply without sabotaging our support system, the natural order. A giant job-intensive industry must be created here.

* We must restore our forests, fisheries, and agriculture to stable, net positive productivity. At present, we are cutting more timber than we grow and catching more fish than can reproduce. We are even putting far more petroleum-based calories into agriculture than we get out in food calories—in essence, we are eating oil, a non-renewable resource. And if we eat lower on the food chain and cut down on livestock, we will reduce our climate impacts even more than by getting rid of private cars.

* We must put people to work restoring our rivers, waterfronts, and wetlands—trashed by generations of engineers, dumpers, and developers. Carry on with what the New Deal started!

••••••••••
See also:

Tags:

“If You Had A Bad Run…For A Moment It Hurts”

June 13, 2012 in Excerpts, Sports, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Here’s the full 22-minute version of Paul Ryan’s excellent 1969 documentary, “Ski Racing,” which uses bold editing and FM radio rock to help profile that era’s world-class downhill racers. One of the pros included is Vladimir “Spider” Sabich who would die horribly in 1976 in an infamous crime.

From the 1974 Sports Illustrated article, “The Spider Who Finally Came In From The Cold“:

In selling the tour, the sales pitch is not pegged strictly to exciting races and the crack skiers but also to its colorful personalities. There is Sabich, who flies, races motorcycles and figures that a night in which he hasn’t danced on at least one tabletop is a night wasted. Jim Lillstrom, Beattie’s P.R. man, also enjoys checking off some of the other characters.Norway’s Terje Overland is known as the Aquavit Kid for the boisterous postvictory celebrations he has thrown. He’s also been known to pitch over a fully laden restaurant table when the spirits have so moved him. Then there is the poet, Duncan Cullman, of Twin Mountain, N.H., author of The Selected Heavies of Duncan Duck, published at his own expense, who used to travel the tour with a gargantuan, bearded manservant. And Sepp Staffler, a popular Austrian, who plays guitar and sitar and performs nightly at different lounges in Great Gorge, N.J. when he isn’t competing. The ski tour also has its very own George Blanda. That would be blond, wispy Anderl Molterer, the 40-year-old Austrian, long a world class racer and still competitive.

Pro skiing’s immediate success, however, seems to depend on an authentic rivalry building up between Sabich and [Billy] Kidd, who are close friends but whose living styles are as diverse as snow and sand. Sabich is freewheeling on his skis as well as on tabletops. Kidd is thoughtful, earnest, a perfectionist. Spider has his flying, his motorcycles and drives a Porsche 911-E. Billy paints and now drives a Volvo station wagon. Spider enjoys the man-to-man challenge of the pro circuit. Billy harbors some inner doubts regarding his ability to adapt to it.•

Tags: , ,

A Brief Note From 1896 About A Hypnotized Man

June 13, 2012 in Old Print Articles, Urban Studies | Permalink

From the October 5, 1896 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:

“Atlanta, Ga.–During a performance at a local theater the subject of hypnotism imagined he was a monkey. He grabbed a hat off a man in the audience and bit a piece out of it.”

“Facebook’s Data Could Provide Cheap And Accurate Ways To Track Social Trends”

June 13, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

From “What Facebook Knows,” Tom Simonite’s interesting MIT Technology Review article about the myriad of unexpected ways that the voluminous data Zuckerberg and friends have collected allows the social network to do social science:

“One of [Cameron] Marlow’s researchers has developed a way to calculate a country’s ‘gross national happiness’ from its Facebook activity by logging the occurrence of words and phrases that signal positive or negative emotion. Gross national happiness fluctuates in a way that suggests the measure is accurate: it jumps during holidays and dips when popular public figures die. After a major earthquake in Chile in February 2010, the country’s score plummeted and took many months to return to normal. That event seemed to make the country as a whole more sympathetic when Japan suffered its own big earthquake and subsequent tsunami in March 2011; while Chile’s gross national happiness dipped, the figure didn’t waver in any other countries tracked (Japan wasn’t among them). Adam Kramer, who created the index, says he intended it to show that Facebook’s data could provide cheap and accurate ways to track social trends—methods that could be useful to economists and other researchers.”

Tags: ,

“Each Innovation Enabled Other Innovations”

June 12, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Jonathan Rauch, that introvert, writing in 2001 for the Atlantic about old and new economies becoming acquainted:

“Although at this point no one can prove anything, a story that seems plausible to many economists and business executives goes like this: In the 1980s Old Economy businesses tended to waste much of what they spent on computers and software. Companies in traditional industries would drop a PC on every desk and declare themselves computerized; they would buy spreadsheet programs and word-processing software and networking equipment that as often as not just substituted new frustrations for old ones. This began to change, however, as software and hardware grew in power, and as companies began learning how to use them not just as conveniences or crutches but to change the nature of the job. At first the impact, like a misty drizzle, was too small to show up in the national economic statistics. However, each innovation enabled other innovations, none of them revolutionary but all of them combining in an accelerating cascade. By the second half of the 1990s the aggregate effect on productivity became large enough to register in the national accounts, and the line between the New Economy and the Old Economy began to blur. That is the story of the New Old Economy.”

Tags:

Recently Posted On NYC’s Craigslist

June 12, 2012 in Misc., Urban Studies | Permalink

Will pay you cash for your hair

If you need a little extra money to help you out in this rough economy and you are willing to cut some length off your hair or even some that was cut recently but want some cash for . the hair that is cut off is used for wigs , dolls or extensions. so depending on what length you are willing to cut off the fee you would get is based upon the current length, your color, the thickness of your hair and also the condition that it presently in. so if you can take a picture or send me a description i can give you a estimated guess of what kind of money you can earn.

“Today I Learned Olive Garden Is Like Game Of Thrones”

June 12, 2012 in Excerpts, Urban Studies | Permalink

A couple of brief passages from an Ask Me Anything on Reddit with a former Olive Garden employee. Mostly sex and vomit, as you might expect.

•••••••••••

Q: Is everyone there really family?

A: If family means everyone has sex with each other then, yes.

Q: Today I learned Olive Garden is like Game of Thrones.

A: Seriously though, everyone is having sex with everyone.

Q: Alright, now I know what my summer job will be.

A: I’d strongly recommend it.

••••••••••

Q: What’s the grossest thing that ever happened there?

A: I once saw a customer suffer some sort of allergic reaction to his meal. He stood up in front of the whole dining room, threw up everything he ate and drank, then passed out in his vomit pile. It was gross. About half of the dining room left.

Dipping sauce.

“We Find That The Fears And Troubles Of Space Flight Have Been Greatly Overexaggerated”

June 12, 2012 in Politics, Science/Tech, Videos | Permalink

Gordon Moore didn’t publish his Law until 1965, so you can forgive U.S. space research bigwig J. Gordon Baethe for underestimating how quickly we would take ourselves from atmosphere to stratosphere, when he was interviewed in 1954 on Longines Chronoscope. As usual, that Nazi Wernher von Braun was the more accurate prognosticator.

Tags: ,

“You Have These Gigantic Expenses For Things That Are Really Vital”

June 12, 2012 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

From Timothy Noah’s new Browser interview, in which the journalist speaks to America’s growing income disparity:

“If you compare consumption today to consumption 60 years ago there are differences. What you will find, broadly speaking, is that the big things are more expensive and the little things are less expensive. Cars are more expensive – they may be safer but they’re more expensive. Houses are more expensive – they’re bigger but they’re more expensive. Healthcare is more expensive – more people’s diseases are cured but it’s more expensive. College education is more expensive – and I don’t think you can make the case that college education is improved in any way compared to 50 or 60 years ago. My guess is that, if anything, it’s probably a little bit worse over the last half century. So those big things are harder to obtain.

The little things – electronics, food and clothing – are easier to obtain. The only one of those items that you have to get on a regular basis is food. And yes, clothing is less expensive. So are TVs. But you probably buy these less frequently, so they’re less meaningful. Meanwhile you have these gigantic expenses for things that are really vital. Healthcare keeps you alive. College education makes it possible for you to achieve upward mobility. An automobile in many parts of the country is a necessity to get you to your job.”

Tags:

“This Is A Motor Age, And The Motorcar Spells Mobility”

June 12, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Robert Moses wrote an Atlantic essay in 1962 in which he returned fire at his many critics just as his iron fist was losing its grip on New York City. The power broker argued, naturally, in favor of a metropolis based on automobiles and high-occupancy apartment buildings. An excerpt:

“To sum up, let me ask the Gamaliels of the city a few pointed questions.

By what practical and acceptable means would they limit the growth of population?

How would they reduce the output of cars, and if they could, what would take the place of the car as an employer of workers or as a means of transport in a motorized civilization?

If more cars are inevitable, must there not be roads for them to run on? If so, they must be built somewhere, and built in accordance with modern design. Where? This is a motor age, and the motorcar spells mobility.

Is the present distinction between parkways, landscaped limited-access expressways, boulevards, ordinary highways, and city streets unscientific? If so, what do the critics propose as a substitute?

Is mass commuter railroad transportation the sole and entire answer to urban street congestion? Is conflict between rubber and rails in fact irrepressible? Are there not practical combinations of public, quasi-public, and private financing which can solve the riddle? And what of the people who prefer cars and car pools and find them more comfortable, faster, and even cheaper than rails?

If a family likes present city life, should it be forced to live according to avant-garde architectural formulas? Do most professional planners in fact know what people think and want? The incredible affection of slum dwellers for the old neighborhood and their stubborn unwillingness to move are the despair of experts. The forensic medicine men who perform the autopsies on cities condemn these uncooperative families to hell and imply that they could be transplanted painlessly to New Delhi, Canberra, Brasilia, and Utopia. We do not smoke such opium. We have to livewith our problems.

Is it a mark of genius to exhibit lofty indifference to population growth, contempt for invested capital, budgets, and taxes; to be oblivious to the need of the average citizen to make a living and to his preferences, immediate concerns, and troubles?

What do the critics of cities offer as a substitute for the highly taxed central city core which supports the surrounding, quieter, less densely settled, and less exploited segments of the municipal pie? Have they an alternative to real-estate taxes?

Pending responsible answers to these questions, those of us who have work to do and obstacles to overcome, who cannot hide in ivory towers writing encyclopedic theses, whose usefulness is measured by results, must carry on.”

••••••••••

A rarely shown 1953 interview with Moses on the Longines Chronoscope:

Tags:

“The Blood Was All Wrong–It Didn’t Look Like Blood”

June 11, 2012 in Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

A scene from Slacker, 1991, as virtual reality began becoming preferable to reality, and the show was only getting started.

Old Print Article: “Died In A Chair In A Saloon,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle (1902)

June 11, 2012 in Old Print Articles, Urban Studies | Permalink

"When Swansen brought the salt, a moment later, the man was dead."

A self-medicating man with an odd taste for tinctures did himself no good in a saloon according to this article in the October 27, 1902 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:

“A poorly dressed man, apparently about 35 years of age, entered Harry Kennedy’s saloon, at 184 Park Row, Manhattan, shortly, before 6 o’clock this morning and asked the bartender, William Swansen, to give him a pinch of salt.

‘What do you want with salt?’ asked the bartender, surprised by the request.

‘I have a hemorrhage,’ replied the man, at the same time spitting a quantity of blood on the floor. Swansen went to one end of the bar to get some salt and the stranger staggered into the back room and sank into a chair. When Swansen brought the salt, a moment later, the man was dead.

The dead man was five feet nine inches in height, had brown hair, gray eyes and a smooth face. He weighed about 150 pounds. He wore a blue shirt, striped coat and trousers, brown stockings and laced shoes. The body will be removed to the Morgue.”

Tags: , ,

“Cheap, Agile Drone Technology Is Available Now”

June 11, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

From the Economist, a passage in which the recent meme (and hoax) the TacoCopter is used to illustrate why cheap tech like drones might allow innovators to overcome the increasing burden of knowledge:

“That’s another reason the burden of knowledge issue is less of a concern to me than it may be to others. Advancement of the scientific frontier is growing more difficult. Yet deployment of existing technologies to more productive ends may well be growing easier. Consider the tacocopter. The tacocopter is a not-quite-real-not-quite-a-joke business idea that became a brief internet sensation back in March. The concept is stunningly simple: order tacos on your iPhone and a quadracopter drone will deliver them to your doorstep. As you can read here, the plan would face technical and (especially) regulatory hurdles if implemented today. Yet the potential, for this or similar experiments, is obvious. Cheap, agile drone technology is available now. Building apps is trivially easy. Mapping and location technology and data are getting better all the time. If not drone copters, perhaps 3D printers or autonomous vehicles. It’s a short leap from the ridiculous to the transformative. And the ideas needed to transfer these technologies to everyday life are increasingly the domain of entrepreneurs rather than academics. One doesn’t need 20 years of study to spot profit opportunities.”

“He’s Really The First And Most Seminal Sports Figure In The Information Age”

June 11, 2012 in Excerpts, Sports, Urban Studies | Permalink

I poked fun at Lebron James a couple years back after his ridiculous Decision program, when he announced on live television that he’d be “bringing his talents to South Beach,” but even a Knicks fan like myself can be awed by him. And I don’t just mean the way he plays the game. Here was a guy born with tremendous talent, yes, but born also into a place and situation where so many things could have gone wrong. Instead, despite being the American sports fan’s best frenemy, he’s turned out tremendously on and off the court.

At Grantland, Bill Simmons and Malcolm Gladwell discuss, among many things, an astute comment that Shane Battier made offhandedly about James. That comment:

“He sneezes and it’s a trending topic on Twitter. He is a fascinating study because he’s really the first and most seminal sports figure in the information age, where everything he does is reported and dissected and second-guessed many times over and he handles everything with an amazing grace and patience that I don’t know if other superstars from other areas would have been able to handle.”

Tags: , , ,

“They Don’t Have A Negative Cash-Flow Position–They’re Fucking Broke!”

June 11, 2012 in Politics, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

George Carlin, in one of his most famous bits, decrying the “soft language” that proliferated in America in the second half of last century, as advertising execs and marketing gurus infiltrated every aspect of life, from corporations to politics to the military.

Tags:

“I Advise People To Stick With Their Seductive But Really Ridiculous Thoughts”

June 11, 2012 in Excerpts, Urban Studies | Permalink

The opening of a 2003 interview the Harvard Review of Philosophy conducted with the moral philosopher Philippa Foot, who introduced her famed Trolley Problem in 1967:

“HRP: At the beginning of Natural Goodness, you recall an intervention of Wittgenstein’s at a seminar at which a speaker realized that what he was about to say was, though seductive, clearly ridiculous. The speaker was trying to hit on something more sensible, and Wittgenstein said: ‘No. Say what you want to say! Be crude, and then we shall get on.’ Why do you think this is good advice for philosophers?

Philippa Foot: I begin Natural Goodness with this remark, since I have found it excellent advice. Whenever I find myself tempted to pass over a weird thought, I try to do the opposite, and give this thought its day in court. So I advise people to stick with their seductive but really ridiculous thoughts, because one may well strike gold just there.”

••••••••••

See also:

 

Tags: , ,

Recently Posted On NYC’s Craigslist

June 11, 2012 in Misc., Urban Studies | Permalink

looking for Britney (long island)

anyone know where a stripper that went by the name of Britney who worked in SHOWWORLD for many years in Babylon is working now !!

“He Could Make An American Typewriter Speak 145 Different Tongues, From Russian To Homeric Greek”

June 11, 2012 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Bruce Sterling’s thoughtful New York Times homage to Ray Bradbury reminded me that the recently deceased sci-fi author wrote his greatest work, Fahrenheit 451, on a coin-operated typewriter. The machine, invented in 1938 by Martin Tytell, was located in train stations and hotel lobbies and cost a couple of dimes an hour. From Tytell’s 2008 Economist obituary:

“His love affair had begun as a schoolboy, with an Underwood Five. It lay uncovered on a teacher’s desk, curved and sleek, the typebars modestly contained but the chrome lever gleaming. He took it gently apart, as far as he could fillet 3,200 pieces with his pocket tool, and each time attempted to get further. A repair man gave him lessons, until he was in demand all across New York. When he met his wife Pearl later, it was over typewriters. She wanted a Royal for her office; he persuaded her into a Remington, and then marriage. Pearl made another doctorly and expert presence in the shop, hovering behind the overflowing shelves where the convalescents slept in plastic shrouds.

Mr. Tytell could customise typewriters in all kinds of ways. He re-engineered them for the war-disabled and for railway stations, taking ten cents in the slot. With a nifty solder-gun and his small engraving lathe he could make an American typewriter speak 145 different tongues, from Russian to Homeric Greek. An idle gear, picked up for 45 cents on Canal Street, allowed him to make reverse carriages for right-to-left Arabic and Hebrew. He managed hieroglyphs, musical notation and the first cursive font, for Mamie Eisenhower, who had tired of writing out White House invitations.”

Read also:

Tags: ,

“It Must Be Virtually Maintenance-Free Yet Be Enduringly Beautiful”

June 10, 2012 in Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Amusing 1964 short about the building of the Unisphere for the 1964 World’s Fair in Flushing, Queens. Robert Moses is front and center, of course, with an appearance by Gustave Eiffel’s grandson.

Tags: ,

“Where, In Short, Are The Flying Cars?”

June 10, 2012 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

America should have announced in January 1970, in the wake of our successful moon voyage, that we were visiting Mars in 1986, when that planet and ours were going to be in relatively close orbit. Just imagine how much further our science would have progressed if we had stayed on course. But failure of vision isn’t the only reason why our Space Age fantasies haven’t come to fruition. The opening of David Graeber’s Baffler essay, “Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit“:

“A secret question hovers over us, a sense of disappointment, a broken promise we were given as children about what our adult world was supposed to be like. I am referring not to the standard false promises that children are always given (about how the world is fair, or how those who work hard shall be rewarded), but to a particular generational promise—given to those who were children in the fifties, sixties, seventies, or eighties—one that was never quite articulated as a promise but rather as a set of assumptions about what our adult world would be like. And since it was never quite promised, now that it has failed to come true, we’re left confused: indignant, but at the same time, embarrassed at our own indignation, ashamed we were ever so silly to believe our elders to begin with.

Where, in short, are the flying cars? Where are the force fields, tractor beams, teleportation pods, antigravity sleds, tricorders, immortality drugs, colonies on Mars, and all the other technological wonders any child growing up in the mid-to-late twentieth century assumed would exist by now? Even those inventions that seemed ready to emerge—like cloning or cryogenics—ended up betraying their lofty promises. What happened to them?

We are well informed of the wonders of computers, as if this is some sort of unanticipated compensation, but, in fact, we haven’t moved even computing to the point of progress that people in the fifties expected we’d have reached by now.”

Tags:

“I Have The Answer To A Question That We’ve All Asked”

June 10, 2012 in Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

TED, a machine oiled with tech money and seemingly frightened of the most mundane political statements, presents this fun talk in which Terry Moore explains why “x” represents the unknown.

Tags:

“Stephen Hawking Declared That Philosophy Was ‘Dead'”

June 10, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Every time I think that physics is tremendously important and philosophy is not, I remind myself that physicists didn’t come up with democracy. From a recent Jim Holt piece in the New York Times:

“Last year at a Google ‘Zeitgeist conference’ in England, Stephen Hawking declared that philosophy was ‘dead.’ Another great physicist, the Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg, has written that he finds philosophy ‘murky and inconsequential’ and of no value to him as a working scientist. And Richard Feynman, in his famous lectures on physics, complained that ‘philosophers are always with us, struggling in the periphery to try to tell us something, but they never really understand the subtleties and depths of the problem.’

Why do physicists have to be so churlish toward philosophy? Philosophers, on the whole, have been much nicer about science. ‘Philosophy consists in stopping when the torch of science fails us,’ Voltaire wrote back in the 18th century. And in the last few decades, philosophers have come to see their enterprise as continuous with that of science.”

Tags:

“The Only Way Out Is To Sell His Body Parts”

June 10, 2012 in Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Hoaxer Alan Abel pulled a scam during the economic downturn of the early 1990s in which he pretended to be a financially desperate man willing to sell his kidneys and lungs. The ruse was eagerly devoured by news media because it toyed furiously with the fear of falling being experienced by a shrinking American middle class, which was under extreme pressure from a dwindling manufacturing base, neocon anti-unionists and technology-driven downsizing. All you have to do is glance cursorily at Craigslist today to see many forlorn people earnestly considering pawning their organs. If someone wanted to do this story now, it would be true, a trend piece and unsurprising.

See also:

Tags:

A Brief Note From 1894 About A Strange Woman With A Fat, Red Face

June 10, 2012 in Old Print Articles, Urban Studies | Permalink

From the October 20, 1894 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:

“A strange woman with a fat red face was seen to leave the residence of Patrick Haggerty at 261 Warren Street yesterday afternoon. Soon afterward Mr. Haggerty reported that a gold watch and a diamond pin, worth in all $75, had been stolen by a sneak thief from his house.”

Tags:

This Week’s Afflictor Keyphrase Searches

June 9, 2012 in Misc. | Permalink


Some search-engine keyphrases bringing traffic to Afflictor this week:

« Older entries § Newer entries »