Grace Hopper who hated bugs and was wittier than Letterman, was one of the true pioneers in modern computing. A TV appearance from 1986, a couple of months after her involuntary retirement from the Navy.
You are currently browsing the yearly archive for 2013.
Tags: David Letterman, Grace Hopper
‘Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house…
…not a creature was stirring…
…not even a louse.
The stockings were hung by the chimney with care…
…in the hopes that the paparazzi soon would be there.
Now Vinny!
Now Victor!
Now Vito!
Now Sheamus!
Please take my photo.
I want to be famous!
I’ll protect you, my dear. They won’t get anywhere near you.
Stay away from me, dummy, or I’ll smack you with a horseshoe.
You’ll cost me a reality show and a spacious new palace.
My life’s more confused than the plotline of Malice.
What is the source of your furious behavior?
I’m insecure about my manhood and need to be a savior.
Perhaps switch to decaf and learn to shut up.
Regardless, when this is over, I’ll contest the prenup.
Until then, I’ll rage…
…and attack…
…and make scenes.
But Happy Christmas to all, even all you toxic queens.
___________________________
Happy holidays, Afflictor readers, whatever religion or culture you observe. Unless you think your stupid personal mythology makes you better than someone else. Then you should go scratch your ass with a broken milk bottle. Because none of us is special. I mean, most of us actually deserve a good caning. So let’s tear down the pretenses and egos and statues, and realize that we’re all just sacks of shit. Beautiful sacks of shit, sure, but that’s it. After all, we only believe those nonsense religions because we’re afraid of dying. And we should be. Death is a bastard.
Anyhow: Happy holidays!–Darren
From the October 18, 1896 New York Times:
“Cincinnati, Ohio–Charles Doran, a business man of Glendale, took a pinch of snuff to-day for a cold. So severe was the sneezing that followed that the inferior oblique muscle of the left eye was ruptured, and as he continued to sneeze the exertion forced the eye out of its socket.
Doran says he felt as if something had broken in his head. With his right eye he saw his left eyeball hanging down his cheek. Dr. Heady replaced the eye and applied a lotion to the muscle. The eye was then bandaged, so it could not fall out again.
Dr. Heady believes the eye is not destroyed.”
Tags: Charles Doran, Dr. Heady
From “Endless Fun,” neuroscientist Michael Graziano’s excellent Aeon article about the implications, many worrisome, of immortality through computer uploading, which sidesteps cryogenics and its frozen heads and gets to the essence beneath–the brain’s data:
“Imagine a future in which your mind never dies. When your body begins to fail, a machine scans your brain in enough detail to capture its unique wiring. A computer system uses that data to simulate your brain. It won’t need to replicate every last detail. Like the phonograph, it will strip away the irrelevant physical structures, leaving only the essence of the patterns. And then there is a second you, with your memories, your emotions, your way of thinking and making decisions, translated onto computer hardware as easily as we copy a text file these days.
That second version of you could live in a simulated world and hardly know the difference. You could walk around a simulated city street, feel a cool breeze, eat at a café, talk to other simulated people, play games, watch movies, enjoy yourself. Pain and disease would be programmed out of existence. If you’re still interested in the world outside your simulated playground, you could Skype yourself into board meetings or family Christmas dinners.
This vision of a virtual-reality afterlife, sometimes called ‘uploading’, entered the popular imagination via the short story ‘The Tunnel Under the World’ (1955) by the American science-fiction writer Frederik Pohl, though it also got a big boost from the movie Tron (1982). Then The Matrix (1999) introduced the mainstream public to the idea of a simulated reality, albeit one into which real brains were jacked. More recently, these ideas have caught on outside fiction. The Russian multimillionaire Dmitry Itskov made the news by proposing to transfer his mind into a robot, thereby achieving immortality. Only a few months ago, the British physicist Stephen Hawking speculated that a computer-simulated afterlife might become technologically feasible.”
Tags: Michael Graziano
In a post at Practical Ethics, Dominic Wilkinson asks a thorny question that seems like a simple one at first blush: Should some people, who are considered exceptional, receive health care that others don’t? Of course not, we all would say. Human lives are equal in importance, and our loved ones are just as valuable as the most famous or successful among us. But Wilkinson quickly points out that Nelson Mandela, probably the most beloved among us during his life, received expensive and specialized care that would have been denied almost anyone else in South Africa. But how could we deny Mandela anything, after he sacrificed everything and ultimately led a nation 180 degrees from a civil war that could have cost countless lives? You can’t, really, though I would wager that Peter Singer disagrees with me. The opening of Wilkinson’s post:
“There are approximately 150,000 human deaths each day around the world. Most of those deaths pass without much notice, yet in the last ten days one death has received enormous, perhaps unprecedented, attention. The death and funeral of Nelson Mandela have been accompanied by countless pages of newsprint and hours of radio and television coverage. Much has been made of what was, by any account, an extraordinary life. There has been less attention, though, on Mandela’s last months and days. One uncomfortable question has not been asked. Was it ethical for this exceptional individual to receive treatment that would be denied to almost everyone else?
At the age of almost 95, and physically frail, Mandela was admitted to a South African hospital intensive care unit with pneumonia. He remained there for three months before being transferred for ongoing intensive care in a converted room in his own home. Although there are limited details available from media coverage it appears that Mandela received in his last six months a very large amount of highly expensive and invasive medical treatment. It was reported that he was receiving ventilation (breathing machine support) and renal dialysis (kidney machine). This level of treatment would be unthinkable for the vast majority of South Africans, and, indeed, the overwhelming majority of the people with similar illnesses even in developed countries. Frail elderly patients with pneumonia are not usually admitted to intensive care units. They do not have the option of prolonged support with breathing machines and dialysis at home.”
Tags: Dominic Wilkinson, Nelson Mandela
Ima Hogg, 1900.
Scientific studies (which I mostly don’t believe) have long shown that those with more common names fare better in life than those with unique ones. Barack Obama is a small sample size, but he’s done fairly well personally and professionally. And then there’s Ima Hogg, who was the celebrated belle of Texas as well as un-porcine. Well, she did have family connections, so I could be talking about another exception. I suppose the one area in which a name can have an impact is when it allows an employer with biased hiring practices to know the race or ethnicity of the applicant. That does have a bearing on happiness.
The opening of an interesting New Yorker blog post on the topic by Maria Konnikova:
“In 1948, two professors at Harvard University published a study of thirty-three hundred men who had recently graduated, looking at whether their names had any bearing on their academic performance. The men with unusual names, the study found, were more likely to have flunked out or to have exhibited symptoms of psychological neurosis than those with more common names. The Mikes were doing just fine, but the Berriens were having trouble. A rare name, the professors surmised, had a negative psychological effect on its bearer.
Since then, researchers have continued to study the effects of names, and, in the decades after the 1948 study, these findings have been widely reproduced. Some recent research suggests that names can influence choice of profession, where we live, whom we marry, the grades we earn, the stocks we invest in, whether we’re accepted to a school or are hired for a particular job, and the quality of our work in a group setting. Our names can even determine whether we give money to disaster victims: if we share an initial with the name of a hurricane, according to one study, we are far more likely to donate to relief funds after it hits.
Much of the apparent influence of names on behavior has been attributed to what’s known as the implicit-egotism effect: we are generally drawn to the things and people that most resemble us. Because we value and identify with our own names, and initials, the logic goes, we prefer things that have something in common with them. For instance, if I’m choosing between two brands of cars, all things being equal, I’d prefer a Mazda or a Kia.
That view, however, may not withstand closer scrutiny.”
Tags: Barack Obama, Ima Hogg, Maria Konnikova
I want to be adopted by a wealthy colombian family (anywhere)
I am a nice guy in my 20s that has fell on some hard times and some criminal problems. i need some help out and i need a new godfamily. please help. i would be a great son or brother or grandson. i love cars, cash and sex.
In promoting his new book about Twitter, Nick Bilton sat for an excellent interview with Shaun Randol of the Los Angeles Review of Books. A passage in which the Times reporter describes the changes in journalistic portraits in the Information Age:
Shaun Randol:
Can you speak about writing a narrative using at least four competing memories?
Nick Bilton:
There were over 100 competing memories. Everyone has a different viewpoint of what happened. I interviewed not only the founders and the board members; I interviewed also the people who worked there in the early days, their spouses, their ex-spouses, ex-girlfriends, and ex-boyfriends. I found people who worked at nearby coffee shops. I spoke with anyone who I could have a conversation with.
What I found the most fascinating was that I could go back to social media and use that in my reporting. For example: There’s a moment in the book when Twitter launches at the Love Parade, a rave in San Francisco. Everyone I spoke to believed it happened in June or July, or the beginning of summer. I looked up the Love Parade online and discovered it was in September. So then I went through and searched Jack’s tweets and those of other people from that time, and I ended up finding references of them at the Love Parade in September. Their memories believed it was the beginning of the summer, but they had actually documented it was the end of the summer.
That was the moment I realized that I could use these tweets and social media as a reporting tool for this book. There was a treasure trove of stuff that existed online, whether it was tweets, Flickr photos, videos on YouTube, Facebook updates, or Foursquare updates. These things existed everywhere and allowed me to pinpoint almost with exact accuracy where people were at certain points in time. I was able to untangle all of the somewhat different memories.
Shaun Randol:
There are significant implications of leaving that digital breadcrumb.
Nick Bilton:
Yes. If you want to write a book about me and I won’t let you interview me, you could potentially say what I was doing at certain points in time just by looking at my social media feeds: Foursquare, Facebook, Twitter. For this book, I had access to thousands of emails and other documents, but there were certain events that I could find via social media. The places people had gone. Videos of boat trips they took. Writing and reporting this story was a real eye-opening experience.
Shaun Randol:
I’m reminded of Gay Talese’s famous portrait of Frank Sinatra, ‘Frank Sinatra Has a Cold,’ in which a vivid portrait of the singer was drawn without ever speaking to him.
Nick Bilton:
That’s the piece that everyone attains to when they write a story like this. Imagine how Talese’s piece would have looked if Frank Sinatra was on Twitter and there were photographs on Instagram of him. As you see in my book, there are incredible details about what people were wearing, the temperature that day, and even the gusty wind. I used the internet to find these things. I could look at almanacs to find what the weather was that day and the photos on Flickr of what people were wearing that day.”
Tags: Nick Bilton, Shaun Randol
“BELDING followed her from that room to the front room, in which the murder was committed with a shoemaker’s hammer.”
Sometimes people can separate from the world and be uninterrupted from delusions. They needn’t even move away–they just disappear inside themselves. That can lead to a dangerous, fever dream of a life, one in which a monster grows undisturbed. Such a departure from reality in 1859 led a father and daughter to enter into a religious mania which caused the elder to brutally slay his child. From an article in that year’s New York Times:
“The quiet Sabbath was broken in upon yesterday by the commission of a horrid murder, in the town of Sandlake, about 11 miles from Troy, of a daughter by her father and only surviving parent, a man of 60 years of age, named JOHN BELDING. The scene of the homicide is about 4 miles east of Sliter’s Tavern, and near the steam saw-mill on the Sandlake road. The parties lived in a little house, in which the father earned a livelihood for himself and daughter by following the trade of a shoemaker. The daughter’s name was CHRISTINA. She is about 19 years of age, and is described by the neighbors as a quiet and well-behaved girl. She had been unwell for some time, and, it is said, had been under the care of a female doctress residing in Berlin, in this county, named WEAVER. Her mind, it appears, was somewhat affected, but whether from religious excitement or from some other cause, we are unable to say. She labored under the impression that the devil had possessed her, and used to pray very frequently for deliverance from his grasp. A day or two before the murder, the old man and daughter went over to the house of DAVID HORTON, who resided opposite the BELDINGS, when CHRISTINA said she had taken medicine of MRS. WEAVER, and it made her feel as if ‘the devil was in her and she would scratch him off; but that she had thrown the medicine away, and drove the devil away, too.’ The old man had not done much work recently, as it affected the girl’s head, and it is supposed that in consequence of his care of her and want of sleep, &c., his own mind had become temporarily affected, and while under the delusion [that] ‘Dena,’ as he called her, was the devil, he killed her.
The account which BELDING gives of the affair is that he saw the devil lying upon the bedroom and he struck it in the face. The girl, it appears, was lying down in the back room. BELDING followed her from that room to the front room, in which the murder was committed with a shoemaker’s hammer. Her skull was completely smashed to pieces. Portions of the hair were scattered around the room, and pieces of the skull were lying over the floor. Her face, too, was considerably bruised and disfigured, but no marks of violence were discovered on the other parts of her body, BELDING says he thought she was the devil–that she appeared to him to be four times as large as ‘Dena’–that her face was too large for ‘Dena’–and that from his previous and subsequent conduct there can scarcely be a doubt that the old man imagines he had a fight with the devil, or, as he expressed it, with ‘three devils, and he had all he could do to kill them.’ They lived alone in the house. It is supposed the murder was committed about 12 1/2 o’clock yesterday afternoon. The first person who discovered the murder was NICOLAS RYBERMILLER, who first saw the old man outside the house. He appeared very much excited, and told RYBERMILLER that he had ‘Killed the devil, and it was lying in there,’ pointing to his house. RYBERMILLER looked in and discovered the dead body of the daughter. He asked the old man if it was not DENA that he had killed? BELDING replied that he did not think it was. BELDING’S hands and shirt-sleeves were covered in blood. RYBERMILLER testified before the Coroner’s jury that the father and daughter had lived with him about six months, previously to their residing in the house where the murder was committed, and that they always appeared happy together, and, as the witness expressed it, ‘Never had any crazy times.’ CHRISTINA was a quiet, good girl.
BELDING was raving like a maniac when the Coroner arrived. Several witnesses were examined, and the jury rendered a verdict that, ‘in their opinion said CHRISTINA BELDING came to her death on Sunday, May 1, 1859, from fractures of the skull, and said injuries were inflicted with a hammer in the hands of her father, JOHN BELDING–he at the time laboring under temporary aberration of mind.’
The Grand Jury sit to-day. The evidence in this case will be handed over to them for their action at once. They will probably authorize a commission to investigate the sanity of the murderer, and if he is declared insane, will send him to the Lunatic Asylum; or they will indict him for murder, as in their opinion the evidence warrants.”
Tags: Christina Belding, David Horton, John Belding, Mrs. Weaver the Female Doctress, Nicolas Rybermiller
From Robert Walker’s well-considered Science 2.0 article explaining why terraforming Mars is a far more fraught operation than merely building working Biospheres, which themselves aren’t easy assignments:
“Our only attempt at making a closed Earth-like ecosystem so far on Earth, in Biosphere 2, failed. There, it was because of an interaction of a chemical reaction with the concrete in the building, which indirectly removed oxygen from the habitat. Nobody predicted this and it was only detected after the experiment was over. The idea itself doesn’t seem to be fundamentally flawed, it was just a mistake of detail.
In the future perhaps we will try a Biosphere 3 or 4, and eventually get it right. When we build self-enclosed settlements in space such as the Stanford Torus, they will surely go wrong too from time to time in the early stages. But again, you can purge poisonous gases from the atmosphere, and replenish its oxygen. In the worst case, you can evacuate the colonists from the space settlement, vent all the atmosphere, sterilize the soil, and start again.
It is a similar situation with Mars, there are many interactions that could go wrong, and we are sure to make a few mistakes to start with. The difference is, if you make a mistake when you terraform a planet, it is likely that you can’t ‘turn back the clock’ and undo your mistakes.
With Mars, we can’t try again with a Mars 2, Mars 3, Mars 4 etc. until we get it right.”
Tags: Robert Walker
From a Wired piece by Liz Stinson about a printable paper speaker by a French product designer:
“If you’re the tinkering type, you’ve probably deconstructed a fair number of electronics. It doesn’t take a genius to tear apart a radio, but once you get past the bulk of plastic packaging and down to the guts, you begin to realize that reading the mess of circuits, chips and components is like trying to navigate your way through a foreign country with a map from the 18th century.
But it doesn’t have to be so complicated, says Coralie Gourguechon. ‘Nowadays, we own devices that are too complicated considering the way we really use them,’ she says. Gourguechon, maker of the Craft Camera, believes that in order to understand our electronics, they need to be vastly simpler and more transparent than they currently are.”
Tags: Coralie Gourguechon, Liz Stinson
Libertarian billionaire Peter Thiel is an interesting guy, though I don’t agree with most of what he says. I’d love, for instance, to see him apply some of his know-how to coming up with solutions for poverty. Like a lot of people in Silicon Valley, he seems to exist on an island where such messy problems don’t register.
From a new Financial Times profile of Thiel by Richard Waters, in which the subject rails against government regulation, some of which might have come in handy on Wall Street during the aughts:
“He sounds equally uncomfortable discussing himself. The ‘ums’ multiply as he tries to explain why he threw in law and banking and came to Silicon Valley to pursue something far more world-changing. ‘There was this decision to move back to California and try something new and different,’ he says as though it were something that happened to someone else.
He is similarly vague when talking about the origins of his personal philosophy. ‘I’ve always been very interested in ideas and trying to figure things out.’ His undergraduate degree, from Stanford University, was in philosophy but his stance against the dominant political philosophy on many issues seems more visceral than intellectual. ‘I think that one of the most contrarian things one can do in our society is try to think for oneself,’ he says.
He only really regains his stride when talking about how technological ambition has gone from the world, leaving what he calls an ‘age of diminished expectations that has slowly seeped into the culture.’ Predictably, given his libertarian bent, much of this is traced back to regulation.
This is his explanation for why the computer industry (which inhabits ‘the world of bits’) has thrived while so many others (‘the world of atoms’) have not. ‘The world of bits has not been regulated and that’s where we’ve seen a lot of progress in the past 40 years, and the world of atoms has been regulated, and that’s why it’s been hard to get progress in areas like biotechnology and aviation and all sorts of material science areas.'”
Tags: Peter Thiel, Richard Waters
I don’t have to tell you that Sarah Palin is a liar, a hypocrite and a fool, but I will. Her reaction about Martin Bashir being fired by MSNBC for his comments about her followed by her response to Phil Robertson’s suspension by A&E for his comments about gay people.
“It was refreshing to see though, that many in the media did come out and say, ‘Look our standards have got to be higher than this.’ Those with that platform, with a microphone, a camera in their face, they have to have some more responsibility taken.”
“Free speech is an endangered species. Those ‘intolerants’ hatin’ and taking on the Duck Dynasty patriarch for voicing his personal opinion are taking on all of us.”
Tags: Martin Bashir, Phil Robertson, Sarah Palin
10 search-engine keyphrases bringing traffic to Afflictor this week:
- the man in the white suit ealing comedy 1951
- marilyn chambers interviewed by tom snyder
- novels david foster wallace loved
- what was carl sagan’s contribution to 2001 a space odyssey?
- david bowie on dinah shore show
- the hanging of arthur clement day
- was michael rockefeller eaten by cannibals?
- the ship must be sinking muhammad ali
- harold robbins dream merchant
- david isay dinosaur gardens moscow texas
Afflictor: Thinking that the controversy over Phil Robertson’s homophobic remarks forced A&E to find a new patriarch for Duck Dynasty.
I’m back, you toxic queens.
- I disagree with Malcolm Gladwell’s contention that today’s celebrities behave better because of tabloid culture.
- I agree with Gladwell’s contention that PED hysteria if rife with hypocrisy.
- Old Print Articles: Jameson whiskey heir accused of arranging cannibalism (1890) + People believe that a dog is able to talk (1910).
- Featured Videos: Richard Burton, fresh from rehab, interviewed by Michael Parkinson (1984) + Muhammad Ali and Rocky Marciano fought a computerized “bout” (1970) + JFK conspiracist Jim Garrison interviewed by Johnny Carson (1966) + Allan Havey interviews Robert Downey Sr. (1991).
- Recently Posted on NYC’s Craigslist: Now you’re dead pet can complain about you + “I have a huge data set” is an interesting way to put it + Our teenage son doesn’t have an Internet connection.
- The New Yorker‘s 1972 coverage of the terrorism at the Munich Olympics.
- Walter Isaacson is crowdsourcing his new book about Silicon Valley.
- Al Goldstein was ahead of the curve when it came to pornography.
- Peter Singer points out the moral failings of the Batkid celebration.
- Non-human animals routinely display superpowers.
- North Korea’s ranking among countries that use the death penalty.
- How much Apollo astronauts earned for risking their lives.
- “Samantha West” is a telemarketing robot or perhaps something else.
- Is Google the contemporary Bell Labs? Arguments for and against.
- Beyoncé’s recent record is an outlier in every way.
- Ronnie Biggs of the Great Train Robbery was a masterful celebrity.
- We have summer blockbusters because Jaws was set on a beach.
- Discovering signs of life on other planets may be our death knell.
- Computer simulation changes scientific research in good and bad ways.
- A critical piece of the Internet of Things puzzle needs to be solved.
- Autonomous-vehicle development will affect all transportation planning.
- A brief note from 1910 about a frolic.
- A brief note from 1904 about dynamite.
- This week’s Afflictor keyphrase searches.
Here’s Allan Havey, a guest this week of Marc Maron, interviewing Robert Downey Sr. in 1991. There’s really nothing like Putney Swope, is there?
Tags: Allan Havey, Robert Downey Sr
Moral philosopher Peter Singer is a bothersome man, a stickler, a provider of inconvenient truths. He’s the humanist who’s tough to take. But if you were sick or impoverished, you’d want him on your side.
Two excerpts: The opening of his new Washington Post editorial about the Make-a-Wish Batkid celebration in San Francisco and the beginning of “The Dangerous Philosopher,” Michael Specter’s 1999 New Yorker profile of the ethicist.
From WaPo:
“You’d have to be a real spoilsport not to feel good about Batkid. If the sight of 20,000 people joining in last month to help the Make-A-Wish Foundation and the city of San Francisco fulfill the superhero fantasies of a 5-year-old — and not just any 5-year-old, but one who has been battling a life-threatening disease — doesn’t warm your heart, you must be numb to basic human emotions.
Yet we can still ask if these basic emotions are the best guide to what we ought to do. According to Make-A-Wish, the average cost of realizing the wish of a child with a life-threatening illness is $7,500. That sum, if donated to the Against Malaria Foundation and used to provide bed nets to families in malaria-prone regions, could save the lives of at least two or three children (and that’s a conservative estimate). If donated to the Fistula Foundation, it could pay for surgeries for approximately 17 young mothers who, without that assistance, will be unable to prevent their bodily wastes from leaking through their vaginas and hence are likely to be outcasts for the rest of their lives. If donated to the Seva Foundation to treat trachoma and other common causes of blindness in developing countries, it could protect 100 children from losing their sight as they grow older.
It’s obvious, isn’t it, that saving a child’s life is better than fulfilling a child’s wish to be Batkid? If Miles’s parents had been offered that choice — Batkid for a day or a cure for their son’s leukemia — they surely would have chosen the cure.”•
From Specter’s profile:
“Peter Singer may be the most controversial philosopher alive; he is certainly among the most influential. And this month, as he begins a new job as Princeton University’s first professor of bioethics, his unorthodox views will be debated in America more passionately than ever before. For nearly thirty years, Singer has written with great severity on subjects ranging from what people should put on their dinner plates each night to how they should spend their money or assess the value of human life. He is always relevant, but what he has to say often seems outrageous: Singer believes, for example, that a human’s life is not necessarily more sacred than a dog’s, and that it might be more compassionate to carry out medical experiments on hopelessly disabled, unconscious orphans than on perfectly healthy rats. Yet his books are far more popular than those of any other modern philosopher. Animal Liberation, which was first published in 1975, has sold half a million copies and is widely regarded as the touchstone of the animal-rights movement. In 1979, he brought out Practical Ethics, which has sold more than a hundred and twenty thousand copies, making it the most successful philosophy text ever published by Cambridge University Press.
Singer laid out his brutally frank approach to ethics in his first major paper, ‘Famine, Affluence, and Morality,’ which has become required reading for thousands of university students. ‘As I write this in November 1971, people are dying in East Bengal from lack of food, shelter, and medical care,” Singer’s essay began. ‘The suffering and death that are occurring there now are not inevitable, not unavoidable.’ The problem, he explained, is a result of the moral blindness of rich human beings who are far too selfish to come to the aid of the poor.
Following in the tradition of the eighteenth-century moral philosopher William Godwin–who asked, famously, ‘What magic is there in the pronoun `my’ to overturn the decisions of everlasting truth?’–Singer argues that proximity means nothing when it comes to moral decisions, and that personal relationships don’t mean much, either. Saving your daughter’s life is a fine thing to do, for example, but it can never measure up to saving the lives of ten strangers. If you were faced with the choice, Singer’s ethics would require you to save the strangers. ‘It makes no moral difference whether the person I can help is a neighbor’s child ten yards from me or a Bengali whose name I shall never know, ten thousand miles away,’ he wrote in his essay. Singer believes we are obliged to give money away until our sacrifice is of ‘comparable moral importance’ to the agony of people starving to death. ‘This would mean, of course,’ he continued, approvingly, ‘that one would reduce oneself to very near the material circumstances of a Bengali refugee.’
Singer’s views on animal rights are even bolder: he calls man’s dominion over other animals a ‘speciesist’ outrage that can properly be compared only to the pain and suffering ‘which resulted from the centuries of tyranny by white humans over black humans.’ For Singer, that ‘tyranny’ is one of the central social issues of our age. Yet what has brought him infamy is his radical position on an even more compelling set of moral questions: how to cope with the borders between birth, life, and death in an era when we are becoming technologically capable of controlling them all.”•
Tags: Michael Specter, Peter Singer
“It’s kind of embarrassing to me.”
Husband Wants Me to do it….
We have not explained the “facts of life” to our young teenage son yet, and my husband says he can’t get involved in doing this. Says I must do it alone. How do I, a middle-aged mother talk to my 13 year old son about sex, masturbation, std’s, pregnancy, birth control, etc? It’s kind of embarrassing to me.
Serena.
From the May 1, 1910 New York Times:
“As a result of a girl companion’s prank, played more than a year ago, Miss Mary V. Sullivan lies dead at the home of her mother, Mrs. Catherine Sullivan, at 821 South Eleventh Street, Newark. The young woman died on Friday night. About a year ago Miss Sullivan and several girl friends were playing jokes on each other. During the frolic one of the girls pulled a chair from under her just as she was about to sit down. In falling she injured her spine.”
Karaoke, the smallpox of singing, the pained sounds people make when success is no longer an option, was not a naturally occurring, viral phenomenon, but an invention, originally called a Juke 8, that was marketed more than 40 years ago. Via Alexis C. Madrigal’s Atlantic article, Daisuke Inoue, the enabler of drunken-salarymen warbling, recalls his devilry:
“Inoue recounted his adventures in 2005 to Topic Magazine, which allowed the Atlantic-favorite history site The Appendix to reprint his first person account of creating a modern sensation.
One day, the president of a small company came to the club where I was playing to ask a favor. He was meeting business clients in another town and knew they would all end up at a drinking establishment and that he would be called on to sing. ‘Daisuke, your keyboard playing is the only music that I can sing to! You know how my voice is and what it needs to sound good.’
So at his request I taped a number of his favorite songs onto an open-reel tape recorder in the keys that would best suit his voice. A few days later he came back full of smiles and asked if I could record some more songs. At that moment the idea for the Juke 8 dawned on me: You would put money into a machine with a microphone, speaker and amplifier, and it would play the music people wanted to sing.
As I had attended a Denko (or Electric Industry) High School, you’d think I could have built the machine myself. But I was always scared of electricity and so graduated without much of an ability to put things together. A member of my band introduced me to a friend of his who had an electronics shop. I took my idea to him, and he understood exactly what I’d envisioned. With my instruction, he built eleven Juke 8s. Each machine consisted of an amplifier, a microphone, a coin box and an eight-track car stereo. Putting the machines together took about two months and cost around $425 per unit.
That was in 1969, but the machines did not actually hit the market until 1971. At first, people weren’t all that interested, but once they figured out how they worked, they started to take off with an Atari-like speed.”
Tags: Alexis C. Madrigal, Daisuke Inoue
Google isn’t striving for driverless cars just so its employees can get to work more easily; it wants to sell the software to every automaker. The same likely goes for the robots it plans to build. From Illah Nourbakhsh’s New Yorker blog post about the company’s recent robotics-buying binge:
“While some analysts initially suggested that Google’s goal was to more thoroughly automate factories—highly controlled environments that are well-suited for a fleet of semi-independent robots—it’s now clear that the company’s team of engineers and scientists has a vision of truly dexterous, autonomous robots that can walk on sidewalks, carry packages, and push strollers. (A disclosure: Carnegie Mellon’s Community Robotics, Education, and Technology Empowerment Lab, which I direct, has partnered with Google on a number of mapping projects that utilize our GigaPan technology.) Before its acquisition of Boston Dyanmics, Google ingested seven start-ups in just six months—companies that have created some of the best-engineered arms, hands, motion systems, and vision processors in the robotics industry. The companies Meka and Schaft, two of Google’s recent acquisitions, designed robot torsos that can interact with humans at work and at home. Another, Redwood Robotics, created a lightweight, strong arm that uses a nimble-control system. Boston Dynamics, Google’s eighth acquisition, is one of the most accomplished robotics companies on the planet, having pioneered machines that can run, jump, and lift, often better than humans. Its latest projects have focussed on developing full-body robot androids that can wear hazmat clothing and manipulate any tool designed for humans, like front loaders or jackhammers. The potential impact of Google’s robot arsenal, already hinted at by its self-driving car effort, is stunning: Google could deploy human-scale robots throughout society. And, while Amazon is busy optimizing delivery logistics, Google bots could roboticize every Amazon competitor, from Target to Safeway.
If robots pervade society, how will our daily experiences change?”
Tags: Illah Nourbakhsh
One more thing from the recent email exchange between Bill Simmons and Malcolm Gladwell. (I posted here about my agreement with Gladwell’s remarks about PEDs.) The host and guest discuss celebrity early in the conversation and make some good points. There is one thing, however, I disagree with. In discussing an anecdote from Johnny Carson, the new book by Henry “Bombastic” Bushkin, the late talk show host’s longtime lawyer, Gladwell asserts that celebrity behavior must have been far worse 50 years ago because there wasn’t so much press attention. This is conventional, but I think incorrect, wisdom.
Celebrity behavior was horrible decades ago, and it was covered up. That’s true. Every now and then something would explode into public view, like the cases with Errol Flynn and Fatty Arbuckle. But I believe the same thing happens now, even with the tabloid culture. Paparazzi aren’t muckrakers duty-bound to serve the public good but entrepreneurs who sell salacious details, even uncovered information about criminality, to the highest bidder. Plenty gets covered up. It’s a marketplace in which silence is bought with money or favors. Let’s assume that tween performers don’r grow up to be so dysfunctional without cause and that action stars don’t always behave well while filming abroad. Every now and then something will explode into the public view, like the cases of O.J. Simpson and Michael Jackson. But despite the surfeit of information everywhere, most misbehavior is still kept quiet.
From Simmons and Gladwell:
“Bill Simmons:
It’s weird to think of Johnny Carson involved in a conspiracy, though.
Malcolm Gladwell:
And it just not plausible today, is it? There are 4 million Americans with top secret security clearances. How can you make a legitimate cultural argument for the presence of some shadowy secret government when 4 million people are in on the shadowy secret government? But in 1970, the Mafia throws the biggest star on television down the stairs and then puts a contract on him, causing him to lock himself in his apartment for three days and for millions of Americans to be forced to watch live coverage of the Italian American unity rally, and none of that became public. This is tabloid malpractice.
Bill Simmons:
Wait, it seems like you were inordinately mesmerized by this Carson book. Was it because you didn’t realize that he was such a flawed human being? Or were you blown away by how different celebrity culture was in the 1960s and 1970s compared to now?
Malcolm Gladwell:
Well, it made me think that the average level of celebrity behavior must have been much worse 50 years ago than today.”
Tags: Bill Simmons, Henry "Bombastic" Bushkin, Malcolm Gladwell
Al Goldstein was a horrible man, so it’s a shame he was right. The Screw publisher, who just passed away at 77, had a dream–a wet one–and lived long enough to see it become reality. Goldstein envisioned a world in which porn was ubiquitous and acceptable, and now it’s available on every screen in our homes and shirt pockets. He was the McLuhan of smut, not envisioning a Global Village so much as a universal circle jerk. He won.
One of my favorite video clips of all time: Smartmouth Stanley Siegel interviews Goldstein and comedian Jerry Lewis in 1976. When not busy composing the world’s finest beaver shots, Goldstein apparently had a newsletter about tech tools. He shows off a $3900 calculator watch and a $2200 portable phone. Lewis, easily the biggest tool on the stage, flaunts his wealth the way only a truly insecure man can.
“This is a present from a white man who desires to see her eaten.”
In 1890, James S. Jameson, heir to the famed whiskey-distilling family’s wealth, was accused of a crime that was singular and sinister even by the standards of colonialism. Syrian translator Assad Farran testified that the peripatetic explorer paid African natives a number of handkerchiefs to kill and cannibalize a small girl. Jameson, it was alleged, desired to not only witness the heinous acts but to sketch them. From an article the November 14, 1890 New York Times:
“London— The Times publishes the full text of Assad Farran’s affidavit. After describing Barttelot’s cruelties, it deals with the Jameson cannibal affair in Ribakiba.
Jameson expressed to Tippoo’s interpreter curiosity to witness cannibalism. Tippoo consulted with the chiefs and told Jameson he had better purchase a slave. James asked the price and paid six handkerchiefs.
A man returned a few minutes after with a ten-year-old girl. Tippoo and the chiefs ordered the girl to be taken to the native huts. Jameson himself, Selim, Masondie, and Farhani, Jameson’s servant, presented to him by Tippoo, and many others followed.
The man who had brought the girl said to the cannibals: ‘This is a present from a white man who desires to see her eaten.’
‘The girl was tied to a tree,’ says Farran, ‘the natives sharpening their knives the while. One of them stabbed her twice in the belly.
‘She did not scream, but knew what would happen, looking to the right and left for help. When stabbed she fell dead. The natives cut pieces from her body.
‘Jameson in the meantime made rough sketches of the horrible scenes. Then we all returned to the child’s house. Jameson afterward went to his tent, where he finished his sketches in water colors.
‘There were six of them, all neatly done. The first sketch was of the girl as she was led to the tree. The second showed her stabbed, with the blood gushing from the wounds. The third showed her dissected. The fourth, fifth, and sixth showed men carrying off the various parts of the body.
‘Jameson showed these and many other sketches to all the chiefs.'”
Tags: Assad Farran, James S. Jameson
The opening of a post at the Lefsetz Letter which offers a perfectly reasonable takedown of those who see Beyoncé’s record sales last week as anything but an extreme outlier, just a brief flash when an old paradigm still worked, a singular moment of calm before the sharks again turn the water red:
“It’s a stunt. No different from Radiohead’s In Rainbows. Unrepeatable by mere mortals, never mind wannabes and also-rans.
That’s how desperate Apple is. It lets Beyonce circumvent its rules and release a ‘video album,’ so the record industry can have its bundle and the Cupertino company can delude itself into believing that it’s got a solution to Spotify, when the Swedish streaming company is chasing YouTube, not iTunes.
And the media is so impressed by numbers that it trumpets the story, believing its role is to amplify rather than analyze.
Yes, it was a story. The same way a bomb or SpaceX or anything new gets people’s attention. Only in this case, there was something to buy. Whoo-hoo! We got lemmings and fans to lay down their credit cards to spend money for the work of a superstar, as if this is a new paradigm.
And we’ve got Rob Stringer and the rest of the inane music business slapping its back, declaring victory.
What a bunch of hogwash.
The story of 2013 is cacophony.”
Tags: Beyoncé