“Mirror!!!”
A Fat Guy Called Me Fat. (Sad Chubby Guy)
I could not believe a guy fatter than me had the nerve to call me fat. I also always see this happening in TV talk shows. Mirror!!!
You are currently browsing the yearly archive for 2013.
In a fascinating Science interview, Emily Underwood spoke with DARPA’s Geoffrey Ling about two of the agency’s proposed brain-related projects: 1) Wireless devices that can cure neurological disorders such as PTSD, depression and chronic pain, and 2) A wireless device that repairs brain damage and restores memory loss. One exchange:
“Question:
For RAM, why did DARPA choose to focus on memory, and what kinds of memory do you hope to restore?
Geoffrey Ling:
All these [injured] guys and gals want to go back into the service. A lot of them can go back because we’ve got good prosthetic legs, and now we’ve got the prosthetic arm that’s really close to being FDA [Food and Drug Administration] approved. But the thing with brain-injured guys—the thing that really keeps them out—is they can’t remember how to do certain motor tasks like drive a car or operate machinery. Now I don’t know if we are at that point, but if we can fix hearts, and we can fix badly broken bones, why can’t we fix part of the brain? If you had to pick an area of the brain that you can fix, the memory area is the most obvious because motor-task memory is really pretty well-worked out in preclinical models. Declarative memory is very different than associative memory and emotional memory—that stuff, nobody even knows anything about it—but when you look at the work in rodents with memory motor tasks, you say ok, it’s still a big step but it’s rational.”
Tags: Emily Underwood, Geoffrey Ling
“For a time, all lived in one large house.”
Heber Z. Ricks had twelve wives, though it’s really not polite to count. He was a Mormon who really, really believed in the teachings of Brigham Young. The family man was profiled in an article in the January 29, 1900 Brooklyn Daily Eagle. An excerpt:
“In the Valley of the Snake River, near where that stream forms the boundary line between Wyoming and Idaho, lives the father of the largest family on the American continent, and probably the world. The owner of this unique distinction is Heber Z. Ricks, one of the faithful followers in religion and practices of the late Brigham Young. Reliable persons who have known Ricks for many years say he has 12 wives and 66 children. Many of his sons and daughters have long since taken unto themselves helpmates for life and to these have been born 218 children, thereby bringing the number of souls in the Ricks family, exclusive of the venerable father, up to 296.
The members of the Ricks family are scattered over a stretch of country fourteen miles long by two miles wide. Heber Ricks has an even dozen ranches, which, with those of the sons and daughters, make quite a good size settlement. In the center of this settlement, a town called Ricksville has been established. Here are located a general store and a church. During week days the church is transformed into a school room, and a regularly employed teacher (usually one of the Ricks daughters) labors with the descendants of Heber Z. On Sundays, and not infrequently of an evening, services, which are, of course, strictly Mormon, are held. These religious meetings are usually presided over by the elder Ricks, and are very interesting, being conducted in that manner peculiar to the Mormon faith. In the absence of the ‘bishop,’ as the head of the family is known in the settlement, as is frequently the case when he makes a visit to one of his wives living in the extreme upper or lower ends of the colony, one of the sons will fill the pulpit and preach the doctrine of his father, says the Chicago Inter-Ocean.
When Ricks left Missouri, it is said, he was a single man, but when he and his party reached Salt Lake valley, he was the possessor of five better halves. Settling near Salt Lake, Ricks continued to take unto himself additional wives until he had ten. In the year 1856, with the number of his wives increased to twelve, Ricks pulled up stakes and moved across the mountains through eastern Idaho to the valley of the Snake River. There, upon one of the most fertile spots to be found on the continent, he established himself. The first few years were ones of great activity for Ricks and his already large family. For a time, all lived in one large house, which was hastily erected, but later twelve houses, composed of roughly hewn logs, were constructed at different points along the river. To these were added, in due time, corrals and other outbuildings, and in a few years Ricksville was something more than a name.”
In a Financial Times article by David Pilling, unorthodox Cambridge economist Ha-Joon Chang, something of a lone wolf in the dismal science, argues against his discipline’s prevailing ways of conducting business and also explains his contention that washing machines were more revolutionary than the Internet. Two excerpts.
1.
“‘The predominant view in the profession is that there’s one particular way of doing economics. It’s basically to set up some mathematical model, the more complicated the better,’ he says, advocating instead what he calls a multidisciplinary approach. ‘In a biology department, you have people doing all sorts of different things. So some do DNA analysis, others do anatomy, some people go and sit with gorillas in the forests of Burundi, and others do experiments with rats. But they are called biologists because biologists recognise that living organisms are complex things and you cannot understand them only at one level. So why can’t economists become like that? Yes, you do need people crunching numbers, but you also need people going to factories and doing surveys, you need people watching political changes to see what’s going on.'”
2.
“What’s all this about the washing machine and the internet?
‘I was not trying to dismiss the importance of the internet revolution but I think its importance has been exaggerated partly because people who write about these things are usually middle-aged men who have never used a washing machine,’ he replies. ‘It’s human nature to think that the changes you are living through are the most momentous, but you need to put these things into perspective. I brought up the washing machine to highlight the fact that even the humblest thing can have huge consequences. The washing machine, piped gas, running water and all these mundane household technologies enabled women to enter the labour market, which then meant that they had fewer children, had them later, invested more in each of them, especially female children. That changed their bargaining positions within the household and in wider society, giving women votes and endless changes. It has transformed the way we live.'”
Tags: David Pilling, Ha-Joon Chang
George Carlin is my favorite comic of all time, and Russell Brand has a lot of Carlin in his brain. In a new Guardian piece, Brand eviscerates Rupert Murdoch, the Scrooge McDuck of media titans who has the gall to fancy himself as a champion of the people while protecting the interests of those who despise them. An excerpt:
“Rupert Murdoch, an animatronic al-Qaida recruitment poster, in his private letter to Sun staff, after the News of the World was briefly closed for a makeover (not through remorse, or shame, no, because they couldn’t sell advertising space and because he wanted to launch the Sun on Sunday anyway because it’s cheaper to run one title than two – some guys get all the luck) referred consistently to his pride in the Sun as ‘a trusted news source’. Trusted is the word he used, not trustworthy. We know the Sun is not trustworthy and so does he. He uses the word ‘trusted’ deliberately. Hitler was trusted, it transpired he was not trustworthy. He also said of the arrested journalists, ‘everyone is innocent until proven guilty.’ Well, yes, that is the law of our country, not however a nicety often afforded to the victims of his titles, and here I refer not only to hacking but the vituperative portrayal of weak and vulnerable members of our society, relentlessly attacked by Murdoch’s ink jackals. Immigrants, folk with non-straight sexual identities, anyone in fact living in the margins of the Sun‘s cleansed utopia.”•
________________________________________________
Rupert Murdoch, in 1968, about to gain control of News of the World:
Tags: Rupert Murdoch, Russell Brand
10 search-engine keyphrases bringing traffic to Afflictor this week:
- confessions of a superhero 2007 documentary
- boxing in old brooklyn
- what are kevin kelly’s views about workplace automation?
- can humans outrun animals?
- henry wirz civil war atrocities
- richard brautigan attitude toward technology
- can lepers exercise?
- kleinberg on why more people are living alone
- casting choices for fifty shades of grey
- mark fainaru-wada on nfl violence
Afflictor: Thinking Black Friday was a scary day when shoppers fought over expensive cameras and such.
Happy holidays, you toxic queens.
- Lee Harvey Oswald likely acted alone when assassinating JFK.
- Old Print Articles:Cemeteries plundered, corpses kidnapped (1888).
- Featured Videos: Dr. Jonas Salk interviewed by James Day (1974) + Author Katherine Anne Porter speaks to James Day (1974) + Tiny jellyfish-shaped robots can drift in the air.
- Recently Posted on NYC’s Craigslist: Let’s face it, the sex is going to be unprotected + If you eat our mud, you’ll have twins.
- Marc Andreessen discusses our epoch of creative destruction.
- Economist Joel Mokyr believes we’re mismeasuring innovation.
- Computer superiority hasn’t ended chess but improved it.
- Richard Dawkins did an Ask Me Anything at Reddit.
- Tesla Motors batteries are aiding solar-energy systems for homes.
- The billionaire Lerner family should stop asking for corporate welfare.
- Jony Ive designs seamless products, is a tough biographical subject.
- Françoise Mouly recalls bringing R. Crumb into the New Yorker fold.
- Jonathan Franzen and others reveal their favorite 2013 books.
- Parents are starting to keep their children from playing youth football.
- Bowie-covering astronaut Chris Hadfield worries about Spaceship Earth.
- Japan wants to build a solar farm on the moon.
- Television has never been so celebrated or reviled.
- For 35 years, a librarian obsessively recorded news on VHS tapes.
- In the 1930s, international air travel was very different.
- Freeports allow the wealthy a tax-free haven for luxury purposes.
- A brief note from 1895 about a friendly grocer.
- A brief note from 1914 about a wooden leg.
- This week’s Afflictor keyphrase searches.
Billionaire Ted Lerner and his family don’t seem like awful people, not the kind of wealthy folks who are lobbying on behalf of politicians who want to punish the poor. But they should stop trying to rip off the taxpayers of Washington D.C. The district already financed a stadium for the Nationals baseball team that the Lerners own, which cost locals close to a billion dollars with interest factored in, and now the patriarch is requesting a retractable roof on the stadium to also be paid for by taxpayers. Building sports stadiums for billionaires to improve the economy is a fool’s errand to begin with, but this roof business is even more egregious. This project will create zero permanent jobs and will enhance no one’s financial standing but the Lerners. It’s corporate welfare at its ugliest. If the Lerners want to enhance the value of their holdings, they should invest in them themselves. Thankfully, Mayor Gray is holding firm against this preposterous request. From the Washington Post:
“Mayor Vincent C. Gray said Tuesday that Washington Nationals owner Theodore N. Lerner pitched him earlier this year on a pricey plan to have the city build a retractable roof over Nationals Park — a proposal, Gray said, that he swiftly but politely rejected.
The private one-on-one meeting took place in the John A. Wilson Building in mid-July and lasted about 15 minutes, Gray said.
What Lerner wanted to talk about was the possibility of a roof on Nationals Park,’ the mayor (D) said. ‘That was it. There was no discussion about how much it was going to cost and no further details. I’ve had no further discussions.’
An administration official familiar with the matter but not authorized to comment publicly on it confirmed that there have been no recent talks about improvements of that scope for Nationals Park, which was built with well more than $600 million in taxpayer financing and opened in 2008.
‘The mayor was polite but unequivocal,’ the official said. ‘We are not going to spend taxpayer money to put a roof on the stadium, regardless of the cost.'”
The great writer Katherine Anne Porter, in her eighties, making a rare talk-show appearance with James Day in 1974. She nearly died during the flu pandemic of 1918, which claimed at least 50 million people, but squeaked by after all hope seemed lost.
Tags: James Day, Katherine Anne Porter
It’s great that we’re starting to harness the sun’s energy on Earth, but it still amazes me that we haven’t tried to build a remote solar farm closer to the star. In the wake of Fukushima, Japan is aiming to do something similar, but with the moon. From Timon Singh at Inhabitat:
“Man hasn’t been back to the moon since 1972, but that hasn’t stopped a team of Japanese engineers from developing a plan to turn our celestial neighbor into a massive solar power plant. The disaster at the Fukushima nuclear power station has made Japan think more seriously about alternative energy, and as a result Shimizu Corporation‘s crazy plan has been gaining traction. The plan calls for a massive 12 mile-wide, 6,800 mile long ‘Luna Ring’ of solar panels to be constructed on the moon’s surface. The solar belt would then harness solar power directly from the sun and then beam it straight to Earth via microwaves and lasers.
Shimizu Corporation’s plan would see 13,000 terawatts of continuous energy sent to receiving stations around the Earth, where it will be then distributed to the planet’s population. With NASA’s plans to return the moon currently on hold, Shimizu is planning on building the massive lunar construction project with robots. In fact, humans will barely be involved and will only be present in an overseeing capacity.”
Tags: Timon Singh
Dr. Jonas Salk, not his cousin, appears on James Day’s talk show in 1974. He looked like Larry David at this point in his life, which is pretttty, pretttty good. Salk was a cerebral guy not really cut out for the great mainstream attention he received in the 1950s after his polio vaccine proved successful. It’s difficult to overestimate how much his discovery changed the world.
Tags: James Day, Jonas Salk
Hey, why does this turkey taste like shit?
I prepared it myself.
I need to speak to Dr. Morey at once.
Dr. Morey, that horrible woman who keeps eating shit is on the line.
Put Sarah Palin through, Gloria.
What is your professional opinion, Doctor?
I’ve got good news and I’ve got bad news.
What’s the bad news?
You’re stupid. Oh, and you ate Martin Bashir’s feces.
What’s the good news?
At least you didn’t drink Glenn Beck’s urine.
Uh-oh.
I prepared it myself.
That pardon isn’t for free, Paulie. We need you to work with us.
President Obama continued a Thanksgiving tradition today when he pardoned two turkeys, Paulie and Frankie. In order to secure the pardons, the brothers agreed to help the Feds bring down their family’s racketeering operation. Paulie turned state’s evidence and Frankie wore a wire. They tried to play it cool, but word got out that they’d flipped, so they had to be taken out. You know how it is when you go against the family, boys. It’s nothing personal–just business.
A bullet in the neck for you, Paulie.
You lived like scum, Frankie, and you died like it.
Paulie (2013-2013).
Frankie (2013-2013).
Brian (1998-2013).
I promise that I will never rewatch Goodfellas during a holiday week again. Remember, kids: Crime doesn’t pay. Except for most types of white-collar crime. Happy Thanksgiving, Afflictor readers!–Darren
From the August 22, 1895 New York Times:
“Camden, N.J.–Charles Atkinson, aged eight years, is in the Cooper Hospital, his eyes being nearly burned out with acid. One eye is very badly eaten. Frank Schuck, a clerk in Shuster’s grocery, is under bail, awaiting the action of the court, charged with having inflicted young Atkinson’s injuries.
Young Atkinson went into Shuster’s store to make some purchases. The boy was waited on by Schuck, and he and Atkinson started fooling. Schuck, in a joke, picked up a glass containing what he supposed to be water, and threw it into young Atkinson’s face. It turned out to be acid that was in the glass.”
Tags: Charles Atkinson, Frank Schuck
From another smart post from Matt Novak’s wonderful Paleofuture blog, this one about international air travel in the 1930s:
“Equal parts harrowing adventure and indulgent luxury, taking an international flight in the 1930s was quite an experience. But it was an experience that people who could afford it signed up for in droves.
Nearly 50,000 people would fly Imperial Airways from 1930 until 1939. But these passengers paid incredibly high prices to hop around the world. The longest flights could span over 12,000 miles and cost as much as $20,000 when adjusted for inflation.
A flight from London to Brisbane, Australia, for instance, (the longest route available in 1938) took 11 days and included over two dozen scheduled stops. Today, people can make that journey in just 22 hours, with a single layover in Hong Kong, and pay less than $2,000 for a round trip ticket.”
Tags: Matt Novak
Few things make me sadder than Muhammad Ali being unable to speak. By the time I discovered him in my childhood, he was at the very end of his career, a legend but washed up, already slurring his speech, his motor skills screeching to a halt. For all his flaws, Ali still seemed immaculate, and I became obsessed with him. (I may have watched a.k.a. Cassius Clay a hundred times.) But I didn’t become a boxing fan because of his shaky, then quieted, voice.
So, I never paid close attention to the spectacle of Mike Tyson, the last amazing heavyweight, though it was hard to completely recuse yourself from his greatness and his badness. As Norman Mailer astutely reported, Tyson was the uneasy king of what were really just gaudy, late-century cockfights, a man crumbling inside of a sport that was crumbling.
Mike Tyson is sad for reasons beyond the usually depressing second act of retired boxers, as they endure the slowing of brains that have been treated like speed bags. His reckoning is America’s reckoning. He’s the son of broken promises, of neglect, even of the failure of our best efforts. Raised first by a prostitute and then in the cages of Spofford, he was the boy who could only really love pigeons, and later he was the chicken that came home to roost.
From Joyce Carol Oates’ New York Review of Books piece about the autobiography Tyson has co-authored with Larry Sloman:
Mike Tyson, at twenty the youngest heavyweight champion in history, and in the early, vertiginous years of his career a worthy successor to Ali, Louis, and Jack Johnson, has managed to reconstitute himself after he retired from boxing in 2005 (when he abruptly quit before the seventh round of a fight with the undistinguished boxer Kevin McBride). He became a bizarre replica of the original Iron Mike, subject of a video game, cartoons, and comic books; a cocaine-fueled caricature of himself in the crude Hangover films; star of a one-man Broadway show directed by Spike Lee, titled Undisputed Truth, and the HBO film adaptation of that show; and now the author, with collaborator Larry Sloman, of the memoir Undisputed Truth.
In his late teens in the 1980s Mike Tyson was a fervently dedicated old-style boxer, more temperamentally akin to the boxers of the 1950s than to his slicker contemporaries. In his forties, Tyson looks upon himself with the absurdist humor of a Thersites for whom loathing of self and of his audience has become an affable shtick performance. He liked to come on as crazed and dangerous, screaming in self-parody at press conferences:
I’m a convicted rapist! I’m an animal! I’m the stupidest person in boxing! I gotta get outta here or I’m gonna kill somebody!… I’m on this Zoloft thing, right? But I’m on that to keep me from killing y’all…. I don’t want to be taking the Zoloft, but they are concerned about the fact that I’m a violent person, almost an animal. And they only want me to be an animal in the ring.•
Tags: Joyce Carol Oates, Larry Sloman, Mailer Oates Tyson, Mike Tyson
Money can be off-shored and disappeared from the taxman, but how about luxury goods? “Freeports,” as they’re called, allow the super-rich a duty-free loophole for art collections and such. From the Economist:
“PASSENGERS at Findel airport in Luxembourg may have noticed a cluster of cranes a few hundred yards from the runway. The structure being erected looks fairly unremarkable (though it will eventually be topped with striking hexagonal skylights). Along its side is a line of loading bays, suggesting it could be intended as a spillover site for the brimming cargo terminal nearby. This new addition to one of Europe’s busiest air-freight hubs will not hold any old goods, however. It will soon be home to billions of dollars’ worth of fine art and other treasures, much of which will have been whisked straight from collectors’ private jets along a dedicated road linking the runway to the warehouse.
The world’s rich are increasingly investing in expensive stuff, and ‘freeports’ such as Luxembourg’s are becoming their repositories of choice. Their attractions are similar to those offered by offshore financial centres: security and confidentiality, not much scrutiny, the ability for owners to hide behind nominees, and an array of tax advantages. This special treatment is possible because goods in freeports are technically in transit, even if in reality the ports are used more and more as permanent homes for accumulated wealth.”
Excerpts from two solar-centric stories by Todd Woody at Quartz. The first, “Why SolarCity and Tesla Are Going to Replace Your Utility,” looks at how some great inventions beget others. My biggest prediction early on in this blog is that we would see the development of batteries in a way that would change our lives. There have been a lot of naysayers on the topic, but it seems to be coming true in part because of the repurposing of Tesla Motors batteries. The second piece reports that the U.S. has 43 nuclear power plants worth of solar energy in development. That’s not the same thing as a done deal, but it’s impressive.
1.
“Millions of California homeowners and businesses have installed solar panels on their roofs to generate their own electricity. Now a small but growing number of them want to pull the plug on their utilities by storing that energy in batteries and tap that power when the sun isn’t shining. And that has set off a fight over who will ultimately control the state’s power grid—California’s three big monopoly utilities or their customers empowered by companies like SolarCity and Tesla Motors.
SolarCity, the Silicon Valley solar installer, has quietly begun to offer some homeowners a lithium-ion battery pack made by electric carmaker Tesla to store electricity generated by their rooftop photovoltaic arrays.”
2.
“The boom in solar energy in the US in recent years? You haven’t seen anything yet. The pipeline of photovoltaic projects has grown 7% over the past 12 months and now stands at 2,400 solar installations that would generate 43,000 megawatts(MW), according to a report released today by market research firm NPD Solarbuzz. If all these projects are built, their peak electricity output would be equivalent to that of 43 big nuclear power plants, and enough to keep the lights on in six million American homes.
Only 8.5% of the pipeline is currently being installed, with most of it still in the planning stages.”
There’s a very good EconTalk episode this week with host Russ Roberts being joined by Northwestern economist Joel Mokyr. The guest is an optimist about the transformative powers of technology, and two areas of the conversation particularly interested me: 1) Economic production and growth may be slowing down by most measures because those measures are inefficient and outdated at gauging the value of recent tech advancements, and 2) We are reaching an epoch in which the “death of distance” is becoming a reality because of connectivity and we may be returning to a pre-Industrial Revolution, home-centered society.
On the first count, Mokyr comments that those who decry that plane travel hasn’t speeded up in decades as a sign that we’ve stagnated technologically are giving short shrift to airline passengers being able to use laptops, tablets, smartphones and wi-fi to do work during their trips.
From a Mokyr essay at PBS.org: “Yet today, once again, we hear concerns that innovation has peaked. Some claim that ‘the low-hanging fruits have all been picked.’ The big inventions that made daily life so much more comfortable — air conditioning, running cold and hot water, antibiotics, ready-made food, the washing machine — have all been made and cannot be matched, so the thinking goes.
Entrepreneur Peter Thiel’s widely quoted line ‘we wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters’ reflects a sense of disappointment. Others feel that the regulatory state reflects a change in culture: we are too afraid to take chances; we have become complacent, lazy and conservative.
Still others, on the contrary, want to stop technology from going much further because they worry that it will render people redundant, as more and more work is done by machines that can see, hear, read and (in their own fashion) think. What we gained as consumers, viewers, patients and citizens, they fear, we may be about to lose as workers. Technology, while it may have saved the world in the past century, has done what it was supposed to do. Now we need to focus on other things, they say.
This view is wrong and dangerous. Technology has not finished its work; it has barely started.”
Tags: Joel Mokyr, Russ Roberts
Tired of good girls
Where are the real bad girls the ones on parole, probation the ones that just got out of rehab? The girls that are more proud of their rap sheet than their work history. I want a chick that likes bald headed, tattooed up guys that been to the big house and now has there crap together. I am tired of the everyday plain Jane women.
Hope to hear from you soon!
Robbing graves to supply medical schools with cadavers is as old as the dissecting table itself, but the ransoming of famous corpses began in earnest in America when an attempt was made to disinter President Lincoln’s remains from his final resting place. A report from the March 13, 1888 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:
Within the last ten years there has arisen a phase of grave robbing against which the law in its present form seems to provide but poorly. Previously the operations of grave robbers had been confined to procuring subjects for the dissecting table, and it is for this class of crimes that the present laws are framed. They do not contemplate the union of shameful extortion to sacrilege in the form of grave robbing for the purpose of obtaining ransom.
Of late years the plundering of cemeteries and vaults with this purpose has become of such frequency that it is now deemed prudent, if not necessary, to place a guard over the grave of every person of wealth or distinction immediately after burial. This kind of grave robbing began in this country in 1876, with an attempt to steal the body of President Lincoln from its resting place in Springfield, Ill. It was the purpose of the conspirators to hold the body for a ransom of $250,000, together with the pardon of a noted counterfeiter to whom they were friendly. The success of the scheme was happily thwarted by the confusion of one of the confederates.
Two years later a like attempt made on the body of A.T. Stewart, of New York, was more successful. The details of this robbery are still remembered. The body has been recovered by the family, but at what cost is not accurately known. Those concerned in the plot have never been apprehended. These well known cases serve to indicate the good reasons for the precautions taken in the protection of the bodies of ex-President Grant, of William H. Vanderbilt and more recently of Mrs. John Jacob Astor.
By way of showing to what extent the law is powerless in such cases, it is of interest to cite the theft of the body of Earl Crawford, in Scotland, in 1882. On the arrest of one of the perpertrators of this outrage it was found that there was no statute more applicable to this case than that for the punishment of sacrilege. No penalties for robbery could be imposed, since a dead body could not be regarded at law as property.
The maximum penalty prescribed by the public statutes of our State for criminal grave robbing is imprisonment not exceeding three years, or by fine not exceeding $2,000. The whole chapter of which this section forms a part has for its subject the preservation of chastity, morality, decency and good order. It is true that it is no more an offense to steal the body of a rich man than it is to steal the body of a poor man, yet there is in the former case an additional element which finds an additional punishment in the eyes of the law. It would seem that but just that in cases where extra inducement in the hope of extortion exists, extra penalties should be imposed; for sacrilege may remain mercifully unknown to the relatives of the dead, but grave robbing, with the aim of extorting ransom, cruelly wounds the hearts of the living and is one of the most shameful forms of plunder.•
Two exchanges from an excellent Fortune interview that Andy Serwer conducted with Marc Andreessen.
The first one focuses on something I blogged about recently, which is the possibility of the invention of new jobs and careers that may occur on a large scale in the post-Industrial Age the way it did in the post-Agrarian Age. As Andreessen points out, though, there’s a hard and scary road getting to that point in our increasingly automated society.
The second is Andreessen’s prediction that cars will become an on-demand, shared good that will destroy the century-old ownership model. I have my doubts about the shared aspect, though I think fleets of driverless cars on demand will become a reality in cities.
_________________________
Andy Serwer:
We all understand that the Internet revolution is inevitable at this point, but it’s also kind of controversial. There are scads of new jobs at Facebook and Twitter and other places, but what about the ones that are destroyed by the inroads of technology into every industry? Are you actually creating more than you’re destroying?
Marc Andreessen:
Jobs are critically important, but looking at economic change through the impact on jobs has always been a difficult way to think about economic progress. Let’s take a historical example. Once upon a time, 100% of the United States effectively was in agriculture, right? Now it’s down to 3%. Productivity in agriculture has exploded. Output has never been higher. The same thing happened in manufacturing 150 years ago or so. It would have been very easy to say, “Stop economic progress because what are all the farmers going to do if they can’t farm?” And of course, we didn’t stop the progress of mechanization and manufacturing, and our answer instead was the creation of new industries.
Andy Serwer:
And the same story will play out with the Internet?
Marc Andreessen:
Right. So the jobs are something that happens in the end. But what happens first are improvements in consumer welfare. This is the part that doesn’t get much attention because jobs going away is a much scarier story. Improvements in consumer welfare are more diffuse, and it’s hard to specifically call them out. But it’s a really big deal. It’s a really big deal for people to have a lot more information. It’s a really big deal for people to be able to communicate and collaborate. One of the things that’s going to be huge in the future is the ability to get educated online. That’s a wave that’s going to hit in a major way in the next 20 years, and will be a huge improvement to consumer welfare all around the world. And so the gains to anybody with a screen and a network connection are absolutely phenomenal. It’s one of those things where everybody’s life keeps getting better. But you don’t get the creation without the destruction. And so there is a lot of turbulence, and will be a lot of turbulence.
_________________________
Andy Serwer:
Speaking of cars, you’ve talked about a shared economy where people will share cars. They won’t own cars. You see a little bit of that today, but is that really the way the world’s going?
Marc Andreessen:
So this is when I get really excited. This is another example of the impact of information transparency on markets. We are 90 years or so into cars. And we drive our cars around. And we own our cars. And then when we’re not in our cars they sit parked. So the average car is utilized maybe two hours out of the day. It sits idle for 90% of the time. The typical occupancy rate in the U.S. is about 1.2 passengers per car ride. And so even when the car is in motion, three-quarters of the seats are unfilled.
And so you start to run this interesting kind of thought experiment, which is what if access to cars was just automatic? What if, whenever you needed a car, there it was? And what if other people who needed that same ride at that same time could just participate in that same ride? What if you could perfectly match supply and demand for transportation?
Taken a step further, what if you could bring delivery into it? Two people were going to drive between towns, and there was also a package that needed to go. Let’s also put that in there so we can fill a seat with a package. Just run the thought experiment and say, “What if we could fully allocate all the cars, and then what if we could have the cars on the road all the time?”
And of course the answer is a whole bunch of things fall out of it. You’d need far fewer cars. The number of cars on the road would plummet by 75% to 90%. You’d instantly solve problems like congestion. You’d instantly solve a huge part of the emissions problem. And you’d cause a huge reduction in the need for gas. And then you’d have this interesting other side effect where you wouldn’t need parking lots, at least not anywhere near the extent that you do now. And so you could turn a lot of parking lots into parks.
Tags: Andy Serwer, Marc Andreessen
Chris Hadfield, the astronaut whose Bowie cover fell to Earth, has penned an article for Wired about the need to treat Spaceship Earth the same way we treat other spacecrafts–with great care. An excerpt:
“The communities and countries best at using energy to optimize a microclimate for human life are also the ones whose people have the longest average lifespans. Canada, Sweden, and Iceland—places with inhospitable winter weather—are front-runners in sustaining human health and life. They have no choice but to use what energy they have in the most efficient manner. Like the careful, constant nurturing of mushrooms in a hothouse, the right application of technology and stability can lead to the greatest yield.
Earth has never fed as many people as it does today. From orbit, the gingham-quilt patterns of farms all across eastern Europe and the massive grain fields of the world’s steppes and prairies are clearly laid out. Vast fields for supply connect to roads and railways for transportation, all leading to dense hubs of consumption in the cities. When the sun is just right, you can even see the wakes of ocean-going ships imperturbably hauling bulk goods between continents.
The space station, high above, is a microcosm—an international collection of people living in a finite area with finite resources, just like the planet below. Power comes from a blend of fossil fuels and renewable energy. Air, food, and water come in limited quantities. Like Earth, the ISS is subject to unpredictable outside forces—solar flares, meteor impacts, technical breakdowns, budget cycles, and international tensions. And in both locations, lives are in the balance. Make a small mistake and people are inconvenienced, capability is lost. Make a big one and people die.”
Tags: Chris Hadfield
Richard Dawkins, evolutionary biologist, atheist-in-chief, coiner of the term “meme,” and maker of perplexing comments about church sex scandals, just did an Ask Me Anything at Reddit. A few exchanges follow.
__________________________
Question:
As an expert on evolution, what do you feel is the strangest creature on Earth, or the one that just doesn’t seem to make sense from an evolutionary standpoint yet continues to survive? (Besides people)
Richard Dawkins:
Nautilus (because of its pinhole camera eye). But that’s just off the top of my head. I’d probably think of a better answer given more time (that is so often true!)
__________________________
Question:
Richard, what would you say to Muslims who point out (correctly) that during Islam’s Golden Age, science and education flourished in the Caliphate as Muslim scientists either started new fields, or built on past work by Greek and Indian scholars.
Richard Dawkins:
Great job in the Middle Ages, guys. What went wrong?
__________________________
Question:
How do you feel about South Park’s depiction of you and their take on the argument?
Richard Dawkins:
Satire is supposed to satirise. Depicting somebody as having a predilection for buggering a bald transvestite is not satire and not witty. The futuristic projection of wars between atheist factions is genuine satire and quite witty. I think it’s important understand the difference. I preferred the experience of going on The Simpsons.
__________________________
Question:
How do you feel now that memes, first discussed in your book The Selfish Gene, have become ubiquitous in internet culture?
Richard Dawkins:
I’m pleased that the concept of meme has become widely understood, but the true meaning is a bit broader than the common understanding. Anything transmitted with high fidelity from brain to brain by imitation is a meme.
__________________________
Question:
Would you like to take a moment to chat about our lord and savior Jesus Christ?
Richard Dawkins:
No thank you.•
Tags: Richard Dawkins
The wonderfully talented Françoise Mouly, art editor at the New Yorker and one of the forces behind the legendary Raw, tells Sarah Boxer of the Los Angeles Review of Books about introducing R. Crumb to the New Yorker during the 1990s:
“Sarah Boxer:
It’s amazing that you ever got R. Crumb in The New Yorker. How did that go down?
Françoise Mouly:
When I started back in 1992, I asked him for an image for the cover. And it was of some interest to him, because as a kid growing up with his brother, what they’re looking at is Mad magazine, but also The New Yorker covers, because it was narrative storytelling. There’s a picture of his brother Charles in their room, and on the walls are New Yorker covers from the ’30s and ’40s.
That medium of the New Yorker cover is a challenge. It’s like writing a kind of sonnet, with only so many meters, or like a haiku, because you can’t use too many words.
Sarah Boxer:
You didn’t always love Crumb’s work. In the Masters of American Comics catalog, you wrote: “I came to R. Crumb’s work with the full force of all my prejudices. I found his work unabashed in its vulgarity and was put off by the glorification of his own nerdiness, his occasionally repulsive depictions of women, blacks, and Jews, and his endless graphic representations of kinky smelly, sweaty sex.”
Françoise Mouly:
I had to get over my prejudices against the offensive part to find the incredibly sensitive, humanistic side of the man. When you read the complete R. Crumb stories, you realize he’s such a good observer of the people around him. It makes sense that he became an emblem of the ’60s, not so much for Mr. Natural, but because he is such a sensitive and communicative observer.
He’s not a hippie in any way. He may have been smoking dope and taking acid, but Crumb was always somewhat mocking of the ‘peace-man’ hippie, the long-haired, bearded hippie. He himself was straitlaced, more of a beatnik, you know, wearing a hat, his beard trimmed. Of course, he’s misogynistic and misanthropic, but he’s also a real humanist. I don’t believe they are incompatible.”
Tags: Françoise Mouly, Sarah Boxer