Excerpts

You are currently browsing the archive for the Excerpts category.

“There Will Be More Progress In The Next 30 Years Than Ever”

January 28, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Bill Gates’ AMAs at Reddit are always fun, wide-ranging affairs. Below are some early exchanges from one he’s currently doing.

_____________________________

Question:

In your opinion, has technology made the masses less intelligent?

Bill Gates:

Technology is not making people less intelligent. If you just look at the complexity people like in Entertainment you can see a big change over my lifetime. Technology is letting people get their questions answered better so they stay more curious. It makes it easier to know a lot of topics which turns out to be pretty important to contribute to solving complex problems.

_____________________________

Question:

2015 will mark the 30th anniversary of Microsoft Windows. What do you think the next 30 years holds in terms of technology? What will personal computing will look like in 2045?

Bill Gates:

There will be more progress in the next 30 years than ever. Even in the next 10 problems like vision and speech understanding and translation will be very good. Mechanical robot tasks like picking fruit or moving a hospital patient will be solved. Once computers/robots get to a level of capability where seeing and moving is easy for them then they will be used very extensively.

One project I am working on with Microsoft is the Personal Agent which will remember everything and help you go back and find things and help you pick what things to pay attention to. The idea that you have to find applications and pick them and they each are trying to tell you what is new is just not the efficient model – the agent will help solve this. It will work across all your devices.

_____________________________

Question:

What do you think has improved life the most in poor countries in the last 5 years?

Bill Gates:

Vaccines make the top of the list. Being able to grow up healthy is the most basic thing. So many kids get infectious diseases and don’t develop mentally and physically. I was in Berlin yesterday helping raise $7.5B for vaccines for kids in poor countries. We barely made it but we did which is so exciting to me!

_____________________________

Question:

What is your opinion on bitcoins or cyptocurency as a whole? Also do you own any yourself?

Bill Gates:

Bitcoin is an exciting new technology. For our Foundation work we are doing digital currency to help the poor get banking services. We don’t use bitcoin specifically for two reasons. One is that the poor shouldn’t have a currency whose value goes up and down a lot compared to their local currency. Second is that if a mistake is made in who you pay then you need to be able to reverse it so anonymity wouldn’t work.

Overall financial transactions will get cheaper using the work we do and Bitcoin related approaches.

Making sure that it doesn’t help terrorists is a challenge for all new technology.

_____________________________

Question:

Is there anything in life that you regret doing or not doing?

Bill Gates:

I feel pretty stupid that I don’t know any foreign languages. I took Latin and Greek in High School and got A’s and I guess it helps my vocabulary but I wish I knew French or Arabic or Chinese. I keep hoping to get time to study one of these – probably French because it is the easiest. I did Duolingo for awhile but didn’t keep it up. Mark Zuckerberg amazingly learned Mandarin and did a Q&A with Chinese students – incredible.

_____________________________

Question:

What do you think about life-extending and immortality research?

Bill Gates:

It seems pretty egocentric while we still have malaria and TB for rich people to fund things so they can live longer. It would be nice to live longer though I admit.•

Tags:

“The Parents Were Worried About Evil In the World And Wanted To Escape From ‘Impending Doom'”

January 28, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Some people can be citizens of the world and do evil and others can live cloistered in their homes and do good, but there’s a great danger in recusing ourselves from the wider world. It’s hard enough to understand this spinning planet when we’re in its midst and that much more difficult when we’re removed. A single person can go mad and a couple can “nurture” each other’s madness, a family creating its own reality. Such horrible potential knows almost no borders, existing seemingly wherever people are. That’s apparently what occurred with Benjamin and Kristi Strack, a Utah couple that was unwell before things got even worse. From the AP report:

SPRINGVILLE, Utah (AP) — A Utah couple and their three children who were found dead in their home last fall overdosed on drugs after the parents told friends and family they were worried about the apocalypse, authorities said Tuesday. 

Police also found old letters written by the mother to a Utah inmate serving time for killing family members in the name of God, slayings chronicled in the 2003 Jon Krakauer book Under the Banner of Heaven.

Benjamin and Kristi Strack and three of their four children — ages 11, 12 and 14 — were found dead in September in a locked bedroom of their Springville home. All five were tucked into covers in and around their parents’ bed.

At a news conference Tuesday, Springville Police Chief J. Scott Finlayson said investigators have concluded their probe and determined the family members died from drug toxicity from either methadone, heroin or a combination of drugs, including those found in cold medicine.

Authorities determined the parents committed suicide. The younger two children’s deaths were ruled homicides, although Finlayson said there were no signs of a struggle.

The manner of death for the 14-year-old, Benson Strack, was undetermined.

Police said Benson wrote a goodbye letter, leaving some of his belongings to his best friend. The only other recent writing the family left behind was a notebook containing handwritten to-do lists about feeding the pets and other chores.

Finlayson said interviews with people who knew the Stracks indicated the parents were worried about evil in the world and wanted to escape from “impending doom.”

“There seemed to be a concern about a pending apocalypse that the parents bought into,” Finlayson said. “While some friends though that suicide may have been, or could have been, included in their plans, others believed they were going to move somewhere and live off the grid.”•

Tags: , ,

“They Therefore Threaten To Replace The Humans Who Once Made The Day-To-Day Decisions”

January 27, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The dream of the automated workplace, shared by 1930s European Fascists and technologists in postwar America, is not only aimed at blue collars but white ones also, the secretaries under siege but bosses as well. In hs Aeon essay, “RoboCorp,” Daniel C. Morris makes digestible the complexities of cryptocurrency and DACs (Distributed Autonomous Corporations) while trying to work through the pros and cons of such an arrangement. An excerpt:

“…the true economic significance of automated systems and robotics remains troublingly unclear. While they make our daily lives easier by increasing the productive efficiency of each input unit of human labour, they displace jobs; automated factories need far fewer workers. John Maynard Keynes saw this coming 85 years ago, when he coined the term ‘technological unemployment’.

Technologists (and many economists) argue that workers who lose their simple or repetitive jobs to machines are thereby set free to perform more complicated tasks. One former factory worker might supervise his robot replacement, another might design them, and still others move into entirely new sectors of the economy. Until 2008, that logic seemed to largely hold true – automation increased efficiency without dramatically reducing employment.

But automated logistics and financial systems aren’t just putting rivets into holes. These robots, whether DACs or more centralised systems, are now able to move money around an economy programmatically. They therefore threaten to replace the humans who once made the day-to-day decisions required to run businesses and organisations. Would that be so bad? The machines have already come for the manual and clerical workers; perhaps there’s a certain kind of grim satisfaction in watching them close in on the executive class, too. And yet it would be hasty to predict a broadly egalitarian outcome. The US economist Paul Krugman sees the broader risk: that we will end up ‘a society that grows ever richer, but in which all the gains in wealth accrue to whoever owns the robots.’•

Tags: ,

“Do Not Permit Burial Of The Dead Until Some Certain Indication Of Death Is Apparent”

January 27, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

From the 1902 World Almanac and Encyclopedia, the best methods to tell if someone has died:

Tests of Death: Hold mirror to mouth. If living, moisture will gather. Push pin into flesh. If dead the hole will remain. If alive it will close up. Place fingers in front of a strong light. If alive, they will appear red; if dead, black or dark. If a person is dead decomposition is almost sure to set in after 72 hours have elapsed. If it does not, then there is room for investigation by the physician. Do not permit burial of the dead until some certain indication of death is apparent.•

“India Is Going To Need On Order Of A New Chicago Every Single Year For The Fifteen Years”

January 27, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Gurgaon in India is a libertarian wet dream, a high-tech private city that grew from nothing, knows little or no regulation and has no infrastructure. You want your sewage taken away? Hire a firm to do it. You want to start a business? Don’t worry about pesky rules. You want roads to drive on? Not so much. You’re worried about environmental protection? Wait, what? It’s the free market extrapolated to an extreme.

On the latest EconTalk episode, Russ Roberts and fellow economist Alex Tabarrok have a lively discussion about this private city and other ones which favor “voluntary action.” While the guest is enthusiastic about Gurgaon as something of a model for the next global cities, he acknowledges its faults (“The roads situation is terrible, a disaster”), though he often waves these shortcomings away by saying they’re no worse than in other parts of India. The idea of using some sort of Disneyland approach to building private cities on a large scale, which Tabarrok seriously suggests, seems a little cuckoo to me. An excerpt:

Alex Tabarrok:

Between just 2015 and 2030, in India, the urban population is expected to increase by over a quarter of a billion people. So, just think about that. What that means is that during the next 15 years, even taking into account the reduced infrastructure in India, India is going to need on the order of a new Chicago every single year for the next 15 years. At least. And then continuing on into the future. So we have, around the world, massive increases in the urban population. And most of this is happening in the developing world. And the developing world, of course, is struggling with corruption and with poor governments and with a lack of information. And you know, we just can’t expect governments to work very well in these countries. So how are we going to plan? We can hope, right, that cities will be planned and laid out and the sewage lines will be planned for the future and everything will be divided neatly. You know, the way an urban planner in theory would do it. But that’s just not realistic. So, what can we expect? Are there other ways of doing this? And Gurgaon is one possible alternative route, which involves, you know, leaving a whole lot to the private sector.

Russ Roberts:

When you talk about that increasing urbanization, say, in India, the most likely way that’s going to happen is that the existing cities in India are going to get larger. And they are going to have increasing stress on their current infrastructure systems, which are not very effective, from what I understand, already. And so, the likely result of this urbanization and population growth is going to be muddling through with a big set of imperfections. It seems to me China is taking a different approach. China is saying: We need a bunch of new cities. So they are just building them. They are building cities out in the middle of relatively nowhere, from scratch. With lots of buildings, lots of infrastructure, from the top down. And I did read today–I didn’t get to click through on the tweet, but somebody tweeted that the Chinese, some Chinese officials were bidding in auctions to keep land prices high in some of the cities that they are worried about. This is not likely to be a successful strategy for creating value. But China has taken a different approach. It might be a lot better.

Alex Tabarrok:

So, current urban areas are certainly going to grow. But there’s also no question that we’re going to need entirely new cities–both in India and China and elsewhere. And you just look at the United States. Even in the United States, which has long been majority-urbanized, we’ve seen growth, really essentially new cities. Like Houston, has grown in the past 50 years from 100,000 to, you know, several million people. And so forth. You think about the Industrial Revolution in Great Britain: the creation of new cities like Birmingham and so forth. It’s not just London getting bigger, in other words. Although that happened as well. So, I want to put China aside for a minute, and maybe come back and talk about that. But I want to keep on, on Gurgaon, for a little bit longer, because I want to talk about what has worked, and what hasn’t.

Russ Roberts:

Yeah, go ahead.

Alex Tabarrok:

So, fire prevention in Gurgaon works really well. So, what has happened is these private developers buy a chunk of land. And within that chunk of land you have excellent infrastructure; you have excellent delivery of services. So, the developers will build office parks. And within the office parks, you have sewage. But the sewage doesn’t go anywhere. It just–once it leaves the office park–well, sometimes it will go to a small treatment plant. You’ll also have electricity–electricity 24 hours, but funded with diesel, provided with diesel. Which is inefficient. You don’t get all the economies of scale. You do get excellent fire protection. It’s pretty interesting: Gurgaon has India’s only private fire department. And it’s the only fire department really in all of India which has equipment which can reach the top of these skyscrapers.

Russ Roberts:

Good idea.

Alex Tabarrok:

Yeah, exactly. The public system is a complete disaster. You also have delivery of transportation. So, these private firms hire taxis, sort of like Uber but a totally private system to bring their workers, ferry their workers, all over the city.

Russ Roberts:

Yeah. By the way, it’s important to mention: we’ve had some discussions of private busses here, in Chile with Mike Munger. But of course many firms in Silicon Valley outside of San Francisco bus workers into their companies and have major, significant private bus companies.

Alex Tabarrok:

Exactly. It’s very similar.

Russ Roberts:

They are running them themselves. I don’t think they are hiring them out. But they are not public.

Alex Tabarrok:

Exactly. It’s very similar to that.•

Tags: ,

“That’s A Lot Of Murderers Who Got Away Clean”

January 27, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The murder rate has declined pretty much all over America, in cities enamored with the Broken Windows Theory and those not, and Los Angeles is no exception, having seen a remarkable drop since the bad old days of the early 1990s. One cloud in the silver lining of fewer murders is that those committed in L.A. have a very low arrest rate. From Hillel Aron in the LA Weekly:

The number of murders in Los Angeles County are down – way down. In 1993, the year after the Rodney King riots, there were 1,944 homicides. In 2014, there were 551. That’s nearly a 75 percent drop in less than 20 years, an astonishing reversal of fortune that occurred all over the country, though it was especially prominent in L.A., known as the gang capital of the world. 

But there’s a dark cloud to that silver lining, as it turns out. The Los Angeles News Group published a disturbing package on Sunday, “Getting Away With Murder,” the product of an 18-month study in which its Los Angeles Daily News and other papers found that between 2000 and 2010, 46 percent of all homicides went unsolved.

That’s a lot of murderers who got away clean. Over the same period, the national average was 37 percent. 

Perhaps even more depressing, 51 percent of murders where the victim was black went unsolved. When the victim was white, only 30 percent went unsolved. Over half of all unsolved homicide victims were Latino.

And actually, the real story might be even worse than the numbers suggest. The Daily News also found that LAPD listed some homicides as “cleared” (i.e., solved) even though no one had been convicted: 

596 homicide cases from 2000 through 2010 that the LAPD has classified as “cleared other” — cop speak for solving a crime without arresting and filing charges against a suspect….

The LAPD cleared some of these cases because the D.A. declined to prosecute, but when asked for the reason each case was cleared, police officials did not respond.

In other words, the police think they know who the killer is, in many cases, but knowing is not the same as being able to convict before a jury.•

Tags:

“Hackman Played Exceptionalists — Cops, Lawyers, Coaches, Military Leaders, Heads Of Industry, Lex Luthor”

January 27, 2015 in Excerpts, Film | Permalink

In the 1970s, Gene Hackman portrayed a very American sort of exceptionalism, lending his flesh to characters possessed by a thrilling and dangerous gusto, who were often stunned that their efficacy could be called into question, that their best punch could be taken and returned. Some of my favorite Hackman performances are the strangest ones from that period, from the titles that became famous (The Conversation) to the ones that did not (Prime Cut, Night Moves). In a wonderful Grantland piece, Steve Hyden offers up a career retrospective on one cinema’s best stars. An excerpt:

I was searching for a thread in Hackman’s movies, and for a while I wasn’t sure I’d find one. Unlike his contemporaries Dustin Hoffman and Robert Duvall — Hackman’s running mates in the late-’50s/early-’60s New York City theater scene, and the other defining examples of the “not quite a leading man, not quite a character actor” type — Hackman didn’t have passion projects. When Hackman had the clout to function as the reigning auteur on set, he chose not to take advantage. He instead approached the material as a craftsman-for-hire — speak the lines as written, get the story across, execute the take, cash the check. When asked by GQ in 2011 what he wanted his epitaph to be, Hackman was customarily humble: “He tried.”

Nevertheless, there is a thematic link in Hackman’s movies, and it doesn’t square with the word most often used to describe him: Everyman. On the contrary, Hackman played exceptionalists — cops, lawyers, coaches, military leaders, heads of industry, Lex Luthor. For more than 30 years, people bought movie tickets to watch Hackman take charge. He was a molder of men: Hackman taught Redford how to ski, DiCaprio how to shoot, and Keanu how to play quarterback.

As the culture’s perspective on Great White Males changed, so did cinema’s view of Hackman. If you want to chart how attitudes about power shifted in the late 20th century, Gene Hackman movies are a good place to start. His filmography unfolds as a treatise on how authority is established, then corrupted, then dissolved.

In the Watergate-weary ’70s, Hackman was a capable man called on to fail, again and again. Popeye Doyle in The French Connection kills a fellow cop and lets Fernando Rey evade capture. Harry Caul in The Conversation is duped by his own surveillance and allows his client to be murdered. In the underrated noir Night Moves, Hackman is private detective Harry Moseby, who is lied to by everybody and seems resigned to it; when his wife, who is cuckolding him, asks who’s winning the football game he’s sullenly watching, Moseby says, “Nobody, one side’s just losing more slowly than the other.” Even in Scarecrow, Hackman’s personal favorite of his films, the one in which he plays a penniless drifter named Max Millan, Hackman loses the one thing he has: the adoration of his friend, Lion (Al Pacino), who winds up getting institutionalized right before the pals can realize their dream of opening a car wash.•

Tags:

“Does This Group Feel The Need To Exist In A Place Outside Of ‘Normal’?”

January 26, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Laurie Segall, correspondent for CNN, a paragon of journaltainment, just did an Ask Me Anything at Reddit in which she discussed alternative lifestyles among Silicon Valley technologists, particularly in regards sex and drugs, from polyamory to biohacking. The Q&A is tied to a new TV special which needs to score ratings for Jeff Zucker’s party boat of reportage or he’s off to the Game Show Network. A few exchanges follow.

________________________________

Question:

What’s an example of the members of a sex party? For example, 3 silicon execs and 2 prostitutes and 4 average joes…or just 6 silicon execs.

Laurie Segall:

Lots of engineers, a mobile developer who worked at a big Silicon Valley company, a lawyer – all types. What was interesting was the guy who started the bronze party (swingers event I attended) said a lot of startup people would come to events and then help him with his website and getting around gmail filters.

Question:

Do you feel there was a difference between how men and woman approached drugs, sex, etc. in Silicon Valley, and how do you feel it reflects on the gender disparity in STEM fields as whole? 

Laurie Segall:

I learned about two different sex communities – polyamorous communities and the swinger crowd (they like to be called “lifestyle members,” not swingers). Polyamory is based more on emotions and swinger community is based more on sex. The woman I spoke to who was polyamorous seemed very in touch with how men and woman are looked at in general. She said people in her position could face discrimination at work and spoke a bit about the power dynamic in Silicon Valley. It was easier to find men experimenting with drugs than women. That’s just a start… we could talk for a long time about this.

________________________________

Question:

Did you try any of the smart drugs like piracetam, ciltep or modafinil? If so, did the have a smart effect?

Laurie Segall:

I have a bag full of them with me now actually and thought about doing a whole “I tried smart drugs” piece. I’d want to try them over a long period of time and not when I’m looking for a result if that makes any sense. I interviewed the guy who started ciltep and it’s interesting to hear about so many people trying to make their own versions and stacks of nootropics. I will try them at some point but haven’t yet. Dave Asprey, who we interviewed for this, gave us bulletproof coffee. It has some oil in there that’s supposed to make you more energetic. It certainly worked. For about 10 minutes I was talking a mile a minute. This morning I took a giant bag full of the smart drugs on the subway with me and got some interesting looks.

________________________________

Question:

You mention psychedelics. How are these being used? Are they used for a specific performance enhancement or rather to recreationally?

Laurie Segall:

The entrepreneurs I spoke to said they used LSD for creative breakthrough moments. I’m sure LSD is used recreationally, but the Cisco engineer said he didn’t consider it recreational. He took it 4-5 times a year when he was looking to think of a creative solution. Tim Ferriss said that while smart drugs are used to work harder, stay up later, be more productive, psychedelics are often used to pour gasoline on the fire and solve hard problems. LSD is classified as highly addictive so there are quite a few risks associated with using it.

Question:

What are some of the results people have said they have gotten from taking the drugs?

Laurie Segall:

One of the entrepreneurs said he was able to get rid of his brain fog. He said different types of smart drugs and nootropics helped him with everything from memory to energy. He did mention side effects. That’s something people should know about if they’re going to try this stuff. There are no long-term studies on a lot of these things.

________________________________

Question:

Is there an element of elitism going on here? Does this group feel the need to exist in a place outside of “normal”? I can almost set the scene where a group of techies sit circled around their coffee table crunching stacks and laying out the partner rotation schedule on an excel sheet. Heads stuck squarely up their own asses. Am I off base here?

Laurie Segall:

I think a lot of these people have more money and live in a place where it’s a bit more ok to explore different lifestyles that might now be acceptable in more traditional places. I do think that in order to have access to a lot of this stuff you’ve got to have more money, so that’s something to consider. I didn’t get the feeling that some of the people I interviewed had that element of elitism.•

Tags:

“You’ve Got An iPhone Now And A Better TV, But Your Median Income Hasn’t Changed”

January 26, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The American middle class is thinner and grayer than it used to be and that’s not just due to the Great Recession. The trend lines have been headed in that direction for decades. Thomas Piketty has suggested that the green shoots of widespread prosperity, like the period the U.S. enjoyed in the aftermath of WWII, are more exception than rule. But belief in the American Dream, that those who work hard will be rewarded, is difficult to shake no matter what the numbers say, and many still vote their aspirations rather than their actuality, which can lead to policy mismatched to reality. From Dionne Searcey and Robert Gebeloff at the New York Times: 

The middle class that President Obama identified in his State of the Union speech last week as the foundation of the American economy has been shrinking for almost half a century.

In the late 1960s, more than half of the households in the United States were squarely in the middle, earning, in today’s dollars, $35,000 to $100,000 a year. Few people noticed or cared as the size of that group began to fall, because the shift was primarily caused by more Americans climbing the economic ladder into upper-income brackets.

But since 2000, the middle-class share of households has continued to narrow, the main reason being that more people have fallen to the bottom. At the same time, fewer of those in this group fit the traditional image of a married couple with children at home, a gap increasingly filled by the elderly.

This social upheaval helps explain why the president focused on reviving the middle class, offering a raft of proposals squarely aimed at concerns like paying for a college education, taking parental leave, affording child care and buying a home. …

According to a New York Times poll in December, 60 percent of people who call themselves middle class think that if they work hard they will get rich. But the evidence suggests that goal is increasingly out of reach. When middle class people look up, they see the rich getting richer while they spin their wheels.

“The middle has basically stayed the same; it hasn’t improved,” said Lawrence F. Katz, an economist at Harvard University. “You’ve got an iPhone now and a better TV, but your median income hasn’t changed. What’s really changed is the penthouse has become supernice.”•

Tags: , ,

“The Union’s Victory Had Wider Repercussions”

January 26, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

From an Economist review of Don Doyle’s new book, The Cause of All Nations: An International History of the American Civil War, which analyzes the global ramifications of the War Between the States:

The Union’s victory had wider repercussions. Spain, fearing American naval power, began withdrawing from its colonies in Latin America and the Caribbean. Ulysses Grant, a civil-war general, turned his military attention south, to Mexico, where Napoleon III had installed an Austrian, Maximilian, as emperor. When the threat of an alliance between France and the Confederacy was dashed, Napoleon withdrew his support and in 1867 Maximilian was executed by Mexican troops. Across the ocean, Britain’s republicans marched to victory that same year, forcing the passage of the Reform Act, while Napoleon III lasted just four more years, until the Paris Commune seized France’s capital. Democracy had not just survived, but flourished.

After Lincoln’s death Avenir National, a French newspaper, wrote that he “represented the cause of democracy in the largest and the most universal understanding of the word. That cause is our cause, as much as it is that of the United States.” To commemorate the Union’s victory a French artist crafted a statue out of copper sheeting, a figure representing freedom, tall and proud, holding a torch aloft. The Statue of Liberty stands today in New York harbour, the copper now green with age, her gaze fixed across the Atlantic on Europe.•

Tags:

“They Are Reluctant To Spend A Few Billions Of Dollars To Get Back An Infinite Quantity Of Money”

January 26, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

In a 1979 interview conducted by NASA veteran and journalist Phil Konstantin for Southwest Airlines magazine, Isaac Asimov held forth on the odds of humans surviving on Earth and flourishing in space. An excerpt:

Southwest Airlines:

How about orbital space colonies? Do you see these facilities being built or is the government going to cut back on projects like this?

Isaac Asimov:

Well, now you’ve put your finger right on it. In order to have all of these wonderful things in space, we don’t have to wait for technology – we’ve got the technology, and we don’t have to wait for the know-how – we’ve got that too. All we need is the political go-ahead and the economic willingness to spend the money that is necessary. It is a little frustrating to think that if people concentrate on how much it is going to cost they will realize the great amount of profit they will get for their investment. Although they are reluctant to spend a few billions of dollars to get back an infinite quantity of money, the world doesn’t mind spending $400 billion every years on arms and armaments, never getting anything back from it except a chance to commit suicide.

Southwest Airlines:

Do you think that we will avoid a self-inflicted global catastrophe?

Isaac Asimov:

The chances don’t look so good, but they don’t look so black, either. The birth rate is going down over most of the world, and if it continues to go down, then perhaps we can bring a halt to the population explosion before it completely overwhelms us. There is always the danger of nuclear war, but we’ve kept away from it now for thirty-five years. And maybe we can keep on keeping away from it. We’ve been polluting and using up our energy, but I think more and more we are aware of the dangers of this. And perhaps, we will do something about it. To my way of thinking, the biggest obstacle to solving the problems we have, and we have some of the solutions, is that the world is dividing up into separate nations, all of which are more concerned over their own short-term interests than over the long-term survival of the human species. And as long as that is so, then I don’t think we will have a chance, because we will all go down the tube quarreling, so to speak.

Southwest Airlines:

Do you see this as the foreseeable future, or will we have enough sense to avoid this?

Isaac Asimov:

Well, I do see this tendency to draw back from the brink. In other words, we to tend to realize that we can’t afford to quarrel, the earth is too small for that, and the United States and the USSR do keep talking and now it looks as though the US and China are going to keep talking. I would like to see the Soviet Union and China have a detente, too. I would like to see initiative toward peace between Israel and Eygpt expanded to include the rest of the Middle East. All of these things are hopeful beginnings. The various detentes are hopeful beginnings, but they are only beginnings, and at the rate they are moving, we will never make it. So, we will have to go faster.•

Tags: ,

“And If CDs Are Truly Dead, Then Digital Music Sales Are Lying In The Adjacent Grave”

January 26, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

In an Atlantic piece, Derek Thompson notes that while CDs are under siege, digital music is itself being disrupted, with abundance making profits scarce. Music is desired, but the record store–in any form–is not. The opening:

CDs are dead.

That doesn’t seem like such a controversial statement. Maybe it should be. The music business sold 141 million CDs in the U.S. last year. That’s more than the combined number of tickets sold to the most popular movies in 2014 (Guardians) and 2013 (Iron Man 3). So “dead,” in this familiar construction, isn’t the same as zero. It’s more like a commonly accepted short-cut for a formerly popular thing is now withering at a commercially meaningful rate.

And if CDs are truly dead, then digital music sales are lying in the adjacent grave. Both categories are down double-digits in the last year, with iTunes sales diving at least 13 percent.

The recorded music industry is being eaten, not by one simple digital revolution, but rather by revolutions inside of revolutions, mouths inside of mouths, Alien-style. Digitization and illegal downloads kicked it all off. MP3 players and iTunes liquified the album. That was enough to send recorded music’s profits cascading. But today the disruption is being disrupted: Digital track sales are falling at nearly the same rate as CD sales, as music fans are turning to streaming—on iTunes, SoundCloud, Spotify, Pandora, iHeartRadio, and music blogs. Now that music is superabundant, the business (beyond selling subscriptions to music sites) thrives only where scarcity can be manufactured—in concert halls, where there are only so many seats, or in advertising, where one song or band can anchor a branding campaign.•

_____________________________

“In your home or in your car, protect your valuable tapes.”

Tags:

“Uber Says Nearly Half Its Drivers Become Inactive After A Year – Either Because They Quit Or Are Terminated”

January 26, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The Peer Economy may be a good idea whose time has come, but that doesn’t mean it’s good for workers. In America, it’s a crumb tossed to those squeezed from the middle class by globalization, automation, etc. Keeping employees happy isn’t a goal of Uber and others because it treats labor like a dance marathon, the music never stopping, new “employee-partners” continually being supplied by a whirl of desperation. From Douglas MacMillan at the WSJ:

The sheer numbers of Uber’s labor pool and rate of growth are hard to fathom. The company added 40,000 new drivers in the U.S. in the month of December alone. The authors of the paper say the number of new drivers is doubling every six months. At the same time, Uber says nearly half its drivers become inactive after a year – either because they quit or are terminated.

If those trends continue, Uber could end this year with roughly half-a-million drivers in the U.S. alone.

That growth is being driven mainly by UberX, the company’s service for non-professional drivers that first rolled out in 2012. UberX has create a new part-time job opportunity for people who have never driven professionally, which account for 64% of Uber’s total number of drivers.

Most, or 62% of Uber drivers, have at least one additional source of income. Which could mean that at least for some, Uber is not economically feasible as a full-time job.

Uber claims an average driver makes $19.04 an hour, after paying Uber a commission, higher than the $12.90 average hourly wage (including tips, Uber says) that the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates for taxis and chauffeurs. Uber drivers make the most average pay in New York, followed by San Francisco and Boston.

The average pay for former taxi drivers on Uber is $23 per hour; for former black car drivers it’s $27 per hour.

But the paper’s authors admit these figures don’t include expenses that come out drivers own pockets, including gas, maintenance and insurance. And a number of people with experience driving for the company say Uber has made it more difficult to make a good wage because it frequently cuts prices as a way to entice new passengers.

A drop in prices can have a profound effect on driver pay.•

Tags:

“Today’s Automatic Machines With Their Electronic Brains Are The Advance Guard Of A New Army Of Workers”

January 25, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

It took decades longer than predicted in the 1954 Popular Mechanics article “Is the Automatic Factory Here?” for “electronic brains” to mature enough to replace human workers en masse in a concentrated time frame, but the day of reckoning is apparently finally here–and we’re still only at the beginning. The automated workplace’s eventual arrival was clear during the peace-dividend period in post-WWII America, with its bowling-ball return machines and device-driven assembly lines. The question is whether, as in the ’50s and ever since, new opportunities will arise to replace those disappeared by Weak AI. An excerpt:

Automatic brains and tools are even marching out of the shops and into the offices. A new electronic system for a Chicago mail-order firm gulps down catalogue orders as fast as 10 operators can press keys. In much less than a second, an operator can find out the total number of orders on file for a particular item. The machine does the work of 39,000 adding machines and much of the brain work of 40-odd girls who formerly classified and recorded the orders.

Dr. Simon Ramo, head of the Ramo-Woolridge Corporation and one the nation’s leading authorities on “synthetic intelligence” declares flatly: “It is possible for engineers today, on the basis of known science, to produce devices which could displace a very large fraction of the white-collar workers who are doing routine paperwork which can be reduced to simple thought processes.”

Today’s automatic machines with their electronic brains are the advance guard of a new army of workers. An appropriate word has popped into the language to describe these “synthetic” workers and thinkers, a word that likely will be as commonplace as the word electronics within five years. That word is automation.

Down-to-earth engineers, supervisors and even businessmen are becoming experts on automation. This is not a Rube Goldberg dream nor the zany Technocracy of the early ’30s, but a new Industrial Revolution, a revolution that is coming slowly but inevitably.

The first Industrial Revolution replaced man’s muscles with machinery. The new revolution, most automation experts firmly believe, will replace man’s routine brainwork with machines. Dr. Ramo says:

“Surely no one can deny that the replacing of man’s brains will effect some sort of revolution. The biggest factor in changing all business and industry must be the coming of the age of synthetic electronic intelligence.”•

Tags: ,

“Within Two Decades, We Will Have Almost Unlimited Energy, Food And Clean Water”

January 25, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The 2015 version of the Gates Annual Letter makes bold and hopeful predictions for the world by 2030 (infant mortality halved, an HIV vaccine, Africa a prosperous continent, etc.) In the spirit of the missive, Politico invited other thinkers to consider life 15 years hence. Below are two examples representing polar opposites, neither of which seems particularly likely.

_____________________________

Technology for the good

By Vivek Wadhwa, fellow at the Arthur & Toni Rembe Rock Center for Corporate Governance at Stanford University

Technology is advancing faster than people think and making amazing things possible. Within two decades, we will have almost unlimited energy, food and clean water; advances in medicine will allow us to live longer and healthier lives; robots will drive our cars, manufacture our goods and do our chores. It will also become possible to solve critical problems that have long plagued humanity such as hunger, disease, poverty and lack of education. Think of systems to clean water; sensors to transform agriculture; digital tutors that run on cheap smartphones to educate children; medical tests on inexpensive sensor-based devices. The challenge is to focus our technology innovators on the needs of the many rather than the elite few so that we can better all of humanity.•

_____________________________

No breakthroughs for the better

By Leslie Gelb, president emeritus and board senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations

The world of 2030 will be an ugly place, littered with rebellion and repression. Societies will be deeply fragmented and overwhelmed by irreconcilable religious and political groups, by disparities in wealth, by ignorant citizenry and by states’ impotence to fix problems. This world will resemble today’s, only almost everything will be more difficult to manage and solve.

Advances in technology and science won’t save us. Technology will both decentralize power and increase the power of central authorities. Social media will be able to prompt mass demonstrations in public squares, even occasionally overturning governments as in Hosni Mubarak’s Egypt, but oligarchs and dictators will have the force and power to prevail as they did in Cairo. Almost certainly, science and politics won’t be up to checking global warming, which will soon overwhelm us.

Muslims will be the principal disruptive factor, whether in the Islamic world, where repression, bad governance and economic underperformance have sparked revolt, or abroad, where they are increasingly unhappy and disdained by rulers and peoples. In America, blacks will become less tolerant of their marginalization, as will other persecuted minorities around the world. These groups will challenge authority, and authority will slam back with enough force to deeply wound, but not destroy, these rebellions.

A long period of worldwide economic stagnation and even decline will reinforce these trends. There will be sustained economic gulfs between rich and poor. And the rich will be increasingly willing to use government power to maintain their advantages.

Unfortunately, the next years will see a reversal of the hopes for better government and for effective democracies that loomed so large at the end of the Cold War.•

Tags: , , ,

“If We Ever Did Make Contact, What Social Problems Would That Meeting Force Us To Face As A Species?”

January 25, 2015 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Lee Billings, author of the wonderful and touching 2014 book, Five Billion Years of Solitude, is interviewed on various aspects of exoplanetary exploration by Steve Silberman of h+ Magazine. An exchange about what contact might be like were it to occur:

Steve Silberman:

If we ever make contact with life on other planets, they will be the type of creatures that we could sit down and have a Mos Eisley IPA or Alderaan ale with — even if, by then, we’ve worked out the massive processing and corpus dataset problems inherent in building a Universal Translator that works much better than Google? And if we ever did make contact, what social problems would that meeting force us to face as a species?

Lee Billings:

Outside of the simple notion that complex intelligent life may be so rare as to never allow us a good chance of finding another example of it beyond our own planet, there are three major pessimistic contact scenarios that come to mind, though there are undoubtedly many more that could be postulated and explored. The first pessimistic take is that the differences between independently emerging and evolving biospheres would be so great as to prevent much meaningful communication occurring between them if any intelligent beings they generated somehow came into contact. Indeed, the differences could be so great that neither side would recognize or distinguish the other as being intelligent at all, or even alive in the first place. An optimist might posit that even in situations of extreme cognitive divergence, communication could take place through the universal language of mathematics.

The second pessimistic take is that intelligent aliens, far from being incomprehensible and ineffable, would be in fact very much like us, due to trends of convergent evolution, the tendency of biology to shape species to fit into established environmental niches. Think of the similar streamlined shapes of tuna, sharks, and dolphins, despite their different evolutionary histories. Now consider that in terms of biology and ecology humans are apex predators, red in tooth and claw. We have become very good at exploiting those parts of Earth’s biosphere that can be bent to serve our needs, and equally adept at utterly annihilating those parts that, for whatever reason, we believe run counter to our interests. It stands to reason that any alien species that managed to embark on interstellar voyages to explore and colonize other planetary systems could, like us, be a product of competitive evolution that had effectively conquered its native biosphere. Their intentions would not necessarily be benevolent if they ever chose to visit our solar system.

The third pessimistic scenario is an extension of the second, and postulates that if we did encounter a vastly superior alien civilization, even if they were benevolent they could still do us harm through the simple stifling of human tendencies toward curiosity, ingenuity, and exploration. If suddenly an Encyclopedia Galactica was beamed down from the heavens, containing the accumulated knowledge and history of one or more billion-year-old cosmic civilizations, would people still strive to make new scientific discoveries and develop new technologies? Imagine if solutions were suddenly presented to us for all the greatest problems of philosophy, mathematics, physics, astronomy, chemistry, and biology. Imagine if ready-made technologies were suddenly made available that could cure most illnesses, provide practically limitless clean energy, manufacture nearly any consumer good at the press of a button, or rapidly, precisely alter the human body and mind in any way the user saw fit. Imagine not only our world or our solar system but our entire galaxy made suddenly devoid of unknown frontiers. Whatever would become of us in that strange new existence is something I cannot fathom.

The late Czech astronomer Zdeněk Kopal summarized the pessimist outlook succinctly decades ago, in conversation with his British colleague David Whitehouse. As they were talking about contact with alien civilizations, Kopal grabbed Whitehouse by the arm and coldly said, “Should we ever hear the space-phone ringing, for God’s sake let us not answer. We must avoid attracting attention to ourselves.”•

Tags: , , ,

“My Show Was Often Like A Zoo”

January 25, 2015 in Excerpts, Urban Studies | Permalink

Joe Franklin had a talk show on television for more than 40 years, until somebody found out. 

Like a Ben Katchor character come to life, he possessed an encyclopedic memory for things nobody cared about anymore, hoarding popular culture which had grown unpopular and doggedly appreciating vanishing entertainments: platters of wax, alleys of tin pan, anecdotes of Eddie Cantor. That he occasionally welcomed a cutting-edge guest seemed almost an accident of mathematical possibility, the stopped clock being right twice a day. Franklin always insisted that he had never dyed his hair; the bottle of shoe polish declined comment. He was apparently married to a woman who did some Bettie Page-ish bondage modeling back in the day. Who knew? An excerpt from his New York Times obituary penned by James Barron:

What came to be considered campy began as pioneering programming: the first regular program that Channel 7 had ever broadcast at noon. WJZ-TV, as the station was known then, had not been signing on until late afternoon before the premiere of “Joe Franklin — Disk Jockey” on Jan. 8, 1951.

Soon celebrities like Elvis Presley, Bing Crosby and John F. Kennedy were making their way to the dingy basement studio on West 67th Street — a room with hot lights that was “twice the size of a cab,” Mr. Franklin recalled in 2002. He booked Woody Allen, Dustin Hoffman, Barbra Streisand, Bill Cosby and Liza Minnelli as guests when they were just starting out, and hired two other young performers, Bette Midler and Barry Manilow, as his in-house singer and accompanist.

“My show was often like a zoo,” he said in 2002. “I’d mix Margaret Mead with the man who whistled through his nose, or Richard Nixon with the tap-dancing dentist.”

Mr. Franklin claimed a perfect attendance record: He said he never missed a show. Bob Diamond, his director for the last 18 years of his television career, said that there were a few times in the days of live broadcasts when the show had to start without Mr. Franklin. But Mr. Franklin always got there eventually.

And he always seemed to have a gimmick. He celebrated his 40th anniversary on television by interviewing himself, using a split-screen arrangement. “I got a few questions I’m planning to surprise myself with,” he said before he began.

Had he been asked, he could have told viewers that he was born Joe Fortgang in the Bronx. He explained in his memoir, “Up Late With Joe Franklin,” written with R. J. Marx, that his press materials had long said that he had been born in 1928, “but I’m going to come clean and admit that my real birth date was March 9, 1926.” He was the son of Martin and Anna Fortgang; his father was a paper-and-twine dealer who had gone to Public School 158 with James Cagney.•

Tags: ,

“When Something Moves As Fast And As All-Consumingly As The Digital Revolution, It Leaves Us In Its Thrall”

January 25, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Videos | Permalink

In Peter Aspden’s Financial Times profile of clock-watcher and turntablist Christian Marclay, the talk turns to how digital technology has refocused our attention from product to production, the process itself now a large part of the show. An excerpt:

When did the medium become more important than the message? Philosopher Marshall McLuhan theorised about the relationship between the two half a century ago — but it is only today that we seem to be truly fascinated by the processes involved in the creation of contemporary art and music, rather than their end result. Nor is this just some philosophical conceit; it extends to the lowest level of popular culture: what are the TV talent shows The X Factor and The Voice if not obsessed by the starmaker machinery of pop, rather than the music itself?

There are two reasons for this shift in emphasis. The first is technology. When something moves as fast and as all-consumingly as the digital revolution, it leaves us in its thrall. Our mobile devices sparkle more seductively than what they are transmitting. The speed of information has more of a rush than the most breakneck Ramones single.

Digital tools also enable the past to be appropriated in thrilling new forms — “The Clock” would not have been possible in an analogue age. Marclay has said he developed calluses on his fingers from his work in the editing suite, echoing the injuries once suffered by the hoariest blues guitarists. “The Clock” is a reassemblage of found objects: that is not a new phenomenon in artistic practice, but never has it been taken to such popular and imaginative heights.

It is the art of the beginnings of the digital age: not something entirely new, but a reordering of great, integral works of the past. “A record is so tangible,” says Marclay when I ask him about his vinyl fixation. “A sound file is nothing.” Sometimes, I say, it feels as if he has taken all the passions of my youth — records, movies, comic books — and thrown them all in the air, fitting them back together with technical bravura and, in so doing, investing them with new, hidden meanings. I ask if his art is essentially nostalgic. “I don’t think it is,” he replies firmly. “But there is a sense of comfort there. These are things we grew up with. They are familiar. And that is literally the right word: they are family.”

The second, less palatable, reason for the medium to overshadow the message is because of a loss of cultural confidence. We are not sure that the end result of whatever it is we are producing with such spectacular technological support can ever get much better than Pet Sounds, or Casablanca, or early Spider-Man. This does lead to nostalgia; not just for the old messages but for the old media, too. Marclay tells me there is a cultish following for audio cassettes, as if the alchemy of that far-from-perfect technology will help reproduce the magic of its age.•

______________________________

Marclay re-making music in 1989. 

Tags: ,

“I Don’t Want To Be BuzzFeed”

January 23, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Say what you will about Jill Abramson, but she gave the New York Times enduring gifts with the hires of Jake Silverstein and Deborah Needleman, editors respectively of the Magazine and the T Magazine. They’ve both done a lot of excellent work early in their tenures.

Her successor, Dean Baquet, amateur proctologist, is a talented person with a huge job ahead of him at the venerable and wobbly news organization, and he may yet call Mike Bloomberg boss because such a transaction makes a lot of sense financially. In a new Spiegel interview conducted by Isabell Hülsen and Holger Stark, Baquet addresses the technological “Space Race” he’s trying to win–or at least not lose. An excerpt:

Spiegel:

Digital competitors like BuzzFeed and the Huffington Post offer an extremely colorful mix of stories and have outperformed the New York Times website with a lot of buzz.

Dean Baquet:

Because they’re free. You’re always going to have more traffic if you’re a free website. But we’ve always admitted that we were behind other news organizations in making our stories available to people on the web. BuzzFeed and the Huffington Post are much better than we are at that, and I envy them for this. But I think the trick for the New York Times is to stick to what we are. That doesn’t mean: Don’t change. But I don’t want to be BuzzFeed. If we tried to be what they are, we would lose.

Spiegel:

In May, your internal innovation report was leaked along with its harsh conclusion that the New York Times’ “journalistic advantage” is shrinking. Did you underestimate your new digital competitors?

Dean Baquet:

Yes, I think we did. We assumed wrongly that these new competitors, whether it was BuzzFeed or others, were doing so well just because they were doing something journalistically that we chose not to do. We were arrogant, to be honest. We looked down on those new competitors, and I think we’ve come to realize that was wrong. They understood before we did how to make their stories available to people who are interested in them. We were too slow to do it.

Spiegel:

The report was disillusioning for many newspaper executives because the Times is widely seen as a role model when it comes to the question of making money on the web. The report, instead, pointed out that the Times lacks a digital strategy and the newsroom is far away from a “digital first” culture.

Dean Baquet:

First, the Times is and has always been a digital leader. The report only cited some areas where we fell down. Second: Half of the report is critical, and half of it has ideas for things you can do to fix the problem. A lot of things have been done already.

Spiegel:

What has changed?

Dean Baquet:

We have, for example, built a full-bodied audience development team that engages with our readers through social networks. The team has been in operation for three months now and we already have a pretty consistent 20 percent increase in traffic.

Spiegel:

How does this influence the work of your journalists?

Dean Baquet:

It used to be, if you were a reporter, you wrote a story and then you moved on to the next one. We were used to people coming to us. We waited for them to turn on our website or to pick up our print paper and see what we have. We now understand that we have to make our stories available to our readers. A lot of people get their news from Facebook or Twitter and we want to make sure that they see some of our best stories there, too. We do this more aggressively now than we did before.•

Tags: , , , , ,

“BMW, Go Park Yourself”

January 23, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The arduousness of parallel parking is one way young egos of the technological world learn humility and patience. Try and fail and try and fail and try. Soon enough, those lessons will be learned by other means, if they are to be learned, as cars will be deposited solely by sensors and such in the near future. From John R. Quain at the New York Times:

TECHNOLOGY may soon render another skill superfluous: parking a car.

Sensors and software promise to free owners from parking angst, turning vehicles into robotic chauffeurs, dropping off drivers and then parking themselves, no human intervention required.

BMW demonstrated such technical prowess this month with a specially equipped BMW i3 at the International CES event. At a multilevel garage of the SLS Las Vegas hotel, a BMW engineer spoke into a Samsung Gear S smartwatch.

“BMW, go park yourself,” and off the electric vehicle scurried to an empty parking spot, turning and backing itself perfectly into the open space. To retrieve the car, a tap on the watch and another command, “BMW, pick me up,” returned the car to the engineer.•

“What’s Less Obvious In All This Are The Hidden, Often Surprising Risks”

January 23, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Technology can render things faster and cheaper but also, sometimes, out of control. Embedded in our trajectory of a safer and more bountiful world are dangers enabled by the very mechanisms of progress. In “A Fault in Our Design,” a typically smart and thoughtful Aeon essay, Colin Dickey meditates on nautical advances which allowed the Charles Mallory to deliver devastating disease in 1853 to a formerly far-flung Hawaii and considers it a cautionary tale for how modern wonders may be hazardous to our health. An excerpt:

It’s hard not to feel as though history is progressing forward, along a linear trajectory of increased safety and relative happiness.

Even a quick round-up of the technological advances of the past few decades suggests that we’re steadily moving forward along an axis of progress in which old concerns are eliminated one by one. Even once-feared natural disasters are now gradually being tamed by humanity: promising developments in the field of early warning tsunami detection systems might soon be able to prevent the massive loss of life caused by the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami and similar such catastrophes.

Technology has rendered much of the natural world, to borrow a term from Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant, sublime. For Kant, nature becomes sublime once it becomes ‘a power that has no dominion over us’; a scene of natural terror that, viewed safely, becomes an enjoyable, almost transcendental experience. The sublime arises from our awareness that we ourselves are independent from nature and have ‘a superiority over nature’. The sublime is the dangerous thing made safe, a reaffirmation of the power of humanity and its ability to engineer its own security. And so with each new generation of technological innovation, we edge closer and closer towards an age of sublimity.

What’s less obvious in all this are the hidden, often surprising risks. As the story of the Charles Mallory attests, sometimes hidden in the latest technological achievement are unexpected dangers. Hawaii had been inoculated from smallpox for centuries, simply by virtue of the islands’ distance from any other inhabitable land. Nearly 2,400 miles from San Francisco, Hawaii is far enough away from the rest of civilisation that any ships that headed towards its islands with smallpox on board wouldn’t get there before the disease had burned itself out. But the Charles Mallory was fast enough that it had made the trip before it could rid itself of its deadly cargo, and it delivered unto the remote island chain a killer never before known.

Which is to say, the same technologies that are making our lives easier are also bringing new, often unexpected problems.•

Tags:

“Jay Got Cast As The Caviar Edition”

January 22, 2015 in Excerpts | Permalink

Ricky Jay is to a playing cards as Nikola Tesla was to electrical currents–brilliant, thrilling, dangerous, shocking–and having the masterly and stylish critic Tom Carson write of him for Grantland is happiness. Jay, who has holes in his memory but none in his logic, somehow knows things we don’t, even in this age when everything is seemingly known. It’s like magic. An excerpt:

Jay even survived the perils of being in fashion, which happened when Miley Cyrus was a toddler. One of the true oddities of the ’90s was that magic — nobody’s idea of chic entertainment in decades, or maybe ever — got trendy out of the blue. Penn & Teller became hipster heroes, David Copperfield graduated from cultural acne to showbiz Death Star, and you couldn’t piss out of a skyscraper without hitting David Blaine. Since “Who are you going to believe: me or your own lying eyes?” was basically Bill Clinton’s motto, PhD dissertations have probably been written about the culture’s unconscious groping for analogues to the hat-trick expert in the White House.

When schlockmeisters and the culturati end up on the same page, something interesting is usually afoot. Fox got count-’em four ratings bonanzas out of Breaking the Magician’s Code: Magic’s Greatest Secrets Finally Revealed. (They were awesomely cretinous, and I don’t think I missed one.) Literature got in on the act — a bit late, as usual — with Glen David Gold’s Carter Beats the Devil. Then came 9/11, and whaddya know? The whole vogue turned quaint damn near overnight. That’s why 59-year-old Penn and 66-year-old Teller, whose six-nights-a-week Las Vegas residency is now in its 14th year — they settled in at the Rio in 2001, almost like they’d figured out the cool-kids jig was up — are still the youngest and, ahem, “edgiest” professional magicians whose names anyone is likely to recognize.

Jay got cast as the caviar edition. A long and awestruck New Yorker profile by Mark Singer is still the closest thing to an intimate portrait he’s ever sat for, and was followed in 1994 by the first of his one-man Broadway shows, Ricky Jay and His 52 Assistants — directed by David Mamet, who went on to oversee two more. Because Jay’s card wizardry works only in jewel-box-size theaters, scoring tickets conferred instant membership in the hipoisie, and I should know: I saved a discarded eight of clubs from his act for years.

Adding to the nimbus of classiness, he was and is a formidably erudite and genial historian of his whole branch of the popular arts from the 15th century to now, with half a dozen books packed with esoteric wonders to his credit. He’s lectured on magic versus spiritualism at Princeton and on confidence games at police conventions. Then there’s his movie work, not only as an actor — for Anderson and Mamet, most memorably — but also as a consultant on big-screen illusions.

What he hasn’t done, at least in any obvious way, is cash in.•

Tags: ,

“From Soup To Roast, It Was All Horse”

January 22, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

No one is more moral for eating pigs and cows rather than dogs and cats, just more acceptable. 

Dining on horses, meanwhile, has traditionally fallen into a gray area in the U.S. Americans have historically had a complicated relationship with equine flesh, often publicly saying nay to munching on the mammal, though the meat has had its moments–lots of them, actually. From a Priceonomics post by Zachary Crockett, a passage about the reasons the animal became a menu staple in the fin de siècle U.S.: 

Suddenly, at the turn of the century, horse meat gained an underground cult following in the United States. Once only eaten in times of economic struggle, its taboo nature now gave it an aura of mystery; wealthy, educated “sirs” indulged in it with reckless abandon.

At Kansas City’s Veterinary College’s swanky graduation ceremony in 1898, “not a morsel of meat other than the flesh of horse” was served. “From soup to roast, it was all horse,” reported the Times. “The students and faculty of the college…made merry, and insisted that the repast was appetizing.”

Not to be left out, Chicagoans began to indulge in horse meat to the tune of 200,000 pounds per month — or about 500 horses. “A great many shops in the city are selling large quantities of horse meat every week,” then-Food Commissioner R.W. Patterson noted, “and the people who are buying it keep coming back for more, showing that they like it.”

In 1905, Harvard University’s Faculty Club integrated “horse steaks” into their menu. “Its very oddity — even repulsiveness to the outside world — reinforced their sense of being members of a unique and special tribe,” wrote the Times. (Indeed, the dish was so revered by the staff, that it continued to be served well into the 1970s, despite social stigmas.)

The mindset toward horse consumption began to shift — partly in thanks to a changing culinary landscape. Between 1900 and 1910, the number of food and dairy cattle in the US decreased by nearly 10%; in the same time period, the US population increased by 27%, creating a shortage of meat. Whereas animal rights groups once opposed horse slaughter, they now began to endorse it as more humane than forcing aging, crippled animals to work. 

With the introduction of the 1908 Model-T and the widespread use of the automobile, horses also began to lose their luster a bit as man’s faithful companions; this eased apprehension about putting them on the table with a side of potatoes (“It is becoming much too expensive a luxury to feed a horse,”argued one critic).

At the same time, the war in Europe was draining the U.S. of food supplies at an alarming rate. By 1915, New York City’s Board of Health, which had once rejected horse meat as “unsanitary,” now touted it is a sustainable wartime alternative for meatless U.S. citizens. “No longer will the worn out horse find his way to the bone-yard,” proclaimed the board’s Commissioner. “Instead, he will be fattened up in order to give the thrifty another source of food supply.”

Prominent voices began to sprout up championing the merits of the meat.•

Tags:

“[America’s] Education System Favors The Well-Off More Than Anywhere Else In The Rich World”

January 22, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

I’m not a geneticist, but I doubt successful, educated parents are necessarily more likely to have preternaturally clever children than their poorer counterparts, as is argued in a new Economist article about the role of education in America’s spiraling wealth inequality. Of course, monetary resources can help provide a child every chance to realize his or her abilities, ensuring opportunities often denied to those from families of lesser material means. That, rather than genes, is the main threat to meritocracy. An excerpt:

Intellectual capital drives the knowledge economy, so those who have lots of it get a fat slice of the pie. And it is increasingly heritable. Far more than in previous generations, clever, successful men marry clever, successful women. Such “assortative mating” increases inequality by 25%, by one estimate, since two-degree households typically enjoy two large incomes. Power couples conceive bright children and bring them up in stable homes—only 9% of college-educated mothers who give birth each year are unmarried, compared with 61% of high-school dropouts. They stimulate them relentlessly: children of professionals hear 32m more words by the age of four than those of parents on welfare. They move to pricey neighbourhoods with good schools, spend a packet on flute lessons and pull strings to get junior into a top-notch college.

The universities that mould the American elite seek out talented recruits from all backgrounds, and clever poor children who make it to the Ivy League may have their fees waived entirely. But middle-class students have to rack up huge debts to attend college, especially if they want a post-graduate degree, which many desirable jobs now require. The link between parental income and a child’s academic success has grown stronger, as clever people become richer and splash out on their daughter’s Mandarin tutor, and education matters more than it used to, because the demand for brainpower has soared. A young college graduate earns 63% more than a high-school graduate if both work full-time—and the high-school graduate is much less likely to work at all. For those at the top of the pile, moving straight from the best universities into the best jobs, the potential rewards are greater than they have ever been.

None of this is peculiar to America, but the trend is most visible there. This is partly because the gap between rich and poor is bigger than anywhere else in the rich world—a problem Barack Obama alluded to repeatedly in his state-of-the-union address on January 20th (see article). It is also because its education system favours the well-off more than anywhere else in the rich world.•

“You Can’t Believe How Innocent We Were”

January 22, 2015 in Books, Excerpts, Urban Studies | Permalink

For those who read Lolita after the Sexual Revolution of ’60s and ’70s had ended, how can the book appear like anything but an amazing piece of writing about a horrifying “romance”? But I suppose for some of the young who came of age during the carnal tumult of that earlier time, the novel seemed like a different thing–or at least the culture told them it was. In the opening question of an interview conducted by Erik Morse of the Los Angeles Review of Books, Emily Prager, the novelist and journalist who briefly appeared on the original iteration of Saturday Night Live, astutely explains the generational differences in interpretations of the controversial work:

Erik Morse:

Do you remember when you first read Lolita? What were your initial impressions, both of Nabokov’s story and the character of Lo?

Emily Praeger:

I don’t remember when I read Lolita but the idea of Lolita was a large part of the ’60s when I matured. Recently I saw the now 50ish-year-old woman whom Roman Polanski allegedly raped. She kept stammering that it was a different time, that you can’t judge Polanski by today’s standards. That’s because the Lolita idea was everywhere — there was a book with almost softcore photos of baby ballerinas that was on every coffee table, tons of very young women with much older men and it was okay. Men ruled after all. Many took Humbert Humbert as their role model. They liked him best of all. A few years ago, I went to dinner with some women who had grown up in the ’60s. It was when the new attitude toward sexual harassment in the workplace was surfacing. We had a great laugh because every single one of us had been importuned in the workplace constantly. When I was 17 and a prop girl off-Broadway, we had to kiss the house manager when we arrived at work. We rolled our eyes and did it. We thought it was ridiculous and those who asked it of us ludicrous. Lolita, the movie, came out in 1962, and it was with Peter Sellers and Stanley Kubrick directing and it was cool. We all wanted the heart-shaped sunglasses. You know, the myth of the ’60s is that it was all about sex. The truth is we knew nothing about sex except what society told us, which was it was bad. We just didn’t want anyone anymore saying anything to us about how to think about sex. So sexual liberation had to include Lolita. It was every girl for herself. You can’t believe how innocent we were. I doubt most of us registered that she might be being taken advantage of. The other thing was that very young boys were going to fight and die in Vietnam, not 12 but 18, which then was about 13. Young girls having sex didn’t seem that wrong. Of course you read Lolita now — I teach it in my fiction-writing course and modern girls are disgusted by it, horrified.•

Tags: ,

« Older entries § Newer entries »