Excerpts

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“The Wright Brothers Didn’t Make Money Off Of Aviation”

November 11, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

In defending modern-day billionaire technologists and the technology that enables their wealth and likely contributes to the wage stagnation of those with punier portfolios, Peter Thiel makes an argument to Ellen Huet in Forbes that doesn’t seem fair. He uses the Wright brothers as examples of inventors who didn’t profit from their innovation. Well, they didn’t become the 1903 equivalent of billionaires, that’s true, but there are reasons. While the brothers were (likely) the first to take air in a plane, they weren’t miles ahead of their competitors, so they weren’t able to grow one of Thiel’s beloved monopolies. They also weren’t very good businesspeople; Wilbur who was somewhat better at commerce passed away less then a decade after the historic flight. Orville wasn’t exactly left destitute, selling their company for enough money to build a giant estate and never need work again. They didn’t become billionaires despite being at the vanguard of aviation the way Gary Kildall didn’t become one even though he was at the forefront of computer software. It happens sometimes, but it’s an anecdote that doesn’t really speak to the macro. From Forbes:

“‘When you think about the history of innovation more broadly, the past 200 to 250 years, it’s a sobering fact how many inventors and creators of new things, how little they capture over time,’ Thiel said. ‘You have to create x dollars of value for the world and you have to capture y% of x. And in most cases y equals 0.’

The Wright brothers didn’t make money off of aviation, he pointed out, and even after the advent of the first factories and the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, much of the wealth was still held by the aristocratic classes in Europe. In Silicon Valley, a similar split can be seen between software and cleantech, Thiel said.”

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“Brownback’s Supply-Side Experiment Has Been A Big Budget-Buster”

November 11, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

Following up on my argument that Kansans are what’s the matter with Kansas, and perhaps the awfulness of the state’s economy should be laid at their feet rather than those of Democratic or Republican politicians, here’s the opening of Luke Brinker’s Salon piece about state finances at the dawn of Brownback 2.0:

“Less than one week after Kansas voters narrowly reelected Gov. Sam Brownback despite the disastrous budgetary consequences of his massive tax cuts for the wealthy, state analysts announced Monday that the state’s fiscal outlook is even more dire than initially realized.

We’ve known for some time that Brownback’s supply-side experiment has been a big budget-buster. Thanks to the governor’s tax cuts, Kansas collected $330 million less revenue than expected for fiscal year 2014 — $700 million below revenue for fiscal 2013. Despite the Brownback administration’s assurances that the state’s fiscal picture would improve — any day now! — the state’s revenue from July to September came up an astonishing 10 percent short of expectations.

The numbers released yesterday are even worse.”

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“A Maneuver Like This Has Never Before Been Attempted”

November 11, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

The European Space Agency is attempting tomorrow to go where no human has gone before, landing a probe on a comet, a mission that has been in motion for nearly two decades. From a report on the effort by Olaf Stampf at Spiegel:

“[Achim] Zschaege is one of the veterans in the European Space Agency’s (ESA) control room and he has been accompanying Rosetta on its trip through the solar system for more than a decade. Now, finally, the mission is nearing its climax: On Wednesday, a landing vehicle released by Rosetta is set to actually touch down on a comet.

A maneuver like this has never before been attempted, partly because of the extreme difficulties associated with such a landing. Researchers are essentially trying to land a probe on an object with a surface area roughly equal to Manhattan as it speeds through space 20 times faster than a rifle bullet. If they’re unlucky, the comet’s surface could be as crumbly as a cracker.

Zschaege’s superior, Italian flight director Andrea Accomazzo, has been waiting for Wednesday’s landing for 17 long years. ‘For all of us, it feels like a second moon landing,’ he says.

Even measured against other voyages into space, Rosetta’s rendezvous with Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko took a long time. When Rosetta was first fired into space, Gerhard Schröder was still Germany’s chancellor and America’s invasion of Iraq was just a year old. Since its launch on March 2, 1994, the probe has traveled 6 billion kilometers, roughly 40 times the distance between Earth and the sun. Many of those who worked on the mission in its early years have long since retired.

As part of Rosetta’s marathon flight, it traveled to the outer edges of our solar system, so far away from the sun that its solar cells were unable to power the probe’s systems. Ground controllers plunged the spacecraft’s electronics into a kind of hibernation.

For two-and-a-half years, there wasn’t a peep from Rosetta and it was only reawakened at the beginning of this year. ‘We had to wait almost an hour before we received the signal’ indicating the maneuver had worked, Accomazzo says. ‘It was totally silent in the control room.'”

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“A Pistol Ball Entered The Back Of The President’s Head, Penetrating Nearly Through”

November 11, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

President Lincoln was an early adopter of technology, but so unconnected were we in 1865, it took a dozen days for the news of his assassination to reach London. Reuters–then spelled “Reuter’s”–got the scoop, but there was no byline. What a byline that would have been to have.

From the Reuters site:

“After 12 days crossing the Atlantic, a Reuters report of the assassination of President Lincoln reaches London first, throwing European financial markets into turmoil. Reuter intercepted the mail boat off Ireland and telegraphed the news to London.”

 

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“Then, After A While, The Dreams Stopped”

November 11, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Stephen Glass, the infamous fabulist who was nearly the death of The New Republic in the late 1990s, no longer practices journalism nor should he ever. He works for a law firm in Los Angeles, leading a good-if-unglamorous life, a different man. But is he a changed one? And should he be trusted again in his new vocation? Chuck Lane, the editor who uncovered the fraud, has not forgiven or forgotten, and it’s hard to blame him. To those he lied to, it isn’t easy to restore faith. In a new TNR piece “Hello, My Name Is Stephen Glass, and I’m Sorry,” written by one of his former deceived deskmates, Hanna Rosin, the author tries her best to see things with fresh eyes, hoping they’re not blind ones. An excerpt:

“Once we knew what he’d done, I tried to call Steve, but he never called back. He just went missing, like the kids on the milk cartons. It was weird. People often ask me if I felt ‘betrayed,’ but really I was deeply unsettled, like I’d woken up in the wrong room. I wondered whether Steve had lied to me about personal things, too. I wondered how, even after he’d been caught, he could bring himself to recruit me to defend him, knowing I’d be risking my job to do so. I wondered how I could spend more time with a person during the week than I spent with my husband and not suspect a thing. (And I didn’t. It came as a total surprise). And I wondered what else I didn’t know about people. Could my brother be a drug addict? Did my best friend actually hate me? Jon Chait, now a political writer for New York and back then the smart young wonk in our trio, was in Paris when the scandal broke. Overnight, Steve went from ‘being one of my best friends to someone I read about in The International Herald Tribune,’ Chait recalled. The transition was so abrupt that, for months, Jon dreamed that he’d run into him or that Steve wanted to talk to him.

Then, after a while, the dreams stopped. The Monica Lewinsky scandal petered out, George W. Bush became president, we all got cell phones, laptops, spouses, children. Over the years, Steve Glass got mixed up in our minds with the fictionalized Stephen Glass from his own 2003 roman à clef,The Fabulist, or Steve Glass as played by Hayden Christiansen in the 2003 movie Shattered Glass. It was the book that finally provoked my anger. The plot follows a thinly fictionalized Steve in the aftermath of the affair. It portrays him as humble, contrite, and ‘a few shades hipper than the original,’ I wrote in a review for Slate. The rest of us came off as shallow jerks barely worth apologizing to. Steve sent about 100 handwritten letters of apology that year to people he’d injured, all several pages long and very abject: ‘I’m genuinely sorry that I lied to you and betrayed you.’ But he was also hawking his book, so we saw the letters as an effort to neutralize us. Reading the novel pretty much killed off my curiosity. For years afterward, if I thought about Steve at all—usually when I got an e-mail from a journalism student who had seen the movie in an ethics class—he was the notorious Stephen Glass, still living in the Clinton era. …

Steve Glass now lives in Venice Beach with his longtime girlfriend, Julie Hilden, a dog, two cats, and a rotating cast of foster pets. (The couple are also vegans.) He works as director of special projects at Carpenter, Zuckerman, Rowley, a personal-injury law firm in Beverly Hills. For anyone who knew him back in the day, this is a comical juxtaposition. Steve is a Jewish boy from the posh Chicago suburb of Highland Park with pushy Jewish parents who insisted on the usual (doctor, lawyer). When they urged him to go to law school, they probably had Supreme Court appearances in mind, not, as the firm boasts, a $2.1 million settlement for a homeless man hit by a garbage truck. But Paul Zuckerman, the partner who hired Steve and has become his mentor, considers this development to be a sign of grace. ‘You were on track to be an asshole,’ he told Steve when I was there. ‘The best thing that ever happened to you in your life is that you fell flat on your face.'”

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“The Politics Of It Have Always Seemed Especially Tricky For The FCC”

November 11, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

Timothy Wu, the Columbia law professor who coined the term “net neutrality,” spoke on the topic with Nancy Scola of the Washington Post on the day President Obama strongly urged the FCC to treat the Internet as a public utility. An excerpt:

“Question:

Even if you accept that Title II reclassification has the clearest legal runway, the politics of it have always seemed especially tricky for the FCC.

Timothy Wu:

Oh yeah. The law’s not hard. The politics are hard.

Question:

So what does Obama’s statement do to the politics?

Timothy Wu:

The FCC was leaning toward a slightly more compromised approach, and I suppose having the White House do this could leave them feeling like they have no allies and are unwilling to act for a while. I imagine they’re not very happy over there.

Question:

Chairman Wheeler’s statement on Obama’s move actually, seemed, well, pretty sassy. It emphasized how the FCC is an independent agency…

Timothy Wu:

I think the FCC had settled, and may still be settled, on a different way of using Title II. And without the White House on its side and with Congress against it, they’re kind of in that middle of the road area where you get run over. Politically, they’re stranded right now, and I’m not sure what that means from them. Wheeler seems to be indicating that they’re going to push the hold button on net neutrality, which could be a disappointing outcome if that hold button stays there for a very long time.

Question:

Their argument seems to be that they haven’t developed the record to be able to defend a Title II-based approach in court. But Title II has been around for 80 years.

Timothy Wu:

‘We don’t have the record yet’ is agency-speak for, ‘we gotta figure out what to do next.’ They can act without the White House and without Congress, but no one one in Washington likes to go it alone. It’s very precarious.”

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“There Didn’t Seem To Be Any Obvious Ideological Trends”

November 10, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

On the face of it, the Sharing Economy is a conservative wet dream, subverting regulations and damaging unions. But politics on the granular level is never quite that simple, and so far Blue States have been somewhat friendlier to Uber and others. The deciding factor seems to not be ideology but population density and consumer demand, so Los Angeles, blue as can be, has embraced such services while some red enclaves have not. From Josh Barro at the New York Times’ Upshot:

“The R.N.C. chairman, Reince Priebus, probably doesn’t get a lot of phone calls from taxi medallion owners, or car dealers, or other businesspeople who want to be insulated from competition.

But local politicians do; Republicans may be especially likely to hear from them because small business owners are a constituency that skews Republican.

As a result, in practice, it’s not clear Republicans are any more pro-market than Democrats when it comes to business regulation.

Andrew Moylan, a senior fellow at the R Street Institute think tank, has examined ride-sharing regulations around the country and doesn’t see a clear partisan divide. On Monday, R Street and Engine, a group advocating policies that support start-ups, will release a report card rating the 50 largest cities on their friendliness to ride sharing. The eight cities receiving failing grades include ones in blue areas (Philadelphia and Portland, Ore.) and red ones (Omaha, Phoenix and San Antonio).

‘There didn’t seem to be any obvious ideological trends,’ Mr. Moylan said. ‘It may have something more to do with population density and consumer demand.’

In the case of Uber, the cities with the most to gain from innovation tend to be large and dense, and often Democratic. So at the local level, the leaders in welcoming Uber are often Democrats. Conservatives like to mock California as anti-business, but the state is one of just two to have enacted a comprehensive, statewide regulatory framework that is friendly to ride sharing. The other is Colorado, also run by Democrats.”

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“An Economic Crisis Could Also Make Russian Behavior More Unpredictable And Reckless”

November 10, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

Before departing for a trip to China, President Obama sent more troops to Iraq, and Russia reportedly dispatched additional soldiers to Crimea. Of these three regions, China is almost definitely the biggest challenge to U.S. in the long term, if more economically than militaristically presently. In a Financial Times column, Gideon Rachman argues that Russia, not the Middle East, is the greater short-term threat, which is not the conventional wisdom. An excerpt:

“The darkest scenarios, being discussed behind closed doors, include Russian escalation up to and including the use of tactical nuclear weapons. If that were to happen it would, of course, be the biggest international security crisis in decades – far more significant and dangerous than another round in the 25 years of fighting in Iraq.

Most experts still dismiss the nuclear scenarios as far-fetched. It is more common to worry that Mr Putin may launch an all-out conventional war in Ukraine – or encourage uprisings by Russian-speakers in the Baltic states, which are members of Nato. If Russia then intervened in the Baltic states and Nato did not respond, the Kremlin would have achieved the huge prize of demonstrating that the western military alliance is a paper tiger.

Some hope that the growing pressure on the Russian economy and the rouble might dissuade the Kremlin from escalation. But an economic crisis could also make Russian behaviour more unpredictable and reckless.

Amid all this angst, President Obama has set off for a summit in China. For believers in America’s ‘pivot to Asia’ it remains true that – over the longer term – the biggest challenge to US power is still a rising China, rather than a declining Russia or a disintegrating Middle East.”

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“Computers Might Write Pulitzer-Worthy Stories By 2017”

November 10, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Film, Science/Tech | Permalink

The idea that machines can write narratives is nothing new, and I suspect that broad screenplays could be produced by algorithms right now or in the near future. Popular books and reportage written with a human level of nuance by bots is a harder trick to pull off, though it probably will be possible given enough time. Not that I’m looking forward to that. From Jason Dorrier at Singularity Hub:

The idea that computers are increasingly taking figurative pen to paper has recently attracted quite a bit of attention. Over the last few years, algorithmic news writing has begun quietly infiltrating big name journalism.

Last year a Los Angeles Times algorithm was first to break the news of a mild quake that hit LA in the early morning hours. And one of the best known algorithms, by Narrative Science, is used by a number of news outlets, including Forbes.

These robot writers are fairly limited and highly formulaic (to date). For the most part, they excel at what might be called data-centric journalism—sports, finance, weather. Basically anything that generates statistics and spreadsheets.

The bots peruse the data, looking for outliers, maximums, minimums, and averages. They take the most newsworthy of these statistics, come up with an angle and story structure—choosing from an internal database—and spit out the final text.

The result is simple but effective, and on a quick read, perfectly human.

It’s tempting to look ahead a few years and forecast a news media dominated by algorithmic writing. Narrative Science’s Kristian Hammond says computers might write Pulitzer-worthy stories by 2017 and generate 90% of the news by 2030.

He might be right. But the software will need to be more capable than it is now. In fact, computers have been similarly constructing algorithmic sentences since 1952. A machine from that era, the Ferranti Mark 1, constructed love letters from a static list of words, a very simple version of the way modern newsbots build articles from preprogrammed phrases.”•

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“In America At Least, Inequality In Wealth Is Approaching Record Levels”

November 10, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Although better education, particularly at the primary and secondary levels, would be a great thing in America, I don’t really believe that such an improvement would reverse wealth inequality in the country, as Thomas Piketty has suggested. We seem to be in a spiral with no easy answers. From the Economist:

“AMONG the most controversial of Thomas Piketty’s arguments in his bestselling analysis of inequality, Capital in the Twenty-First Century is that wealth is increasingly concentrated in the hands of the very rich. Rising wealth inequality could presage the return of an 18th century inheritance society, in which marrying an heir is a surer route to riches than starting a company. Critics question the premise: Chris Giles, the economics editor of the Financial Times, argued earlier this year that Mr Piketty’s data were both thin and faulty. Yet a new paper suggests that, in America at least, inequality in wealth is approaching record levels.

Earlier studies of American wealth have tended to show only small increases in inequality in recent decades. A 2004 study of estate-tax data by Wojciech Kopczuk of Columbia University and Emmanuel Saez of the University of California, Berkeley, found an almost imperceptible rise in the share of wealth held by the top 1% of families, from about 19% in 1976 to 21% in 2000. A more recent investigation of the Federal Reserve’s data on consumer finances, by Edward Wolff of New York University showed a continued but gentle increase in inequality into the 2000s. Mr Piketty’s book, which drew on this previous work, showed similarly modest rises in wealth inequality in America.

A new paper by Mr Saez and Gabriel Zucman of the London School of Economics reckons past estimates badly underestimated the share of wealth belonging to the very rich. It uses a richer variety of sources than prior studies, including detailed data on personal income taxes (which the authors mine for figures on capital income) and property tax, which they check against Fed data on aggregate wealth. The authors note that not every potential source of error can be accounted for; tax avoidance strategies, for instance, could cause either an overestimation of the wealth share of the rich (if they classify labour income as capital income in order to take advantage of lower rates) or an underestimation (if they intentionally seek out lower yielding investments for their tax advantages). Yet they believe their estimates represent an improvement over past attempts.

The results are enough to make Mr Piketty blush.”

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“So Much Ingenuity Had Been Deployed To Solve The Problem Of ‘Reading'”

November 9, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Keith Gessen’s Vanity Fair article “The War of the Words” is probably the most balanced piece I’ve yet read about Amazon’s battle with traditional publishers over pricing. The Internet has released the presses from the tyranny of a few New York houses, allowing for self-publishing of sub-genres to flourish, but what’s good for pop fiction may not be so for the literary kind. A passage in which Gessen tours Amazon Lab126, ground zero for Kindle development:

“The next day I flew to Silicon Valley and visited Amazon Lab126, the Amazon subsidiary that develops all of the company’s Kindle products. A tremendous amount of thought and research has gone into these devices. At Lab126 there is a ‘reading room,’ where test subjects are asked to read on various devices for hours at a time. They are filmed and studied. People reading in a chair will, naturally, hold their Kindle differently from people standing up (on the subway, for example), but even people sitting in a chair will shift their positions over time. Eighty percent of page turns are forward, by the way, but 20 percent (20!) are backward. On the conference table before us were the dozens of iterations of possible page-turning buttons for the new Kindle Voyage, buttons that would have been on the back of the Kindle, a switch button, and also arrows alongside the screen—a > for forward and a < for back—the most visually pleasing design and by far the most intuitive, but then in testing it turned out that people liked to turn the Kindle and read horizontally, which meant that the arrows were pointing, confusingly, up and down. (The designers settled on two sleek lines for forward and two cool dots for back.)

After meeting the designers and engineers, I went down to the Kindle stress-testing lab, where various machines twisted the Kindle and dropped it and tumbled it around as if in a dryer. There was a machine that specialized in tapping the Kindle, pressing the on-and-off button thousands of times, until the Kindle couldn’t take it anymore. There was a machine that sprayed a salty mist over the Kindle, because the devices are frequently taken to the beach. All of this testing was monitored by quiet, serious people in light-blue lab coats who looked as if they had once worked for Dr. No.

So much ingenuity had been deployed to solve the problem of ‘reading’—in their different ways by the Kindle engineers, by the warehouse-software specialists, by Otis Chandler at Goodreads. And I remembered something a book editor, one of the best I know, had said to me about the Amazon situation. ‘They’re always talking about inefficiency,’ he said. ‘Publishing is inefficient; print is inefficient. I mean, yeah. But inefficiency, that’s human. That’s what being human is.’ The Kindle really is an extraordinary device—the fulfillment centers are wonders of undeniable efficiency. They too represent a remarkable human achievement. But art by definition is something for which there is no practical use.”

 

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“They Often Represent Alternatives To US-Based Jobs”

November 9, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The unemployment rate is falling in America, but wages aren’t rising in most sectors, which is counterintuitive. Two explanatory notes about U.S. employment in the aftermath of the 2008 economic collapse, one from Eric Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee’s The Second Machine Age, and the other from Derek Thompson’s Atlantic article “The Rise of Invisible Unemployment.”

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From Brynjolfsson and McAfee:

“A few years ago we had a very candid discussion with one CEO, and he explained that he knew for over a decade that advances in information technology had rendered many routine information-processing jobs superfluous. At the same time, when profits and revenues are on the rise, it can be hard to eliminate jobs. When the recession came, business as usual obviously was not sustainable, which made it easier to implement a round of streamlining and layoffs. As the recession ended and profits and demand returned, the jobs doing routine work were not restored. Like so many other companies in recent years, his organization found it could use technology to scale up without the workers.”

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From Thompson:

“3. The rise of invisible work is too large to ignore.

By ‘invisible work,’ I mean work done by American companies that isn’t done by Americans workers. Globalization and technology is allowing corporations to expand productivity, which shows up in earnings reports and stock prices and other metrics that analysts typically associate with a healthy economy. But globalization and technology don’t always show up in US wage growth because they often represent alternatives to US-based jobs. Corporations have used the recession and the recovery to increase profits by expanding abroad, hiring abroad, and controlling labor costs at home. It’s a brilliant strategy to please investors. But it’s an awful way to contribute to domestic wage growth.“•

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“The World Is A Very Unequal Place”

November 9, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

A more extreme way of looking at wealth inequality is not within nations but among them. In a Financial Times piece, Tim Harford argues the biggest lottery to win in life isn’t genetics or parentage but a fortunate patch of the map. An excerpt:

“I’ve been a lucky boy. I could start with the ‘boy’ fact. We men enjoy all sorts of privileges, many of them quite subtle these days, but well worth having. I’m white. I’m an Oxford graduate and I am the son of Oxbridge graduates….

Imagine lining up everyone in the world from the poorest to the richest, each standing beside a pile of money that represents his or her annual income. The world is a very unequal place: those in the top 1 per cent have vastly more than those in the bottom 1 per cent – you need about $35,000 after taxes to make that cut-off and be one of the 70 million richest people in the world. If that seems low, it’s $140,000 after taxes for a family of four – and it is also about 100 times more than the world’s poorest people have.

What determines who is at the richer end of that curve is, mostly, living in a rich country. Branko Milanovic, a visiting presidential professor at City University New York and author of The Haves and the Have-Nots, calculates that about 80 per cent of global inequality is the result of inequality between rich nations and poor nations. Only 20 per cent is the result of inequality between rich and poor within nations. The Oxford thing matters, of course. But what matters much more is that I was born in England rather than Bangladesh or Uganda.”

 

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“Could Women’s Prisons Actually Be Eliminated In The United States?”

November 9, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The prison population in the United States is finally declining, thankfully, and at the Washington Post, Patricia O’Brien has a modest proposal for thinning that crowd even more: Stop incarcerating women, no matter the crime. Her suggestion is extreme, and we’d probably be better off just eliminating sentencing for most drug-possession crimes for both genders, though she does make some good points. An excerpt:

“Could women’s prisons actually be eliminated in the United States, where the rate of women’s incarceration has risen by 646 percent in the past 30 years? The context is different, but many of the arguments are the same.

Essentially, the case for closing women’s prisons is the same as the case for imprisoning fewer men. It is the case against the prison industrial complex and for community-based treatment where it works better than incarceration. But there is evidence that prison harms women more than men, so why not start there?

Any examination of the women who are in U.S. prisons reveals that the majority are nonviolent offenders with poor education, little employment experience and multiple histories of abuse from childhood through adulthood. Women are also more likely than men to have children who rely on them for support — 147,000 American children have mothers in prison.

Prison nation

The United States is a prison nation. More than 1.5 million people are incarcerated in the country. And this obsession with punishment is expensive. Cumulatively, states spend more than $52 billion a year on their prison systems. The federal government also spends tens of billions to police, prosecute and imprison people, though research demonstrates that incarceration harms individual well-being and does not improve public safety.

What purpose is served by subjecting the most disempowered, abused and nonviolent women to the perpetually negative environment of prisons?”

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“His First Interview In The National Media Was In Defense Of Torture”

November 7, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

In a New York Times Magazine Q&A conducted by Jim Rutenberg, satirist Garry Trudeau describes his classmate George W. Bush’s undergraduate dalliance not with water(boarding) but fire:

“Question:

You went to Yale with George W. Bush.

Garry Trudeau:

When I was a sophomore and W. was a senior, I illustrated an article for the newspaper about hazing at Bush’s fraternity — D.K.E. had been branding initiates with a red-hot iron. It became a national story. The Times assigned a reporter, who came up to New Haven and interviewed Bush. And Bush described the branding as no worse than a cigarette burn. His first interview in the national media was in defense of torture.”

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“We Remain A Very Long Way From Being Able To Automate All Jobs”

November 7, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

While I don’t believe technological unemployment is coming for all jobs in the near future, I certainly think the transition could increasingly gain steam (or electricity or what have you). Economist Robin Hansen doesn’t agree, believing there will be merely a gradual replacement of human labor by machinery, no different now in the AI era than it’s been for centuries. From “This Time Isn’t Different” at Overcoming Bias:

“In each boom many loudly declare high expectations and concern regarding rapid near-term progress in automation. ‘The machines are finally going to soon put everyone out of work!’ Which of course they don’t. We’ve instead seen a pretty slow & steady rate of humans displaced by machines on jobs.

Today we are in another such boom. For example, David Brooks recently parroted Kevin Kelley saying this time is different because now we have cheaper hardware, better algorithms, and more data. But those facts were also true in most of the previous booms; nothing has fundamentally changed! In truth, we remain a very long way from being able to automate all jobs, and we should expect the slow steady rate of job displacement to long continue.

One way to understand this is in terms of the distribution over human jobs of how good machines need to be to displace humans. If this parameter is distributed somewhat evenly over many orders of magnitude, then continued steady exponential progress in machine abilities should continue to translate into only slow incremental displacement of human jobs. Yes machines are vastly better than they were before, but they must get far more vastly better to displace most human workers.”

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“The Sunshine Here Has Fried Peoples’ Brains”

November 7, 2014 in Excerpts, Film, Urban Studies | Permalink

Another new item about one of my favorite movies, Los Angeles Plays Itself, this one a Q&A with director Thom Andersen conducted by Standard Culture. An excerpt about the differences between celluloid Los Angeles and New York City and the actual cities:

“Question:

How are New York and Los Angeles represented differently in movies?

Thom Andersen:

It’s a big question. When sound came in [to film], there was an influx of New York writers to Los Angeles, so there were many, many films set in the NY, although they were filmed in Los Angeles, mostly on stages. They created this picture of New York as this magical city. And that kind of romanticizing of a city never happened with Los Angeles except in some movies made by directors who came from other places for whom Los Angeles was a magical city. For local filmmakers, Los Angeles had a more mixed feeling — something that seems to continue to the present day. There’s something about New York that lends itself to representation on film. It may be simply the fact, as Rem Koolhaas said: it’s a city based on a culture of congestion. Whereas LA is a culture of dispersion, which make it harder to represent on film.

Question:

Do you prefer New York or Los Angeles?

Thom Andersen:

Los Angeles is an easier place to get things done, but to me, New York is still the center of the world. People look better there. They’re smarter. The sunshine here has fried peoples’ brains.”

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“Whitman Did Live With The Books”

November 7, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Just once I came across George Whitman in the Paris Shakespeare & Company, but I didn’t pay the eccentric and legendary owner much mind, so distracted I was by the leaking ceiling and broken floor. Still, wow, what a bookshop. From Bruce Handy’s new Vanity Fair piece about the fabled store:

“You know who else loved Shakespeare and Company and who wasn’t a writer with skin in the game? Frank Sinatra—according, that is, to Ed Walters, a former pit boss at the Sands, in Las Vegas, who was taken under Sinatra’s wing in the 1960s and offered this account for a forthcoming history the store plans to publish:

What few Sinatra fans know is that he loved books, especially history books. He was in the casino at a 21 table, playing blackjack and talking with his friends. He told the guys, ‘I’m giving Eddie some books to educate him. He needs it.’

He asked about a book he’d given me, was I reading it. He said, ‘Eddie you must travel and when you do, go to Paris, go to the Shakespeare bookstore. I know the guy there. . . . Go see the guy George—he’s a guy that lives with the books.’

Whitman died on December 14, 2011, two days after his 98th birthday. Unlike many once young bohemians and idealistic self-proclaimed Communists, he hewed to his ideals all the way through to the end. He made a fetish of thriftiness, sometimes cooking from restaurant and market leavings for himself and guests. Unwilling to pay for haircuts, he trimmed his by lighting it on fire with candles. (You can see him do so in a video on YouTube that is equal parts beguiling and horrifying.) His one concession to fashion: a grotty paisley jacket he wore for decades and which had already seen better days when the poet Ted Joans described it as never-been-cleaned in 1974. In short, he was the rare businessman who cared little for money except as a vehicle to expand his shop, which over the decades grew from a single ground-floor room into the multi-floor, ad-hoc institution it is today. In a eulogy he wrote for Whitman, Ferlinghetti described Shakespeare and Company as ‘a literary octopus with an insatiable appetite for print, taking over the beat-up building … room by room, floor by floor, a veritable nest of books.’ I like to think of it as a half-planned, half-accreted, site-specific folk-art masterpiece: the Watts Towers of bookselling, with its warren of narrow passageways lined by casually carpentered bookshelves; its small rooms adorned with whimsical names (OLD SMOKY READING ROOM and BLUE OYSTER TEAROOM); its owner’s favorite epigrams painted above doorways and on steps (LIVE FOR HUMANITY and BE NOT INHOSPITABLE TO STRANGERS LEST THEY BE ANGELS IN DISGUISE); its scavenged floorings, including, in one of the ground-floor rooms, marble tiling Whitman is said to have stolen decades ago from Montparnasse Cemetery and laid down in an abstract mosaic around the store’s ‘wishing well’—a hole in which customers toss coins to be harvested by the store’s more impecunious residents. (Sign: FEED THE STARVING WRITERS.)

Sinatra was right, by the way: Whitman did live with the books, eventually taking a small apartment on the building’s fourth floor (or third, by French floor-numbering convention), which was really just an extension of the store. His own back bedroom had three walls of bookshelves, double-lined with books: novels, poetry, biographies, philosophy, complete sets of Freud and Jung—pretty much anything you can think of, plus the detective novels he kept stashed under his pillows. That bedroom is where, following a stroke, he passed away, so Sinatra could have said he died with the books, too.”

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“Mr. McConnell And His Colleagues Have Done Everything They Could To Undermine Effective Policy”

November 7, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Urban Studies | Permalink

I hope we’re not going to get lectures about how Democrats lost so many states in the midterm elections because they didn’t communicate their message clearly enough, they didn’t find the “magic words.” Nothing presents more clarity than a family desperate for healthcare visiting doctors for the first time in years. You can’t be clearer than life and death. I don’t think those people have been “tricked” if they then choose to elect politicians desperate to take that benefit from them, as they did with Mitch McConnell in Kentucky. Sure, it would have been great for the media to explain recently how universal healthcare lifts the threshold for a plague in America, imported or “home-grown,” than to engage in ceaseless fearmongering about Ebola, a virus yet to claim a single U.S. citizen on American soil. But I think the people get the media and government they deserve. If they want to vote their ideology and aspirations rather than their reality, that’s what going to happen. The matter with Kansas, at long last, may be Kansans. From Paul Krugman at the New York Times:

“But the biggest secret of the Republican triumph surely lies in the discovery that obstructionism bordering on sabotage is a winning political strategy. From Day 1 of the Obama administration, Mr. McConnell and his colleagues have done everything they could to undermine effective policy, in particular blocking every effort to do the obvious thing — boost infrastructure spending — in a time of low interest rates and high unemployment.

This was, it turned out, bad for America but good for Republicans. Most voters don’t know much about policy details, nor do they understand the legislative process. So all they saw was that the man in the White House wasn’t delivering prosperity — and they punished his party.

Will things change now that the G.O.P. can’t so easily evade responsibility? I guess we’ll find out.”

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“[It] Is Known Mostly For Being Perhaps The World’s First Bitcoin-Only Cafe”

November 6, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The opening of Tuan C. Nguyen’s Washington Post piece about Paralelní Polis, a Czechoslovakian cafe opened by crypto-anarchists in which the coin of the realm is virtual:

“Step inside the newest coffeehouse on Dělnická street in Prague and it doesn’t take long to notice that something’s amiss. There’s no cash register, nor a counter where customers would typically form a line.

Instead, you’ll find a long, wood slab table situated ever so slightly towards the left side of the room, where a wide selection of pastries, along with menus, plates, cups, utensils, jugs of water and an expresso machine can be found neatly laid out in the open.

Oddly enough, there’s something about the arrangement that’s refreshing, and at the same time, a bit disconcerting. Upon passing through the first time, my initial reaction was to quickly scan the room for any apron-wearing employee. And as the confusion intensified, so did the urge to grab a cup and, heck, whip up a latte myself.

Just as I began mulling over that very notion, a gentlemen with a tightly-trimmed beard and who looked to be in his 20’s, got up from a nearby table, where he had been seated with a couple of young women, and walked over to greet me.

‘I know the set-up can be sort of disorientating, but that’s the whole point,’ Michal Navrátil, operations manager and part-time barista, assured me. ‘The idea is that by not having uniforms, we also get rid of the imposed separation between patrons and workers.’

Paralelní Polis, which in Czech means ‘Parallel World,’ is known mostly for being perhaps the world’s first bitcoin-only cafe. All transactions — from wages to point of sale — are processed virtually, using one of the most well-recognized cryptocurrencies. More broadly though, the recently-renovated space, which includes a co-working room and hacker space, was conceived as way to demonstrate on a micro level how an entirely decentralized society might function.”

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“Crichton Taps Out His Books On An Olivetti Word Processor (Price: $13,500)”

November 6, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Film, Science/Tech | Permalink

Michael Crichton was one of the more unusual entertainers of his time, a pulp-ish storyteller with an elite education who had no taste–or talent?–for the highbrow. He made a lot of people happy, though scientists and anthropologists were not often among them. The following excerpt, from a 1981 People portrait of him by Andrea Chambers, reveals Crichton (unsurprisingly) as an early adopter of personal computing.

_____________________________

At 38, he has already been educated as an M.D. at Harvard (but never practiced), written 15 books (among them bestsellers like The Andromeda Strain and The Terminal Man), and directed three moneymaking movies (Westworld, Coma and The Great Train Robbery). He is a devoted paladin of modern painting whose collection, which includes works by Frank Stella and Robert Rauschenberg, recently toured California museums. In 1977, because the subject intrigued him, Crichton wrote the catalogue for a Jasper Johns retrospective at Manhattan’s Whitney Museum. “Art interviewers tend to be more formal and discuss esthetics—’Why did you put the red here and the blue there?’ ” says Johns. “But Michael was trying to relate me to my work. He is a novelist and he brings that different perspective.”

Crichton’s latest literary enterprise is Congo (Alfred A. Knopf), a technology-packed adventure tale about a computer-led diamond hunt in the wilds of Africa. Accompanied by a friendly gorilla named Amy, Crichton’s characters confront everything from an erupting volcano to ferocious apes bred to destroy anyone who approaches the diamonds. The novel has bobbed onto best-seller lists, despite critical sneers that it is “entertaining trash.” (A New York Times reviewer called it “literarily vapid and scientifically more anthropomorphic than Dumbo.”)

Crichton cheerfully admits that Congo owes more than its exotic locale to Sir Henry Rider Haggard’s classic King Solomon’s Mines. “All the books I’ve written play with preexisting literary forms,” Crichton says. A model for The Andromeda Strain was H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds. The Terminal Man was based on Frankenstein’s monster. Crichton’s 1976 novel Eaters of the Dead was inspired by Beowulf. “The challenge is in revitalizing the old forms,” he explains.

Crichton taps out his books on an Olivetti word processor (price: $13,500) and bombards readers with high-density scientific data and jargon, only some of which is real. “I did check on the rapids in the Congo,” he says. “They exist, but not where I put them.” His impressive description of a cannibal tribe is similarly fabricated. “It amused me to make a complete ethnography of a nonexistent tribe,” he notes. “I like to make up something to seem real.”•

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“To Be Human Is To Copy”

November 6, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Lone geniuses exist and are necessary, but they’re few and would never be able to advance society on their own. Progress is a cumulative process. While basic copyright laws are necessary for a stable economy, the human species is (fortunately) wired for imitation. Other animals mostly learn and die, their knowledge gone with them, whereas we can pass along methods and maneuvers. The opening of “Brilliant Impersonators,” Kat McGowan’s Aeon ode to the copycat:

“Imitation might be a form of flattery, but it is also a good way to end up in legal trouble. More than 6,000 lawsuits over patent infringements were filed in the United States last year. Samsung and Apple, locked in what’s been called the bloodiest corporate war in history, have jointly spent more than $1 billion in the past four years trying to prove that one poached the other’s smartphone technology.

In today’s world, inventors are our heroes and our saviours – the geniuses who keep the world economy surging forward, who bring us the newest playthings and the latest comforts. We rely on inventors to build a cleaner, happier, more prosperous future. Copycats are a threat to this cheerful vision. Not for nothing do we call them pirates; by cheating and stealing, copiers undermine the system. By profiting from the hard work of others, they reduce the incentive to create. They are a threat to the social order.

But according to a cluster of like-minded researchers, we’ve misunderstood how innovation really works. Throughout human history, innovation – including the technological progress we cherish – has been fuelled and sustained by imitation. Copying is the mighty force that has allowed the human race to move from stone knives to remote-guided drones, from digging sticks to crops that manufacture their own pesticides. Plenty of animals can innovate, but no other species on earth can imitate with the skill and accuracy of a human being. We’re natural-born rip-off artists. To be human is to copy.”

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“Some Of Us Turn On One Another”

November 6, 2014 in Books, Excerpts | Permalink

I think Pastoralia is still my favorite George Saunders short-story collection, though I really love them all, their devastating deadpan and deep humanity. A very cool T magazine feature publishes new annotations made by authors in 75 first editions to be auctioned at Sotheby’s to benefit the PEN American Center. An example from Saunders’ oeuvre follows.

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CivilWarLand in Bad Decline by George Saunders, published in 1996.

At the end, Saunders writes: ‘Closing thought: I like the audacity of this book. I like less the places where it feels like I went into Auto-Quirky Mode. Ah youth! Some issues: Life amid limitations; paucity. Various tonalities of defense. Pain; humiliation inflicted on hapless workers – some of us turn on one another. Early on, this read, could really feel this young writer’s aversion to anything mild or typical or bland. Feeling, at first, like a tic. But then it started to grow on me — around ‘400 Pound CEO.’ This performative thing then starts to feel essential; organic somehow – a way to get to the moral outrage. I kept thinking of the word ‘immoderation.’ Like the yelp of someone who’s just been burned.”

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“The Internet And Social Networks Make It Easy To Indoctrinate Young People”

November 6, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Young people, their minds not yet made up, have always been the easiest to recruit, but there’s something different about ISIS poaching the impressionable for extremism, and it’s social networks being repurposed for anti-social behavior. France has been hardest hit, with nearly 1,000 teens and twentysomethings joining the Mideast madness. Two factors overlap many of the cases: The children were headed for careers which could have genuinely helped the world, and they’ve been drawn into the circle of hatred online. We’re all connected now, for better and worse. From Julia Amalia Heyer at Spiegel:

“The number of young people who have become radicalized and have disappeared is rising rapidly. More than 140 families have contacted Bouzar since January 2014.

Radicalization used to be limited to the poor and the uneducated, says Bouzar. Immigrants from Muslim backgrounds were usually the ones who joined jihadist groups. But the situation has changed today, she explains. ‘Now three-quarters of them come from atheist families.’ They include Christians and Jews, and almost all are from the middle class, with some coming from upper-class families, the children of teachers, civil servants and doctors. Bouzar is even familiar with a case involving an elite female university student. It also appears that more and more girls and young women are fantasizing about jihad.

Indoctrination

The Internet and social networks make it easy to indoctrinate young people. In her research, Bouzar discovered that the French-speaking unit of the Al-Nusra Front actually employs headhunters to recruit young women and men.

The process of brainwashing usually follows the same principles, not unlike the approach taken by sects. First the victim, be it a boy or a girl, is isolated from his or her surroundings. The young people are pressured to sever all ties to family and friends. Then the indoctrination begins, through videos about genetically engineered food or alleged conspiracies. The goal is to make the victims believe that the world is evil and that only they have been chosen to make it a better place.

As a result of this brainwashing, the young women and men gradually lose their connection to everyday life and their old identities. Once a new identity has been created, they often see themselves as members of a chosen group of fighters for a better world.

Bouzar has found that the radicalized young women have a common trait: They are all interested in careers in social work or humanitarian aid.”

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“There’s No Jurassic Park Scenario Going To Play Out”

November 6, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

In a new Edge discussion about de-extinction, John Brockman asks Stewart Brand about the dangers inherent in the reintroduction of bygone birds and bears into the world, which, you would think, would have some unintended consequences. An excerpt:

“John Brockman:

What are the dangers, if any?

Stewart Brand:

The dangers of de-extinction mostly get interpreted in ecological or conservation terms, and mostly by people who are mistakenly worried that nature is really, really fragile. We saw this when a year ago we had a TEDx de-extinction that Ryan organized that had twenty-five scientists holding forth on various aspects of a wide number of projects that are going on—everything from the European aurochs to the Spanish bucardo to the gastric brooding frog in Australia.

Our projects are not the only one. Then the news went out: “De-extinction might happen”, and it was great because it went out in a way that people understood it as a scientific issue. They understood we weren’t going to have dinosaurs. There’s no Jurassic park scenario going to play out. But immediately you would see in these wonderful comment lines after every place online, where the trolls emerge and start fretting, and the hand-wringing would be around, let’s see: what if you bring it back and it turns out to be insanely invasive? And, passenger pigeons, there used to be five billion and suddenly there’s five billion birds crapping on everything, it’ll be like kudzu. Well, actually it’s not an invasive. They were in North America for 22 million years. The invasive in this story is us, and we’re the ones who shot them all to death. If we’ve got an invasive to worry about it’s the human one, which is fair. Nature will accommodate these birds coming back. Nature’s not broken.

Another common comment is that there’s obviously no habitat left for these birds, or for the woolly mammoths, because the world has changed since their day. Again, time machine notions of if you were suddenly thrown into the 15th century or the 24th century, you wouldn’t be able to function because you wouldn’t know how to call a cab. It’s not like that in nature, and things blend in and take time in. Nature is not broken just because humans have been farming for 10,000 years. It is very robust.

What are the real dangers? The real dangers are it won’t work.”

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