Excerpts

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“The Notion Of A ‘Pitch Clock’ Was Mentioned During The Owners’ Conversations This Week”

August 17, 2014 in Excerpts, Sports | Permalink

I don’t know if Rob Manfred is the best person to be the new baseball commissioner in the post-Selig Era–maybe too much of an inside man?–but I’m heartened that he and the other candidates focused on speeding up the game, spreading the content better through new platforms and doing a superior job selling the players. (Mike Trout and Andrew McCutchen should be household names even to non-baseball fans.)

On the first item on the list: You can only hasten the game so much because the number of commercials is mind-numbing, but there should be a 15-second pitch clock and a failure to beat the timer resulting in a ball call. Some think this would lead to more pitcher injuries because they’d be rushing, but I doubt it would exacerbate that problem. From Jon Paul Morosi at Fox Sports:

“Ultimately, the owners’ occasionally contentious discussions served a noble purpose: They forced the candidates — and themselves — to confront concerns about baseball among contemporary sports consumers.

The game often moves too slowly, and baseball has lost young fans to other sports — particularly soccer, which fits neatly into two-hour blocks on kid-friendly Saturday and Sunday mornings in the Eastern time zone.

The notion of a ‘pitch clock’ was mentioned during the owners’ conversations this week; old-school types are certain to cringe, but that’s precisely the sort of thing that Manfred will need to consider to ensure baseball’s viability to future generations.

‘Folks see Rob as a person who can take where we are and jump-start it into new dimensions with new ideas, fresh ideas,’ Baer said. ‘We have to figure out ways to make (baseball) relevant to that 12-year-old … We want to make baseball as relevant as possible to them — with their handheld, on television, getting more people playing the sport.'”

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“I Never Thought I Was A Tough Cookie At All”

August 15, 2014 in Excerpts, Film | Permalink

I’d be remiss if I closed the week without posting something about the recently departed Lauren Bacall. After that beautiful published her memoirs at the end of 1978, she sat for an interview with Christopher P. Andersen of People. An excerpt:

“Question:

You were brought up to be a ‘nice Jewish girl,’ as you put it, but in Hollywood you hid that fact. Why? 

Lauren Bacall:

So much more was made of my concealing it because I didn’t ‘look’ Jewish. There was anti-Semitism in Hollywood and I was terribly frightened. Remember, I was 19 and wasn’t exactly swimming in self-confidence. It’s one area of my life I am not proud of. 

Question:

When you were going with Bogart, did you tell him you were Jewish? 

Lauren Bacall:

Yes. I had once been asked out by a West Point cadet and the subject of religion came up. He never called back, and I was sure it was because I was a Jew. So when I fell in love with Bogie, I knew I had to damn well get it straight. Of course, he was the last man on earth it would have bothered. 

Question:

Were you a great fan of Bogie’s before you met him? 

Lauren Bacall:

Howard Hawks said he’d like to put me in a film with Cary Grant or Humphrey Bogart. I thought, ‘Cary Grant—terrific! Humphrey Bogart—yucch.’ 

Question:

Didn’t Howard Hawks help create your famous voice? 

Lauren Bacall:

You can’t acquire a voice. Either you have it or you don’t. But Howard wanted me to be insolent with men on the screen, and that meant training my voice so it would remain low. I would park on Mulholland Drive—so as not to disturb the neighbors—and read The Robe aloud in a low, low voice. I was never much of a screecher anyway. 

Question:

How did the Bacall ‘look’ come about? 

Lauren Bacall:

I used to tremble from nerves so badly that the only way I could hold my head steady was to lower my chin practically to my chest and look up at Bogie. That was the beginning of the Look. I still get the shakes from time to time. 

Question:

Are you the tough cookie most people think you are? 

Lauren Bacall:

I never thought I was a tough cookie at all. When I was making To Have and Have Not Howard Hawks wanted an attitude of worldliness. At the time I was trying to figure out how a kid with absolutely no sexual experience could convey worldliness. The biggest misconception people have about me is that I’m in control of every situation. I’m rarely in control of any situation.

…

Question:

After Bogie’s death your brief engagement to Frank Sinatra ended abruptly. How do you view Sinatra today? 

Lauren Bacall:

Frank did me a great favor. He saved me from the complete disaster our marriage would have been. But the truth is that he behaved like a complete shit. Still, that was over 20 years ago. When I run into him now, we give each other a nice hello.”

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“We’re Heading Down A Path That Will Allow Us To Supercharge The Brain”

August 15, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

As I’ve mentioned before, I doubt we’ll survive as a species without AI and brain-enhancement, though those things could potentially end us as well. It’s a gambit. The opening of Kevin Loria’s Business Insider article about the future of souped-up brains, which I would guess are probably still a long way off:

“With a jolt of electricity, you might be able to enter a flow state that allows you to learn a new skill twice as fast, solve problems that have mystified you for hours, or even win a sharpshooting competition.

And this just scratches the surface in terms of what we might be able to do to improve cognition as our understanding of the brain improves. With an implanted chip, the possibilities might be close to limitless.

Researchers think that as we learn more about the brain, we’ll be able to use electricity to boost focus, memory, learning, mathematical ability, and pattern recognition. Electric stimulation may also clear away depression and stave off cognitive decline. We’ll eventually even implant computer chips that allow us to directly search the web for information or even download new skills — like Neo learning Kung-fu in The Matrix.

We’re heading down a path that will allow us to supercharge the brain.

The key is decoding how the brain works. That’s the hurdle in the way, and the one that billions of dollars in research are going towards right now.

‘I don’t think there’s any doubt we’ll eventually understand the brain,’ says Gary Marcus, a professor of psychology at New York University, and an editor of the upcoming book The Future of the Brain: Essays by the World’s Leading Neuroscientists.

‘The big question is how long it’s going to take,’ he says.”

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“Our Emotional Expressions Seem To Be Inborn”

August 15, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

We have to learn how to use words, and even when we do they don’t always translate, but facial expressions seem pretty natural and universal. Why? In a great Aeon essay, Michael Graziano, Princeton psychology and neuroscience professor, attempts to explain. The opening:

“About four thousand years ago, somewhere in the Middle East — we don’t know where or when, exactly — a scribe drew a picture of an ox head. The picture was rather simple: just a face with two horns on top. It was used as part of an abjad, a set of characters that represent the consonants in a language. Over thousands of years, that ox-head icon gradually changed as it found its way into many different abjads and alphabets. It became more angular, then rotated to its side. Finally it turned upside down entirely, so that it was resting on its horns. Today it no longer represents an ox head or even a consonant. We know it as the capital letter A.

The moral of this story is that symbols evolve.

Long before written symbols, even before spoken language, our ancestors communicated by gesture. Even now, a lot of what we communicate to each other is non-verbal, partly hidden beneath the surface of awareness. We smile, laugh, cry, cringe, stand tall, shrug. These behaviours are natural, but they are also symbolic. Some of them, indeed, are pretty bizarre when you think about them. Why do we expose our teeth to express friendliness? Why do we leak lubricant from our eyes to communicate a need for help? Why do we laugh?

One of the first scientists to think about these questions was Charles Darwin. In his 1872 book,The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, Darwin observed that all people express their feelings in more or less the same ways. He argued that we probably evolved these gestures from precursor actions in ancestral animals. A modern champion of the same idea is Paul Ekman, the American psychologist. Ekman categorised a basic set of human facial expressions — happy, frightened, disgusted, and so on — and found that they were the same across widely different cultures. People from tribal Papua New Guinea make the same smiles and frowns as people from the industrialised USA.

Our emotional expressions seem to be inborn, in other words: they are part of our evolutionary heritage. And yet their etymology, if I can put it that way, remains a mystery. Can we trace these social signals back to their evolutionary root, to some original behaviour of our ancestors? To explain them fully, we would have to follow the trail back until we left the symbolic realm altogether, until we came face to face with something that had nothing to do with communication. We would have to find the ox head in the letter A.

I think we can do that.”

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“Gabrielle Chanel — Better Known As Coco — Was A Wretched Human Being”

August 15, 2014 in Excerpts | Permalink

Yesterday I randomly came across a photo of Coco Chanel talking to Jean Cocteau, and it reminded of this perfect opening paragraph about the fashion designer that Judith Warner wrote for a 2011 New York Times Book Review piece:

“Gabrielle Chanel — better known as Coco — was a wretched human being. Anti-Semitic, homophobic, social climbing, opportunistic, ridiculously snobbish and given to sins of phrase-making like ‘If blonde, use blue perfume,’ she was addicted to morphine and actively collaborated with the Germans during the Nazi occupation of Paris. And yet, her clean, modern, kinetic designs, which brought a high-society look to low-regarded fabrics, revolutionized women’s fashion, and to this day have kept her name synonymous with the most glorious notions of French taste and élan.”

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“Wastefulness Would No Longer Be Bad But Would In Fact Be A Virtue”

August 14, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

digitaltrash

German chemist Michael Braungart is an environmentalist who wants us to consume as much as we’d like, to live richly and abundantly, to not trouble ourselves about conservation, so he’s dedicated himself to creating materials which will never truly become trash. It sounds like a wonderful world, all our greed biodegrading into natural beauty, but we may be living below sea level long before we’ve achieved this post-waste idyll. From Michaela Schiessl at Spiegel:

“Our current world of products is totally primitive,” says Braungart. We produce things, often filled with pollutants, and we eventually throw them away. The toxins escape into the soil, air and water. In his view, our practices are completely underdeveloped — part of a dark, Neanderthal-like world. “A product that becomes waste is simply a bad product. Bad chemistry.”

Braungart wants to apply good chemistry, and make products without any pollutants, which either end up as compost or are returned into the technical cycle as a pure, unadulterated raw material. If this were achieved on a large scale, many things would change. Wastefulness would no longer be bad but would in fact be a virtue, and we would be living in a world filled with abundance instead of restrictions. Our world would mimic nature, in which, for example, the blossom on a cherry tree turns into fruit, humus or a new tree – an elixir of life in all three cases. This eco-hedonism is Braungart’s creed. “I want people to live extravagantly,” he says.

Austerity and sacrifice, the favorite disciplines of many environmentalists, are anathema to him. The German environmental movement? “A club of guilt managers deprived of enjoyment.” The proponents of sustainability? “They’re optimizing the wrong thing.”

To turn his theory into practice, Braungart has established a company, EPEA. His German clients include personal care products giant Beiersdorf and lingerie maker Triumph, mail order company Otto and cosmetics maker Aveda. Braungart advises Volkswagen, Unilever and BMW. With his help, HeidelbergCement developed a special cement that purifies the air once its been processed into concrete. And, in 2013, Puma introduced the first fully recyclable athletic clothing collection, which includes compostable shoes.•

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“In Tehran, The Capital, Long Known For Its Underground Sex Scene, Chastity Is Plainly Becoming Less Common”

August 14, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Iran’s theocracy is one thing, and its people seem another altogether. It’s a strange state where the rules can be broken as long as everyone pretends otherwise. From an Economist report about a Middle Eastern Masters and Johnson-ish sex survey:

“An 82-page document recently issued by Iran’s parliamentary research department is stark in its findings. Not only are young adults sexually active, with 80% of unmarried females having boyfriends, but secondary-school pupils are, too. Illicit unions are not just between girls and boys; 17% of the 142,000 students who were surveyed said that they were homosexual.

In Tehran, the capital, long known for its underground sex scene, chastity is plainly becoming less common. The scope and pace of change are challenging the government and posing a headache for the clerics who dispense guidance at Friday prayers.

The report is also a rare official admission of the unspoken accord in Iran: people can do what they want so long as it takes place behind closed doors. Parliament’s researchers, on this occasion, were allowed to say the unsayable.

Their suggestion for stopping unsanctioned sex is remarkably liberal. Instead of seeking to cool the loins of the youngsters altogether, they should be allowed publicly to register their union by using sigheh, an ancient practice in Shia Islam that lets people marry temporarily. A legal but loose and much-deprecated arrangement, which can last from a few hours to decades, sigheh is often viewed as a cover for promiscuity or prostitution. Clerics themselves have long been suspected of being among its biggest beneficiaries, sometimes when they are on extended holy retreats in ancient religious cities such as Qom.”

“What Is Happening In Ferguson Is Exactly What Opponents Of The Rise In Military-Style Policing Across America Have Long Feared”

August 14, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Ferguson, Missouri, August 2014.

Ferguson, Missouri, August 2014.

The Iraq War is one that keeps on giving–grief–and not only overseas. The fog of that war has clouded American neighborhoods as the weapons and tools used by soldiers there have come home to roost in a neighborhood near you. Militarized police forces have drones and AR-15s, a dubious dividend, and every officer can be a Robocop now. It’s overkill that leads to actual killing, especially when the ugliness of racism shows its teeth.

Some of these arms and armor might have happened eventually anyhow in our high-tech society, but the often-misguided War on Terror has rebounded furiously back at us with weaponry the way the mission to the moon brought us memory foam and freeze-dried food. We’re all on the moon now. A brief excerpt from Sadhbh Walshe in the Guardian:

“What is happening in Ferguson is exactly what opponents of the rise in military-style policing across America have long feared: when the feds arm white local cops with weapons of war and their superiors encourage them not to just play dress-up but to use their new war toys, it is inevitable that ordinary citizens – especially citizens of color – will get treated as the enemy. As we’ve seen in Ferguson, when military might comes to Main Street, ‘hands-up, don’t shoot‘ quickly turns into a quasi-declaration of war on a grieving community.

How the hell do we stop equipping and training suburban cops as warriors?”

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“This Was Harold Robbins’s Less-Than-Subtle Signal For The Orgy To Begin”

August 14, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Urban Studies | Permalink

A writer who doesn’t do research isn’t worth a damn. Harold Robbins, he did research. From a 2007 Daily Mail article about the author working at his craft:

Under the beady eyes of the host, the party began with a little gentle socialising.

His hand-picked guests – as always, more women than men – then moved on to the next stage: marijuana, inhibition-loosening sedatives and cocaine.

When everyone seemed suitably relaxed, he started stroking a woman’s hair, moving his hands slowly downwards onto her body.

This was Harold Robbins’s less-than-subtle signal for the orgy to begin.

Soon, people were ripping off their clothes, piling into his vast, champagne-coloured bedroom and losing themselves in a pile of writhing bodies.

As they cavorted, heads would occasionally pop up to check out the view in the mirrored ceiling.

As the mastermind of these popular Beverly Hills parties, the best-selling novelist always selected the participants himself – each of whom had to be stunningly good-looking, famous or well-endowed.
His second wife, Grace, used to say that she never knew where he found them.

“I had never met any of them before, or ever would again,” she said.•

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“The Middle Is Moving To The Bottom”

August 14, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

A couple of entries from one argument in the new Pew Research Center report, “AI, Robotics, and the Future of Labor,” which tries to divine how automation will alter the workforce by 2025. 

_________________________

Argument #2: The consequences for income inequality will be profound

For those who expect AI and robotics to significantly displace human employment, these displacements seem certain to lead to an increase in income inequality, a continued hollowing out of the middle class, and even riots, social unrest, and/or the creation of a permanent, unemployable “underclass.”

Justin Reich, a fellow at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society, said, “Robots and AI will increasingly replace routine kinds of work—even the complex routines performed by artisans, factory workers, lawyers, and accountants. There will be a labor market in the service sector for non-routine tasks that can be performed interchangeably by just about anyone—and these will not pay a living wage—and there will be some new opportunities created for complex non-routine work, but the gains at this top of the labor market will not be offset by losses in the middle and gains of terrible jobs at the bottom. I’m not sure that jobs will disappear altogether, though that seems possible, but the jobs that are left will be lower paying and less secure than those that exist now. The middle is moving to the bottom.”

Stowe Boyd, lead researcher at GigaOM Research, said, “As just one aspect of the rise of robots and AI, widespread use of autonomous cars and trucks will be the immediate end of taxi drivers and truck drivers; truck driver is the number-one occupation for men in the U.S.. Just as importantly, autonomous cars will radically decrease car ownership, which will impact the automotive industry. Perhaps 70% of cars in urban areas would go away. Autonomous robots and systems could impact up to 50% of jobs, according to recent analysis by Frey and Osborne at Oxford, leaving only jobs that require the ‘application of heuristics’ or creativity…An increasing proportion of the world’s population will be outside of the world of work—either living on the dole, or benefiting from the dramatically decreased costs of goods to eke out a subsistence lifestyle. The central question of 2025 will be: What are people for in a world that does not need their labor, and where only a minority are needed to guide the ‘bot-based economy?”

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“I Am Absolutely Sure That In Due Course A Computer Will Be A Really Outstanding And Terrifyingly Good World Champion”

August 14, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Sports | Permalink

In a 1979 Omni interview, Dr. Christopher Evans spoke with chess player, businessman and AI enthusiast David Levy, who defeated a computer-chess competitor that year but was unnerved by his hard-fought victory. Just six years earlier, he had confidently said: “I am tempted to speculate that a computer program will not gain the title of International Master before the turn of the century and that the idea of an electronic world champion belongs only in the pages of a science fiction book.” Levy knew before the matches at the end of the ’70s were over that our time of dominance was nearing completion. An excerpt:

“Omni:

When did you first begin to feel that computer chess programs were really getting somewhere?

David Levy:

I think it was at the tournament in Stockholm in 1974. One of the things that struck me was a game in which one of the American programs made the sacrifice of a piece, in return for which it got a very good positional advantage. Now, programs don’t normally give up pieces unless they can see something absolutely concrete, but in this case the advantages that it got were not concrete but rather in the structure or nature of the position. It wasn’t a difficult sacrifice for a human player to see, but it was something ! hadn’t expected from a computer program. I was giving a running commentary on the game, and I remember saying to the audience that i would be very surprised indeed if the program made this sacrifice, whereupon it went and made it. I was very, very impressed, because this was the first really significant jump that I’d seen in computer chess.

Omni:

So somewhere around that time things began to stir. To what do you attribute this?

David Levy:

Interest in computer chess generally was growing at a very fast rate, for a number of reasons. First of all, there were the annual tournaments in the United States at the ACM conferences, and these grew in popularity They inspired interest partly because there was now a competitive medium in which the programs could take part. Also, there was my bet, which had created a certain amount of publicity and, I suppose, made people wish that they could write the program that would beat me.

Omni:

How much of this has gone hand in hand with the gradually greater availability of computers and the fact that it no longer costs the earth to get access to one?

David Levy:

Quite a lot. As recently as 1972, in San Antonio, I met some people who were actually writing a clandestine computer program to play chess. They hadn’t dared tell their university department about it because they would have been accused of wasting computer time. They were even unable to enter their program in the tournament, because. If they had they would have lost their positions at the university. Today the situation is dramatically changed, because it is so much easier to get machine time. Now, with the advent of home computers, I think it’s only a matter of time before everyone interested in computer chess will have the opportunity to write a personal chess program.

Omni:

Times have changed, haven’t they? Not very long ago you’d see articles by science journalists saying that computers could never be compared with brains, because they couldn’t play a decent game of chess. There was even some jocular correspondence about what would happen if two computers played each other, and it was argued that if white opened with pawn to king four, black would immediately resign.

David Levy:

This presupposes thai chess is, in practical terms, a finite game. In theoretical terms it is because there is a limit to the number of moves you can make in any position, and the rules of the game also put an upper limit on the total number of moves that any game can involve. But the number of possible different chess games is stupendous — greater than the number of atoms in the universe, in fact. Even if each atom in the universe were a very, very fast computer and they were all working together, they still would not be able to play the perfect game of chess. So the idea that pawn to king four as an opening move could be proved to be a win for white by force is nonsense. One reason you hear these kinds of things is that most people do not understand either the nature of computer programs or the nature of chess. The man in the street tends to think that because chess grand masters are geniuses, their play is beyond the comprehension of a computer. What they don’t understand is that when a computer plays chess, it is just performing a large number ol arithmetic operations. Okay, the end result is typed out and constitutes a move in a game of chess. But the program isn’t thinking. It is just carrying out a series of instructions.

Omni:

One sees some very peculiar, almost spooky moves made by computers, involving extraordinary sacrifices and almost dashing wins, Could they be just chance?

David Levy:

No. Wins like that are not chance. They are pure calculation, The best way to describe the situation is to divide the game of chess into two spheres, strategy and tactics. When I talk about tactics I mean things such as sacrifices with captures, checks, and threats on the queen or to force mate, When I talk about strategy I mean subtle maneuvering to try and gradually improve position. In the area of tactics, programs are really very powerful because of their ability to calculate deeply and accurately. Thus, where a program makes a spectacular move and forces mate two moves later, it is quite possible that the program has calculated the whole of that variation. These spectacular moves look marvelous, of course, to the spectator and to the reader of chess magazines’ because they are things one only expects from strong players. In fact, they’re the easiest things for a program to do.

What is very difficult for a. program is to make a really good, subtle, strategic move, because that involves long-range planning and a kind of undefinable sixth sense for what is ‘right in the position.’ This sixth sense, or instinct, is really one of the things that sorts out the men from the boys on the chessboard. The top chess programs may look at as many as two million positions every time they make a move. Chess masters, on the other hand, look at maybe lifty, so it’s evident that the nature of their thought processes, so to speak, are completely different. Perhaps the best way to put it is that Ihe human knows what he’s doing and the computer doesn’t.

I can explain this with an example from master chess. The Russian ex-world champion Mikhail Tal was. explaining after one game his reasons behind particular moves. In one position his- king was in check on king’s knight one. and he had a choice between moving it to. the corner or moving it nearer to the center of the board. Most players, without very much hesitation, would immediately put the king in the corner, because it’s safer there. But he rejected this move, and somebody in the audience said, ‘Please, Grand Master, can you tell us, Why did you move the king to the middle of the board when everybody knows, that it is safer in the comer?’ And he said, ‘Well, I thought that when we reached the sort of end game- which I anticipated, it would be very important to have my king near the center of the board.’ When they reached the end game, he won it by one move, because his king was one square nearer the vital part of the board than his opponent’s. Now this was something that he couldn’t have seen through blockbusting analysis and by looking ten or even twenty moves ahead. It was just feel.

Omni:

This brings us up against the question of whether or not a computer will ever play a really great game of chess. How do you feel about I. J. Good’s suggestion that a computer could one day be world champion?

David Levy:

Well, ten years ago I would have said, ‘Nonsense.’ Now I am absolutely sure that in due course a computer will be a really outstanding and terrifyingly good world champion. It’s almost inevitable that within a decade computers will be maybe a hundred thousand or a million times faster than they are now. And with many, many computers working in parallel, one could place enormous computer resources at the disposal of chess programs. This will mean that the best players in the world will be wiped out by sheer force of computer power. Actually, from an aesthetic and also an emotional point of view, it would be very unfortunate if the program won the world championship by brute force. I would be much happier to see a world-champion program that looked at very small combinations of moves but looked at them intelligently. This would be far more meaningful, because it would mean that the programmer had mastered the technique of making computer programs ‘think’ in rather the same way that human beings do, which would be a significant advance in artificial intelligence.

Omni:

Which brings us around to the tactics you adopt when playing computers. When did you play your first game against a chess program?

David Levy:

The first one that I remember was against an early version of the. Northwestern University program, and it presented no problems at all. These early programs were rather dull opponents, actually.

The latest ones, of course, are much more intelligent, particularly as they exhibit what you might also describe as psychological characteristics or even personal traits.

Omni:

Could you give an example?

David Levy:

Well, there is this thing called the horizon effect. Say a program is threatened with the loss of a knight which it does not want lo lose. No matter what it does, it cannot see a way to avoid losing the knight within the horizon that it is looking at — say, four moves deep. Suddenly it spots a variation where by sacrificing a pawn it is not losing the knight anymore. It will go into this variation and sacrifice the pawn, but what it does not realize is that after it has lost the pawn, the loss of the knight is still inevitable. The pawn was merely a temporary decoy. But the program is thinking only four moves ahead and the loss of the knight has been pushed beyond its horizon of search, so it is content. Later on, when the pawn has been lost, it will see once again that the knight is threatened and it will once again try to avoid losing the knight and give up something else. By the time it finally does lose the knighl, il has lost so many other things as well that it wishes it had really given up the piece at the beginning. This often brings about a reeling in the program that can best be described as ‘apathy.’ If a program gets into a position that is, extremely difficult because–it is absolutely bound to lose something, it starts to make moves of an apparently reckless kind. It appears to be saying, ‘Oh, damn you! You’re smashing me off the board. I don’t care anymore. I’m just going to sacrifice all my pieces.’ Actually, the program is fighting as hard as it can to avoid the inevitable.

Omni:

That sounds very much like The way beginners get obsessed with defending pieces. But it also sounds as though you’re saying that you feel the program has a
mood.

David Levy:

Almost. One tends.to come to regard these things as being almost human, particularly when you can see that they have understood what you. are doing or you can see they are trying to do something clever; In fact, as with human beings, certain tendencies repeat themselves time and again. For example, there are definite idiosyncrasies of Ihe Northwestern University program that one soon comes to recognize. In a particular variation of the Sicilian defense, white oiten has a knight on his queen four square and black often has a knight on black’s queen bishop three square. Now, it’s quite well known among stronger players that white does not exchange knights, because black can launch a counterattack along ihe queen-knight tile. Now, I noticed quite often that when playing against the Sicilian defense, the Northwestern University program- would exchange knights. Its main reason was that this maneuver leads to black having what we call an isolated pawn, which, as a general principle, is a ‘bad thing,’ So the Northwestern University program, when in doubt, used to say, ‘I’ll take his knight. And when he recaptures with the knight’s pawn, he has got an isolated rook’s pawn. Goody.’ What it didn’t realize is that in the Sicilian defense, the. isolated rook’s pawn doesn’t actually matter, but having the majority of pawns in the center for black does. So when I played my first match against CHESS 4.5 in Pittsburgh, on April 1, 1977, I deliberately made an inferior move in the opening, so that the program would no longer be following its opening book and wouldn’t know what to do. I was confident that after I made this inferior move the program would exchange knights., which it did, and this presented me with the sort of position that I wanted.”

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“To My Great Surprise, His Face Was That Of An Unhappy Man”

August 13, 2014 in Excerpts | Permalink

If you trail down the lesser-remembered paths of Robin Williams’ career, you start to reacquaint yourself with stuff like his lead in the television adaptation of Saul Bellow’s Seize the Day or his appearance on the second season of Homicide: Life on the Street. That show was adapted from then-Baltimore newspaper reporter David Simon’s book, and the future creator of The Wire was only a part-time TV writer when Williams guested on the ratings-challenged program. Simon has written a recollection of his meeting with the great actor, and I hope he wouldn’t think the segment I’m posting below too long. It’s a story that builds, and I felt like a mohel with a hacksaw each time I approached it for more cutting. The excerpt:

“I wanted to offer something — anything — and I thought about the Penn Street morgue in which we were standing.

‘Have you ever heard of the Nutshell Studies?’

He had not, of course.

‘They’re upstairs, off the hallway up there. I can show you. It’s not anything you could imagine, and since we’re actually in the morgue today…’

He nodded, a bit wearily, I thought, and a nervous production assistant followed us upstairs as I tried to explain the dollhouse-sized dioramas that were on display at the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner here in Baltimore. Created as part of the Francis Glessner Lee Seminar for death investigation, a training regimen for police detectives originally funded by Harvard University, each diorama featured the occupants of a dollhouse room in the aftermath of violent death. The scenes were carefully detailed, and a detective in the seminar, as part of his final exam, could stare down at a tableau and determine, from the evidence in each room, whether the doll in question had died accidentally, taken his or her own life, or been willfully murdered.

Mr. Williams looked at each of the rooms, asking questions, fascinated by the macabre display. He guessed at a seemingly accidental death that was in fact a murder, then guessed again at a kitchen suicide by a young girl that seemed at first glance to be a stabbing. I could offer solutions to most of the displays only because I’d learned the answers, years before. The actor took it all in, clicking the buttons to light each diorama and then staring at all of the morbid goings-on until the P.A. told him he was needed back on set.

‘How long has that been here?’ he asked as we walked back.

‘They’re from the 1940s, I think.’

He nodded solemnly. Not a joke to be had.

He smiled for just a moment, but followed the P.A. back downstairs to the set, where the grips and gaffer were still lighting. And then, suddenly, it happened. Nothing specifically to do with the dollhouse horror show, or even the fact that we were filming in a working morgue, but instead the arrival of Mr. Levinson, the executive producer.  I wish I could remember the sequence, but there is no way in hell:

It began, I think, with something about Barry arriving as a mohel to circumcise the cast and crew, replete with an imitation offered up with Hasidic accent, then lurched into a string of jokes about how reluctant crew members could opt for an antemortem autopsy downstairs if they didn’t want to be so fixed by Mr. Levinson. There was a segue into all the other morbid Baltimore locales that would be featured in the episode, and all of the ghoulish degradations that would be endured by the crew, following by some savagery about the film caterer and then some banter with Mr. Belzer, who tried to hang for a few bon mots. But no, Robin Williams was firing all rockets, leaving earth’s orbit. I can’t remember all of the sparks of comic synapse, the absurd connections, the twisting journey from one punchline to the next.  I have a specific recollection of him announcing Mr. Levinson’s new NBC drama as The Pope and Judy, a warm-hearted romp that would make everyone forget that depressing mess about murders in Baltimore: ‘He’s the supreme pontiff of the Roman Catholic Church; she’s an adorable puppet.’

And then a mock-Italian voice, as a pope tries to fellate a falsetto-voiced puppet — the comedian’s left hand — with a communion wafer.

You had to be there. And, yes, I know that the phrase is used to connote moments that are less humorous in retrospect, but with Mr. Williams the live-wire volatility, the no-net comic gymnastics was part of the allure. If you were there, and I was, then you could scarcely breathe from laughing so hard and so long. The crew stopped working, forming a semicircle around him. Word went down the hallway and out to the trucks. More people rushed in to catch the shooting sparks, so that the entire production came to a halt as Robin Williams, quiet for days in the role of a grieving, wounded man, finally exploded. He was soaring for at least another five minutes before Mr. Levinson gave the slightest nod to his watch: We were losing the day.

Mr. Williams caught the look from the producer and ended the impromptu routine abruptly, with an awkward smile. His breathing was labored, and he looked to be genuinely embarrassed by his demonstration as cast and crew applauded with warm delight before returning to work. But it seemed that the actor had gone there as much for his own needs as for the audience, that he had come back downstairs from the dollhouse of the dead, readied himself to shoot another painful scene of grief and guilt, and then, in manic desperation, reached out for as much human comedy as ten minutes will allow.

I last saw him in the hallway, using the few remaining minutes before filming to face the wall and reacquaint himself with whatever horror he was trying to channel. He was sweating, too, as if it had taken all he had to rise to that warm summit and provoke such laughter. To my great surprise, his face was that of an unhappy man, and I retreated, saddened and surprised by the thought.”

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“Texas Dwarfs Even Silicon Valley As A Bitcoin Pioneer”

August 13, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

I can’t name one economist I respect who thinks putting even a single Susan B. Anthony dollar into Bitcoin is a capital idea, but the Lone Start State, forever rushing toward the next gusher and away from regulation, is knee-deep in the cryptocurrency. The opening of Loren Steffy’s new Texas Monthly article on the boom that could go bust:

“‘Texas,’ says Jeremy Kandah, ‘is the most Bitcoin-friendly state in the union.’ Kandah, a member of the Austin venture capital group Bit-Angels Network, has his reasons for asserting that the Lone Star State is bullish on the headline-making virtual currency. BitAngels, after all, is in the business of convincing Bitcoin-related start-ups that Texas is where they should be turning for capital. But once you start paying attention, you notice that Kandah’s enthusiasm is more than just your typical chamber-of-commerce boosterism. Texas dwarfs even Silicon Valley as a Bitcoin pioneer, which is one reason Kandah, like many others who want a piece of tech’s new big thing, recently moved here from California. ‘We have one of the biggest concentrations in the country of Bitcoin users and Bitcoin technology companies,’ says David Johnston, the managing director of BitAngels’ sister company, the Decentralized Applications Fund.

Though Kandah notes that New Jersey is gaining on us, there are plenty of signs of Bitcoin’s unusually heavy presence in Texas. In April the state’s Department of Banking became the first state regulator in the country to issue guidelines for virtual currencies. That same month Steve Stockman, the Republican congressman from Clear Lake who was one of the first politicians in the country to accept Bitcoin donations, introduced a bill that would require the Internal Revenue Service to treat Bitcoins like any other currency. Even the Second Amendment contingent is getting in on the game: in January Austin’s Central Texas Gunworks began accepting payment in Bitcoins, making it the first firearms shop in the country to do so. A month later, after the Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission approved the use of Bitcoins to buy booze, downtown Austin beer and cocktail joint the HandleBar installed the country’s first Bitcoin ATM.

Why is Texas so attached to Bitcoin? Our hands-off regulatory philosophy, which could encourage entrepreneurs to take a chance on a virtual currency, likely has something to do with it. And there’s no doubt that the state’s libertarian leanings play a role; embracing Bitcoin is the ultimate statement of disdain for the Federal Reserve, the bête noire of Texas’s Libertarian party standard-bearer Ron Paul. As Stockman said in an online video, ‘Digital currency’s more about freedom. . . . Freedom to choose what you do with your money and freedom to keep your money without people influencing it by printing money or through regulation.’ Texas Bitcoin Association president Paul Snow likes to throw around libertarian boilerplate phrases like ‘the crumbling, diminishing dollar.’

Yet Bitcoin is in many ways Ron Paul’s worst nightmare: it’s the ultimate example of fiat money, a currency backed not by a tangible commodity like gold but by software code and the faith and labor of thousands of hard-core believers.”

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“It Is Too Gigantic, Pedantic, Tedious”

August 13, 2014 in Excerpts, Film, Videos | Permalink

Jorge Luis Borges penned a perplexing review of Citizen Kane in 1941, and Orson Welles had a perfect riposte for it: “Borges is half-blind,” the director pointed out. “Never forget that.” Here’s the ending of the critique, which can be read in full at the Interrelevant:

“I venture to guess, nonetheless, that Citizen Kane will endure as a certain Griffith or Pudovkin films have ‘endured’—films whose historical value is undeniable but which no one cares to see again. It is too gigantic, pedantic, tedious. It is not intelligent, though it is the work of genius—in the most nocturnal and Germanic sense of that bad word.”

_______________________________

“Now he can live his dreams with less distraction”:

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“If San Francisco Had The Same Population Density As Manhattan, It Could Be Home To Around 3 Million Residents Instead Of Its Current 800,000”

August 13, 2014 in Excerpts, Urban Studies | Permalink

I’ve read that if New Hampshire had the same population density as Brooklyn, every American could live in the state. In a Priceonomics post about San Francisco devoting more than 2% of its land to golf courses when it’s so squeezed for space that burying the dead within city limits isn’t permitted, Alex Mayyasi spells out how sparse the population is and why:

“To the extent that the surprising prevalence of golf courses in San Francisco has relevance to the city’s debates over gentrification, it’s likely as a reminder that the city’s small, constrained size — a commonly cited culprit for high rent prices — is not to blame. If San Francisco had the same population density as Manhattan, it could be home to around 3 million residents instead of its current 800,000. But in order to protect San Francisco from change, its residents have consistently voted for zoning laws that prevent developers from building taller commercial and residential buildings — even downtown. Similarly, a great public transport system could allow people to enjoy San Francisco’s employment opportunities and cultural capital while living outside the city limits, but the Bay Area Transport system has not ‘had a significant upgrade in San Francisco since 1976.‘“

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“Why Then Has It Taken So Long To Discover The Sun?”

August 13, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The New Republic has republished “The Billion-Dollar Fight Over Who Owns the Sun,” a 1975 article by Peter Barnes about the city of Santa Clara working to ensure our brightest star would be a public utility. The opening:

“The city of Santa Clara lies 50 miles south of San Francisco in a robustly sunny valley. As in much of California, rain is concentrated in the winter months, leaving nearly 300 days a year of clear skies. Until now no one paid much attention to the economic value of all that sunshine. But things are changing. By July the city will have completed a new recreation building that will draw about 80 percent of its heating and cooling energy from solar collectors mounted on the roof. After that the city itself will plunge into the solar energy business. ‘What we see is a city-owned solar utility,’ says City Manager Donald Von Raesfeld. ‘The city will finance and install solar heating and cooling systems in new buildings. Consumers will pay a monthly fee to cover amortization and maintenance of the solar units. This will be done on a nonprofit basis, with the capital raised through municipal bonds.’

Santa Clara isn’t alone in its effort to convert sunshine into useful energy. A recent survey listed 68 US buildings, either completed or near completion, that are getting some or all of their energy from the sun. Dozens of corporations are involved in solar research. The federal government is pouring millions of dollars into solar research and development projects. And while the big commitment of government and industry is still to fossil fuels and nuclear fission, energy from the sun is no longer dismissed as farfetched or far off. According to a Westinghouse study funded by the National Science Foundation, solar heating and cooling of buildings will be economically competitive in most parts of the country by 1985-90, and are already almost competitive in sunny regions like California and Florida. By the end of the century, says the NSF, the sun could provide more than one-third of the energy we use to heat and cool buildings, plus 20 to 30 percent of our electricity needs. It could dramatically reduce peak demands for electricity—mainly for summer air-conditioning — and conserve fossil fuels for petro-chemical uses for which there are no ready substitutes. Congress is equally enthused. Last year it passed five laws dealing wholly or partly with solar energy research, spreading money somewhat chaotically among the NSF, NASA, HUD and a new energy research and development agency.

The attractions of solar energy are apparent. It doesn’t pollute or otherwise damage the environment. It creates no dangerous waste products such as plutonium. It won’t run out for a few billion years. It can’t be embargoed by Arabs or anyone else. It’s virtually inflation proof once the basic set-up costs are met, and would wondrously improve our balance of payments. The technology involved, while still not perfected, is much less complex than nuclear technology. And of all energy sources the sun is the least amenable to control by cartel-like energy industry.

Why then has it taken so long to discover the sun? One reason is that the energy contained in sunshine is diffuse and fickle compared to the concentrated energy found in fossil fuels. As long as fossil fuels were plentiful and fairly easy to get at, it was considerably more profitable to collect and sell these stored forms of solar energy than to capture the sun’s current energy emissions. Another reason is the massive commitment of dollars and scientists the US made after World War II to the development of nuclear energy, a commitment that in retrospect appears to have derived at least partly from guilt over having unleashed the atom for destructive purposes, (‘If sunbeams were weapons of war, we would have had solar energy centuries ago,’ chemist George Porter has observed,) Solar energy is finally looking attractive because fossil fuels are no longer cheap, and because the drawbacks of nuclear fission—its hazards, huge capital costs, and low gains in net energy terms (it takes enormous amounts of energy to build reactors and prepare their fuel)—are now more widely appreciated.”

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“Some Of The Revelations Attributed To Snowden May Not In Fact Have Come From Him But From Another Leaker”

August 13, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Information may not want to be free from a financial standpoint, but it does want to be unfettered, with centralized, controlled data no longer a possibility in this connected age. That’s the reality made clear by the Edward Snowden leaks, even if his NSA revelations weren’t exactly a shocker to anyone with open eyes. In many cases this new normal will be a good thing and in some a bad one. But no legislation will really stop it.

Further complicating matters is that most Americans don’t seem to mind if their government snoops on them in the (supposed) name of protecting them. In these scary times, they want a big brother, even if it’s Big Brother.

From “The Most Wanted Man in the World,” James Bamford’s Wired cover article, a passage about a possible second leaker, which is likely though Snowden neither confirms nor denies:

“And there’s another prospect that further complicates matters: Some of the revelations attributed to Snowden may not in fact have come from him but from another leaker spilling secrets under Snowden’s name. Snowden himself adamantly refuses to address this possibility on the record. But independent of my visit to Snowden, I was given unrestricted access to his cache of documents in various locations. And going through this archive using a sophisticated digital search tool, I could not find some of the documents that have made their way into public view, leading me to conclude that there must be a second leaker somewhere. I’m not alone in reaching that conclusion. Both Greenwald and security expert Bruce Schneier—who have had extensive access to the cache—have publicly stated that they believe another whistle-blower is releasing secret documents to the media.

In fact, on the first day of my Moscow interview with Snowden, the German newsmagazine Der Spiegel comes out with a long story about the NSA’s operations in Germany and its cooperation with the German intelligence agency, BND. Among the documents the magazine releases is a top-secret ‘Memorandum of Agreement’ between the NSA and the BND from 2002. ‘It is not from Snowden’s material,’ the magazine notes.

Some have even raised doubts about whether the infamous revelation that the NSA was tapping German chancellor Angela Merkel’s cell phone, long attributed to Snowden, came from his trough. At the time of that revelation, Der Spiegel simply attributed the information to Snowden and other unnamed sources. If other leakers exist within the NSA, it would be more than another nightmare for the agency—it would underscore its inability to control its own information and might indicate that Snowden’s rogue protest of government overreach has inspired others within the intelligence community. ‘They still haven’t fixed their problems,’ Snowden says. ‘They still have negligent auditing, they still have things going for a walk, and they have no idea where they’re coming from and they have no idea where they’re going. And if that’s the case, how can we as the public trust the NSA with all of our information, with all of our private records, the permanent record of our lives?'”

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“I Would Be Willing To Make A Very Strong Commitment That It Could Be Done In 15 Years”

August 13, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

In the earlier post about Freeman Dyson’s outré dreams for space colonization, I mentioned he thought too restrained the planetary-settlement plans of fellow Princeton physicist Gerard K. O’Neill. Here’s a bit from a 1975 interview Stewart Brand conducted with O’Neill on the topic:

“Stewart Brand::

What would it take for you to become a fulltime space colonizer?

Gerard O’Neill:

Well, if the president came to me and said, ‘Here is X-billion dollars, we’re going to go ahead with the thing and we want you to be involved with it.’ That would sure fetch me.

Stewart Brand:

Suppose NASA said ‘Here’s 5 years of personal salary to administer the growth of this program?’

Gerard O’Neill:

That’s not enough. I have a deep suspicion of governments, and really – although I’m not politically active-I know enough about politics to be very suspicious of it; I think I would have to see a really substantial committed kind of program going. I don’t mean at the spending level of billions of dollars, but I’d like to see something where there’s a very solid commitment to continue in the same sense as there was in the Apollo program.

Stewart Brand:

Of the level of Kennedy saying, ‘We’re going to be on the Moon in this decade’ For some politician to make this go, he’s going to have to say ‘by the year so-and so.’ What year is that?

Gerard O’Neill:

Arthur Kantrowitz, the president of AFCO-Everett was out visiting us a few days ago. He happens to be quite enthusiastic about this work, and he says that his answer for things of that kind is to say, ‘You’ll have the result ten years after you’ve stopped laughing,’ which is I think, a pretty good answer. The most responsible answer I could give is to say that if I really had the responsibility for getting it done by a certain time and the authority to do it in what I would consider the right way, then I would be willing to make a very strong commitment that it could be done in 15 years from time-zero. Whatever that time-zero is.

Stewart Brand:

This is Model One with an extra-territorial population of what?

Gerard O’Neill: 

Yes, Model One. Roughly 10,000 people. If you look at the growth rates that you could get from that first one, then you’d probably be talking about a quarter of a million people by the year 2,000. Because you’ll be going up very fast after you get the first beachhead.

Stewart Brand:

And your graph I saw in Washington suggested a net population decrease on the planet’s surface by…

Gerard O’Neill:

I think the turn-over there is about 2018. Now that was based – first of all, I don’t make it as a prediction – it was indicated as a technical possibility, and it was based on a time-zero of essentially now, which is certainly unrealistic politically, and a completion date of 13 years, so that would put Model One in place by 1988. Maybe you could even do it from now, technically, but it’s probably more reasonable to say 13-20 years from a time of decision.

Stewart Brand:

Do you think there’s no way to get the toothpaste back in the tube at this point…. that the idea is inevitable?

Gerard O’Neill:

There are other possibilities. Civilization could tear itself apart with energy shortages, population pressures, and running out of materials. Everything could become much more militaristic, and the whole world might get to be more of an armed camp. Things of this kind might just not be done because no nation would dare to divert that much money away from military efforts. or without war, it could be that the world will become poor, to the point where it can’t afford to try things like this.

Of course, if neither of those possibilities occurs, then I do think there is some sort of inevitability about it. With that, of course, you can’t associate a time-scale. It could be a long time.

Stewart Brand:

Who resists the idea in any large way? If anyone.

Gerard O’Neill:

Well there was a while when I thought that elderly and famous professors of physics were the greatest opponents. . . In fact of all the mail I’ve gotten only about 1% has been in opposition to it.

Stewart Brand:

And what’s your short roster of planetary problems that will be solved by this particular technique? Energy, population. . .

Gerard O’Neill:

Well, yes, but by phrasing the question in that way it’s difficult for me to answer except with a prediction or promise, and that’s something that no decent scientist likes to make. I think it’s very wrong to assume that something like this is going to promise happiness to all people, because people manage to make themselves unhappy in almost any circumstances.”

 

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“A Team Of Young Cyberspace Entrepreneurs Celebrated What Was Apparently The First Retail Transaction On The Internet”

August 12, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

A Marketwatch article by Ariana Tobin pointed me to the New York Times’ 1993 coverage of the first online retail purchase–a Sting CD. Here’s the opening of that piece, “Attention Shoppers: Internet Is Open,” by Peter H. Lewis:

“At noon yesterday, Phil Brandenberger of Philadelphia went shopping for a compact audio disk, paid for it with his credit card and made history.

Moments later, the champagne corks were popping in a small two-story frame house in Nashua, N.H. There, a team of young cyberspace entrepreneurs celebrated what was apparently the first retail transaction on the Internet using a readily available version of powerful data encryption software designed to guarantee privacy.

Experts have long seen such iron-clad security as a necessary first step before commercial transactions can become common on the Internet, the global computer network.

From his work station in Philadelphia, Mr. Brandenburger logged onto the computer in Nashua, and used a secret code to send his Visa credit card number to pay $12.48, plus shipping costs, for the compact disk Ten Summoners’ Tales by the rock musician Sting.

‘Even if the N.S.A. was listening in, they couldn’t get his credit card number,’ said Daniel M. Kohn, the 21-year-old chief executive of the Net Market Company of Nashua, N.H., a new venture that is the equivalent of a shopping mall in cyberspace. Mr. Kohn was referring to the National Security Agency, the arm of the Pentagon that develops and breaks the complex algorithms that are used to keep the most secret electronic secrets secret.

Even bigger organizations working on rival systems yesterday called the achievement by the tiny Net Market a welcome first step.

‘It’s really clear that most companies want the security prior to doing major commitments to significant electronic commerce on the Internet,’ said Cathy Medich, executive director of Commercenet, a Government and industry organization based in Menlo Park, Calif., that hopes to establish standards for commercial transactions on the Internet and other networks.

The idea is to make such data communications immune to wiretaps, electronic eavesdropping and theft by scrambling the transmissions with a secret code — a security technique known as data encryption.”

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“It Was A Strange Kind Of Artificial Place”

August 12, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Urban Studies | Permalink

From Kate Dailey at BBC, a recollection of the lifestyle of thousands U.S. citizens like John McCain who lived in the Panama Canal Zone, a stamp-sized America, yes, yet a dreamworld all its own:

“For almost 100 years, thousands of Americans lived a life of luxury in secluded tropical communities close to the Bay of Panama. Known as ‘Zonians,’ they maintained one of the world’s great engineering feats – the Panama Canal.

Established in 1903, the Panama Canal Zone constituted a home away from home for the Americans who built and maintained the Panama Canal and the workers who supported them.

The zone was an area of 533 square miles that ran the course of the canal and was controlled by the US. Families were given generous benefits, including subsidised housing, ample holiday time, well-stocked commissaries and attentive staff.

Its residents enjoyed the beautiful weather and more relaxed lifestyle of Panama, while also living in comfortable American-style housing, experiencing a top-notch American education and enjoying all the perks of US citizenship.

‘It was a strange kind of artificial place,’ says Michael Donoghue, author of Borderland on the Isthmus: Race, Culture, and the Struggle for the Canal Zone. His father travelled through the zone during World War Two, and compared it to ‘a small southern town transplanted into the middle of Central America.'”

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“As Well As The Internet Of Things, Autonomous Vehicles, Consumer 3D Printing And Wearable Computing Are All Innovations That Are Over-Hyped”

August 12, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Atop the list of overhyped technologies from a new Gartner report: the Internet of Things. Defining common standards is the main problem. Speech recognition, however, is now ready for the masses, the research argues. From Alex Hern at the Guardian:

“Initially, a new technology enters the public’s awareness with low expectations, which slowly rise as the potential becomes clear. Quantum computing, holographic displays and human augmentation are all at that period of the cycle, although the firm puts all three of them at well over 10 years from general use.

Eventually, expectations hit a peak, where the technology is predicted to solve almost every problem known to humanity. As well as the internet of things, autonomous vehicles, consumer 3D printing and wearable computing are all innovations that Gartner thinks are over-hyped at the moment.

Then comes what Gartner calls the ‘trough of disillusionment’: the period when the realisation hits on that the technology is never going to perform as well as its proponents hoped. Examples include gamification, augmented reality, and near-field communication.

Importantly, however, the tech doesn’t disappear from use, and continues to be refined throughout the trough of disillusionment. As the innovation finds its niche, it enters the ‘slope of enlightenment,’ where the public realises the actual potential of the product, as with enterprise 3D printing and gesture control.

Finally, the new technology hits the ‘plateau of productivity.’ It has become good enough to carry out its functions, and the period of hype is far enough in the past that people are willing to give it a second chance. For Gartner, speech recognition has hit that plateau, and is now ready for real world use.”

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“None Of The Search Engines Came Anywhere Close To A 6-Year-Old Child In Terms Of Reasoning Ability”

August 12, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Is it chauvinism that makes us measure what AI an do according to human abilities, or is that the most valid scale? From a Why Boost IQ? post by Douglas Heingartner, the results of a Chinese study which asserts that a child has pattern-recognition powers superior to the best search engines:

“None of the search engines came anywhere close to a 6-year-old child in terms of reasoning ability. The search engines outperformed humans in common knowledge, translation, and calculations, but did poorly in discovering patterns and making speculations.

For example, the engines were stumped when confronted with ’20/5=4, 40/10=4, 80/20=4, 160/40=4: observe the rules, then design the fifth question,’ or ‘If there are many animals in one place, but they are all in cages and many people are looking, then where is it?’

‘The current abilities of search engines in these areas,’ wrote the researchers, is ‘close to zero.’

Their research was partially in response to claims about artificial intelligence soon surpassing the human kind. Though that oft-prophesied moment of singularity has yet to arrive, the researchers hope their test will help chart the Internet’s intellectual development over time, and show how quickly (or slowly) the gap between human and machine intelligence is closing.”

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“A Robot Was Cooking Up Burgers”

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

McDonald’s recently reported poor global sales, hurt mostly by dips in the United States and Asia, so perhaps health information and the reality of factory farming are starting to make a dent. But there’s a way on the horizon for fast-food franchises–and even slower-meal places–to save money: robotics. Employee-less service in a consumer environment is nothing new, but perhaps this time it’s real. From Jason Dorrier at Singularity Hub:

“I saw the future of work in a San Francisco garage two years ago. Or rather, I was in proximity to the future of work, but happened to be looking the other direction.

At the time, I was visiting a space startup building satellites behind a carport. But just behind them—a robot was cooking up burgers. The inventors of the burger device? Momentum Machines, and they’re serious about fast food productivity.

‘Our device isn’t meant to make employees more efficient,’ cofounder Alexandros Vardakostas has said. ‘It’s meant to completely obviate them.’

The Momentum burger-bot isn’t remotely humanoid. You can forget visions ofFuturama’s Bender. It’s more of a burger assembly line. Ingredients are stored in automated containers along the line. Instead of pre-prepared veggies, cheese, and ground beef—the bot chars, slices, dices, and assembles it all fresh.

Why would talented engineers schooled at Berkeley, Stanford, UCSB, and USC with experience at Tesla and NASA bother with burger-bots? Robots are increasingly capable of jobs once thought the sole domain of humans—and that’s a huge opportunity.

Burger robots may improve consistency and sanitation, and they can knock out a rush like nobody’s business. Momentum’s robot can make a burger in 10 seconds (360/hr). Fast yes, but also superior quality. Because the restaurant is free to spend its savings on better ingredients, it can make gourmet burgers at fast food prices.

Or at least, that’s the idea.”

 

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“I Like To Think Iraq Can Still Hold Together”

August 11, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

Jane Arraf, Al Jazeera’s Iraq correspondent, has more hope than most for a one-state solution for the exploding country and its warring factions. She just did an Ask Me Anything at Reddit. A few exchanges follow.

___________________________

Question:

How are the Sunni and Shiite Arabs in Iraq feeling about the U.S. air campaign against ISIS? Most of the media coverage so far has only focused on how the Kurds and Assyrian Christians feel.

Jane Arraf:

I think apart from Iraqi minorities under threat and perhaps the Kurds, very few Iraqis want a large US military presence here. They are though – particularly the Shiite – quite aware of how much of a threat IS fighters pose and when push comes to shove most people are quite happy with US air strikes if it helps restore some stability.

___________________________

Question:

Do you think ISIS has momentum and resource to become an established state, or is its success fleeting?

Jane Arraf:

Great question – it does have resources and certainly momentum but I think the momentum is being stopped. I think people have to look at the root causes of why they are getting support in some regions. The fact remains that in areas they have taken over they are not proving able to run a state that many people would want to live in.

___________________________

Question:

Do you think the Kurds can hold off ISIS much longer?

Jane Arraf:

Not without help no. I think their forced retreat has been a wake-up call. Some of the units that gave up cities in the Nineveh plains seem to have performed quite badly and there are indications that the lack of professionalism that has plagued Iraqi security forces, although to a lesser extent, was to blame. It’s been a long time since the Kurdish region was really threatened and now they are returning to their warrior roots – but they need help.

___________________________

Question:

Do you think peace might be achieved by some sort of neo-Westphalian agreement, in which each particular identity (Shia, Sunni, Kurd, Alawite, Christian, etc.) is given sovereignty over its own national/religious state?

Jane Arraf:

I like to think Iraq can still hold together – people revert to religious and tribal identities when they feel threatened and politicians do it when they have something to gain from it. Everyone now is very insecure and determined to hold on to whatever they have. Eventually there might well be separate Sunni and Kurdish states but I don’t think its inevitable.

___________________________

Question:

As a more broad question, do you think a unified single state solution in Iraq is possible, or is it untenable given the historical strife between different groups within the country (Kurds, Sunnis, Shiites, etc)?

Jane Arraf:

I think Saddam was the awful glue that kind of kept the country together but I would like to think the frequent Iraqi comment that Iraq needs a strong man doesn’t do the country justice. I think with good governance a lot is possible and I’m not sure Iraq has had that so far for a variety of reasons rather than the fault of any one politician.•

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“If This Is The Future…What Is Underway May Be A Kind Of Mercy Killing”

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

Once valuable print properties at Time Inc. and Gannett and Tribune and elsewhere have been spun off from their parent companies, formerly favored children now grown awkward and cast aside. Weren’t they only recently beloved?

These and other print-based corporations hope to remake themselves as Buzzfeed or some other bullshit that works financially, but it’s unlikely. From David Carr at the New York Times:

“At Gannett newspapers, reader metrics will drive coverage and journalists will work with dashboards of data to guide reporting. After years of layoffs, many staff members were immediately told that they had to reapply for jobs when the split was announced. In an attempt to put some lipstick on an ugly pivot, Stefanie Murray, executive editor of The Tennessean, promised readers ‘an ambitious project to create the newsroom of the future, right here in Nashville. We are testing an exciting new structure that is geared toward building a dynamic, responsive newsroom.’ (Jim Romenesko, who blogs about the media industry, pointed out that Gannett also announced ‘the newsroom of the future’ in 2006.)

The Nashville Scene noted that readers had to wait only one day to find out what the news of the future looks like: a Page 1 article in The Tennessean about Kroger, a grocery store and a major advertiser, lowering its prices.

If this is the future — attention news shoppers, Hormel Chili is on sale in Aisle 5 — what is underway may be a kind of mercy killing.

So whose fault is it? No one’s. Nothing is wrong in a fundamental sense: A free-market economy is moving to reallocate capital to its more productive uses, which happens all the time. Ask Kodak. Or Blockbuster. Or the makers of personal computers. Just because the product being manufactured is news in print does not make it sacrosanct or immune to the natural order.“

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