Excerpts

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“In Theory, Hackers Could Infiltrate A Car’s Communication System To Control Its Physical Maneuvers”

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

When I first started taking autonomous vehicles seriously four years ago, I had two hesitations about them even if the software could be worked out:

1) Would Americans, who have long loved the power of being kings of the road, surrender the wheel any sooner than they’d surrender their guns?

2) Couldn’t a hacker force 300 robocars on a Los Angeles freeway to simultaneously suddenly turn left when they weren’t supposed to?

I think number one has been answered in the affirmative, with driverless vehicles so incentivized financially that the majority of us will choose autonomous and use fleets of robocabs, perhaps sacrificing not just the steering wheel but ownership of the whole car.

The answer to the second question is still in flux and likely always will be, with automakers and software developers needing to stay a mile ahead of the hackers. From Danny Yadron at the Wall Street Journal:

“Tesla is one of the only household corporate names with an official presence this year at Def Con, an annual security conference held in Las Vegas, where attendees try to hack the hotel elevators and press room. The company is here courting hackers who can help it find holes in the software that controls its cars. It’s looking to hire 20 to 30 security researchers from Def Con alone, Ms. Paget says. Moreover, hackers who report bugs to Tesla get a platinum-colored ‘challenge coin.’ If they show up at a Tesla factory and give the security team a heads-up, they get a free tour.

Tesla’s presence at Def Con points to a growing concern among automakers: As they connect vehicles to the Internet, bad guys could find a way in.

In one presentation this week, two researchers showed how some cars, such as Chrysler Group’s 2014 Jeep Cherokee, have Wi-Fi and Bluetooth communication systems on the same network as their brakes or automatic parallel parking programs. In theory, hackers could infiltrate a car’s communication system to control its physical maneuvers, said Charlie Miller, one of the researchers who has hacked cars in the past.”

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“Who Could Oppose ‘Smarter’ Sentencing?”

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

Here’s a scary development from our big-data reality: predictive sentencing for defendants based on statistics which suggest future-crime risk. The actual offense committed is only part of the equation, with much thornier things, like race and class, considered. It’s often referred to as “smart sentencing,” but you might not agree if you happen to fit into the wrong statistical quadrant. It’s math run amok. From Sonja B. Starr at the New York Times:

“ANN ARBOR, Mich. — IN a recent letter to the United States Sentencing Commission, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. sharply criticized the growing trend of evidence-based sentencing, in which courts use data-driven predictions of defendants’ future crime risk to shape sentences. Mr. Holder is swimming against a powerful current. At least 20 states have implemented this practice, including some that require risk scores to be considered in every sentencing decision. Many more are considering it, as is Congress, in pending sentencing-reform bills.

Risk-assessment advocates say it’s a no-brainer: Who could oppose ‘smarter’ sentencing? But Mr. Holder is right to pick this fight. As currently used, the practice is deeply unfair, and almost certainly unconstitutional. It contravenes the principle that punishment should depend on what a defendant did, not on who he is or how much money he has.

The basic problem is that the risk scores are not based on the defendant’s crime. They are primarily or wholly based on prior characteristics: criminal history (a legitimate criterion), but also factors unrelated to conduct. Specifics vary across states, but common factors include unemployment, marital status, age, education, finances, neighborhood, and family background, including family members’ criminal history.”

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“I’d Put My Money On The Asteroids”

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

The dominant idea in space colonization today is that we’ll fill up the moon or Mars in a large-scale settlement of 4D cities, try to make it approximate another Earth, with all the comforts of home. But while something with such familiarity may appeal to the masses, Freeman Dyson has long dreamed of exploration on the margins, of something stranger, more diffuse and, perhaps, more dangerous: He wants pioneers to grow vegetables on asteroids.

In a 1978 interview with Omni’s Monte Davis about artificial biodomes and smart clouds, the physicist stood in contrast to his fellow Princeton professor Gerard K. O’Neill, who envisioned massive, standardized space habitats. Regardless of which schemes are superior, Dyson presciently realized at the time that the future of space settlements might be powered by private interests, and in 2014 those entrepreneurs favor O’Neill’s view over his. An excerpt:

“Freeman Dyson:

I’ve done some historical research on the costs of the Mayflower’s voyage, and on the Mormon’s emigration to Utah, and I think it’s possible to go into space on a much smaller scale. A cost on the order of $40,000 per person would be the target to shoot for; in terms of real wages that would make it comparable to the colonization of America. Unless it’s brought down to that level, it not really interesting to me, because otherwise it would be a luxury that only governments could afford.

Omni:

Where would your Mayflower-style colonists go?

Freeman Dyson:

I’d put my money on the asteroids. Dandridge Cole and others suggested using a solar mirror to melt and hollow out an iron asteroid, and in O’Neill’s book his homesteaders build their own shells from the minerals available out there. I wouldn’t accept either of those as the most sensible course: I think you should find an asteroid which is not iron or nickel, but some kind of soil you could grow things in.

Omni:

What do you mean by soil?

Freeman Dyson:

Well, we have specimens of meteoritic mineral called carbonaceous chondrite, which looks like soil–it’s black, crumbly stuff containing a good deal of water; it has enough carbon, nitrogen, oxygen so that there’s some hope you could grow vegetables in it, and it’s soft enough to dig without using dynamite.

Omni:

So you think it would be worth looking for an asteroid like that rather than trying to transform a raw stone or metal asteroid?

Freeman Dyson:

Yes, if it’s to be done on a pioneer basis, you’d jolly well better find a place where you can grow things right away. Otherwise it’s inevitably a much slower and more expensive job.

Omni:

Is the sunlight at a distance adequate to grow plants?

Freeman Dyson:

I think so. Plants are very flexible in their requirements, you know, and they could be genetically altered if it’s needed. After all, a lot of things grow very well even in England…

Omni:

What about colonizing the moon? Too much gravity?

Freeman Dyson:

That…and it’s simply too close to home. Too easy for the tax man to find you. And choosing a place to go is not just a question of freight charges. There have always been minorities who valued their differences and their independence enough to make very great sacrifices, and it seems obvious to me that it’s going to happen again.

Omni:

So you think we may not go in for the big O’Neill-type colonies after all?

Freeman Dyson: 

We may not, but others may. I was in Russia two years ago for a conference on telescopes, and all that anyone there wanted to hear about was O’Neill’s ideas. They knew that he and I were both at Princeton, and assumed I could tell them everything about space colonies. The point is that in Russia, they have very little of our current mistrust of technology on the grand scale–in fact, it fits very well with their ideas about our relationship to nature. Thousands of engineers working on a giant framework floating in space, that’s a picture that excited them very much. I wouldn’t be surprised if they choose that.

If they do, the historical analogy becomes very strong: the Russians play the role of Spanish colonies in the New World, and people like me are more like the English, with smaller, scattered, decentralized colonies. Of course, it took the English much longer to get going, but when we did go we did a better job.”

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“We’ve Never Successfully Predicted Any Emerging Infection Or Pandemic Before It Happens”

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

When I mentioned that I didn’t think that Ebola virus would become a pandemic–though it’s certainly horrible for those who have it–that’s because the next big thing will likely catch us unawares. We’ll have to spend time figuring out what it is and how to deal with it. That will allow the threat to spread, give it time to take hold. If enough people become carriers before we truly know what hit us, that’s when we see mass suffering on a global scale. For all the terror of Ebola, it’s already “announced” itself.

One exchange from “How to Survive the Next Plague,” Joanna Rothkopf’s Salon interview with epidemiologist Dr. Stephen Morse:

“Salon:

Moving into the theoretical future, what kinds of emerging viruses could we see? How well are we prepared to handle a virus that comes as a surprise?

Dr. Stephen Morse:

It’s always easier to prepare for the known, especially when you have warning from somebody else experiencing it and suffering through it. People always ask me which emerging viruses do I worry the most about, and I always say the ones we haven’t found yet, because we’re least prepared for that. If they show infectious signs, like a seizure or severe flu-like illness — these all start like flu-like illnesses and sort of rapidly get worse — hopefully in North American and Western Europe we would all have the awareness to take the appropriate infection control precautions and, as we do with Ebola, treat the patient symptomatically, give them the best supportive treatment until hopefully they get better or whatever.

Obviously we would be trying to identify the virus in the laboratory. There are some more generic ways to do that now with sequencing, and there are some broad-based techniques that will identify even some viruses of known families but which are themselves unknown. But as for the precautions, I think they would generally be fairly similar. These are fairly generic and that’s the good news: that people are careful and take basically similar precautions as they would for SARS or Ebola and try to find out what the patient has.

I have no idea, truthfully. We’ve never successfully predicted any emerging infection or pandemic before it happens — that is, before it actually started to appear in humans. And even with influenza, every prediction we’ve made about the next influenza pandemic has been wrong. So I’m always very cautious about making predictions, but I think many of the generic things you do at the beginning would be useful.

As for the public health systems? I think certainly that’s an area that is stretched pretty thin. New York City is excellent and they work very hard. Even they would tell you that they’re understaffed and many other places have even less. One of the issues in Africa, of course, is the lack of real public health infrastructure in many countries. Not much information sharing across those borders, although the people and the microbes cross the borders quite regularly.”

 

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“Memory Is At The Foundation Of Humanity”

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

As an outsider, I’ve never understood UK privacy laws, which are supposed to be more stringent than America’s free-market melee, yet seem to have absolutely no impact on how tabloids can tarnish the reputation of whomever they please. These rules seem to have done little good in protecting “memory.”

Of course, in a globalized world, when information can travel across borders instantly, there’s little practicality in attempting to be “forgotten,” even though the exposure sometimes pains us. As a very private person, I wish it were different. It’s not.

Maybe I feel that way because I’m from the U.S., or maybe it’s because I’m pragmatic about privacy in the wake of the tools we’ve developed–and the ones that will come soon enough.

Julia Powles of the Guardian has a very different take. The opening of her article:

“Jimmy Wales, co-founder of Wikipedia, has a particular cultural and economic perspective on free speech – reflected in comments made both by him and by the Wikimedia Foundation.

Free speech is undoubtedly a cornerstone of freedom, but it cannot always be fought or guarded in the court of public opinion; the free market of ideas.

To Wales, bad speech is defeated by more speech. Such a solution does not guarantee a defence to the weak and the marginalised. Here, in particular, the human rights that benefit all of us serve a fundamental purpose.

In the UK – where a serious legal commitment to human rights is wavering – we cannot afford to be loose with terminology. Wales refers, inaccurately, to ‘history as a human right,’ to ‘the right to remember,’ to ‘the right to truth.’

Of course, memory is at the foundation of humanity. Memory builds truth, truth brings justice, and justice brings peace. These are the fundamental pillars of human society.

Within these pillars, the right to privacy and, in Europe, the right to personal data, are embedded, harmonised, legally-recognised human rights.

And so we come to the hard sociopolitical problem at the heart of the so-called ‘right to be forgotten.’ It is not about the search engines, online services, Google, or Wikipedia. It is about the value humanity ascribes to them as purveyors of ‘truth,’ of ‘history,’ and of ‘memory.’

It is about confronting what they really are.”

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“If You Can Deliver Groceries, Why Not Deliver Health Care As Well?”

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

If Silicon Valley and Alley are now the preeminent Dream Factories, it makes sense that tech start-ups are identified by pithy, cross-pollination pitches worthy of Hollywood blockbusters, so Pager, a service that delivers medical professionals to your doorstep when beckoned by a smartphone, is, of course, “Uber for doctors.” A couple of exchanges from Sarah Kliff’s Vox interview with company founder Richard Baker:

“Sarah Kliff:

Can you tell a little bit about the theory behind Pager, and how it fits into the current system of how we deliver health care?

Richard Baker:

Pager began with the idea that health care needs to be delivered in a more efficient and convenient way. We do already have a connected world, with telemedicine, but Pager and its founders thought there could be a better way of delivering health care by actually delivering it to people. If you can deliver groceries, why not deliver health care as well? Why not have urgent care on wheels?

If a person is living alone — and 32 million Americans are — or if you have a child who is home with a nanny, why not bring a doctor to that individual?

Oscar Salazar [an original engineer behind Uber], Philip Eytan, and Gaspard de Dreuzy, are all technology entrepreneurs who thought if we could use technology to make it really simple for patients, it could work. And you can see the app has a lot of Uber finger prints all over it.

Sarah Kliff:

One of the things I find interesting about Pager is that, even though it uses new technology, its almost like a throw-back to an older era of medicine when doctors did lots of house calls. But house calls faded away as it became more convenient for doctors to see their patients in the office. What makes right now the right time to bring back the house call?

Richard Baker:

This is a bit of a ‘back to the future’ situation. My father was what at the time was called a GP, or general practitioner, and was doing house calls in the 1950s and 1960s. He liked it very very much. He got a great deal of satisfaction with the personal interaction. But it ultimately fell out of favor with specialization, and enormous pressure of having things done in the office.

I think at this point, doctors have evolved in what they think is important. This can potentially be more fulfilling than simply running an emergency room or through a very busy office practice. And this is also a supplement to their income. Even though doctors do tend to do very nicely, primary-care doctors may be interested in that.”

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“He Loathed The Masters Of The Universe Who Boasted About How Many Jobs They Had Nuked And How Much Money They Had Made”

August 10, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Some are likely born leaders, but there aren’t nearly enough to go around, so we better be able to teach important leadership skills. Warren Bennis, who wrote the book on corporate leadership (30 of them, actually), began focusing on the topic in the 1950s and lived long enough to see the rise of the “job creator,” a species he wished extinct. From an Economist piece about the recently deceased theorist: 

“Mr Bennis believed leaders are made, not born. He taught that leadership is a skill—or, rather, a set of skills—that can be learned through hard work. He likened it to a performance. Leaders must inhabit their roles, as actors do. This means more than just learning to see yourself as others see you, though that matters, too. It means self-discovery. ‘The process of becoming a leader is similar, if not identical, to becoming a fully integrated human being,’ he said in 2009. Mr Bennis knew whereof he spoke: he spent a small fortune on psychoanalysis as a graduate student, dabbled in ‘channelling’ and astrology while a tenured professor and wrote a wonderful memoir, Still Surprised.

What constitutes good leadership changes over time. Mr Bennis was convinced that an egalitarian age required a new style. Leaders could no longer crack the whip and expect people to jump through hoops. They needed to be more like mentors and coaches than old-fashioned sergeant-majors. Top-down leadership not only risked alienating employees. It threatened to squander the organisation’s most important resource: knowledge. There is no point in employing knowledge workers if you are not going to allow them to use their knowledge creatively.

The last quarter of the 20th century often saw Mr Bennis in despair. He loathed the Masters of the Universe who boasted about how many jobs they had nuked and how much money they had made. On Becoming a Leader is full of prophetic warnings about corporate corruption, extravagant executive rewards and short-termism. He also lamented the quality of leadership in Washington, DC.”

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“Sporting A Gold Star Of David Around His Neck And Another On His Pinky, Lindsey Zips Around Southern California In A Mercedes 450 SL”

August 10, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Film, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

The world is ending, eventually.

One who sees the curtain coming down sooner than later is the Christian evangelist Hal Lindsey, co-author with Carole C. Carlson of the meshuganah 1970 bestseller, The Late Great Planet Earth, which estimated 1988 as the Judgement Day. Missed by that much. Lindsey, who is still alive as are many of the rest of us, spends his dotage accusing President Obama of being “the Antichrist.” Whatever.

In 1979, when the batshit book had been made into a film–with Orson Welles picking up late-life wine-and-bullfight money for handling the narration–Lindsey was profiled in a People piece by Lucretia Marmon. The opening:

In 1938 Orson Welles terrified radio listeners with War of the Worlds, an imaginative report of a Martian invasion. Now Welles, as gloomy-voiced narrator of a film, The Late Great Planet Earth, out this fall, tells another frightening tale. This time it is a movie version of the end of the world, based on a scenario by evangelist-author Hal Lindsey. The script, claims Lindsey, really isn’t his. It’s all in the Scriptures.

Lindsey’s book Earth, published in 1970, has been translated into 31 languages and 10 million copies have been sold. The public also snapped up five subsequent Lindsey books on the same subject, running his sales total to over 14 million.

Thus Lindsey, 47, may now be the foremost modern-day Jeremiah. ‘If I had been writing 15 years ago I wouldn’t have had an audience,’ he concedes. ‘But a tremendous number of people are worried about the future. I’m just part of that phenomenon.’

Lindsey splices Bible prophecies of doom with contemporary signs. For instance, he says the Bible pinpoints Israel’s rebirth as a nation as the catalyst to Judgment Day, which will probably occur by 1988. The intervening years will see the emergence of a 10-nation confederacy (prophet Daniel’s dreadful 10-horned beast) or, as Lindsey sees it, the European Common Market. Eventually Russia (biblical Magog) will attack Israel and precipitate a global nuclear war. Only Jesus’ followers will be spared. Hence, Lindsey advises, “the only thing you need to understand is that God offers you in Jesus Christ a full pardon.”

Meanwhile, is Lindsey cowering in his fallout shelter? Not at all. Sporting a gold Star of David around his neck and another on his pinky (‘After all, Jesus was a Jew’), Lindsey zips around Southern California in a Mercedes 450 SL. He conducts services on the beach and indulges in his hobbies of photography and surfing.•

______________________

“This was a prophet–a false prophet”:

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“The League Is Acknowledging That Football Can Be Extremely Hazardous To Your Mental Health”

August 8, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Sports, Urban Studies | Permalink

At Pacific-Standard, Steve Swayne predicts that brain damage caused by football will force the end of most American high school and college programs within 15 years. It’s difficult to imagine that the coup de grâce will be administered so swiftly, but class-action suits will likely proliferate as we proceed. One note: The editor who wrote the article’s subheading should realize that “futból” also has a nasty head-injury problem. From Swayne:

“I’m not the first to make these suggestions; in a 2012 story in Grantland, economists Kevin Grier and Tyler Cowen looked at historical models of businesses dying off and provided some illustrations about how America would look without football. And the NCAA’s recent announcement giving more autonomy to the biggest conference schools will, in my estimation, only accelerate the speed of the changes as colleges and universities re-evaluate their finances and mission and weigh the place of football to both.

Even if football’s demise doesn’t come to pass as starkly as I imagine and they outline, we all can see that the world of football is changing rapidly and dramatically. At first the NFL was a league of denial when it came to the connection between concussions and brain damage. Then, having been sued by former players, the league offered a limited settlement. Now, ‘the N.F.L. has made an open-ended commitment to pay cash awards to retired players who have dementia and other conditions linked to repeated head hits,’ according to the New York Times. In short, the league is acknowledging that football can be extremely hazardous to your mental health.

It’s why I believe institutions of learning are going to re-evaluate the place of football and other high-impact sports in their missions. And I believe this re-evaluation is coming sooner than any of us imagine.”

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“Today Famous Figures Endure The Galella Treatment On A Regular Basis”

August 8, 2014 in Excerpts, Film, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

There was a time when paparazzi and stars were predator and prey, but it’s more complicated now.

Deals are struck, contracts signed, and a paparazzo is hired to “stalk” a star to assure a Q rating remains copacetic. Sometimes a tabloid photographer does get a scoop, an embarrassing one, but these are free-marketers, not muckrakers, and they’ll gladly sell the photos back to the celebrity if they’re willing to pay more than the press. The two sides are in predetermined cahoots or open to such an ad-hoc arrangement, the idea that famous people can’t get away with what they used to, overstated. Those who get caught with their pants down are mostly pols and celebs dense enough to text their own incriminating images to strangers.

Alex Mayyasi of Priceonomics acknowledges some of these points but has a different take. The opening:

Before John F. Kennedy’s assassination in 1963, the handsome, young president had a public image as a doting father and as the man who called Americans to public service. In his private life, he was a serial adulterer. Historians have all but confirmed Kennedy’s involvement with women ranging from Marilyn Monroe to two White House interns who skinny dipped in the presidential pool and flew on Air Force One so that, as Caitlin Flanagan puts it in The Atlantic, “the president could always get laid if there was any trouble scaring up local talent.”

If a current president acted like Kennedy, reporters from every paper would seize on rumors until his presidency ended in shame. But the early 1960s were a different time; the American public remained ignorant of Kennedy’s affairs because no one reported on them. In his biography of Kennedy, Robert Dallek writes that Kennedy “remained confident that the mainstream press would not publicize his womanizing.” Even more incredible than the press’s self-imposed censorship is Dallek’s observation that when gossip columns began speculating about JFK and Marilyn, he sent a friend and former journalist to “tell the editors… that it’s just not true.” Apparently it got results.

After the JFK assassination, Jackie Kennedy lived in New York. She remained in the public eye as a fashion icon and as the widow of the fallen president, but she harbored no great secrets. Nevertheless, a Bronx resident by the name of Ron Galella would not leave her alone. Galella followed Jackie Kennedy Onassis incessantly, snapping pictures of her around the city and leading the former first lady to go to court to win a (largely ineffective) restraining order against Galella. 

‘Today famous figures endure the Galella treatment on a regular basis. Galella is the progenitor of the modern paparazzo who takes pictures of celebrities “doing things,” as he puts it, which is now so common that photographers struggle to get a good picture of Brad Pitt grabbing takeout because so many other paparazzi are crowding him to get a shot.

The proliferation of media devoted to covering famous figures, omnipresent paparazzi, and a change in the culture of how we treat celebrities — from adoring them from a distance to seeking both familiarity and the exposure of all their secrets — has led to an increase in the price of fame. Whereas Kennedy could trust the press not to expose his affairs, modern celebrities must design their lifestyle around avoiding cameras whenever they eat out. Over time, the public has come to expect a certain amount of transparency around famous people’s personal lives. We are all paparazzi now.•

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“Newspapers Would Openly Solicit Companies For Paid Advertising Designed To Look Like Straight News”

August 8, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Not even during the second half of 20th-century America, when owning a print-media organ was tantamount to a license to mint money, did we see a brief, shining moment when native advertising was considered so unseemly that it simply couldn’t be done. Oh, it was done. Today’s foundering news industry’s penchant for more and bigger advertorials is merely a deeper embrace of a practice that’s always been. 

From Matt Novak’s Paleofuture riposte to John Oliver’s very funny piece about the separation of church and state:

“One of the most interesting articles on the history of advertisements disguised as news is probably Linda Lawson’s 1988 paper, ‘Advertisements Masquerading as News in Turn-of-the-Century American Periodicals.’

Lawson explains just how prevalent advertorials were over a century ago. Back then they were called ‘reading notices:’

One such marketing technique was the reading notice. Assuming that people would be more likely to read news stories and editorials than display advertisements, businesses began writing advertisements in the form of news copy. Newspaper and magazine editors agreed to print them for money. 

Lawson cites over a dozen specific cases of advertising content appearing as editorial at the turn of the 20th century, and meticulously documents the many fights over the ethics involved. Newspapers would openly solicit companies for paid advertising designed to look like straight news, demanding much higher rates than traditional ads. Lawson even describes an instance in 1886 when the New York Times asked for and received $1,200 from the Bell Telephone Company in exchange for positive coverage.

Not long after this minor scandal at the Times, New York’s newspaper of record became the harshest critic of accepting money for editorial coverage.”

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“Sixty Thousand Men Vaporized In An Afternoon Is Inconceivable”

August 7, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

From “Soccer in Oblivion,” a perfectly written Grantland piece by Brian Phillips, which examines the intersection of sports and war, one of which is just games and the other often mistaken for one: 

“Fighting on the scale of the Great War is essentially incomprehensible, like the atom or the spaces between stars. Its extremity defeats the imagination. You can say ’16 million dead,’ but what’s 16 million? You can picture the lunar hell between the trenches, the broken trees and craters; you can try to fathom the misery of life in the armies, where rats outnumbered men. But these are conventional images. It may be that all you can do is to sift through fragments, to search for illumination in unexpected places. Sixty thousand men vaporized in an afternoon is inconceivable, but you can find a statistic that makes you catch your breath. This one is eloquent: In August 1914, a British recruit had to stand 5-foot-8 to be accepted into the army. In October, the limit was lowered to 5-foot-5. By November, it was set at 5-foot-3.

Or you can notice, say, the prevalence of soccer balls in group photos from the war. They’re everywhere. You’ll see the Isle of Wight Rifles, 8th Battalion Hampshire Regiment, posed around a cannon, jaunty and smiling, their hats on crooked — and a football tucked between the feet of the man in the center. The football is there because the men like football, of course. But there’s a deeper reason, which is that the men are trying to see war as a game.”

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“Then Rand Paul — He’s Pearl Jam”

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

Former MTV VJ Kennedy, no less an accident of modern free-market capitalism than the Kardashians, is given the first word in Robert Draper’s New York Times Magazine article, “Has the ‘Libertarian Moment’ Finally Arrived?” Without thinking, as is her custom, the Fox political analyst unwittingly labels Sen. Rand Paul just right by identifying him as the “Pearl Jam” of the ideology. You know, because he’s overrated, his words are simplistic, and to paraphrase Portlandia, you liked him…in high school. 

Libertarianism can be useful as can most belief systems in certain cases, but the thought of extreme isolationism overseas and an utter lack of collectivism domestically is beyond plausibility for most American adults.

Of course, the piece could have just as easily asked if Liberalism’s moment has finally arrived, since decriminalizing drugs, reducing the prison population, curtailing government snooping and marriage equality (the latter of which seems to escape Paul’s enthusiasm for liberty) have long been planks of that ideology. But perhaps that wouldn’t have made for as catchy a feature-article angle. The opening:

“Let’s say Ron Paul is Nirvana,” said Kennedy, the television personality and former MTV host, by way of explaining the sort of politician who excites libertarians like herself. ‘Like, the coolest, most amazing thing to come along in years, and the songs are nebulous but somehow meaningful, and the lead singer kills himself to preserve the band’s legacy.

“Then Rand Paul — he’s Pearl Jam. Comes from the same place, the songs are really catchy, can really pack the stadiums, though it’s not quite Nirvana.

“Ted Cruz? He’s Stone Temple Pilots. Tries really hard to sound like Pearl Jam, never gonna sound like Nirvana. Really good voice, great staying power — but the whole is not greater than the sum of its parts.”

I met Kennedy (a gabby 41-year-old whose actual name is Lisa Kennedy Montgomery) in Midtown Manhattan at Fox News headquarters, where she hosts a Fox Business Network program called The Independents. By cable TV standards, the show, which is shown four times a week, is jarringly nonpartisan, for the simple reason that she and her co-hosts — the Reason magazine editor in chief Matt Welch and the entrepreneur Kmele Foster — are openly contemptuous of both parties. Kennedy spent most of the Bill Clinton ‘90s as MTV’s most vocal Republican, but then she soured on the G.O.P., a political shift that solidified during the spending and warring and moralizing excesses of the George W. Bush years. Sometime after the elephant tattoo on her left hip ‘got infected and started looking more like a pig,’ Kennedy began thinking of herself as a libertarian instead. She, Welch and Foster take turns on the show bashing not only “Obamacare” but also the N.S.A., neoconservatives and social scolds. It’s not a hospitable forum for G.O.P. talking points. “There are some libertarian-leaning Republicans who are afraid to be on our show,” Kennedy told me. Libertarianism’s Nirvana, a k a the former congressman and former presidential candidate Ron Paul, has been on The Independents more than once. But Pearl Jam — a k a Ron Paul’s son Rand, a one-term Republican senator who may well run for the presidency in 2016 — has yet to appear.

A few weeks after our conversation, I saw Kennedy onstage in a hotel ballroom, wearing purple spandex, gyrating to the soundtrack of Flashdance and hollering into a microphone, “Are you hungry for more liberty?”•

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“The Robocar Might Create Something Akin To A ‘Neighbourhood Elevator'”

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

Brad Templeton, Google driverless-division consultant, has written a new essay addressing urban density in a time of robocars. An excerpt:

“In today’s cities, there is a ‘downtown’ but there are many other neighbourhood centers, based around an interesting urban street. On that street are shops, restaurants and more, and it is pleasant and productive to walk around them. Houses near these streets are highly valued, and within a block of the cool street real estate values soar. Real estate ads all advertise these places as ‘steps from…’ the cool street. These local centers are space a mile or so apart in medium density urban spaces, a bit more in suburban areas. For those who live more than about 10 minutes, the cool street is more distant, and a destination for walks rather than the place you live.

When you have skyscraper density, as in downtowns and most of Manhattan, there is much greater density of retail streets, and everybody is close to neighbourhood activity and shopping. You just step out of your unit and take the elevator down to be right in the thick of things — a very walkable space. But most cities consist of lots of land with packed single family homes and townhomes, or apartment blocks 2-3 stories high.

The robocar might create something akin to a ‘neighbourhood elevator.’ Imagine a house 3/4 of a mile from the local cool street. In the house is a button. You might press the button and go out. Not that long after you get to the curb, a small robocar pulls up. This is a simple, low-speed model that only goes 30mph. It doesn’t have seatbelts, and is tall and not very aerodynamic. You might just stand in it, rather than sit. You get in and it starts heading towards your neighbourhood center. If you like, you tell it a more specific destination along the street and it takes you there.”

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“Thirty-Three Containers Were Marked And Identified”

August 7, 2014 in Excerpts, Urban Studies | Permalink

Some strange stories never seem to truly end. The Jonestown Massacre occurred in 1978, and the survivors will always carry scars (here and here), but some of the victims are likewise still trying to find peace. From the Associated Press:

“The cremated remains of nine victims of a 1978 mass cult murder-suicide in Jonestown, Guyana, have turned up in a former funeral home in Delaware, officials said Thursday.

The state Division of Forensic Science has taken possession of the remains, discovered at the former Minus Funeral Home in Dover, and is working to make identifications and notify relatives, the agency and Dover police said in a statement.

The division last week responded to a request to check the former funeral home after 38 containers of remains were discovered inside. Thirty-three containers were marked and identified. They spanned a period from about 1970 to the 1990s and included the Jonestown remains.

Bodies of the massacre victims were brought after the deaths to Dover Air Force Base, home to the US military’s largest mortuary.”

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“New York City Was At One And The Same Time Both The Apex Of Western Culture And The Armpit Of The Western World”

August 7, 2014 in Excerpts, Urban Studies | Permalink

Who’s better than Luc Sante? No one, that’s who. The New Yorker editors can blow me off and not interview me when I contact them about jobs–and they do–but the Low Life writer should certainly have a perch at that publication. It’s less the New Yorker for him not being there.

The one time I interviewed Sante years ago, we talked about NYC during the 1970s and early 1980s, when he was making his bones here and was something of a bone-and-rag man, vying for valuables in the struggling city’s castoffs, each corner of Manhattan seeming to contain raw materials for the sharp-eyed alchemist: discarded LPs, dusty books, yellowed pamphlets from the distant past. Sante said to me, ruefully, of that time: “I thought it was prelude.” But the magic act soon vanished, as vital things like cheap tenement apartments went missing in a wave of real-estate deals and Wall Street hustles. Today, one in 25 New Yorkers is a millionaire, which is great as long as you’re not one of the 24. 

The man who “finds the point where poetry and history meet,” as Jim Jarmusch has said of his old pal, discussed his disappeared dream world in an email exchange with Stephen Johnson of the Believer. The opening:

“The Believer:

In the essay ‘My Lost City,’ you describe 1970s New York as a place of danger, authenticity, personality, and color—a city for outcasts.

Luc Sante:

All I know about 1970s New York City is that it’s where I grew up, and you always have an umbilical connection to the time and place of your growing up. It was cheap, didn’t have too many people in it, you could go to the movies or whatever on the spur of the moment, you could get by without working too much and especially without involving yourself in the corporate world. It was a wild, one-in-a-million conjunction of circumstances, a sort of black pearl of world history, when New York City was at one and the same time both the apex of Western culture and the armpit of the Western world. So you had to deal with junkies now and then—I would far rather deal with junkies than with lawyers or developers.

The Believer:

How can New York regain its personality? Or are we getting the city we deserve right now?

Luc Sante:

The city we have now is the one we deserve, the coagulation of money. I’m very pissed off because I love cities and yearn for them, and I can’t live in them now—and not just because I can’t afford to. My ideal city is more like the city (New York and Paris come to mind, but it sort of applies to all) that existed up to and including the 1930s, when different classes lived all together in the same neighborhoods, and most businesses of any sort were mom-and-pop, and people and things had a local identity. The sort of city where—I’ve just been reading Richard Cobb on 1930s Paris—a burglar, a banker, a taxi-driver, an academician, a modiste, and a pushcart vendor might all fetch up together in a corner banquette at the end of the night. That won’t happen again unless we have some major, catastrophic shakeup, like war (at home) or depression, and do we want either of those?”

 

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“There Is Still No Universally Accepted Definition Of Where Space Begins”

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

I’ve mentioned before how much I love the Internet magazine Aeon, one of the smartest things anywhere. All praise to the site’s co-founders Paul and Bridget Hains, their Deputy Editors Ed Lake and Ross Andersen (who’s also written some of the periodical’s best pieces) and the entire staff.

One excellent new essay is Greg Klerkx’s “Outer Limits,” which points out that “space” has never truly been defined. The opening:

“Any time we embark upon a journey, be it a morning commute or a leisurely day trip, we engage in transition. We are a travelling species, which means transitions are commonplace for us, mundane even. But there are some trips that can still fire the human imagination, and none more so than the journey, experienced only by a lucky few, from the surface of Earth to the beginning of space.

On his 108-minute flight in 1961, the Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, the first human being in space, reached a peak altitude of 327 kilometres (203 miles), after blasting off the planet atop a mighty Vostok rocket. After launch shook his tiny capsule violently, Gagarin experienced the feeling of weightlessness, and saw the curvature of the Earth first-hand. By all accounts, he crossed the mysterious border between the Earth and space. Or did he? It has been more than half a century since Gagarin’s historic journey, but there is still no universally accepted definition of where space begins.

There is general agreement that ‘space’ starts where the Earth’s physical influence ends or is significantly displaced, but no consensus as to where that line actually lies. Does space begin where the Earth’s atmosphere ends? That would seem sensible, except the atmosphere extends some 800 kilometres above the planet. That would exclude Gagarin’s flight, and the International Space Station (ISS) whose orbit around the Earth is only 400 kilometres high. Earth’s gravity might well seem like another natural candidate for ‘edge of space’ status, but you have to travel 21 million kilometres before our planet’s gravity loses out to other forces, and that’s roughly halfway to Venus.

The International Astronautical Federation marks the beginning of space, for aviation purposes, at the 100-kilometre mark, where the Earth’s atmosphere is so negligible that conventional aircraft cannot travel fast enough to generate aerodynamic lift. There are other, more arbitrary numbers. In the 1960s, 8 US pilots earned their astronaut wings by flying the arrow-shaped X-15 rocket plane above 80 kilometres. In the US, this standard still applies, meaning that any American who flies on one of Virgin Galactic’s private spacecraft will officially become an astronaut.

Recent scientific discoveries have further muddled our terrestrial-celestial border confusion. In 2009, an instrument called the Suprathermal Ion Imager (SII) pinpointed 118 kilometres as the point at which charged particles from space begin to overwhelm the relatively mild particle flow of the Earth’s upper atmosphere. That was the point, researchers argued, where space really begins. Headlines hailing the discovery of the ‘edge of space’ briefly splashed across the media, but the attendant stories were hesitant, bracketing any notions of finality with alternative edge-of-space definitions.”

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“It Struck People As Unnatural”

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

In a Vox post, Matthew Yglesias manages to get excited over time zones, a remnant of the railroad era. He suggests one global time to avoid confusion from a welter of zones that often don’t make sense. An excerpt about what a world would like like post-time zones:

“If the whole world used a single GMT-based time, schedules would still vary. In general most people would sleep when it’s dark out and work when it’s light out. So at 23:00, most of London would be at home or in bed and most of Los Angeles would be at the office. But of course London’s bartenders would probably be at work while some shift workers in LA would be grabbing a nap. The difference from today is that if you were putting together a London-LA conference call at 21:00 there’d be only one possible interpretation of the proposal. A flight that leaves New York at 14:00 and lands in Paris at 20:00 is a six-hour flight, with no need to keep track of time zones. If your appointment is in El Paso at 11:30 you don’t need to remember that it’s in a different time zone than the rest of Texas.

This has always been the underlying logic of the railroad time scheme — clockface times should be abstracted away from considerations of solar position. But the initial introduction of railroad time was controversial. It struck people as unnatural. Today, however, we are very accustomed to the idea that time zone boundaries should be bent for the sake of convenience and practicality. That means we should move to the most convenient and most practical time system of all — a single Earth Time for all of humanity.”

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“We Can Shape The Genetic Future Of Our Species, But Should We?”

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

I often doubt we have the intelligence to survive as a species without bioenhancement, but one of the downsides of gene manipulation is that that someone, some group, gets to choose what’s best about humans. 

Go to the Guardian to watch a lecture by IVF expert Professor Robert Winston, a bioconservative, who cautions against designer humans. From the lecture’s introduction:

“The question he will address is whether scientists should be given free rein to use advances in molecular biology – in particular our increasing ability to manipulate the genetic blueprint carried by eggs and sperm – to direct the evolution of our species and create Humanity 2.0.

That such a thing will one day be possible is beyond doubt now that geneticists can precisely edit the genome of monkeys. This procedure, and others like it, will allow us to replace faulty or otherwise “undesirable” genes in the human germline with new improved versions of the same gene.

In principle we could design humans to be stronger, smarter and less susceptible to physical and mental illness. It has been suggested, for example, that our genome could be tweaked to make future generations resistant to HIV. We can already edit the DNA in patients’ immune cells to make them less susceptible to the virus.

So we can shape the genetic future of our species, but should we? Is it ethically defensible to determine the genetic fate of people not yet born? “

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“This Is A Kind Of War With A Non-Human Enemy”

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

The numbers tell us that there’ll likely be another global pandemic someday, the population density always demands it, but it won’t likely be the Ebola virus. That doesn’t mean it’s any less horrifying for the people suffering from it or those treating the patients. Richard Preston, an Ebola expert who’s written on the topic in his book, The Hot Zone, and in the New Yorker, just did an Ask Me Anything at Reddit. A trio of exchanges follow.

_______________________

Question:

Is any of the panic surrounding Ebola justified?

Richard Preston:

Not entirely justified. This is a kind of war with a non-human enemy. It is a fairly clever and very aggressive enemy. However, if you are in a jam it is never a good idea to panic. That’s how you lose. The doctors in Africa definitely are not panicking, they are just working 20 hours a day in the fight. And we sure don’t have to panic in the US, we’ve got a strong medical care system.

_______________________

Question:

How can the doctors and nurses prevent themselves from getting the virus as they help others?

Richard Preston:

They haven’t been able to fully protect themselves, doctors and nurses are dying. They’re wearing full protection biohazard suits, but the Ebola wards are just horrifying, 30 Ebola patients with one doctor and one nurse, both in space suits. Conditions are awful in those wards, we need more doctors and nurses – not even a space suit can totally protect you if the ward is really a mess.

_______________________

Question:

What do you think about this experimental serum that we heard about being used on Thursday? Something that is directly contributing to the two Americans’ recovery, or not necessarily the case?

Also, are there any common lasting effects among those that manage to live through Ebola? All I’ve heard about is some joint problems and whatnot, but I would’ve expected there to be much more severe aftereffects.

Richard Preston:

Good q’s – the antibody serum ZMAPP seems to be amazingly effective but we don’t know because it’s only been tried on the two patients. As for aftereffects, i interviewed Dr. Shem Musoke who nearly died of Marburg (close cousin of Ebola) and he told me it took him about a year to recover fully but now he was fine. It’s a crushing disease but if you survive you do recover.•

 

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“I Wouldn’t Be Afraid Of Any Robot Or Mechanical Man”

August 6, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Sports | Permalink

When I was noodling around the other day to find a robot image for the piece about the automated 1929 department stores, I came across an illustration of Jack Dempsey squaring off with a life-size bucket of bolts. It was the window dressing of a 1934 Popular Mechanics article in which the former champion, retired by that point, explained that he would always be able to deliver a KO to AI. I don’t know; I think the “Manassa Mauler” would have been in trouble if a robot had hit him in his pretty, pretty nose. 

Anyhow, it booked artificial intelligence and boxing on the same card 35 years before the computerized Ali-Marciano fight. The piece’s opening:

“I CAN whip any mechanical robot that ever has or ever will be made. Maybe that sounds a bit egotistical, maybe you will say it’s just the voice of a ‘has-been,’ but I assure you that neither is true.

I was talking over old times with my friend Captain W. H. Fawcett and during the course of conversation he remarked that undoubtedly mechanical ingenuity has done much to improve the work of many boxers.

‘That’s true,’ I answered, ‘but nothing mechanical will ever be able to whip an honest to goodness boxer. Even right now, despite the fact that I am definitely through with the ring as a fighter, I wouldn’t be afraid of any robot or mechanical man. I could tear it to pieces, bolt by bolt and scatter its brain wheels and cogs all over the canvas.’

The reason is simple: Engineers can build a robot that will possess everything except brains. And without brains no man can ever attain championship class in the boxing game. It is true enough that we have had some rare intellectual specimens in the higher frames of boxing glory, but I can truthfully say that no man ever attained genuine boxing recognition without real headwork.”

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“The Book Is More A Reflection On How All Civilizations Are Doomed To Die”

August 5, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Fake, Science/Tech | Permalink

From Hugh Schofield of the BBC, more about Planet of the Apes novelist Pierre Boulle, who was always mystified by the success of his story about a simian civilization:

“In Boulle’s original book the story is told by two honeymooners holidaying in space, who find a bottle containing a manuscript. It is by a French journalist who tells of his adventures on a planet run by monkeys, where the humans are the dumb animals.

At the end of the account, the journalist arrives back at Orly airport in Paris where he finds the staff… are apes. And there is a kicker when we discover the two honeymooners are themselves chimpanzees.

The one moment the book does not contain is possibly the most memorable point of the film – the discovery at the end of the half-buried Statue of Liberty.

In the film, this communicates the astounding fact that the travellers have fast-forwarded in time, and that they are back on Earth – an Earth devastated by nuclear war, in which the apes have emerged as the new dominant species.

In Boulle’s book, the events take place not on Earth but on a distant planet. (In fact the 2001 film remake by Tim Burton was closer to the book’s plot.)

‘It is a big difference. In the film there is this sense of human responsibility. It is man that has led to the destruction of the planet,’ says Clement Pieyre, who catalogued Boulle’s manuscripts at the French National Library.

‘But the book is more a reflection on how all civilisations are doomed to die. There has been no human fault. It is just that the return to savagery will come about anyway. Everything perishes,’ he says”

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“The Reality We Are Faced With In Israel Is That We Must Choose Between Liberalism And Jewishness”

August 5, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

Israel has won the latest military battle with Hamas by a large body count, but it’s lost the public-relations war by an even wider margin. That’s the kind of thing that occurs when there’s one dominant force in a government that doesn’t have to answer to internal dissent. In the case of Israel, it’s the current hard-right wing. America displayed the same type of tone-deafness during the Iraq War, when neocons made us unpopular the world over. That’s not to say that some of the criticism of Israel hasn’t been commingled with anti-Semitism–there are sadly still a lot of those feelings in the world–but that Israel, like America, is a deeply polarized country, and the current regime is directing it in a path that’s injurious to others and itself. I mean, it’s made Hamas seem sympathetic to a lot of people!

From Julia Amalia Heyer’s Spiegel interview with Israeli sociologist Eva Illouz, an explanation of how Israel swung so far to the right:

“Spiegel:

Why is the right so strong at the moment even though there are far fewer terror attacks in Israel than there used to be?

Eva Illouz:

Entire generations have been raised with the territories, with Israel being a colonial power. They do not know anything else. You have the settlements which are highly ideological. They expanded and entered Israeli mainstream political life. Settlements were strengthened by systematic government policies: They got tax breaks; they had soldiers to protect them; they built roads and infrastructure which are much better than those inside the country. There are entire segments of the population that have never met a secular person and have been educated religiously. Some of these religious segments are also very nationalist. The reality we are faced with in Israel is that we must choose between liberalism and Jewishness, and if we choose Jewishness, we are condemned to become a religious Sparta which will not be sustainable. Whereas in the 1960s, you could be both socialist and Zionist, today it is not possible because of the policies and identity of Israel. Then you have the role which Jews who live outside Israel play in Israel. Many of these Jews have very right-wing views and contribute money to newspapers, think tanks and religious institutions inside Israel. Let’s face it: the right has been more systematic and more mobilized, both inside and outside Israel.”

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“This Is As Close To What Anybody Is Going To Experience To Sitting Down And Having A Beer With Nixon”

August 5, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

The Frost-Nixon interviews of 1977 were the final word on Watergate figuratively, though not literally. In 1983, Frank Gannon, a former Nixon aide who went on to work as a producer for David Letterman, recorded 30 hours of interviews with his old boss. The tapes, not erased but largely forgotten, have resurfaced on the 40th anniversary of America’s only Presidential resignation. From the Associated Press:

“The segments were culled from more than 30 hours of interviews that Nixon did with former aide Frank Gannon in 1983. The sections on Watergate aired publicly once, on CBS News, before gathering dust at the University of Georgia for more than 30 years.

‘This is as close to what anybody is going to experience to sitting down and having a beer with Nixon, sitting down with him in his living room,’ said Gannon, now a writer and historian in Washington DC.

‘Like him or not, whether you think that his resignation was a tragedy for the nation or that he got out of town one step ahead of the sheriff, he was a human being,’ he said.

Nixon, who died in 1994, had hoped that providing his own narrative would help temper America’s final judgment of him.

Perhaps with that in mind, he didn’t shy away from the tough questions, commenting on everything from the threat of impeachment to the so-called ‘smoking gun’ conversation that included evidence he participated in a Watergate cover-up.

‘This was the final blow, the final nail in the coffin. Although you don’t need another nail if you’re already in the coffin – which we were,’ Nixon said in a segment about the 23 June 1972 tape.

Nixon said when he decided to resign, he faced such strong resistance from his wife that he brought a transcript of the ‘smoking gun’ tape to a family meeting to show her how bad it was.

‘I’m a fighter, I just didn’t want to quit. Also I thought it would be an admission of guilt, which of course it was,’ he said. ‘And, also, I felt it would set a terribly bad precedent for the future.’

The tone of the tapes contrasts with the sometimes adversarial tone of the well-known series of Nixon interviews done in 1977 by British journalist David Frost.”

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“Water Is ‘The Big Elephant In The Room’ For Tech Companies”

August 5, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The bigger threat to a growing global population might not be food shortages but water scarcity. As more people in China and elsewhere take greater advantage of inventions of the Industrial and Computer Ages, the need for water acquisition grows.

A Financial Times series “A World Without Water,” begins today, in FT fashion, by examining how the lack of H2O affects corporations. While you would expect Coke to be apoplectic about potential shortfalls, technology companies are likewise concerned (or should be). An excerpt from Pilita Clark’s piece:

“Google, for example, declines to say how much it spent on a plant it has built at one of its data centres in the US state of Georgia, which enables it to use diverted sewer water to keep its servers cool. Nor has it disclosed how much it spends at a Belgian data centre that uses water from an industrial canal.

Joe Kava, the company’s head of data centre operations, has warned that water is ‘the big elephant in the room’ for tech companies, which can typically use hundreds of thousands of gallons of water a day. ‘We’ve been focusing on power consumption and energy efficiency and that’s excellent,’ he said in 2009. ‘I think the next thing we need to turn our attention to is what do we do about the looming water crisis?’ As water becomes more scarce, data companies’ use of it could attract public scrutiny, he added, possibly resulting in regulations governing how much water they consume.

Google told the FT last week that its focus on water conservation means it now has a facility in Finland cooled entirely by seawater. It is also looking at using captured rainwater in South Carolina.

Regulation is a growing concern for many companies, which is a reason investors are starting to press for more disclosure about water risks.”

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