Excerpts

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“The World Cup In Brazil Will Be The Biggest Media Event In History”

June 10, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Sports | Permalink

From “What Does Soccer Mean Today,” Ryan O’Hanlon’s Pacific Standard interview with writer Simon Kuper, an exchange about the effect of globalization on the world’s game, which has made interest somewhat shallower but much wider:

“Pacific Standard:

Some have said that this globalization has lessened the importance of the World Cup. Basically, anyone with an Internet connection can watch any game. And with club soccer, they’re watching better, more cohesive teams. Where do you see the World Cup fitting within all that?

Simon Kuper:

It’s still the most meaningful for players and for fans, so your career can be made in a minute. You score a brilliant goal or you score a terrible own goal at the World Cup, and that marks you for the rest of your life just because of the interest and the meaning that people attach to it is still much higher—even though all the things you say are true. What’s special about the World Cup—if you go back to before the World Cup in the U.S., very few Americans were interested, very few Chinese, Indians, Japanese, Indonesians, so really, the biggest countries in the world were excluded. And now each World Cup really is a World Cup, so in that sense it’s much more wider and deeper than it used to be. And I think that’s quite thrilling: The idea that when somebody plays, he’s watched by people literally all over the world. It’s the most uniting event in our planet’s history, given the increase in global communication. The World Cup in Brazil will be the biggest media event in history, judged by numbers of viewers and numbers of clicks, and there’s something majestic about that.”

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“The City Has Become A Vast Pawnshop”

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

Could a few entrepreneurs, even wildly successful ones like Bill Gates, Paul Allen and Jeff Bezos, rescue an entire city from collapse? A new essay by Andrew Yang in Fast Company, “The Entrepreneurs Who Saved Seattle,” credits the Microsoft and Amazon founders almost wholly with Seattle’s renaissance. The openings of Yang’s article and “City of Despair,” the 1971 Economist piece he references, which interestingly demonstrates the downside of a company town.

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From “The Entrepreneurs Who Saved Seattle,” 2014:

“Today, Seattle is considered one of the most desirable places to live and work in the U.S. Amazon, Starbucks, Expedia, and other leading companies make their homes there.

But in 1979, Seattle was the last place you’d think to find a growth business. It had more in common with today’s Rust Belt than Silicon Valley–its economy centered on a declining manufacturing base and the lumber industry, both of which were shedding jobs. Starbucks was just a tiny local company with three stores serving standard-issue coffee. The Economist had labeled Seattle the ‘city of despair’ and a billboard appeared saying “Will the last person leaving Seattle–turn off the lights.’

So what changed? Two Seattle natives decided to move their 13-employee company there in 1979 from Albuquerque. The two natives were Bill Gates and Paul Allen. And the company was Microsoft.

Is it possible to ascribe Seattle’s entire economic trajectory to just one company? Well, today over 40,000 people work at Microsoft in the region, and 28,000 of them are highly paid engineers. Approximately 4,000 businesses have been started by Microsoft alumni, many of which are in the region. Just one of these companies, RealNetworks, employs 1,500 people. Expedia, originally a Microsoft spinoff, employs another 14,000. The Gates Foundation itself has another several hundred employees. The economist Enrico Moretti estimates that Microsoft’s growth has directly created 120,000 regional jobs for services workers with limited educations (cleaners, taxi drivers, carpenters, hairdressers, real estate agents, etc.) and another 80,000 jobs for workers with college degrees (teachers, nurses, doctors, architects).

The growth of Microsoft also influenced Jeff Bezos to locate Amazon there in 1994 when he was looking for a city with ample tech talent to build an e-commerce company. Today, about 17,000 of Amazon’s 51,000 employees live and work in the Seattle region. If Microsoft had not been there, Bezos could easily have migrated elsewhere.”

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From “City of Despair,” 1971:

“The country’s best buys in used cars, in secondhand television sets, in houses, are to be found in Seattle, Washington. The city has become a vast pawnshop, with families selling anything they can do without to get money to buy food and pay the rent. Even restaurant meals are a bargain: a two for the price of one is offered to customers in smart, half-empty eating places.

More than 100,000 people are out of work in the Seattle area, which many people think is the worst example of economic decline in any sector of America since the great depression 40 years ago. Unemployment in Seattle stands officially at 13.1 per cent of the labour force, more than double the national level, Unofficially the welfare workers closest to the people put it at twice that high.

The root of the problem lies in the economic dominance of the area by one giant corporation, the Boeing Company. Two years ago its sales of aircraft were booming but now Boeing is undergoing a continuing attrition of government and civilian contracts. The halt in the development of the SST, America’s projected Supersonic aircraft, was merely the latest of many blows. Boeing’s payroll of 106,000 two years ago is down to 40,000 and the company acknowledges that it will cut employment further this year, probably to 29,000. The decline would not ave been halted even if the Senate had voted this week to revive the SST.”

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“The Real Value And Insight Comes From The Data That These Devices Provide”

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

A little more about the Internet of Things, that rough beast waiting to be born, from Luke Dormehl at the Guardian:

“What unites products as seemingly disparate as driverless cars and fitness-tracking wearables such as the Jawbone UP is their ability to collect data from, and on behalf of, their users.

‘When people talk about the Internet of Things, they tend to get hung up on the ‘things’ themselves,’ says Ian Foddering, chief technology officer and technical director at Cisco UK and Ireland. ‘Actually, the real value and insight comes from the data that these devices provide. We’re just at the tip of the iceberg when it comes to what is possible in terms of data extraction. It’s a very exciting time.’

‘Data empowers us,’ says Renee Blodgett, vice president of marketing and strategy at Kolibree, the world’s first connected electric toothbrush (yes, really!). ‘For the first time, we have data on how we brush our teeth, where we brush our teeth and where we need to improve. Before now, we would only get that feedback from our dentist once a year when we have our annual cleaning. Now, we can get that feedback in real time.’

While marginal gains in toothbrushing might not sound like much, the overall point about the power of big data is certainly valid.”

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“Injecting The Dolphins With LSD Was Not Something Lovatt Was In Favor Of”

June 9, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Even for the 1960s, neuroscientist and LSD experimenter John Lilly was far out there (see here and here and here). His interspecies communication research with dolphins for NASA gradually came to include providing the creatures with interspecies sex and psychedelic drugs. From Christopher Riley’s eye-popping Guardian article about Margaret Howe Lovatt, a young woman who lived with the dolphin named Peter until the project capsized:

“In the 1960s a small selection of neuroscientists like John Lilly were licensed to research LSD by the American government, convinced that the drug had medicinal qualities that could be used to treat mental-health patients. As part of this research, the drug was sometimes injected into animals and Lilly had been using it on his dolphins since 1964, curious about the effect it would have on them.

Much to Lilly’s annoyance, nothing happened. Despite his various attempts to get the dolphins to respond to the drug, it didn’t seem to have any effect on them, remembers Lovatt. ‘Different species react to different pharmaceuticals in different ways,’ explains the vet, Andy Williamson. ‘A tranquilliser made for horses might induce a state of excitement in a dog. Playing with pharmaceuticals is a tricky business to say the least.’

Injecting the dolphins with LSD was not something Lovatt was in favour of and she insisted that the drug was not given to Peter, which Lilly agreed to. But it was his lab, and they were his animals, she recalls. And as a young woman in her 20s she felt powerless to stop him giving LSD to the other two dolphins.

While Lilly’s experimentation with the drug continued, Lovatt persevered with Peter’s vocalisation lessons and grew steadily closer to him. ‘That relationship of having to be together sort of turned into really enjoying being together, and wanting to be together, and missing him when he wasn’t there,’ she reflects. ‘I did have a very close encounter with – I can’t even say a dolphin again – with Peter.’

By autumn 1966, Lilly’s interest in the speaking-dolphin experiment was dwindling. ‘It didn’t have the zing to it that LSD did at that time,’ recalls Lovatt of Lilly’s attitude towards her progress with Peter. ‘And in the end the zing won.'”

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“We’ll Fight Till We’re Dead Or We’re Free”

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

Some will always leave the culture, go off by themselves or in pairs or groups. They’ll disappear into their own heads, create their own reality. For most it’s benign, but not for all. There are those who don’t want to live parallel to the larger society and come to believe they can end it. The deeper they retreat, the harder it is to reemerge. Instead they sometimes explode back into their former world, as in the case of Jerad and Amanda Miller committing acts of domestic terrorism in Las Vegas. It reminds me of a piece of reportage by Denis Johnson.

The writer was paranoid about both the government and the anti-government militia movement in 1990s America when he wrote the chilling article “The Militia in Me,” which appears in his non-fiction collection, Seek. The violence of Ruby Ridge and Waco and the horrific Oklahoma City bombing had shocked the nation into realizing the terror within, so Johnson traveled the U.S. and Canada to find out how and why militias had come to be. Three brief excerpts from the piece.

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The people I talked with seemed to imply that the greatest threat to liberty came from a conspiracy, or several overlapping conspiracies, well known to everybody but me. As a framework for thought, this has its advantages. It’s quicker to call a thing a crime and ask Who did it? than to call it a failure and set about answering the question What happened?

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I’m one among many, part of a disparate–sometimes better spelled “desperate”–people, self-centered, shortsighted, stubborn, sentimental, richer than anybody’s ever been, trying to get along in the most cataclysmic century in human history. Many of us are troubled that somewhere, somehow, the system meant to keep us free has experienced a failure. A few believe that someone has committed the crime of sabotaging everything.

Failures need correction. Crimes cry out for punishment. Some ask: How do we fix it? Others: Who do we kill?

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They told me they made furniture out of antlers and drove around anywhere and everywhere, selling it. For the past month I’d been reading about the old days, missing them as if I had lived in them, and I said, “You sound like free Americans.”

“No,” the smaller man said and thereafter did all the talking, while the other, the blond driver changed my tire. “No American is free today.”

“Okay, I guess you’re right, but what do we do about that?”

“We fight till we are,” he said. “Till we’re free or we’re dead, one or the other.”

“Who’s going to do the fighting?”

“A whole lot of men. More than you’d imagine. We’ll fight till we’re dead or we’re free.”•

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“Writing Is Cognitively Unnatural”

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

 

 

William Faulkner.

Two brief excerpts from “Writing in the 21st Century,” a thought-provoking Edge piece about the nature of composition by Steven Pinker.

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“The first thing you should think about is the stance that you as a writer take when putting pen to paper or fingers to keyboard. Writing is cognitively unnatural. In ordinary conversation, we’ve got another person across from us. We can monitor the other person’s facial expressions: Do they furrow their brow, or widen their eyes? We can respond when they break in and interrupt us. And unless you’re addressing a stranger you know the hearer’s background: whether they’re an adult or child, whether they’re an expert in your field or not. When you’re writing you have none of those advantages. You’re casting your bread onto the waters, hoping that this invisible and unknowable audience will catch your drift.

The first thing to do in writing well—before worrying about split infinitives—is what kind of situation you imagine yourself to be in. What are you simulating when you write, and you’re only pretending to use language in the ordinary way? That stance is the main thing that iw distinguishes clear vigorous writing from the mush we see in academese and medicalese and bureaucratese and corporatese.”

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“Poets and novelists often have a better feel for the language than the self-appointed guardians and the pop grammarians because for them language is a medium. It’s a way of conveying ideas and moods with sounds. The most gifted writers—the Virginia Woolfs and H.G. Wellses and George Bernard Shaws and Herman Melvilles—routinely used words and constructions that the guardians insist are incorrect. And of course avant-garde writers such as Burroughs and Kerouac, and poets pushing the envelope or expanding the expressive possibilities of the language, will deliberately flout even the genuine rules that most people obey. But even non-avant garde writers, writers in the traditional canon, write in ways that would be condemned as grammatical errors by many of the purists, sticklers and mavens. “

 

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“I Never Had The Chance To Pry Off The Top Of His Head To See What Motivated Decisions Like This”

June 9, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Film, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Regardless of what actually killed him, Howard Hughes died of being Howard Hughes, eaten alive from the inside by neuroses. But that doesn’t mean he was alone at the feast. An autopsy suggested codeine and painkillers were among the culprits, and his personal physician, Dr. Wilbur Thain, whose brother-in-law Bill Gay was one of the executives angling for control of Hughes’ holdings, was treated like a precursor to Conrad Murray, though he was ultimately cleared of any wrongdoing.

From Dennis Breo’s 1979 People interview with Thain, who made the extremely dubious assertion that aspirin abuse claimed the man who was both disproportionately rich and poor:

Question:

Are you satisfied that Hughes received adequate medical attention?

Dr. Wilbur Thain:

Everything possible was done to help Hughes in his final hours. At no time did the authors of Empire try to get in touch with me. Yet they say in the book that an aviator friend of Hughes called me in Logan, Utah two days before Hughes’ death and told me, “I don’t want to play doctor, but your patient is dying.” I am quoted as telling the guy to mind his own business, since I had to go to a party in the Bahamas. Well, the first word I actually got that Hughes was in trouble was about 9 p.m. April 4, 1976—the night before he died. I was in Miami at the time—not Utah. At about midnight I was called and told that Hughes had suddenly become very critical. I was stunned. I left Miami at 3:30 a.m., arriving in Acapulco at 8 a.m. April 5.

Question:

What was the first thing you did?

Dr. Wilbur Thain:

Empire says the first thing I did was spend two hours shredding documents in Hughes’ rooftop suite at the Acapulco Princess. This is absolutely false. I walked straight into Hughes’ bedroom with my medical bag. He was unconscious and having multiple seizures. He looked like he was about to die. Other than one trip to the bathroom, I spent the next four hours with him.

Question:

Why did you then fly to Houston?

Dr. Wilbur Thain:

The Mexican physician who had seen Hughes advised against trying to take him to a local medical center, so we spent two hours trying to find an oxygen tank that didn’t leak and preparing the aircraft to fly us to Houston. We left at noon. He died en route.

Question:

Was Howard Hughes psychotic?

Dr. Wilbur Thain:

No, not at any time in his life. He was severely neurotic, yes. To be psychotic means to be out of touch with reality. Howard Hughes may have had some fanciful ideas, but he was not out of touch with reality. He was rational until the day he died.

Question:

Was Hughes an impossible patient?

Dr. Wilbur Thain:

That’s a masterpiece of understatement. He wanted doctors around, but he didn’t want to see them unless he had to. He would allow no X-rays—I never saw an X-ray of Hughes until after he died—no blood tests, no physical exams. He understood his situation and chose to live the way he lived. Rather than listen to a doctor, he would fall asleep or say he couldn’t hear.

Question:

Is that why you didn’t accept his job offer after you got out of medical school?

Dr. Wilbur Thain:

No, I just wanted to practice medicine on my own. I understand that Hughes was quite upset. I didn’t see him again for 21 years. He was 67 then. He had grown a beard, his hair was longer. He had some hearing loss partially due to his work around aircraft. That’s why he liked to use the telephone: It had an amplifier. He was very alert and well-informed. His toenails and fingernails were pretty long, but he had a case of onchyomycosis—a fungus disease of the nails which makes them thick and very sensitive. It hurt like hell to trim them. For whatever reason, he only sponge-bathed his body and hair.

Question:

What was the turning point?

Dr. Wilbur Thain:

After his successful hip surgery in August of 1973 he chose never to walk again. Once—only once—he walked from the bedroom to the bathroom with help. That was the beginning of the end for him. I told him we’d even get him a cute little physical therapist. He said, “No, Wilbur, I’m too old for that.”

Question:

Why did he decide not to walk?

Dr. Wilbur Thain:

I never had the chance to pry off the top of his head to see what motivated decisions like this. He would never get his teeth fixed, either. Worst damn mouth I ever saw. When they operated on his hip, the surgeons were afraid his teeth were so loose that one would fall into his lung and kill him!

Question:

What kinds of things did he talk about toward the end of his life?

Dr. Wilbur Thain:

The last year we would talk about the Hughes Institute medical projects and his earlier life. All the reporting on Hughes portrayed him as a robot. This man had real feelings. He talked one day about his parents, whom he loved very much, and his movies and his girls. He said he finally gave up stashing women around Hollywood because he got tired of having to talk to them. In our last conversation, he told me how much he still loved his ex-wife Jean Peters. But he was also always talking about things 10 years down the road. He was an optimist in that sense. If it hadn’t been for the kidney failure, Hughes might have lasted a lot longer.•

A 1976 Houston local news report on the death of Howard Hughes, whose demise was as shrouded in mystery as was much of his life.

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“This Future Vehicle Is Not A Car, Not As We Know It Today”

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

From a blog post by Brad Templeton, consultant to Google’s driverless-car division, about the company’s recent wheel-less and brake-less autonomous prototype, which has been surprisingly mocked by some:

“I was not involved in the specifics of design of this vehicle, though I pushed hard as I could for something in this direction. Here’s why I think it’s the right decision.

First of all, this is a prototype. Only 100 of this design will be made, and there will be more iterations. Google is all about studying, learning and doing it again, and they can afford to. They want to know what people think of this, but are not scared if they underestimate it at first.

Secondly, this is what is known as a ‘Disruptive Technology.’ Disruptive technologies, as described in the Silicon Valley bible The Innovators Dilemma are technologies that seem crazy and inferior at first. They meet a new need, not well understood by the incumbent big companies. Those big companies don’t see it as a threat — until years later, they are closing their doors. Every time a disruptive technology takes over, very few of the established players make it through to the other side. This does not guarantee that Google will dominate or crush those companies, or that everything that looks silly eventually wins. But it is a well established pattern.

This vehicle does not look threatening — not to people on the street, and not to existing car companies and pundits who don’t get it. Oh, there are many people inside those car companies who do get it, but the companies are incapable of getting it in their bones. Even when their CEOs get it, they can’t steer the company 90 degrees — there are too many entrenched forces in any large company. The rare exception are founder-led companies (like Google and Facebook and formerly Apple and Microsoft) where if the founder gets it, he or she can force the company to get it.

Even large companies who read this blog post and understand it still won’t get it, not most of the time. I’ve talked to executives from big car companies. They have a century of being car companies, and knowing what the means. Google, Tesla and the coming upstarts don’t.

One reason I will eventually move away from my chosen name for the technology — robocar — along with the other popular names like ‘self-driving car’ is that this future vehicle is not a car, not as we know it today. It is no more a ‘driverless car’ than a modern automobile is a horseless carriage. 100 years ago, the only way they could think of the car was to notice that there was no horse. Today, all many people notice about robocars is that no human is driving. This is the thing that comes after the car.”

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“If It Can Be Improved, Then These Robots, And Others Like Them, Might Stride Out Of Research Laboratories And Populate The World”

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

An excerpt from “The Robots Running This Way,” Will Knight’s long-form Technology Review article about Boston Dynamics, one of Google’s recently purchased robotics companies:

Many of the robots struggle to complete the tasks without malfunctioning, freezing up, or toppling over. Of all the challenges facing them, one of the most difficult, and potentially the most important to master, is simply walking over uneven, unsteady, or just cluttered ground. But the Atlas robots (several academic groups have entered versions of the Boston Dynamics machine) walk across such terrain with impressive confidence.

A couple of times each day, the crowd gets to see two other legged robots made by Boston Dynamics. In one demo, a four-legged machine about the size of a horse trots along the track carrying several large packs; it cleverly shuffles its feet to stay upright when momentarily unbalanced by a hefty kick from its operator. In another, a smaller, more agile four-legged machine revs up a loud diesel engine, then bounds maniacally along the racetrack like a big cat, quickly reaching almost 20 miles per hour.

The crowd, filled with robotics researchers from around the world and curious members of the public, gasps and applauds. But the walking and running technology found in the machines developed by Boston Dynamics is more than just dazzling. If it can be improved, then these robots, and others like them, might stride out of research laboratories and populate the world with smart mobile machines. That helps explain why a few days before the DARPA Challenge, Boston Dynamics was acquired by Google.•

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“SpaceX Already Has The Lowest Launch Costs In The Industry”

June 8, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

Critics of President Obama as a big-government champion certainly aren’t talking about about space exploration, which he seems content to leave to Elon Musk and other private market entities. There’s little doubt that Space X is more cost effective than NASA’s Space Launch System will be, but corporations can change course on projects based on economics, personnel and stock prices, whereas the government has to stay the course. Probably best to have a competition between public and private. That should be the new Space Race. From the Economist:

“SpaceX, the most successful of the private firms, is planning to build a super-heavy Falcon rocket of its own that would be even beefier than the SLS. If all goes to plan, the so-called Falcon XX could reach lunar orbit in the early 2020s and go on to Mars later in the decade, ten years ahead of the SLS. SpaceX already has the lowest launch costs in the industry. It is working on making its rockets reusable, which would cut prices even further. Some (admittedly speculative) estimates say that NASA could cut its costs by a factor of 25 or 50 by going with the Falcon XX rocket instead of the (non-reusable) SLS.

But this is not just an argument about money and jobs. The charitable interpretation of Congress’s plan is that it takes its inspiration from the greatness of the government-run Apollo programme. But Mr Musk is equally forceful when he says that ‘NASA’s most valuable role is to fund advanced science projects such as the Hubble space telescope or the Curiosity Mars rover—things that are valuable for humanity as a whole [and] where there’s not an obvious commercial transaction.’ The rest, in other words, including colonising Mars, Mr Musk’s ultimate aspiration, should be left to entrepreneurs.”

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“London Wrote That He Wanted The Piggery To Be ‘The Delight Of All Pig-Men In The United States'”

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

From a Modern Farmer article by Tyler LeBlanc about the last decade of Jack London’s life, when he repaired to Sonoma to create a “futuristic farm”:

Of his innovations, arguably the most impressive was the pig palace, an ultra-sanitary piggery that could house 200 hogs yet be operated by a single person. The palace gave each sow her own “apartment” complete with a sun porch and an outdoor area to exercise. The suites were built around a main feeding structure, while a central valve allowed the sole operator to fill every trough in the building with drinking water.

London wrote that he wanted the piggery to be “the delight of all pig-men in the United States.” While it may not have brought about significant change in the industry – it is said to have cost an astounding $3,000 (equal to $70,000 now) to build — it was one of London’s greatest innovations, and, unfortunately, his last. He died the following year.•

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“Let’s See What He’s Got Up His Sleeve For Us This Time”

June 6, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Videos | Permalink

People in show business are often labeled “genius” if they’re able to complete a sudoku slightly faster than Heidi Klum. But Ricky Jay is the real deal, a deeply brilliant person who can accomplish amazing things with his brain despite the deterioration of some basic neurological functions. A clip of the magician, actor and scholar appearing with Merv Griffin in 1983 and then an excerpt from Mark Singer’s great 1993 New Yorker profile, “Secrets of Magus.”

“Jay has an anomalous memory, extraordinarily retentive but riddled with hard-to-account-for gaps. ‘I’m becoming quite worried about my memory,’ he said not long ago. ‘New information doesn’t stay. I wonder if it’s the NutraSweet.’ As a child, he read avidly and could summon the title and the author of every book that had passed through his hands. Now he gets lost driving in his own neighborhood, where he has lived for several years—he has no idea how many. He once had a summer job tending bar and doing magic at a place called the Royal Palm, in Ithaca, New York. On a bet, he accepted a mnemonic challenge from a group of friendly patrons. A numbered list of a hundred arbitrary objects was drawn up: No. 3 was ‘paintbrush,’ No. 18 was ‘plush ottoman,’ No. 25 was ‘roaring lion,’ and so on. ‘Ricky! Sixty-five!’ someone would demand, and he had ten seconds to respond correctly or lose a buck. He always won, and, to this day, still would. He is capable of leaving the house wearing his suit jacket but forgetting his pants. He can recite verbatim the rapid-fire spiel he delivered a quarter of a century ago, when he was briefly employed as a carnival barker: ‘See the magician; the fire ‘manipulator’; the girl with the yellow e-e-elastic tissue. See Adam and Eve, boy and girl, brother and sister, all in one, one of the world’s three living ‘morphrodites.’ And the e-e-electrode lady . . .’ He can quote verse after verse of nineteenth-century Cockney rhyming slang. He says he cannot remember what age he was when his family moved from Brooklyn to the New Jersey suburbs. He cannot recall the year he entered college or the year he left. ‘If you ask me for specific dates, we’re in trouble,’ he says.”

“He’s An Extreme Life Hacker”

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

If Apple is going Fitbit and the iWatch is coming to the market in October, it will allow wearers another way to measure sleep activity, calorie consumption, blood oxygen levels and other vital statistics, another opportunity to quantify themselves at high levels, to understand behavior patterns that might not otherwise be apparent. It will also tacitly permit corporations and (likely) government to obtain such personal information. But Chris Dancy is already living in that space. The opening of Ira Boudway’s Bloomberg Businessweek piece about him:

“Ask Chris Dancy what he ate on Aug. 11 of last year, and he can tell you (Chick-fil-A). He can also tell you about the weather that day (83F), what music he listened to (Kelly Clarkson’s Walk Away), how many e-mails he sent (21), how long he slept (8 hours and 35 minutes), how many steps he took (8,088), and when he took his dogs to the park (1:04 p.m.). Dancy, 45, doesn’t have an amazing memory. He’s an extreme life hacker: He collects information about himself and his surroundings from 10 devices he wears or carries and 13 more in his home and car. He also catalogs virtually all of his online activity. The exhaustive record-keeping is an effort to discover the systems that shape his behavior so he can tinker with them and live better.

Dancy’s project began five years ago when he started archiving his tweets. Twitter (TWTR) didn’t make them searchable at the time, and Dancy wanted to collect them as a kind of diary. He also started dumping his Facebook (FB) posts and status updates into spreadsheets. ‘Then it just became a domino effect,’ he says. He began using any device he thought would help him find his quantified self.”

 

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“The Market Isn’t Logical, Any More Than Is Any Other Human Behavior”

June 6, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

From Zoe Williams’ brief review of Ha-Joon Chang’s Economics: The User’s Guide, the first title from the revived Pelican paperback line, a description of the underlying forces that drive financial considerations:

“I think his favourite section is ‘Let a Hundred Flowers Bloom’ – to judge, anyway, from his endearing pick’n’mix approach, in which he describes the nine key schools of thought, then makes up fresh labels, which you can use, if you wish, to describe yourself. The author’s references from culture proliferate: perhaps the best example is when he tries to explain, later, that the market isn’t logical, any more than is any other human behaviour, and that the things we can trade on the open market (carbon usage) and can’t (people, organs) come from beliefs, impulses and feelings that are deeper than money. ‘So politics is creating, shaping and reshaping markets before any transaction can begin. It is like the ‘Deeper Magic’ that had existed before the dawn of time, which is known to Aslan (the lion) but not to the White Witch in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.’“

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“Two Robots Called Rosie and Sandy Blast Away Paint And Corrosion All Day Long Without A Break”

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

A Financial Times article by Chris Bryant looks at robots that have graduated from the factory to relieve you of your open-air jobs. We’re sorry, but your services will no longer be required. The opening:

“Cleaning the Sydney Harbour Bridge used to be a dangerous, dirty and laborious job. As soon as a team of workers, operating a sandblaster, reached one end of the iconic structure they had to start again to keep 485,000 square metres of steel pristine.

Now two robots called Rosie and Sandy, built by SABRE Autonomous Solutions, blast away paint and corrosion all day long without a break. They determine which area needs most attention via a laser scan and move about on rails.

‘A sand blaster can slice through flesh. Automating jobs like that is a good thing, it helps improve the quality of human work,’ says Roko Tschakarow, head of the Mobile Gripper Systems Division at Schunk, which supplies the lightweight robot arm for the Sydney robots.
Cows and robots

Rosie and Sandy are at the forefront of a wave of new autonomous robots that have broken out of the factory and could be coming to your workplace soon.”

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“I Think I’m Her Best Editor, And I Know She’s My Best Editor”

June 5, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Film | Permalink

Joan Didion is one now, but when she was three her up-and-down marriage to fellow writer John Gregory Dunne was the topic of a 1976 People profile by John Riley. An excerpt:

Every morning Joan retreats to the Royal typewriter in her cluttered study, where she has finally finished her third novel, A Book of Common Prayer, due out early next year. John withdraws to his Olympia and his more fastidious office overlooking the ocean, where he’s most of the way through a novel called True Confessions. “At dinner she sits and talks about her book, and I talk about mine,” John says. “I think I’m her best editor, and I know she’s my best editor.”

While John played bachelor father to Quintana in Malibu, Joan spent a month in Sacramento—where she wrote the last 100 pages of the novel in her childhood bedroom in her parents’ home. She’s retreated there for the final month of all three novels. Her mother delivers breakfast at 9; her dad pours a drink at 6. The rest of the regimen: no one asks any questions about how she’s doing. Joan, a rare fifth-generation Californian, is the daughter of an Air Corps officer. She studied English at Berkeley and at 20 won a writing contest that led to an editing job with Vogue in New York. ‘All I could do during those days was talk long-distance to the boy I already knew I would never marry in the spring,’ she later wrote. John grew up in West Hartford, Conn., where his father was a surgeon. He prepped at a Catholic boarding school, Portsmouth Priory, and studied history at Princeton (where his classmates included Defense Secretary Don Rumsfeld and actor Wayne Rogers). After college he wrote for TIME.

He and Joan met in New York on opposite halves of a double date. When John’s girl passed out drunk in Didion’s apartment, she fixed him red beans and rice and, he recalls, “We talked all night.” Yet they remained only friends for six years until 1963, when they lunched to discuss the manuscript of her first novel, Run River. A year later they married.

California became home after Joan’s hypersensitivity pushed her to the brink of a crack-up in New York. ‘I cried in elevators and in taxis and in Chinese laundries,’ she recalls. “I could not work. I could not even get dinner with any degree of certainty.” Finally, in L.A., John and Joan began alternating columns in The Saturday Evening Post (they are presently sharing a his-and-hers column titled “The Coast” for Esquire). Soon they collaborated on their first filmscript, The Panic in Needle Park (which was co-produced by John’s brother Dominick). Her delicately wrought essays were collected in Slouching Towards Bethlehem, while John turned out nonfiction studies of the California grape workers’ strike (Delano) and 20th Century-Fox (The Studio).

They are only now emerging from two years of antisocial submersion in their novels. “This was the only time we’ve worked simultaneously on books,” John groans. “It was enormously difficult. There was no one to read the mail or serve as a pipeline to the outside world.” Finished ahead of John, Joan is baking bread, gardening and reestablishing contact with cronies like Gore Vidal and Katharine Ross. Unlike most serious writers, Joan and John have banked enough loot from the movies (they did script drafts for Such Good Friends and Play It As It Lays, among others) to indulge in two or three yearly trips to the Kahala Hilton in Hawaii. “Once you can accept the Hollywood mentality that says because you get $100,000 and the director gets $300,000, he’s three times smarter than you are, then it becomes a very amusing place to work,” John observes dryly. But, he adds: “If we didn’t have anything else, I think I’d slit my wrists.”

They’re currently dickering over two Hollywood projects, one about Alaska oil and another about California’s water-rights wars in the 1920s.•

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“He Used An Electronic Computer To Evaluate Each Player’s Performance”

June 5, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Sports, Videos | Permalink

Numbers being crunched is nothing new to sports, as this 1959 video of the Case Institute of Technology basketball team reminds. The assistant coach was an undergraduate computer whiz named Don Knuth who fed data into an IBM 650 to help improve his school’s chances (when he wasn’t busy freelancing for Mad). An excerpt from an interview at computer history.org in which Knuth recalls the first time he saw a computer:

“Later on in my freshman year there arrived a machine that, at first,  I could see only through the glass window. They called it a computer. I think it was actually called the IBM 650 ‘Univac.’ That was a funny name, because Univac was a competing brand. One night a guy showed me how it worked, and gave me a chance to look at the manual. It was love at first sight. I could sit all night with that machine and play with it.”

“Her Real Standout Characteristic Is The Ability To Strike Up Casual Conversations”

June 5, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

The opening of Brad Molen’s Endgadget piece about Microsoft’s human-ish digital assistant, which is based on a scantily clad video-game character:

“She was modeled after real-life personal assistants. She is the product of two years of work, and a large team of scientists and product managers. She has video game origins. She is Microsoft’s response to Siri and Google Now. She is Artificial Intelligence and proud of it. She is Cortana.

It seems odd to refer to smartphone software as a ‘she,’ but that human element is exactly what Microsoft is after with its new Windows Phone digital assistant. Cortana, named after her fictional counterpart in the video game series Halo, takes notes, dictates messages and offers up calendar alerts and reminders. But her real standout characteristic, and the one Microsoft’s betting heavily on, is the ability to strike up casual conversations with users; what Microsoft calls ‘chitchat.’ Next to Apple’s Siri, Cortana is the only other smartphone assistant to come with a baked-in personality. And it’s hard not to see the parallels between Cortana and the affable, Scarlett Johansson-voiced AI in Spike Jonze’s film Her.”

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“The Company Intends To Enter Markets It Says Are Currently Underserved By Games”

June 5, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Videos | Permalink

The first post I ever put up on this blog about driverless cars was in 2010. In it, Atari founder Nolan Bushnell was very enthusiastic about “auto-cars,” and I thought it was dubious that American drivers would be willing to give up the wheel in the immediate future.

Anyhow, Bushnell’s legendary gaming company, essentially a ghost brand that’s still alive in the now-adult minds of the children it entertained decades ago, is about to go through its umpteenth attempt at revival. From Nick Wingfield at the New York Times:

“In a phone interview, Mr. [Frédéric] Chesnais said the company was now focusing on mobile and Facebook games, rather than on the far riskier console market, where development budgets are much higher. Atari has announced plans for a social casino game that will exploit vintage Atari games like Asteroids, Centipede and Breakout within slot, poker and blackjack games.

The company intends to enter markets it says are currently underserved by games. In one game under development, Pridefest, players will be able to create their own L.G.B.T. pride parade, designing floats and parade routes. It’s a variation on an existing Atari franchise, RollerCoaster Tycoon, that lets players design amusement parks.

Mr. Chesnais is exploring other, more inchoate concepts. He calls one Atari TV, a plan to produce exclusive video content. The first example is a daily video blog Atari is co-producing called TheRealPelé, which is following the activities of the Brazilian soccer legend in the days leading up to the World Cup in that country.”

______________________________

So strange and wonderful: In 1972, Rod Serling introduces I’ve Got a Secret host Steve Allen to the home version of the video game Pong. Begins at the 15:40 mark.

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“It’s Rare To Totally Lose Command Of A First Language”

June 5, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

One of the interesting footnotes of the political football that is the case of Sgt Bowe Bergdahl is that in five years the soldier lost much of his ability to speak in his native tongue. Some insight into such cases from the BBC Magazine:

“Some people have gone decades without speaking or hearing their first language but they retain the ability to speak it easily, says Dr. Monika Schmid, a linguistics professor at the University of Essex in the UK. But others begin losing fluency within a few years of not speaking it.

It’s rare to totally lose command of a first language, she says. Instead people have ‘language attrition’ – trouble recalling certain words or they use odd grammar structures. Age is a factor. Once past puberty, Dr Schmid says, your first language is stable and the effects of attrition can reverse themselves if you are re-immersed. But children as old as 10 don’t necessarily retain the language they were born into. In a study of French adoptees who left South Korea in childhood, when asked in their early 30s to identify Korean, they did no better than native French speakers with no exposure to the language.”

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“Owning A Dishwasher Doesn’t Mean Your Position Relative To The Rest Of Society Is Anything Resembling Good Or Fair”

June 5, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Marc Andreessen, whose Google Glasses are rose-colored, sees technological progress in one light when, of course, there are a couple of shades. It’s a net win, sure, but there’s collateral damage and an uneven distribution of the spoils. In a Valleywag post, Sam Biddle takes down Andreessen over a series of breathless technotopia tweets. Part of the summation:

In conclusion, the fact that we aren’t all living in mud huts or clinging to the side of crevasses, babies bundled in animal pelts, is a feat of Silicon Valley. The affordability of a smartphone or a television has everything to do with uncritical, unwavering faith in “tech innovation” and some childish, abstract notion of industrial progress. It has absolutely nothing to do with, say, the legion of Chinese laborers working under deplorable conditions. Ignore the fact that that owning a dishwasher doesn’t mean your position relative to the rest of society is anything resembling good or fair—just be glad your standard of living has increased since the 17th century.

This argument was better made by people like Adam Smith, over two hundred years ago, rather than Marc Andreessen, a guy inside a bubble with a bachelor’s degree in computer science:

Compared, indeed, with the more extravagant luxury of the great, his accommodation must no doubt appear extremely simple and easy; and yet it may be true, perhaps, that the accommodation of an European prince does not always so much exceed that of an industrious and frugal peasant, as the accommodation of the latter exceeds that of many an African king, the absolute master of the lives and liberties of ten thousand naked savages.

Rich have always been able to pay servants to read aloud to them; now most US households can Google ‘wealth of nations summary’ at their leisure. It doesn’t matter, though: Andreessen’s industry peers are so desperate to get some insight via Twitter osmosis, they’ll ignore that his whitewashed analysis and vague trickle-down gesturing would probably land you a C in high school. Marc Andreessen, so far as Valleywag is aware, is not a high school student, but the head of one of the most powerful venture capital firms in history.

The scariest thing here isn’t that Andreessen has such a poor grasp on the history and economics, or his flatly counterfactual statements…•

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“I Wrote A Novel About A Great White Shark”

June 4, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Film, Videos | Permalink

Here’s a rarity: Peter Benchley, author of Jaws, in a part of the preview featurette promoting the novel’s 1975 big-screen Spielberg adaptation, which changed so much about Hollywood filmmaking, pretty much creating the summer blockbuster season. The novelist interviews the director as well as producers Richard Zanuck and David Brown.

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“When We Write, A Unique Neural Circuit Is Automatically Activated”

June 4, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

There certainly seems to be a link between handwriting and memory, and as the former fades and the latter is increasingly stored remotely, what does it mean for primary education? From Maria Konnikova of the New York Times:

“Does handwriting matter?

Not very much, according to many educators. The Common Core standards, which have been adopted in most states, call for teaching legible writing, but only in kindergarten and first grade. After that, the emphasis quickly shifts to proficiency on the keyboard.

But psychologists and neuroscientists say it is far too soon to declare handwriting a relic of the past. New evidence suggests that the links between handwriting and broader educational development run deep.

Children not only learn to read more quickly when they first learn to write by hand, but they also remain better able to generate ideas and retain information. In other words, it’s not just what we write that matters — but how.

‘When we write, a unique neural circuit is automatically activated,’ said Stanislas Dehaene, a psychologist at the Collège de France in Paris. ‘There is a core recognition of the gesture in the written word, a sort of recognition by mental simulation in your brain.

‘And it seems that this circuit is contributing in unique ways we didn’t realize,’ he continued.”

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“Let The Machines Do All The Work!”

June 4, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Before an automated workforce was a threat to employees, it was a real concern for management (of all kinds). The opening exchanges of a fascinating Salon conversation about technology, democracy, capitalism, and other subjects, between Thomas Frank and David Graeber:

“Thomas Frank:

Let’s start at the beginning: Keynes’ prediction, back in the 1930s, that before too long workers would have all sorts of leisure time because of improving productivity. Is there a history of this idea? I mean, others have argued this as well, correct?

David Graeber:

Well, radical elements in the labor movement began embracing such visions from quite early on. After the successful campaigns for the eight-hour day in the 1880s, people immediately started thinking, can we move this to seven, six, or less. Paul Lafargue, Marx’s son-in-law, and author of The Right to Be Lazy, was already calling for something along those lines in 1883. I have a Wobbly T-shirt with a turn-of-the-century style design that says ‘join the IWW for a new dawn,’ it has a sun rising over the rooftops, and on the sun is written, ‘four-day week, four-hour day.’ I don’t know how old the image really is but I’m guessing it’s from the Teens or the ’20s. In the 1930s, a lot of labor unions did move their industries to a 35-hour week. My mom was a garment worker at the time and that’s how she ended up getting involved in the ILGWU musical review Pins and Needles, because everyone had moved to a shorter week and the union started providing leisure activities.

Thomas Frank:

And when did this expectation finally start dying out?

David Graeber:

By the ‘60s, most people thought that robot factories, and ultimately, the elimination of all manual labor, was probably just a generation or two away. Everyone from the Situationists to the Yippies were saying ‘let the machines do all the work!’ and objecting to the very principle of 9-to-5 labor. In the ‘70s, there were actually a series of now-forgotten wildcat strikes by auto workers and others, in Detroit, I think Turin, and other places, basically saying, ‘we’re just tired of working so much.’

This sort of thing threw a lot of people in positions of power into a kind of moral panic. There were think-tanks set up to examine what to do—basically, how to maintain social control—in a society where more and more traditional forms of labor would soon be obsolete. A lot of the complaints you see in Alvin Toffler and similar figures in the early ‘70s—that rapid technological advance was throwing the social order into chaos—had to do with those anxieties: too much leisure had created the counter-culture and youth movements, what was going to happen when things got even more relaxed? It’s probably no coincidence that it was around that time that things began to turn around, both in the direction of technological research, away from automation and into information, medical, and military technologies (basically, technologies of social control), and also in the direction of market reforms that would send us back towards less secure employment, longer hours, greater work discipline.

Thomas Frank:

Today productivity continues to increase, but Americans work more hours per week than they used to, not fewer. Also, more than workers in other countries. Correct?

David Graeber:

The U.S., even under the New Deal, was always a lot stingier than most wealthy countries when it comes to time off: whether it’s maternity or paternity leave, or vacations and the like. But since the ‘70s, things have definitely been getting worse.”

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“Forty Years Ago, Co-Writing A Song With Ringo Starr Would Have Provided Me A House And A Pool”

June 4, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

A world driven by the written word, by novels and newspapers, may have just been a fleeting dream, even if it lasted for more than a century. Was the professional songwriter just a mirage as well? Sure, we knew the brick-and-mortar record store would be sacrificed to technology, but it wasn’t always clear that those who write the songs would also be forced to the altar. The opening of Van Dyke Parks’ Daily Beast piece about watching profits float away in the stream:

“Last month I was invited up to Ringo Starr’s home in Beverly Hills. He asked me to write a song with him for his next ‘virtual’ album. In two days’ devotion, we conjured and recorded a piece called ‘Bamboula.’

We then sat back and guessed what our possible ‘day rate’ for that time and effort would be. What an irony!

Forty years ago, co-writing a song with Ringo Starr would have provided me a house and a pool. Now, estimating 100,000 plays on Spotify, we guessed we’d split about $80. When I got home, on closer study, I found out we were way too optimistic. Spotify (on par with other streamers) pays only .00065 cents per play.

There’s less support for all the arts today, and the blade gets duller with every cut in arts funding. It degrades dance, opera, even academia and, significantly, the art of journalism. As a result, in the U.S., public opinion suffers from what we call ‘infotainment.’ That’s a genre of media news that is not informing, entertaining, or remedial. And it’s a direct result of a vacuum of patronage (and by patronage, I don’t mean just Medici-style sponsorship but the willingness of all arts consumers to pay for what they listen to, read, and watch, and for the industry to fairly recompense creators).

But let’s limit ourselves to a narrow-band study of royalty rates in my occupational field, music composition, and to industry practices in the U.S. from 1914 to 2014, a century in which declining royalty figures reveal a real dilemma: an imploding commodification if not outright destruction of intellectual property rights.”

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