Excerpts

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“I Wanted To Find A ­Disruptive Bank”

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

It’s no shock that disruptive banks haven’t been the thing in Silicon Valley the way market-shifting laundry services have. Literally losing your shirt is unfortunate, but losing it figuratively is completely unacceptable. The opening of Kevin Roose’s New York Magazine article about the possibility of nouveau banking that bucks the system:

“Recently, after a long, drawn-out fight over an overdraft fee, I decided to break up with my bank. I withdrew my balance, closed my accounts, and began looking around. I wanted to find a ­disruptive bank, in the Silicon Valley parlance—one better than the opaque, fee-filled behemoths I’d dealt with in the past.

The problem, I quickly learned, is such a thing doesn’t yet exist. The big banks all offer basically the same bevy of services, and small banks and credit unions tend to skimp on the add-ons I need, like mobile-banking apps and spending trackers. All of them, big and small, run on the same outdated infrastructure—paper checks, debit cards that require punched-in pins, wire transfers that take days to clear. Despite Wall Street’s reputation for ruthless efficiency and staying ahead of the curve, the last truly important innovation in consumer banking might have been the ATM.

To listen to Silicon Valley tell it, that will change soon. ‘I am dying to fund a disruptive bank,’ venture capitalist Marc Andreessen tweeted earlier this year. Financial start-ups—known collectively as ‘fintech’—are spreading like kudzu, each with a different idea about how to usurp the giants of Wall Street by offering better services, lower fees, or both. Bitcoin and other digital currencies are the tech scene’s infatuation du jour. But a number of other companies are finding success by innovating within the monetary system we already have. ‘When I go to Silicon Valley … they all want to eat our lunch,’ lamented ­JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon this year.”

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“He Said This Had Been Caused By Heading Footballs”

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

American football, with its brutal smashmouth style, is something like dogfighting for humans, leaving many players with devastating brain damage. But what about that other sport that the rest of the world calls football, with relatively tamer contact that’s often theatrical, even comical, could it be dangerous to gray matter? Soccer may actually also be quite bad in this regard, with brain injuries caused by jarring headers during the game and thousands of bounces off the skull in practice. From the BBC:

“Ex-England striker Jeff Astle died from a brain condition normally linked to boxers rather than Alzheimer’s disease as previously thought, a neurosurgeon has claimed.

Dr Willie Stewart carried out a new examination of the former West Bromwich Albion forward’s brain.

He said Astle, who died, aged 59, in 2002, was killed by chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE).

He said this had been caused by heading footballs.

Dr Stewart said CTE was formerly known as dementia pugilistica – a progressive degeneration of the the brain caused by repeated head trauma.

He said the condition was frequently mistaken for dementia, as happened to Astle when he was incorrectly diagnosed with Alzheimer’s.

Astle scored the winning goal in West Brom’s 1-0 victory over Everton in the 1968 FA Cup final

Dr Stewart said he believed a number of footballers could be affected by CTE.”

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“We’re Not Speaking Of Normal People But Of Those Who Rule Our Lives”

June 3, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

Whether squaring off with Muhammad Ali, Henry Kissinger or a head-transplant surgeon, Oriana Fallaci was just crazy enough to survive them all–to thrive, even. Here’s an excerpt from a 1977 People interview by Sally Moore, which begins with a question that would never have been asked of a male journalist:

People:

Have you ever had a sexual relationship with an interview subject?

Oriana Fallaci:

No. That’s a matter of pride. They’ll never catch me at that one. The most humiliating thing a woman can be is a coquette. The world thinks, if a man sleeps with a woman he interviews, he’s a journalist. If a woman does it, she’s a whore.

People:

Do you ask very personal questions of people you interview?

Oriana Fallaci:

No—only of those in power. With them, you must do anything. They have no rights. I asked the Shah of Iran about his women, Golda offered to speak with love about her husband. Arafat? I don’t think he loves women, so there wasn’t any problem. Indira spoke about the problems of being a woman leader; it was tragic for her marriage.

People:

Why do people in power fascinate you?

Oriana Fallaci:

Because, you must remember, we’re not speaking of normal people but of those who rule our lives, command us, decide if we live or die, in freedom or in tyranny.

People:

Do you regret any of your interviews?

Oriana Fallaci:

Only that I’ve sometimes been too kind. When I fall in love with a character, as I did with Indira, I have reasons to regret. But then she wasn’t a dictator yet. Then there was that American Lieutenant [Robert] Frishman of the U.S. Navy, whom I interviewed in Hanoi. He was acting so cowardly in front of the North Vietnamese. It makes me crazy to see a man in chains, humiliated, so I was very good to him. Then he came home the hero. He pretended not to recognize me, and I got furious. I was kind with Thieu [South Vietnam’s ex-president], because the moment I saw him I judged him to be a victim of American policy. He was crying.

People:

Then where does your reputation for brutality come from?

Oriana Fallaci:

Americans invented a character that doesn’t exist. What I am—forgive an act of pride—is courageous. Most of our colleagues don’t have the guts to ask the right questions.•

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“I Want To Destroy The EU, Not Europe!”

June 3, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

Sometimes an extremist fringe in a country can actually be a good sign. Because it’s being routed by progress and good sense, such a faction makes noise that can be misheard as a rallying cry when it’s really a death rattle. But if such a group moves from the margins to the center, that’s cause for concern. Marine Le Pen, daughter of racist cuckoo clock Jean-Marie Le Pen and leader of France’s Far Right Front National Party, which enjoyed surprising success in the country’s recent elections, just sat for an interview with Mathieu von Rohr of Spiegel. The opening:

“Spiegel:

Ms. Le Pen, having won 25 percent of the French vote, your Front National party stands as one of the primary beneficiaries of the May 25 European Parliament election. How could such a thing come to pass?

Marine Le Pen:

The French want to regain control of their own country. They want to determine the course of their own economy and their immigration policies. They want their own laws to take precedence over those of the European Union. The French have understood that the EU does not live up to the utopia they were sold. It has distanced itself significantly from a democratic mode of operation.

Spiegel:

Yet, prior to the election, it was said that the establishment of lead candidates for the two biggest groups — Jean-Claude Juncker for the center-right and Martin Schulz for the center-left — would strengthen democracy in the EU.

Marine Le Pen:

That is totally bogus. Everybody knew that the parliament wouldn’t be making the final decision on the next president of the European Commission.

Spiegel:

Do you want to destroy Europe?

Marine Le Pen:

I want to destroy the EU, not Europe! I believe in a Europe of nation-states. I believe in Airbus and Ariane, in a Europe based on cooperation. But I don’t want this European Soviet Union.

Spiegel:

The EU is a vast project for peace. It has helped ensure 70 years without war on the Continent.

Marine Le Pen:

No. Europe is war. Economic war. It is the increase of hostilities between the countries. Germans are denigrated as being cruel, the Greeks as fraudsters, the French as lazy. Ms. Merkel can’t travel to any European country without being protected by hundreds of police. That is not brotherhood.”

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“It’s Difficult To Conceptualize American Streets Before Automobiles Were Everywhere”

June 3, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

A passage from “Murder Machines,” Hunter Oatman-Stanford’s Collectors Weekly article which recalls American streets before Henry Ford’s blasted contraptions became popular:

“Though various automobiles powered by steam, gas, and electricity were produced in the late 19th century, only a handful of these cars actually made it onto the roads due to high costs and unreliable technologies. That changed in 1908, when Ford’s famous Model T standardized manufacturing methods and allowed for true mass production, making the car affordable to those without extreme wealth. By 1915, the number of registered motor vehicles was in the millions.

Within a decade, the number of car collisions and fatalities skyrocketed. In the first four years after World War I, more Americans died in auto accidents than had been killed during battle in Europe, but our legal system wasn’t catching on. The negative effects of this unprecedented shift in transportation were especially felt in urban areas, where road space was limited and pedestrian habits were powerfully ingrained.

For those of us who grew up with cars, it’s difficult to conceptualize American streets before automobiles were everywhere. ‘Imagine a busy corridor in an airport, or a crowded city park, where everybody’s moving around, and everybody’s got business to do,’ says Norton. ‘Pedestrians favored the sidewalk because that was cleaner and you were less likely to have a vehicle bump against you, but pedestrians also went anywhere they wanted in the street, and there were no crosswalks and very few signs. It was a real free-for-all.’

Roads were seen as a public space, which all citizens had an equal right to, even children at play. ‘Common law tended to pin responsibility on the person operating the heavier or more dangerous vehicle,’ says Norton, ‘so there was a bias in favor of the pedestrian.’ Since people on foot ruled the road, collisions weren’t a major issue: Streetcars and horse-drawn carriages yielded right of way to pedestrians and slowed to a human pace. The fastest traffic went around 10 to 12 miles per hour, and few vehicles even had the capacity to reach higher speeds.

In rural areas, the car was generally welcomed as an antidote to extreme isolation, but in cities with dense neighborhoods and many alternate methods of transit, most viewed private vehicles as an unnecessary luxury. ‘The most popular term of derision for a motorist was a ‘joyrider,’ and that was originally directed at chauffeurs,’ says Norton. ‘Most of the earliest cars had professional drivers who would drop their passengers somewhere, and were expected to pick them up again later. But in the meantime, they could drive around, and they got this reputation for speeding around wildly, so they were called joyriders.'”

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“Long Before ‘Popsie’ Hunt’s Death, However, An Ugly Struggle Had Already Begun Within His Family”

June 3, 2014 in Excerpts, Urban Studies | Permalink

When you possess $5 billion and several families full of highly ambitious people, you bequeath a great deal of drama along with great wealth when you die. H.L. Hunt, an ultraconservative oilman with a backstory as large as Texas itself, left just that sort of a messy arrangement 40 years ago when he succumbed to cancer. His descendants behaved in such a manner that they reputedly were the inspiration for the melodramatic TV series Dallas. From a 1974 People:

Haroldson Lafayette Hunt was 32 and broke when he sat down to a game of five-card stud in the Arkansas boom town of El Dorado and won his first oil well. By the time he died of cancer two weeks ago at age 85, H.L. Hunt had pyramided his poker winnings into a global oil empire that made him one of the world’s half-dozen wealthiest men. Long before “Popsie” Hunt’s death, however, an ugly struggle had already begun within his family over the disposition of the Texas tycoon’s personal fortune, estimated at $5 billion. 

The issue is between Hunt’s children by his first wife and those of his second. His first marriage to Lyda Bunker Hunt produced four sons and two daughters—Mrs. Al Hill, 59, H.L. Jr., 57, Mrs. Hugo W. Schoellkopf Jr., 52, Nelson Bunker, 48, Herbert, 46, and Lamar, 42. Hunt’s second wife was Ruth Ray Wright, a former Hunt company secretary, who married H.L. two years after Lyda’s death in 1955. She had four children, whom H.L. immediately adopted: Ray, 30, June, 29, Helen, 26, and Swanee, 23. (Friends say members of the family have told them H.L. was their actual as well as adoptive father.) 

The internecine intrigue began, H.L. confidant Paul Rothermel told a federal grand jury, when he convinced the patriarch in 1969 to leave 51% of Hunt Oil to the “second family.” The first six children, recalled Rothermel, had already amassed many millions of their own. However, the other four children had “only” about $3 million all-told in trust funds. Two years later, private detectives working for Nelson Bunker and Herbert were convicted of tapping the phones of Rothermel and four other Hunt Oil executives believed sympathetic to the younger set of Hunts. Themselves now under federal indictment for ordering the wiretaps, Nelson Bunker and Herbert have pleaded not guilty, arguing that they simply wanted to investigate unaccountable company losses of $62 million over two years. Should the two Hunts be convicted, they could be fined up to $10,000 or be sentenced to five years, or both. For his part, Rothermel has come to an undisclosed out-of-court settlement with the Hunts over the wiretap.•

“The Autonomous Car Brings A Significant Direct Benefits To Consumers”

June 3, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

From Maciamo Hay at h+ magazine, an argument for why autonomous vehicles may grow much more rapidly than the slow uptick experienced of hybrids:

“Some might doubt that autonomous cars will take over the market within 10-15 years of their introduction. After all, hybrid cars were launched over 15 years ago (even if only the Toyota Prius at first) and still represent only 10% of new sales in the US, and 25% in Japan, which has the world’s highest percentage. The reason why hybrid cars haven’t been selling very well yet is that they are too expensive. Even though they consume less fuel, for many years it was very hard to amortize due to the difference of initial investment. The initial enthusiasts were often environmentalists.

In contrast, the autonomous car brings a significant direct benefits to consumers in the form of increased safety and convenience, so that people will want them even if they are a bit more expensive, just as happened with smartphones. As always price will be the determinant factor for the speed of adoption, and sales will follow an exponential curve as manufacturing costs drop progressively.”

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“Why Can’t We Have That In New York?”

June 2, 2014 in Excerpts, Urban Studies | Permalink

Donald Trump stinks, so it’s no surprise he relishes the privilege of serf-like labor to build his garish Dubai developments. He was recently confronted about his low-wage UAE workforce by the aptly pseudonymed Vice correspondent Molly Crabapple. An excerpt:

“On stage, Trump praises his Dubai. He is effusive—and sincere. Trump is one sort of Westerner who loves the UAE. They find here a throwback to colonialism’s heyday. No matter how much you’ve shat the bed at home, here your whiteness will get you a job, money, servants from the Global South. Help is so affordable when migrant workers make $200 a month. In police states, there is little crime.

‘The world has so many problems and so many failures, and you come here and it’s so beautiful,’ Trump says. ‘Why can’t we have that in New York?’

Trump does not mention that, like Dubai, New York is morphing into the no-place of multi-national capitalism. He does not mention that this is partially his fault.

The floor opens to questions.

I stand up.

‘Mr. Trump,’ I ask, ‘the workers who build your villas make less than $200 a month. Are you satisfied?’

The room gasps, then goes silent. The security tenses towards me. In two hours I am scheduled to interview Ahmed Mansoor, who spent eight months in jail for signing a pro-democracy petition. I think about Nick McGeehan, a researcher from Human Rights Watch who was deported a few months ago for investigating the same migrant issues I am.

I think about the web of professional coercion that keeps journalists in the US from asking real questions at press conferences. I wonder if the rules in Dubai are the same.

Trump says nothing.

‘That’s not an appropriate question,’ the publicist barks.”

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“An Obsession With Speed Is Also The Fear Of Being Left Behind Oneself”

June 2, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

I’m not on any social media even though I acknowledge there are a great many wonderful things about it. I just don’t know how healthy it is to live inside that machine. And that’s what it seems like to me–a machine. In fact, it probably most resembles a retro one, a pinball machine. The glass is transparent, there’s a lot of jarring noise and the likely outcomes are TILT and GAME OVER. At the end, you’re a little poorer and unnerved by the cheap titillation and the spent adrenaline. I think it’s particularly questionable whether we should be so linked to our past, that every day could be a high-school reunion. Sure, there’s comfort in it, but maybe comfort is what we want but not what we need. And, of course, being virtual isn’t being actual. Like an actor who goes too deeply into a role, it’s hard to disconnect ourselves from the unreality.

In stepping away for a spell from social media and his neverending Twitter wars, Patton Oswalt shared a quote he loves: “For fear of becoming dinosaurs we are turned into sheep.” It comes from Garret Keizer’s 2010 Harper’s essay, “Why Dogs Go After Mail Carriers.” Here’s the fuller passage from the piece:

“More than the unionization of its carriers or the federal oversight of its operations, the most bemoaned evil of the US mail is its slowness {1}. No surprise there, given our culture’s worship of speed. I would guess that when the average American hears the word socialism the first image to appear in his or her mind is that of a slow-moving queue, like they have down in Cuba, where people have been known to take a whole morning just to buy a chicken and a whole night just to make love. Unfortunately, the costs of our haste do not admit to hasty calculation. As Eva Hoffman notes in her 2009 book Time, ‘New levels of speed … are altering both our inner and outer worlds in ways we have yet to grasp, or fully understand.’

The influence of speed upon what Hoffman aptly calls ‘the very character and materiality of lived time’ [my emphasis] has been a topic of discussion for decades now, though its bourgeois construction typically leans toward issues of personal health and lifestyle aesthetics. Speed alters our brain chemistry; it leaves us too little time to smell the roses – a favorite trope among those who would do better to smell their own exhaust. In essence, the speed of a capitalistic society is about leaving others behind, the losers in the race, the ‘pedestrians’ at the side of the road, the people with obsolete computers and junker cars and slow-yield investments. An obsession with speed is also the fear of being left behind oneself – which drives the compulsion to buy the new car, the faster laptop, the inflated stock. For fear of becoming dinosaurs we are turned into sheep.'”

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“Most Of The Greatest Ideas Are Usually Denounced By Most Of Us As Crazy In The Beginning”

June 2, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

I don’t always agree with Malcolm Gladwell, but I always enjoy reading him for his ideas and because he’s a miraculously lucid writer. He just did an Ask Me Anything at Reddit. A few exchanges follow.

____________________________

Question:

What was your experience on Glenn Beck’s program like?

Malcolm Gladwell:

A lot of people wondered why I went on Glenn Beck’s show. I don’t agree with a lot of what he says. But i was curious to meet him. And my basic position in the world is that the most interesting thing you can do is to talk to someone who you think is different from you and try and find common ground. And what happened! We did. We actually had a great conversation. Unlike most of the people who interviewed me for David and Goliath, he had read the whole book and thought about it a lot. My lesson from the experience: If you never leave the small comfortable ideological circle that you belong to, you’ll never develop as a human being.

____________________________

Question:

What do you think is the most bat-shit crazy common human characteristic?

Malcolm Gladwell:

There are so many to choose from! How’s this. I do not understand the impulse that many people have of looking first for what they DISAGREE with in another person or idea, instead of looking first for what they might learn from. My second is that I don’t understand why we are so scared of changing our minds. What’s wrong with contradicting yourself? Why is it a bad thing to amend your previous opinions, when new facts are available? If a politician hasn’t flip-flopped at some point in his career, doesn’t that mean he’s brain dead?

____________________________

Question:

You write about Steve Jobs a lot and overall I would sum up your opinion of Jobs as rather quite negative. Is this wholly true and what sort of response have you received from people over this?

Malcolm Gladwell:

I have complicated thoughts about Steve Jobs. He fits very clearly into the idea I write about in David and Goliath about how entrepreneurs need to be “disagreeable”–that is, that in order to make something new and innovative in the world you need to be the kind of person who doesn’t care about what your peers think. Why? Because most of the greatest ideas are usually denounced by most of us as crazy in the beginning. Steve Jobs was a classic disagreeable entrepreneur. That makes him a difficult human being to be around. But were he not difficult, he would never have accomplished an iota of what he did!

____________________________

Question:

Your books have a really interesting critical thinking aspect to them. Do you have any idea what your next book/piece will be about?

Malcolm Gladwell:

I’m writing a bunch of pieces for the New Yorker right now. One is about crime–which has been a recurring theme in many of my books. It asks the question: is crime a means of economic mobility? That is–is it a way for outsiders to join the middle class? It clearly was once. The children and grandchildren of Mafia dons ended up going to law school and becoming doctors. But is that still the case? It’s kind of weird question, but it gets at something that we rarely consider, which is that there might be a downside to cracking down too successfully on organized criminal activity. The New Yorker is a great place to explore complicated questions like this. Plus, when my ideas are simply crazy, the editors there are smart enough to step in and save me from embarrassing myself!

____________________________

Question:

Sorry, I haven’t yet read your new book so you may already cover this, but I do have a question about college choice. Thirty years ago, I went to a snooty liberal arts college, paid lot of money, and in those 30 years, literally no one has cared about or even really asked where I went to college. Seems like I wasted my parents money and should have gone to the University of Minnesota for a lot less. Am I wrong?

Malcolm Gladwell:

You aren’t wrong. I have an entire chapter on college choice in David and Goliath. My point in that chapter is that prestige schools have costs: that the greater competition at a “better” school causes many capable people to think they aren’t good at what they love. But your point is equally valid. People going to college and in college vastly over-estimate the brand value of their educational institution. When I hire assistants, I don’t even ask them where they went to school. Who cares? By the time you’re twenty-five or thirty, does it matter anymore?

____________________________

Question:

There’s a lot of discussion here about college choices based off your book. What’s your opinion on the Thiel Fellowship over at MIT where Peter Thiel is giving away $200K to a student to leave school and start their own start-up? Do you think it’s wise for these students to take an investment in their future at the cost of a potentially valuable education?

Malcolm Gladwell:

Thiel’s idea is really interesting. But let’s be clear. He’s not saying that it is a good idea for MOST people not to go to college. He’s saying that if you are really really driven and ambitious and smart and already have a great business idea at the age of 18 or 19, college probably isn’t going to do you much good. And he’s right! But that really only applies to those students in the 99th percentile. This fits into one of my pet peeves, by the way. We spent an awful lot of time as a society fretting over the quality of educational opportunity at the top: gifted programs, elite universities. People actually freely give money to Harvard, which has an endowment of 50 billion! But surely if you are smart enough to get into Harvard, you are the person least in need of the benefits of a 50 billion dollar endowment. We need to spend a lot more attention on the 50 percentile. That’s where money can make a real difference.

____________________________

Question:

Has anyone ever told you that you remind them of Sideshow Bob?

Malcolm Gladwell:

Yes. I take it as a compliment!•

 

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“Alliances Are Very, Very Hard, But They Are Necessary”

June 2, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The three historical things I’ve hoped to see in my life are an African-American President (done), a female U.S. President (soon, perhaps?) and a new-wave, large-scale women’s movement. The last decade there’s seemed to be a growing tide of feminist consciousness in America. And, no, there’s no way I can quantify that, but it seems to be happening. Will it coalesce into an organized movement? 

Because I’m not on social media, I didn’t see the #YesAllWomen insta-campaign until a couple days after it happened, but I thought it was a great sign. Of course, the Digital Age is a double-edged sword for any movement: The connectedness has great utility, but the diffuse nature of culture makes it more difficult for a real movement to form. In our long-tail world, it’s hard for people, even connected ones, to be truly close together.

Here’s a really good New York-centric documentary that focuses on American feminism in the mid-1970s, featuring Rita Mae Brown, Betty Friedan and Margo Jefferson, among many other women.

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“Those Signals Travel Toward A Satellite Orbiting The Moon”

June 1, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

“A rat done bit my sister Nell (with Wi-Fi on the moon)” is the new lyric.

There are rural parts of America that still depend on dial-up, but the moon now has Wi-Fi. Perhaps that’s because Earth is an inhabited planet where everyone has politics and a profit motive, and the moon knows no such barriers. From Timothy McGrath at Global Post:

“Life on the moon just got a whole lot more awesome. Sure, you’ve got to wear a spacesuit and there’s not much to do in the way of recreation and nightlife.

But that’s all okay now, because there’s Wi-Fi.

Researchers at NASA and MIT have figured out how to beam wireless connectivity from a ground base in New Mexico to the moon using telescopes and lasers.

It’s as cool as it sounds.

Here’s how it works. The transmission utilizes four separate telescopes connected to a laser transmitter that feeds coded pulses of infrared light through it. Those signals travel toward a satellite orbiting the moon. Researchers have managed to make a connection and transfer data at a speed approximating slower Wi-Fi speeds on Earth.”

 

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“It’s Possible That The Hippocampus Is Necessary To Project Yourself Into The Future”

June 1, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

A 1981 motorcycle wreck destroyed both of Kent Cochrane’s hippocampuses, leaving him an amnesiac at 30. What was bane for the individual was boon for science: In good part through his travails, we learned that the brain separates factual and personal memories and were able to identify which parts control these functions. Cochrane, who recently passed away, was further plagued in that he didn’t just lose much of the past but also all of the future. He was a man of the moment, always. From Sam Kean at Slate:

“K.C.’s memory loss also had the profound and paradoxical effect of wiping out his future. For the last three decades of his life, he couldn’t have told you what he planned to do over the next hour, the next day, the next year. He couldn’t even imagine those things.

It’s not entirely clear why, but it probably runs deeper than K.C.’s inability to remember his plans. It’s possible that the hippocampus is necessary to project yourself into the future and imagine personally experiencing things in the same way that the hippocampus allows you to put yourself back in time and re-experience the sights, sounds, and emotions of past memories. That’s what your personal memories are really all about.

This loss of his future didn’t pain K.C.; he didn’t suffer or rue his fate. But in some ways that lack of suffering seems sad in itself.” (Thanks 3 Quarks Daily.)

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“He Sees No Reason That Technology Can’t Do The Same With Human Parts”

June 1, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Ray Kurzweil believes humans will be immortal one day, and it will be sooner than you or I might imagine. And he doesn’t worry about brain implants or the like altering our identity since identity is fluid already naturally. From some of his thoughts about a path to forever in a new Wall Street Journal article by Alexandra Wolfe:

“He thinks that humans will one day be able to live indefinitely, but first we must cross three ‘bridges.’

The first of these is staying healthy much longer. To that end, the smooth-skinned and youthful Mr. Kurzweil consumes 120 vitamins and supplements every day, takes nutrients intravenously (so that his body can absorb them better), drinks green tea and exercises regularly. That regimen keeps his ‘real age’ in the 40s, he says.

The second bridge is reprogramming our biology, which began with the Human Genome Project and includes, he says, the regeneration of tissue through stem-cell therapies and the 3-D printing of new organs.

We will cross the third and final bridge, he says, when we embed nanobots in our brains that will affect our intelligence and ability to experience virtual environments. Nanobots in our bodies will act as an extension of our immune system, he says, to identify and destroy pathogens our own biological cells can’t.

Mr. Kurzweil projects that the 2030s will be a ‘golden era,’ a time of revolution in how medicine is practiced. He compares the human body to a car. ‘Isn’t there a natural limit to how long an automobile lasts?’ he asks. ‘However, if you take care of it and if anything goes wrong, you fix it and maybe replace it, it can go on forever.’ He sees no reason that technology can’t do the same with human parts. The body is constantly changing already, he says, with cells replacing themselves every few days to months.

His vision of the future raises the question of what it means to be human. Yet he believes that adding technology to our bodies doesn’t change our essence. ‘The philosophical issue of identity is, Am I the same person as I was six months ago?’ he says. ‘There’s a continuity of identity.'”

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“A Young Cartoonist Could Afford The Years It Might Take To Breach The New Yorker”

June 1, 2014 in Books, Excerpts | Permalink

One of the quiet losses as print magazines have declined because of technological shifts and because they’ve been focus-grouped to death, is the dwindling of panel cartooning. From Bruce Handy’s New York Times Book Review piece about New Yorker cartoon editor Bob Mankoff’s just-published memoir:

“I should note, as Mankoff does, that The New Yorker didn’t invent the captioned, single-panel cartoon, but under the magazine’s auspices the form was modernized and perfected; [Peter] Arno, for one, ought to be as celebrated as Picasso and Matisse, or at least Ernst Lubitsch. But if The New Yorker has long been the pinnacle, ‘the Everest of magazine cartooning,’ as Mankoff puts it, the surrounding landscape has become more of a game preserve, with a sad, thinned herd of outlets. In olden days, when rejected drawings could be pawned off on, among many others, The Saturday Evening Post, Esquire, Ladies’ Home Journal or National Lampoon, a young cartoonist could afford the years it might take to breach The New Yorker — Mankoff himself made some 2,000 total submissions before he sold his first drawing to the magazine, in 1977. Today there are probably more people alive who speak Gullah or know how to thatch a roof than there are first-rate panel cartoonists.”

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“Self-Drive Cars Will Probably Work Through Internet Connectivity”

June 1, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

When the computer is in everything, everything can be hacked. No doubt Google and others are building serious safety features into their driverless-car software because the new vandalism, not to mention terrorism, could be turning an autonomous car the wrong way down a one-way street. From Alex Hern at the Guardian:

“Wil Rockall, a director at KPMG, warns that ‘the industry will need to be very alert to the risk of cyber manipulation and attack.’

‘Self-drive cars will probably work through internet connectivity and, just as large volumes of electronic traffic can be routed to overwhelm websites, the opportunity for self-drive traffic being routed to create ‘spam jams’ or disruption is a very real prospect.’

Rockall suggests that manufacturers could build safety features in to lessen the risk of this happening. ‘The industry takes safety and security incredibly seriously. Doubtless, overrides could be built in so that drivers could shut down many of the car’s capabilities if hacked. That way, humans will still be able to ensure their cars don’t route them on the road to nowhere.’

But Google’s prototype self-driving car, revealed on Tuesday, is largely controlled using an app, and has just two physical buttons: stop, and go. The company has taken a very different approach to firms like Audi and Volvo, who market the driverless features as an addition to, rather than replacement for, a traditional driver.”

_______________________

“Cars without steering wheels,” 1950s:

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“This Time Technological Unemployment May Become A Permanent Fact”

June 1, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

At the Philosopher’s Beard, the whiskered one wonders whether capitalism as we know it has a future in an automated society, arguing for a universal basic income based on human decency, not employment status. An excerpt:

“Unless we intervene, the same economic system that has produced this astonishing prosperity will return us to the Dickensian world of winners and losers that characterised the beginning of capitalism, or worse. The problem is this, how will ordinary people earn a claim on the material prosperity of the capitalist economy if that economy doesn’t need our labour anymore?

The Crisis

The original industrial revolution was basically an energy revolution that replaced puny human brawn with fossil fuel powered machines that were orders of magnitude faster and stronger. Human workers were displaced into the new jobs created by this prosperity, some managing and servicing the machines that made actual things, but most into ‘services’, producing intangible goods such as education by cognitive efforts that the technological revolution in productivity couldn’t reach. We are now living through a second industrial revolution that is replacing puny human brains with machine intelligence. Any kind of work that can be routinised can be translated into instructions for computers to do, generally more cheaply and reliably than human employees can. That includes increasingly sophisticated cognitive labour like driving, legal discovery, medicine, and document translation. Even university lecturers are at risk of being replaced by technology, in the form of Massive Open Online Courses [previously], while the digital cloning of actors promises to allow filmmakers to cheaply manufacture whatever cast they please.

Just like the original industrial revolution this is creating large numbers of losers whose skills are no longer valued by the market. But this time it is not clear that new jobs will appear for these people to move into, for this time the machines can follow us nearly anywhere we try to go. This time technological unemployment may become a permanent fact that we have to deal with by changing how capitalism works. Our birthright as humans – the ability to produce things by our labour that others find valuable – may become economically worthless.”

“Maybe No One In Power Cares About The Singularity, Because They Recognize It As Science Fiction”

June 1, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

In a Popular Science piece, Erik Sofge offers a smackdown of the Singularity, thinking it less science than fiction. An excerpt:

“The most urgent feature of the Singularity is its near-term certainty. [Vernor] Vinge believed it would appear by 2023, or 2030 at the absolute latest. Ray Kurzweil, an accomplished futurist, author (his 2006 book The Singularity is Near popularized the theory) and recent Google hire, has pegged 2029 as the year when computers with match and exceed human intelligence. Depending on which luminary you agree with, that gives humans somewhere between 9 and 16 good years, before a pantheon of machine deities gets to decide what to do with us.

If you’re wondering why the human race is handling the news of its impending irrelevance with such quiet composure, its possible that the species is simply in denial. Maybe we’re unwilling to accept the hard truths preached by Vinge, Kurzweil and other bright minds.

Just as possible, though, is another form of denial. Maybe no one in power cares about the Singularity, because they recognize it as science fiction. It’s a theory that was proposed by a SF writer. Its ramifications are couched in the imagery and language of SF. To believe in the Singularity, you have to believe in one of the greatest myths ever told by SF—that robots are smart, and always on the verge of becoming smarter than us.

More than 60 years of AI research indicates otherwise.”

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“The Result Was Dramatically Uncomputerlike”

May 31, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Sports | Permalink

I’ve already posted the video of the “fight” between Muhammad Ali and Rocky Marciano, which was filmed scenes of the two then-undefeated heavyweight champions (the latter a long-retired one) with a computer supposedly scientifically deciding the winner. Ali needed a paycheck while living in exile in his own country during his military holdout, and Marciano wanted one more glow of warmth from the spotlight. It was to be his very last hurrah, as it turned out, as the older fighter died in a plane crash soon after the filming concluded. The sadness over his sudden death, the antipathy by some toward Ali during the Vietnam War, and the race of those feeding “expertise” into the computers, probably gave Marciano the hypothetical victory more than science did. In both boxers’ primes, I think Ali would have won convincingly. Here’s the brief copy from a 1970 Life magazine article that ran with photos from the film the week after it played in theaters:

“The only two heavyweight champions who never lost a professional fight are Rocky Marciano and Cassius (Muhammad Ali) Clay, and this has provoked many a nonprofessional fight among their fans. So Miami Promoter Murray Woroner decided to make a hypothetical ‘Super Fight’ of it, using a computer. First he matched the two champions and filmed 75 rounds of Hollywood-style fighting, finishing three weeks before Marciano’s death in a plane crash last summer. Then the skills and weaknesses of each fighter–as diagnosed by 1,500 sportswriters, fighters and managers–were programmed. The computer punched out a blow-by-blow reading and selected film segments were matched to it.

Seven possible endings were shot: a knockout, TKO and decisions for each man, and a draw. To foil any gambling capers, the seven endings were held in bonded secrecy until the last minute. When the film was shown at 750 theaters and arenas around the country last week, the result was dramatically uncomputerlike. Cut to simulated ribbons and even floored once, Marciano came back to knock Clay out in the 13th round. ‘It takes a good champion to lose like that,’ Clay smiled afterwards.”

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“Information Wants To Be Free. Information Also Wants To Be Expensive.”

May 30, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

From a brief post at Priceonomics, a correction to the oft-quoted Stewart Brand phrase “Information wants to be free”:

“But that’s not what the quote said. Or rather, that’s only half the quote. Here’s the full quote said by Stewart Brand in 1984:

‘On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it’s so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life.

On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. 

So you have these two fighting against each other.”

In a later book, Brand shortened the statement to: ‘Information Wants To Be Free. Information also wants to be expensive…That tension will not go away.'”

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“Why Are Forecasts So Poor?”

May 30, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

At the Financial Times, Tim Harford explains why (almost) nobody saw the financial collapse of 2008 coming and why economic predictions are usually so lacking:

“Why are forecasts so poor? The chief explanation is that the economy is complicated and we don’t understand it well enough to make forecasts. We don’t even fully understand recent economic history.

Ben Chu, economics editor of The Independent, recently took a look at the UK recession of the 1990s in the light of two decades of data revisions. From the vantage point of 1995, the economy in late 1992 was slightly smaller than the economy in early 1988. But today’s best guess is that the economy of late 1992 was almost 6 per cent larger than in early 1988. The Office for National Statistics has substantially revised its view.

Not only is it difficult to forecast the future, then – forecasting the past isn’t straightforward either. What chance does any prognosticator have?

A second explanation for forecasting’s fallibility is that there is little incentive to do better. The kind of institutional chief economist whose pronouncement makes it into Consensus Forecasts will stick to the middle of the road. Most countries, most of the time, are not in recession, so a safe strategy is never to forecast one. Of course there are the mavericks who receive media attention for making provocative predictions and are lionised when they are right. Their incentives are different but it is unclear that their overall track record is any better.”

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“It Is The First Time In NASA’s History That Operational Control Has Been Handed Over”

May 30, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

A team of hackers got the go-ahead from NASA to attempt to contact and “reawaken” a long-decommissioned satellite, funding the mission with crowdsourced money. So far, so good. From the Economist:

“It appears to have survived unscathed the long occupancy of the orbit in which it was parked. However, celestial mechanics have put the satellite about 250,000km off from where it was expected. Mr Cowing and his colleagues are slightly worried that it may bash into the moon or wander too close to Earth. The craft has antennas measuring 30 metres and extending in four directions, which at a certain altitude above Earth could cause problems. ‘It’s a 360-foot spinning cookie cutter,’ says Mr Cowing.

That the reboot project has got that far is remarkable. Unable to receive a clear go-ahead or an outright no from NASA a few months ago, it set out to raise funds hoping that this might prompt the space agency to acquiesce. It is the first time in NASA’s history that operational control has been handed over, and NASA made the announcement on May 23rd with due fanfare.

With the original software, computers or telecoms gear long gone, the team—with the help of some original mission members and others in and out of NASA who knew where to find the old manuals—recreated the equipment, including a software-defined radio system that allows talking and listening to the satellite. The Arecibo Observatory also provided help: it installed gear purchased by the Reboot Project and allowed it to use Arecibo’s huge satellite dish free during downtimes. The team faced downpours of rain and even an earthquake with a magnitude of 5.8 while one of the volunteers worked near the dish.’

Much remains to be determined. Mr [Keith] Cowing and his colleagues have yet to decide whether the satellite is to explore more comets or to use it for other purposes.”

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“That’s A Massive Change In The Robotics Landscape”

May 29, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

In much the same way that we don’t travel by flying car, we also aren’t waited on by robotic servants. Rodney Brooks, the MIT roboticist who was one of the central figures in Errol Morris’ Fast, Cheap and Out of Control, is disheartened with what he sees as the sector stalling out. Of course, the same thing was said many times about personal computing, that it hadn’t sealed the deal, until, of course, it began to, dramatically. And just because all our sci-fi dreams haven’t come to fruition that doesn’t mean that what we have achieved has been miniscule. From Sharon Gaudin at Computerworld:

“Russ Tedrake, an associate professor in electrical engineering and computer science at MIT, acknowledged Brooks’ points about the state of robotics today, but said big positive changes could come soon via research being pushed by major companies like Google.

‘He’s right that there are lots of things that we haven’t done yet that we had expected to do right now. The early promise was that we’d have robots everywhere by now,’ said Tedrake. ‘Look at Google’s purchase of robotics companies. That’s a massive change in the robotics landscape. The number of companies that are starting robotics and asking how they can work with robots is extremely exciting.’

Will many homes have their own robot that will babysit the kids, make dinner and clean the windows any time soon?

Probably not, according to Tedrake. However, we may have something similar.

‘Maybe we’ll have several small, special-purpose robots instead of one general-purpose robot,’ he said. ‘They might clean your house, cook dinner and mop the floor. Maybe we’ll call them appliances instead of robots.'”

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“When There Is No Other Dude In The Car, The Cost of Taking An Uber Anywhere Is Cheaper”

May 29, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

You can’t blame the CEO of Uber for not trying to fight the advent of driverless cars–he wouldn’t win that war. But like the rest of us, he probably should be a little concerned about the job loss caused by the market disruption. From Nicholas Carlson at Business Insider:

“Uber CEO Travis Kalanick sat for a keynote interview at Code Conference this afternoon in Southern California.

During the interview, Code editor Kara Swisher asked Kalanick what he thinks of self-driving cars.

‘Love it. All day long,’ said Kalanick.

‘The reason Uber could be expensive is you’re paying for the other dude in the car. When there is no other dude in the car, the cost of taking an Uber anywhere is cheaper. Even on a road trip.’

Kalanick said that self-driving cars ordered up through a service like Uber will eventually bring the cost of ridership so far down that car ownership will ‘go away.’

He said self-driving Uber fleets will also be safer and ‘more environmentally friendly.’

Obviously lots of Uber drivers will lose their jobs over time if this vision comes to life. Kalanick is OK with that.”

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“Inexpensive Improvisatory Retrofits Had To Suffice”

May 29, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Urban Studies | Permalink

From Martin Filler’s mixed critique at New York Review of Books of Nikil Saval’s Cubed: A Secret History of the Workplace, a brief explanation of the origins of the open office, which wasn’t chiefly the result of egalitarian impulse but of economic necessity:

“This revolutionary concept emerged in Germany in the late 1950s as die Bürolandschaft (the office landscape). Although the Bürolandschaft approach was codified by the Quickborner Team (an office planning company based in the Hamburg suburb of Quickborn), the ideas it embodied arose spontaneously during Germany’s rapid postwar recovery. With so much of the defeated country in ruins, and a large part of what business facilities that did survive commandeered by the Allied occupation forces (for example, Hans Poelzig’s I.G. Farben building of 1928–1930 in Frankfurt, then Europe’s largest office structure, taken over in 1945 as the American military’s bureaucratic command post), inexpensive improvisatory retrofits had to suffice for renascent German businesses. (A good sense of what those postwar spaces looked like can be gathered from Arno Mathes’s set decoration for Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 1979 film The Marriage of Maria Braun, which recreates freestanding office partitions embellished with trailing philodendron vines.)

Within little more than a decade of its inception, the open office was embraced by American business furniture manufacturers eager to sell not just individual chairs, desks, and filing cabinets, but fully integrated office systems. These modular units incorporated partitions with ‘task’ lighting for up-close illumination, power conduits for the growing number of electrical office machines, and other infrastructural elements that promised unprecedented cost savings as functional needs changed over time.”

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