“Fabio Gramazio and his partner Matthias Kohler recently programmed an industrial robot to work on a Swiss winery. It prefabricated the façade, stacked bricks and applied adhesive, and cranes installed it. ‘We’re replacing the brick module with a machine and controlling the process with algorithms,’ says Gramazio. ‘It’s beyond what could be done with a human.’
The pair have also presented some more speculative projects, including having drones assemble high-rises in Singapore. But to make these scenarios real, Gramazio knows he has to approach the less eye-catching core of the construction industry: ‘If you want to change the logic of building, you have to attack concrete.’ He’s working on a new type of reinforced concrete — one whose reinforcement is a structure extruded by the industrial robot, which allows for more complex structures. ‘We’re currently doing it with plastics, but we’re working with steel, glass, carbon and natural fibres.’ That’s some way off, but Gramazio is thinking long term. ‘If you want complete change, this is 50 to 100 years away,’ the 43-year-old says. ‘And that’s nothing.'”
Norman Mailer pursued immortality through subjects as grand as his ego, and it was the Apollo 11 mission that was Moby Dick to his Ahab. He knew the beginning of space voyage was the end, in a sense, of humans, or, at least, of humans believing they were in the driver’s seat. Penguin Classics is republishing his great 1970 writing, Of a Fire on the Moon, 45 years after we touched down up there. Togetherwith Oriana Fallaci’s If The Sun Dies, you have an amazing account of that disorienting moment when technology, that barbarian, truly stormed the gates, as well as a great look at New Journalism’s early peak. Below are some of the posts that I’ve previously put up that refer to Mailer’s book.
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“It Was Not A Despair He Felt, Or Fear–It Was Anesthesia”
When he wrote about the coming computer revolution of the 1970s at the outset of the decade in Of a Fire on the Moon, Norman Mailer couldn’t have known that the dropouts and the rebels would be leading the charge. An excerpt of his somewhat nightmarish view of our technological future, some parts of which came true and some still in the offing:
“Now they asked him what he thought of the Seventies. He did not know. He thought of the Seventies and a blank like the windowless walls of the computer city came over his vision. When he conducted interviews with himself on the subject it was not a despair he felt, or fear–it was anesthesia. He had no intimations of what was to come, and that was conceivably worse than any sentiment of dread, for a sense of the future, no matter how melancholy, was preferable to none–it spoke of some sense of the continuation in the projects of one’s life. He was adrift. If he tried to conceive of a likely perspective in the decade before him, he saw not one structure to society but two: if the social world did not break down into revolutions and counterrevolutions, into police and military rules of order with sabotage, guerrilla war and enclaves of resistance, if none of this occurred, then there certainly would be a society of reason, but its reason would be the logic of the computer. In that society, legally accepted drugs would become necessary for accelerated cerebration, there would be inchings toward nuclear installation, a monotony of architectures, a pollution of nature which would arouse technologies of decontamination odious as deodorants, and transplanted hearts monitored like spaceships–the patients might be obliged to live in a compound reminiscent of a Mission Control Center where technicians could monitor on consoles the beatings of a thousand transplanted hearts. But in the society of computer-logic, the atmosphere would obviously be plastic, air-conditioned, sealed in bubble-domes below the smog, a prelude to living on space stations. People would die in such societies like fish expiring on a vinyl floor. So of course there would be another society, an irrational society of dropouts, the saintly, the mad, the militant and the young. There the art of the absurd would reign in defiance against the computer.”
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“Doubtless, Everybody Would Be Easier To Monitor”
Some more predictions from Norman Mailer’s 1970 Space Age reportage, Of a Fire on the Moon, which have come to fruition even without the aid of moon crystals:
“Thus the perspective of space factories returning the new imperialists of space a profit was now near to the reach of technology. Forget about diamonds! The value of crystals grown in space was incalculable: gravity would not be pulling on the crystal structure as it grew, so the molecule would line up in lattices free of shift or sheer. Such a perfect latticework would serve to carry messages for a perfect computer. Computers the size of a package of cigarettes would then be able to do the work of present computers the size of a trunk. So the mind could race ahead to see computers programming go-to-school routes in the nose of every kiddie car–the paranoid mind could see crystal transmitters sewn into the rump of ever juvenile delinquent–doubtless, everybody would be easier to monitor. Big Brother could get superseded by Moon Brother–the major monitor of them all might yet be sunk in a shaft on the back face of the lunar sphere.”
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“A Robot That Is Designed To Play Chess Might Also Want To Build A Spaceship”
In his 1970 Apollo 11 account, Of a Fire on the Moon, Norman Mailer realized that his rocket wasn’t the biggest after all, that the mission was a passing of the torch, that technology, an expression of the human mind, had diminished its creators. “Space travel proposed a future world of brains attached to wires,” Mailer wrote, his ego having suffered a TKO. And just as the Space Race ended the greater race began, the one between carbon and silicon, and it’s really just a matter of time before the pace grows too brisk for humans.
Supercomputers will ultimately be a threat to us, but we’re certainly doomed without them, so we have to navigate the future the best we can, even if it’s one not of our control. Gary Marcus addresses this and other issues in his latest New Yorker blog piece, “Why We Should Think About the Threat of Artificial Intelligence.” An excerpt:
“It’s likely that machines will be smarter than us before the end of the century—not just at chess or trivia questions but at just about everything, from mathematics and engineering to science and medicine. There might be a few jobs left for entertainers, writers, and other creative types, but computers will eventually be able to program themselves, absorb vast quantities of new information, and reason in ways that we carbon-based units can only dimly imagine. And they will be able to do it every second of every day, without sleep or coffee breaks.
For some people, that future is a wonderful thing. [Ray] Kurzweil has written about a rapturous singularity in which we merge with machines and upload our souls for immortality; Peter Diamandis has argued that advances in A.I. will be one key to ushering in a new era of ‘abundance,’ with enough food, water, and consumer gadgets for all. Skeptics like Eric Brynjolfsson and I have worried about the consequences of A.I. and robotics for employment. But even if you put aside the sort of worries about what super-advanced A.I. might do to the labor market, there’s another concern, too: that powerful A.I. might threaten us more directly, by battling us for resources.
Most people see that sort of fear as silly science-fiction drivel—the stuff of The Terminator and The Matrix. To the extent that we plan for our medium-term future, we worry about asteroids, the decline of fossil fuels, and global warming, not robots. But a dark new book by James Barrat, Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era, lays out a strong case for why we should be at least a little worried.
Barrat’s core argument, which he borrows from the A.I. researcher Steve Omohundro, is that the drive for self-preservation and resource acquisition may be inherent in all goal-driven systems of a certain degree of intelligence. In Omohundro’s words, ‘if it is smart enough, a robot that is designed to play chess might also want to build a spaceship,’ in order to obtain more resources for whatever goals it might have.”
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“Hippies Will Be Refused Tourist Cards To Enter Mexico Unless They Take A Bath And Get Haircuts”
While Apollo 11 traveled to the moon and back in 1969, the astronauts were treated each day to a six-minute newscast from Mission Control about the happenings on Earth. Here’s one that was transcribed in Norman Mailer’s Of a Fire on the Moon, which made space travel seem quaint by comparison:
“Washington UPI:Vice President Spiro T. Agnewhas called for putting a man on Mars by the year 2000, but Democratic leaders replied that priority must go to needs on earth…Immigration officials in Nuevo Laredo announced Wednesday that hippies will be refused tourist cards to enter Mexico unless they take a bath and get haircuts…’The greatest adventure in the history of humanity has started,’ declared the French newspaper Le Figaro, which devoted four pages to reports from Cape Kennedy and diagrams of the mission…Hempstead, New York: Joe Namath officially reported to the New York Jets training camp at Hofstra University Wednesday following a closed-door meeting with his teammates over his differences with Pro Football Commissioner Pete Rozelle…London UPI: The House of Lords was assured Wednesday that a major American submarine would not ‘damage or assault’ the Loch Ness monster.”
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“There Was An Uneasy Silence, An Embarrassed Pall At The Unmentioned Word Of Nazi”
“What we are seeking in tomorrow’s trip is indeed that key to our future on earth.”
Norman Mailer’s book Of a Fire on the Moon, about American space exploration during the 1960s, was originally published as three long and personal articles for Life magazine in 1969: “A Fire on the Moon,” “The Psychology of Astronauts,” and “A Dream of the Future’s Face.” Mailer used space travel to examine America’s conflicted and tattered existence–and his own as well. In one segment, he reports on a banquet in which Wernher von Braun, the former Nazi rocket engineer who became a guiding light at NASA, meets with American businessmen on the eve of the Apollo 11 launch. An excerpt:
“Therefore, the audience was not to be at ease during his introduction, for the new speaker, who described himself as a ‘backup publisher,’ went into a little too much historical detail. ‘During the Thirties he was employed by the Ordinance Department of the German government developing liquid fuel rockets. During World War II he made very significant developments in rocketry for his government.’
A tension spread in this audience of corporation presidents and high executives, of astronauts, a few at any rate, and their families. There was an uneasy silence, an embarrassed pall at the unmentioned word of Nazi–it was the shoe which did not drop to the floor. So no more than a pitter-patter of clapping was aroused when the speaker went quickly on to say: ‘In 1955 he became an American citizen himself.’ It was only when Von Braun stood up at the end that the mood felt secure enough to shift. A particularly hearty and enthusiastic hand of applause swelled into a standing ovation. Nearly everybody stood up. Aquarius, who finally cast his vote by remaining seated, felt pressure not unrelated to refusing to stand up for The Star-Spangled Banner. It was as if the crowd with true American enthusiasm had finally declared, ‘Ah don’ care if he is some kind of ex-Nazi, he’s a good loyal patriotic American.’
Von Braun was. If patriotism is the ability to improve a nation’s morale, then Von Braun was a patriot. It was plain that some of these corporate executives loved him. In fact, they revered him. He was the high priest of their precise art–manufacture. If many too many an American product was accelerating into shoddy these years since the war, if planned obsolescence had all too often become a euphemism for sloppy workmanship, cynical cost-cutting, swollen advertising budgets, inefficiency and general indifference, then in one place at least, and for certain, America could be proud of a product. It was high as a castle and tooled more finely than the most exquisite watch.
Walt Disney with Wernher von Braun.
Now the real and true tasty beef of capitalism got up to speak, the grease and guts of it, the veritable brawn, and spoke with fulsome language in his small and well-considered voice. He was with friends on this occasion, and so a savory and gravy of redolence came into his tone, his voice was not unmusical, it had overtones which hinted of angelic super-possibilities one could not otherwise lay on the line. He was when all was said like the head waiter of the largest hofbrau in heaven. ‘Honored guests, ladies and gentlemen,’ Von Braun began, ‘it is with a great deal of respect tonight that I meet you, the leaders, and the captains in the mainstream of American industry and life. Without your success in building and maintaining the economic foundations of this nation, the resources for mounting tomorrow’s expedition to the moon would never have been committed…. Tomorrow’s historic launch belongs to you and to the men and women who sit behind the desks and administer your companies’ activities, to the men who sweep the floor in your office buildings and to every American who walks the street of this productive land. It is an American triumph. Many times I have thanked God for allowing me to be a part of the history that will be made here today and tomorrow and in the next few days. Tonight I want to offer my gratitude to you and all Americans who have created the most fantastically progressive nation yet conceived and developed,’ He went on to talk of space as ‘the key to our future on earth,’ and echoes of his vision drifted through the stale tropical air of a banquet room after coffee–perhaps he was hinting at the discords and nihilism traveling in bands and brigands across the earth. ‘The key to our future on earth. I think we should see clearly from this statement that the Apollo 11 moon trip even from its inception was not intended as a one-time trip that would rest alone on the merits of a single journey. If our intention had been merely to bring back a handful of soil and rocks from the lunar gravel pit and then forget the whole thing’–he spoke almost with contempt of the meager resources of the moon–‘we would certainly be history’s biggest fools. But that is not our intention now–it never will be. What we are seeking in tomorrow’s trip is indeed that key to our future on earth. We are expanding the mind of man. We are extending this God-given brain and these God-given hands to their outermost limits and in so doing all mankind will benefit. All mankind will reap the harvest…. What we will have attained when Neil Armstrong steps down upon the moon is a completely new step in the evolution of man.'”
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Wernher von Braun inducted into the Space Camp Hall of Fame:
Tom Lehrer eviscerates Wernher von Braun in under 90 seconds:
That excellent Margalit Fox at the New York Timespenned a postmortem for a Romanian academic who became an unlikely literary superstar when his story intersected with that of one of the world’s most feared figures. An excerpt:
“The first of his many books on the subject, In Search of Dracula, published in 1972 and written with Raymond T. McNally, helped spur the revival of interest in Stoker’s vampirical nobleman that continues to this day.
‘It has changed my life,’ Professor Florescu told The New York Times in 1975. ‘I used to write books that nobody read.’
Radu Nicolae Florescu was born in Bucharest on Oct. 23, 1925. As he would learn in the course of his research, he had a family connection to Vlad, who was known familiarly if not quite fondly as Vlad Tepes, or Vlad the Impaler: A Florescu ancestor was said to have married Vlad’s brother, felicitously named Radu the Handsome.
At 13, as war loomed, Radu left home for London, where his father was serving as Romania’s acting ambassador to Britain. (The elder Mr. Florescu resigned his post after the dictator Ion Antonescu, a Nazi ally, became Romania’s prime minister in 1940.)
The younger Mr. Florescu earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in politics, philosophy and economics from Oxford, followed by a Ph.D. in history from Indiana University. He joined the Boston College faculty in 1953.
In the late 1960s, Professor McNally, a colleague in the history department, grew intrigued by affinities between events in Stoker’s novel, published in 1897, and the actual history of the region. He enlisted Professor Florescu, and together they scoured archives throughout Eastern Europe in an attempt to trace Count Dracula to a flesh-and-blood source.”
My take on the New York Times as a business is that it’s a great publication with real value within the right structure (as part of Bloomberg, for instance), but it probably won’t flourish financially again as a family-owned, independent company.
Financial journalist David Warsh was perplexed by the Times’ internal “Innovation Report” that was recently leaked and has written a scathing article on the topic for Politico Magazine. The opening:
“For all the reporting about the unceremonious manner in which Arthur O. Sulzberger Jr. replaced executive editor Jill Abramson with Dean Baquet, the strongest evidence that the needle on his tenure as publisher of the New York Times has reached the danger zone is the company’s internal “Innovation Report” that someone at the New York Times Co. leaked last week, perhaps in hopes of offsetting the bad publicity.
Prepared by an eight-person newsroom team led by Sulzberger’s son, Arthur Gregg Sulzberger, the glossy, 96-page report is likely to have the opposite effect. It amounts to a clarion call to blow up the 163-year-old business in order to go into competition with the likes of BuzzFeed, Vox, Business Insider, the as-yet unformed First Look Media and the Huffington Post. And what a recipe for disaster that would be: abandoning the great news and insight that is at the heart of the Times brand to chase after audience in a game it can never hope to win.
Astoundingly, the report doesn’t so much as mention the Times’ much more menacing digital competitors, Bloomberg News and Reuters, breakthrough innovators whose news-gathering resources are far greater than those of the newspaper company. On every page, the ‘Innovation Report’ betrays its authors’ failure to understand what the Times’ fundamental business is about.”
If the sea level rises high enough, it will sink us all. But the first casualties of melting glaciers will likely be island nations. The opening of Stephen Leahy’s Vice article “The Nations Guaranteed to Be Swallowed By the Sea“:
“Imagine the street you live on is knee-deep in floodwater, and it’s ruining everything in sight, including your home. Now imagine that those awful floodwaters never, ever recede. Instead, the water just keeps rising and rising until your entire country drowns.
For a number of island nations, that’s ultimately the significance of the recent reports about the unstoppable melt of the massive ice sheets of Antarctica and Greenland, along with hundreds of glaciers.
‘We’ve already lost some island atolls. On others the rising sea is destroying homes, washing away coffins and skeletons from graves,’ Tony de Brum, the foreign minister of the Marshall Islands, told me. ‘Now with every full moon the high tides brings salt water into our streets. We’re moving further inland but can’t move much further.’
The Marshall Islands are located in the northern Pacific Ocean, and are home to some 70,000 people spread out over 24 low-lying coral atolls. Low-lying, as in six feet above sea level on average. Not only do rising seas flood and erode shorelines, they also make groundwater too salty too drink and ‘poison’ the land with salt so crops and even coconuts trees can’t grow.“
I’ve posted before about Google pushing the near-term limits of what Elon Musk thinks is possible with autonomous vehicles. We’ll see how that turns out, but here’s a description the Verge’s David Pierce of Google’s new steering wheel-less autonomous taxi prototype which will definitely be all over the media and perhaps all over city streets:
“Speaking about self-driving cars last September, Elon Musk preached caution. The man who wants to send us all to space and shuttle us between cities at outrageous speeds told the FT that ‘my opinion is it’s a bridge too far to go to fully autonomous cars.’
Somewhere deep inside the secret labs at Google X, Sergey Brin must have read that and smiled. And then climbed into his tiny car — the one with a strange smiley face for a front and a noticeably missing steering wheel — and with a single button press instructed his car to drive him wherever billionaires go to cackle at the short-sightedness of other billionaires.
On Tuesday night, onstage at the Code Conference in California, Brin revealed an entirely new take on a self-driving car, one decidedly more ambitious than anything we’ve seen before. Google’s as-yet-unnamed car isn’t a modified Lexus. It doesn’t just park itself. It’s an entirely autonomous vehicle, with no need for steering wheels or gas pedals or human intervention of any kind. You can’t drive it even if you want to.
The Google Car is fully electric, big enough for two passengers. It’ll only go 25 miles per hour. Your involvement with the car consists of four things: get in, put on your seatbelt, press the Start button, and wait.”
Among the casualties of climate change–us, perhaps?–may well be the glass skyscraper, so sleek and inviting and environmentally irresponsible. From BBC Magazine:
“Glass buildings are popular – not just because of their striking appearance but for the views they boast, and the increased light they let in.
When German architect Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe designed what is said to be the world’s first glass skyscraper in 1921, he associated the glass facade with purity and renewal. Later in the century, British architect Richard Rogers praised glass buildings because of their social worth. Glass walls enabled even employees working in the basement to benefit from reflected natural light and dissolved barriers between a cramped indoor office space and the greenery outside.
Companies like to give the impression of a democratic working environment – open-plan and with floor-to-ceiling windows, so that all employees, not just the boss, benefit from the view.
However, as concerns over global warming have become more widespread, so the glass structure has come under scrutiny. …
Glass lets out and lets in a lot of heat. A vast amount of energy is required for an office full of people to remain cool in the UAE and to stay warm in the snowstorms of Toronto.
Governments are now so concerned by the long-term impact of ‘solar gain’ – the extent to which a building absorbs sunlight and heats up – that they have introduced strict regulations around shape and structure.”
Before portable computing was the thing, New Yorkers used to make fun of Los Angeles for its post-Hippie oddness and the Dream Factory it powered. But the one-liners about California are now pointed northward, at a new kind of dreaming, even if the joke is really on the rest of us. In New York magazine, Jessica Pressler has fun with the whiz kids behind the smartphone-enabled laundry service Washio, while taking broader aim at America’s supposed best and brightest, who’ve descended on Silicon Valley to get rich quick organizing the minutiae of our lives–by making problems disappear, if only briefly. An excerpt about the company that delivers free cookies with your clean clothes:
“Remember the scrub board? One imagines people were thrilled when that came along and they could stop beating garments on rocks, but then someone went ahead and invented the washing machine, and everyone had to have that, followed by the electric washing machine, and then the services came along where, if you had enough money, you could pay someone to wash your clothes for you, and eventually even this started to seem like a burden—all that picking up and dropping off—and the places offering delivery, well, you had to call them, and sometimes they had accents, and are we not living in the modern world? ‘We had this crazy idea,’ says [Jordan] Metzner, ‘that someone should press a button on their phone and someone will come and pick up their laundry.’
So Washio made it thus. For a while, this was pleasing. But in the hubs and coastal cities of Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., and San Francisco—especially San Francisco—new innovations are dying from the day they are born, and laundry delivered with a fresh-baked cookie is no longer quite enough. There’s a term for this. It’s called the hedonic treadmill.
Fortunately, the employees of Washio are on their toes. ‘What if we did bananas?’ Nadler suggested. Everyone laughed.
Metzner held up a small brown bag featuring a silhouette of a flower and a clean lowercase font. ‘I’ve been talking to the CEO of NatureBox,’ he said. ‘It’s like a Birchbox for healthy treats. Every month they send you nuts and …’
“Banana chips?” said Brittany Barrett, whose job as Washio’s community manager includes cookie selection. Everyone laughed, again.
Metzner looked down at the bag. ‘Flax crostini,’ he said. ‘I think it’s a much better value proposition than a cookie.’ He looked at the bag again. ‘What is a flax crostini?’
We are living in a time of Great Change, and also a time of Not-So-Great Change. The tidal wave of innovation that has swept out from Silicon Valley, transforming the way we communicate, read, shop, and travel, has carried along with it an epic shit-ton of digital flotsam. Looking around at the newly minted billionaires behind the enjoyable but wholly unnecessary Facebook and WhatsApp, Uber and Nest, the brightest minds of a generation, the high test-scorers and mathematically inclined, have taken the knowledge acquired at our most august institutions and applied themselves to solving increasingly minor First World problems. The marketplace of ideas has become one long late-night infomercial. Want a blazer embedded with GPS technology? A Bluetooth-controlled necklace? A hair dryer big enough for your entire body? They can be yours! In the rush to disrupt everything we have ever known, not even the humble crostini has been spared.”
One quick exchange about life out there–out there–from a Reddit Ask Me Anything with theoretical physicist Sean Carroll:
“Question:
Does the fact that we exist now, in a 7 billion person community, mean that it is very unlikely that “intelligent life” will someday exist in an interconnected civilization of say a billion earths (with 1019 people)?
Sean Carroll:
I don’t think so. Maybe technologically advanced life is fairly rare, appearing on average once per galaxy per ten billion years. Then we would be at the beginning, but the future could have many more civilizations.
But honestly, we have no idea. Some epistemic humility is in order here.”
Technological positivist Marc Andreessen was Russ Roberts’ guest on a really good installment of the EconTalk podcast. The Netscape founder and venture capitalist sees the world as moving in the right direction in the macro, perhaps giving short shrift to those sinking in the short-term and mid-term turmoil that attends transformation. Notes on myriad discussion topics.
Google. Andreessen details how one of the most powerful companies on Earth had plenty of luck on its way to market dominance and its position as a latter-day Bell Labs. The search giant could have collapsed early on or been purchased, with Larry Page and Sergey Brin winding up as, say, Yahoo! middle managers. (“A fate worse than death,” as the host cleverly sums it up.) The guest recalls a fellow venture capital player calling the chief Google guys the “two most arrogant founders” he’d ever met.
Jobs lost to automation. The guest believes that with the delivery of smartphones into the hands of (eventually) seven billion people, that we’re at the tipping point of an economic boom and great job creation. He doesn’t qualify his remarks by saying that we’re in for rough times in the short run with jobs because of robotics. Andreesen also doesn’t address the possibility that we could have both an economic boom and a jobs shortfall.
Bitcoin. He’s over the moon for the crypto-currency company, saying it’s as revolutionary as the personal computer or the Internet. That seems like way too much hyperbole.
MOOCs. Andreesen points out that good universities will never be able to expand to meet a growing global population, so online courses will be essential if we’re to avoid a disastrous educational collapse.
Political upheavals. The one cloud the Netscape founder sees on the horizon is a barrage of political upheavals that will destabilize sections of the globe at times.
Journalism. Andreessen is sanguine about the future of journalism, believing that companies will adjust to post-monopolistic competition. He points out formerly profitable things about newspapers (classified ads, sports scores, movie times, etc.) that have been cannibalized by the Internet without guessing what will replace them for those faltering companies. If his argument was that nothing need replace them and these erstwhile powerful news corporations were no longer necessary since news distribution is now diffuse, I think that would probably be a stronger argument than suggesting that all but a few such companies are salvageable.•
Muammar Gaddafi was friends with Steven Seagal and Seagal is friends with Vladimir Putin. Wonder what behavior would link three such men.
At the BBC Magazine, Nigerian-American basketball player Alex Owumi recalls unwittingly signing a contract to play point guard for the Gaddafi family team and getting caught in the crossfire of the Libyan civil war. The opening:
“It was a beautiful flat. Everything was state of the art and it was spacious, too. It had two big living rooms, three big bedrooms, flat screens everywhere. The couches had gold trim and were so big and heavy they were impossible to move. The door to the apartment was reinforced steel, like on a bank vault.
It was 27 December 2010 and I had just arrived in Benghazi, Libya’s second biggest city, to play basketball for a team called Al-Nasr Benghazi. I had stayed in some nice places playing for teams in Europe, but this seventh-floor apartment in the middle of town was something else. It was like the Taj Mahal.
I didn’t immediately notice the photographs dotted around the place – of Libyan leader Col Muammar Gaddafi and his grandchildren.
When I did, I phoned the team president – we called him Mr Ahmed – and he told me how it was. ‘The apartment belongs to Mutassim Gaddafi, the Colonel’s son,’ he said. ‘Al-Nasr is the Gaddafi club. You are playing for the Gaddafi family.’
Gaddafi! When I was a young kid growing up in Africa – I was born in Nigeria – Gaddafi was someone we all looked up to. He was always on the news and in the paper, helping out countries like Niger and Nigeria. I thought of him as one of the faces of Africa – him and Nelson Mandela. As a kid I wasn’t really aware of any of the bad things he was doing. Maybe I was too busy playing sports.
In my first practice with my new teammates there was a weird atmosphere.”
Gerontologist Aubrey de Grey, who aims high and communicates well, always makes for good copy, whether you agree or not with his optimistic view of human life without death. From an interview by Gian Volpicelli at Vice:
“Question:
Do you think that people may be starting to think that ageing is the real enemy?
Aubrey de Grey:
I do think so, yes. The things that I’ve been saying for years are finally beginning to get understood. People are understanding that diseases of old age are not really diseases: They are aspects of ageing, side effects of being alive. If you want to cure them, what you’ll have to cure is to be alive in the first place—but you can’t actually do it. So we’ll have to take a preventative maintenance approach. That means that we’ll have to identify the various types of molecular and cellular damage that the body does to itself as a side effect of its normal metabolic operation. Once you’ve identified them, which has already been done, you have to find a way to repair that damage and prevent it from developing into a pathology of old age. That’s what I’m working on.
Question:
What are you really trying to achieve? Longevity or immortality?
Aubrey de Grey:
Well, first of all, any longevity benefit that I may achieve would be a side effect. I don’t work on longevity, I work on health. And it just happens that, historically, the main thing that kills people is…not being healthy. So healthier people will likely live longer.
Question:
How much longer?
Aubrey de Grey:
It depends on how much longer we can keep people healthy. The best we can say at the moment is that the human body is a machine. Therefore, it ought to be the case that we can have the same kind of impact on the human body that we already have now on simple manmade machines, like cars. So, as I said, we can rely on preventative maintenance: repairing any damage before it makes the doors fall off. It seems to work really well with cars; we’ve got one-hundred-year-old cars around now. So, if you do sufficient maintenance, the sky’s the limit. We should be able to maintain the human body in good health indefinitely, however long we like.
Question:
So…it’s immortality, right?
Aubrey de Grey:
Don’t use the word immortality when you talk about my work. It’s taken; it’s a religious word. Immortality means zero risk of death from any cause, but I don’t work on stopping people from being hit by trucks. I work on keeping them healthy.”•
We will all be freed from toil, but freed to what? How do you reconcile a free-market economy with a highly automated one? From Angelo Young at IBT Times:
“As the 106,000 contract workers who lost their Nike jobs in the past year can attest, apparel manufacturers have decided that it’s cheaper to invest in technology than to hire even the world’s lowest-paid workers.
The relentless move toward industrial automation is undercutting vulnerable workers around the globe.
For years, China and India offered manufacturers a low-wage workforce. Production recently expanded around Asia to countries like Cambodia, Bangladesh and Vietnam as well.
But now, automation is allowing manufacturing to stop chasing cheap labor altogether. Automated production machines cut costs and immunize manufacturers from the dangers of a labor shortage.
‘I think this is going to accelerate,’ said Erik Brynjolfsson, professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management. ‘What we have is a situation where robots and automation do more and more tasks that are being done by low-wage labor in Asia and elsewhere in the world. People involved in repetitive work are very vulnerable to what’s happening.'”
I wonder if we were to do a historical hack of the American Revolution and supplied both sides, redcoats and turncoats, with the diffuse and interconnected technology of 2014, if it would have made the uprising’s stunning success more possible, less possible or impossible. It would be fun to reverse engineer that upheaval along modern tech standards.
On a related note, David Runciman of the Guardian wonders whether politics or technology will rule our future. I think it will be tougher and tougher for legislation to control too many things as we move forward, especially if the Internet of Things becomes a real thing. The opening of Runciman’s well-considered piece, which has some interesting thoughts about China’s technocratic rule:
“The most significant revolution of the 21st century so far is not political. It is the information technology revolution. Its transformative effects are everywhere. In many places, rapid technological change stands in stark contrast to the lack of political change. Take the United States. Its political system has hardly changed at all in the past 25 years. Even the moments of apparent transformation – such as the election of Obama in 2008 – have only reinforced how entrenched the established order is: once the excitement died away, Obama was left facing the same constrained political choices. American politics is stuck in a rut. But the lives of American citizens have been revolutionised over the same period. The birth of the web and the development of cheap and efficient devices through which to access it have completely altered the way people connect with each other. Networks of people with shared interests, tastes, concerns, fetishes, prejudices and fears have sprung up in limitless varieties. The information technology revolution has changed the way human beings befriend each other, how they meet, date, communicate, medicate, investigate, negotiate and decide who they want to be and what they want to do. Many aspects of our online world would be unrecognisable to someone who was transplanted here from any point in the 20th century. But the infighting and gridlock in Washington would be all too familiar.
Don Johnson, who seems to be both an a-hole and an underrated actor, recalling Hunter S. Thompson and a couple other A-list friends in a Grantland interview conducted by Amos Barshad:
“Question:
You also got to spend some time with folks like Hunter S. Thompson and Jim Morrison …
Don Johnson:
Hunter was a close, close friend of mine. We were neighbors in Aspen and he was a dear, dear, dear brother to me. I’ve told this before but if I was out of town and I had a sick animal on my ranch, Hunter would go sleep in the stall with the animal to nurse it and make it better. I was very close to him. I loved him. And he co-conceived the idea of Nash Bridges with me. Jim Morrison I knew a little bit, when he was about 25 or 26. He was a charismatic guy, really amazing guy. And then of course he died a year later.
I met Richard Pryor right around that time. That was a thrill. He used to come over to my dressing room. I was doing a play in L.A. and I had two shows back-to-back on Friday and Saturday nights. And he’d come in my dressing room and he would get me ripped. I would have to go out and do the second show just fucking stupid. [Pause.] Good times.”
The Apple Store sells ambience, sure, but at the heart of the experience is an array of amazing products. Most shops in the future will probably try to similarly offer an “experience” and diversify their offerings, but will it work if their selling just things and not the thing? From “What Will Shopping Look Like in the Future,” Mae Anderson’s AP report:
“Forrester analyst Sucharita Mulpuru says stores of the future will be more about services, like day care, veterinary services and beauty services. Services that connect online and offline shopping could increase as well, with more drive-thru pickup and order-online, pick-up-in-store services. Checkout also will be self-service or with cashiers using computer tablets.
Some stores are taking self-service further: A store in Seattle called Hointer displays clothing not in piles or on racks but as one piece hanging at a time, like a gallery.
Shoppers just touch their smartphones to a coded tag on the item and then select a color and size on their phone. Technology in the store keeps track of the items, and by the time a shopper is ready to try them on, they’re already at the dressing room.
If the shopper doesn’t like an item, he tosses it down a chute, which automatically removes the item from the shopper’s online shopping cart. The shopper keeps the items that he or she wants, which are purchased automatically when leaving the store, no checkout involved.
Nadia Shouraboura, Hointer’s CEO, says once shoppers get used to the process, they’re hooked.
‘They end up buying a lot more, they’re laughing and playing with it,’ she says.”
Tom Robbins and I do not agree. It would seem his work is made for me, but I tried and failed in my teens to read his novels, and I walked out on Gus Van Sant’s god-awful adaptation of Even Cowgirls Get the Blues. Robbins talked to Rob Liguori of the New York Times Magazine in connection with the release of the novelist’s first memoir. Here are two exchanges about other writers:
“Question:
You’re often identified as a literary representative of the counterculture of the ’60s and ’70s, along the lines of Hunter S. Thompson.
Tom Robbins:
Once I’m gone, I don’t think I’ll care, but I don’t see Hunter that way at all. For one thing, I don’t think Hunter ever had a genuine LSD trip in his life. He took other drugs at the same time and washed it down with various libations, so he was never a guest in the spiritual dimension that LSD seems to open up for people who take it — well, I don’t want to say responsibly — but who take it under what I consider the right conditions.
Question:
Philip Roth retired a few years ago, and he keeps a Post-it note on his computer that says, ‘The struggle with writing is over.’ Can you relate to that?
Tom Robbins:
Not at all. Even though it can sometimes take me an hour to write a sentence that I’m happy with, I’ve never considered it a struggle.”
“The real transformation of the news market [which prior to the printing press had been oral or laboriously hand-written] would come from the development of a news market in print. This would occur only haltingly after the first invention of printing in the mid-fifteenth century. For half a century or more thereafter printers would follow a very conservative strategy, concentrating on publishing editions of the books most familiar from the medieval manuscript tradition. But in the sixteenth century they would also begin to open up new markets — and one of these was a market for news. News fitted ideally into the expanding market for cheap print, and it swiftly became an important commodity. This burgeoning wave of news reporting was of an entirely different order. It took its tone from the new genre of pamphlets that had preceded it: the passionate advocacy that had accompanied the Reformation. … News also became, for the first time, part of the entertainment industry. What could be more entertaining than the tale of some catastrophe in a far-off place, or a grisly murder?
Naturally the elites sought to control this new commercial market, to ensure that the messages delivered by these news books would show them in a good light. Printers who wanted their shops to remain open were careful to report only the local prince’s victories and triumphs, not the battlefield reverses that undermined his reputation and authority. Those printers who co-operated willingly could rely on help in securing access to the right texts. … From remarkably early in the age of the first printed books Europe’s rulers invested considerable effort in putting their point of view, and explaining their policies, to their citizens. …
The divisions within Europe brought about by the Reformation were a further complicating factor: the news vendors of Protestant and Catholic nations would increasingly reproduce only news that came from their side of the confessional divide. News therefore took on an increasingly sectarian character. All this led to distortions tending to obscure the true course of events. … The purveyors of the news pamphlets had a clear incentive to make these accounts as lively as possible. This raised real questions as to their reliability. How could a news report possibly be trusted if the author exaggerated to increase its commercial appeal?”
Prince Rupert zu Loewenstein, the money manager who made those three-chord wonders, the Rolling Stones, into multi-millionaires, just passed away. Unsurprisingly, his life was colorful. From his New York Times obituary by Douglas Martin:
“On the most prosaic level, Prince Loewenstein got the group to stop accepting paper bags full of cash as payment. On the grand scale, he led in planning a tour — its biggest at the time — to coincide with the release of the Steel Wheels album in 1989. The tour grossed $260 million worldwide and represented a patching up of the strained relationship between Mick Jagger and Mr. Richards.
The prince once described himself as ‘a combination of bank manager, psychiatrist and nanny.’ He helped Mr. Jagger negotiate his divorce from Bianca Jagger in 1978 and his estrangement from Jerry Hall in 1999.
When Mr. Richards was arrested on heroin-trafficking charges in Toronto in 1977, Prince Loewenstein showed the extent of Mr. Richards’s casual spending — $350,000 in the previous year — as evidence that Mr. Richards was wealthy enough not to have to commit crimes to feed a heroin habit. The charge was reduced to ‘simple possession of heroin.’
Rupert Louis Ferdinand Frederick Constantine Lofredo Leopold Herbert Maximilian Hubert John Henry du Loewenstein was born on Aug. 24, 1933, into Bavarian royalty on the Spanish island of Majorca. An ancestor helped repel the Huns in 907.”
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“Please allow me to introduce myself, I’m a man of wealth and taste”:
The opening of Randy Rieland’sa Smithsonian post about MIT’s Skylar Tibbits, who aims to one-up 3D printing before it even becomes popularized:
“These days, 3D printing seems to be at the core of most new new research ventures, whether it’s developing ways to print entire meals or recreating facial features to repair a patient’s face.
But Skylar Tibbits wants to up the ante: He’s hoping 4D printing will be the thing of the not-so-far future.
The name for his concept, Tibbits admits, was a bit lighthearted at first. At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Tibbits and researchers from the firms Stratasys and Autodesk Inc were trying to come up with a way of describing the objects they were creating on 3D printers—objects that not only could be printed, but thanks to geometric code, could also later change shape and transform on their own.
The name stuck, and now the process they developed—which turns code into ‘smart objects’ that can self-assemble or change shape when confronted with a change in its environment—could very well pop up in a number of industries, from construction to athletic wear.”
In what you’ve studied, what’s the most interesting reason/way that a civilization collapsed? Is there anything in the story of that collapse that you think that we could take a lesson from today?
Eric H. Cline:
I’ve only studied the Late Bronze Age collapse, but in my view all of the civilizations were interlinked and so I argue that there a lot of interesting reasons/ways that brought down the civilizations, ranging from climate change, drought, famine, earthquakes, internal rebellions, etc. There may or may not be lessons that we can learn; some people reading my book are intrigued by the fact that there is evidence for climate change back then, just before/as the civilizations were collapsing.
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Question:
What’s your most controversial opinion?
Eric H. Cline:
That we’re never going to find Noah’s Ark. That pisses off more people than you might imagine…
________________________
Question:
What are your thoughts on Jesus?
Eric H. Cline:
He was a nice Jewish boy.
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Question:
The title of your book is very intriguing. Can you explain the significance of this year and how you pinpointed 1177 B.C. as the year that Bronze Age Civilization collapsed?
Eric H. Cline:
Thanks for a great question. Let me simply quote from my book by way of answering:
“The end of the Late Bronze Age in the Aegean and Eastern Mediterranean regions, an area that extended from Italy and Greece to Egypt and Mesopotamia, was a fluid event, taking place over the course of several decades and perhaps even up to a century, not an occurrence tied to a specific year. But the eighth year of the reign of the Egyptian pharaoh Ramses III—1177 BC, to be specific, according to the chronology currently used by most modern Egyptologists—stands out and is the most representative of the entire collapse. For it was in that year, according to the Egyptian records, that the Sea Peoples came sweeping through the region, wreaking havoc for a second time. It was a year when great land and sea battles were fought in the Nile delta; a year when Egypt struggled for its very survival; a year by which time some of the high-flying civilizations of the Bronze Age had already come to a crashing halt. In fact, one might argue that 1177 BC is to the end of the Late Bronze Age as AD 476 is to the end of Rome and the western Roman Empire. That is to say, both are dates to which modern scholars can conveniently point as the end of a major era. Italy was invaded and Rome was sacked several times during the fifth century AD, including in AD 410 by Alaric and the Visigoths and in AD 455 by Geiseric and the Vandals. There were also many other reasons why Rome fell, in addition to these attacks, and the story is much more complex, as any Roman historian will readily attest. However, it is convenient, and considered acceptable academic shorthand, to link the invasion by Odoacer and the Ostragoths in AD 476 with the end of Rome’s glory days. The end of the Late Bronze Age and the transition to the Iron Age is a similar case, insofar as the collapse and transition was a rolling event, taking place between approximately 1225 and 1175 BC or, in some places, as late as 1130 BC. However, the second invasion by the Sea Peoples, ending in their cataclysmic fight against the Egyptians under Ramses III during the eighth year of his reign, in 1177 BC, is a reasonable benchmark and allows us to put a finite date on a rather elusive pivotal moment and the end of an age. We can say with certainty that the far-reaching civilizations that were still flourishing in the Aegean and the ancient Near East in 1225 BC had begun to vanish by 1177 BC and were almost completely gone by 1130 BC. The mighty Bronze Age kingdoms and empires were gradually replaced by smaller city-states during the following Early Iron Age. Consequently, our picture of the Mediterranean and Near Eastern world of 1200 BC is quite different from that of 1100 BC and completely different from that of 1000 BC.”•
Amazon is building a trio of biospheres–the kind filled with crazy laughter, not crazy ants–in Seattle to serve as new company headquarters. Unlike Google and Nintendo, which live in that city’s suburbs, Bezos’ bunch are heading downtown, bringing excitement to the locals but also fears that they’ll be priced out of the fun. From Colin Marshall at the Guardian:
“Pending the completion of the towers, Amazon’s current South Lake Union operations go on in clusters of lower-rise buildings whose purpose you couldn’t necessarily surmise through a streetcar window. But other, subtler clues identify their function: the sudden preponderance of blue Amazon badges and unflattering Amazon logo-emblazoned hooded sweatshirts on the street; the nearby dentist’s and even masseuse’s offices advertising their acceptance of Amazon health insurance; the recorded voice inside the streetcar itself advertising the upcoming stop as ‘sponsored by Amazon.com.’
Nobody could ever mistake Microsoft and Nintendo’s Redmond campuses, surrounded for miles by little more than grass and parking, for cities. Even the most Amazonian blocks of South Lake Union, by contrast, never feel less than urban in form. Maybe it has to do with the nearness of the Seattle skyline, or with all the construction adding to the bustle, or with the fact that people actually live here, not just sleep on the plush employee-lounge couches. Still, much of it struck me as slightly too new, and slightly too thought-through; I couldn’t quite shake the feeling of spending time in a company town, albeit a company downtown.
Even in its incomplete state – and even more than America’s older city centres, now coming back to life largely through infusions of high-end shopping – South Lake Union caters to those prepared to spend. You may do it with relative modesty, at the food truck parked at the end of the streetcar line offering kale salads and burgers with bacon jam and jalapeño aioli; you may drop a few dollars more at the speciality hot-chocolate shop or the combined dog bakery and boutique; or you may go all the way and get your teeth capped, purchase a Bang & Olufsen stereo system, and put in an order for an $80,000 electric sports car at the neighbourhood Tesla showroom.”
One unintended consequence to driverless cars and their growing ability to avoid traffic infractions is that the money from tickets often goes to fund law enforcement. Of course, fewer road accidents and, say, the decriminalization of drugs, would lead to less of a need for a large police budget. From Colin Neagle at Network World:
“Shortly after the state of Washington voted to legalize recreational marijuana late last year, opponents made a very interesting, if somewhat counterintuitive, argument against legalized pot – law enforcement would miss out on the huge revenue stream of seized assets, property, and cash from pot dealers in the state.
Justice Department data shows that seizures in marijuana-related cases nationwide totaled $1 billion from 2002 to 2012, out of the $6.5 billion total seized in all drug busts over that period. This money often goes directly into the budgets of the law enforcement agencies that seized it. One drug task force in Snohomish County, Washington, reduced its budget forecast by 15% after the state voted to legalize marijuana, the Wall Street Journal reported in January. In its most fruitful years, that lone task force had seen more than $1 million in additional funding through seizures from marijuana cases alone, according to the report.
Naturally, this dynamic is something law enforcement either is or should already be preparing for as driverless cars make their way onto the roads. Just as drug cops will lose the income they had seized from pot dealers, state and local governments will need to account for a drastic reduction in fines from traffic violations as autonomous cars stick to the speed limit.
Google’s driverless cars have now combined to drive more than 700,000 miles on public roads without receiving one citation, The Atlantic reported this week. While this raises a lot of questions about who is responsible to pay for a ticket issued to a speeding autonomous car – current California law would have the person in the driver’s seat responsible, while Google has said the company that designed the car should pay the fine – it also hints at a future where local and state governments will have to operate without a substantial source of revenue.”
Mike Leach wasn’t only a radically innovative offensive mind while coach at Texas Tech but also an eccentric who made for great copy. Unfortunately, his obsessions with history and his myriad oddities were so alluring to journalists (Michael Lewis among them) in search of a salable narrative that most of them never dug deep enough. Leach was ultimately fired from his post for serious misconduct in his treatment of his players. He’s now the head coach for Washington State University. His fixation on certain historical periods and his new book about Geronimo and leadership, which seems ready-made for the corporate-lecture circuit, were central to an Ask Me Anything he just did at Reddit. A few exchanges follow.
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Question:
I know you are big history buff, if you had to fill your coaching staff with historical figures who would you choose? For the sake of discussion you can’t pick a sports figure.
Mike Leach:
Head Coach: George Washington. Offensive Coordinator: Geronimo. Offensive Assistant: Tarzan. Defensive Coordinator: Winston Churchill. Defensive Assistant: Daniel Boone.
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Question:
The team is down by 15 with four minutes left when it punches in the ball on the outside zone read that hasn’t worked all day but finally beats the WILL who’s starting to dog it late in the game. Geronimo is the head coach. Does he go for 2 now, or kick the PAT and wait for the second opportunity?
Mike Leach:
Geronimo’s speed and tenacity in adverse conditions is going to allow him and his band of Chiricahua Apaches to score swiftly with that much time left. Illustrated in my book, “Geronimo: Leadership Strategies of an American Warrior,” they prepared for situations like this and were raised to respond to them starting as children. They would never flinch in a situation like this. Going for 1 or 2 would be based on their evaluation of the opponent, the terrain, and the resources they had to work with.
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Question:
What characteristic of Geronimo’s do you most look up to and how has he influenced your coaching?
Mike Leach:
I have read about and studied Geronimo for a long time since I was a child. In writing the book with Buddy Levy, and articulating a lot of these things, I discovered that I have been sharing a lot of these philosophies and stories with my teams for years. Among many others, Geronimo’s life story illustrates that a lot of impossible things are possible, everybody can work harder than they think they can, everybody is tougher than they think they are, but it is starts with the proper preparation, attitude, and philosophy. One of the most exciting parts of writing the book was the opportunity to discover a lot of interesting specifics on what made the Apaches what they were.
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Question:
Who is your favorite pirate?
Mike Leach:
The most exciting pirate is Edward Teach (Blackbeard). Probably the most productive one, and someone I would be fascinated to study more closely, would be Bartholomew Roberts.•
Are we attracted to dystopic novels and films because they caution us or because they titillate us? Deep inside humans, along with an impulse to create, is one to destroy. Some get more joy from the seconds it takes to topple an elaborate sand castle than the hours it takes to build one. Perhaps these stories of decline and doom are psychological outlets for destructive tendencies, the way sports can be a safer outlet for aggression than war. Of course, sports has not ended war nor gave apocalyptic books and movies stopped us from trying to extinct ourselves.
Excerpts follow from two new pieces about dystopian art.
“Maybe there are people who read dystopian tales for self-improvement the way people used to read sermons, or for amusement—people who can edit out the very details that have most preoccupied the person who made them up, and read for the story alone. The stories, boiled down, are usually at bottom just the good old stories. Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange, set in London, is basically the same story as Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, set in the dystopian world of a mental institution; both Alex and McMurphy are forced into conformity and docility by institutional powers.
There are quest stories or love stories—a quest runs through Margaret Atwood’s trilogy about Crake and Oryx. Chang-rae Lee’s On Such a Full Sea is both a quest and a love story—a girl searches for her lover and for her brother, and so on. There’s no missing the appeal, especially for adolescents, of another common structure of these tales: a protagonist, often a teen, somehow preserved from the brainwashed docility of most people in his or her society—a rebel—solves some personal or social problem afflicting everyone (Hunger Games), and escapes from the future into what we recognize as a more normal world.
Utopias of course are just variations of dystopia, the reverse side of the same coin, in which a traveler from somewhere better tells about a distant society whose humanity and wisdom throw into relief the practices of our own, as in Sir Thomas More’s Utopia, or William Dean Howells’s A Traveler from Altruria, when the disingenuously leading questions that the suavely persuasive traveler asks his American host expose American laws, tastes, and manners as a kind of dystopia next to the traveler’s ideal Altruria. Through three hundred pages, America is indirectly portrayed as a dystopia of hypocrisy and self-delusion, the way Brobdingnagians, Yahoos, Lilliputians, and Houyhnhnms threw light on Swift’s and Gulliver’s England.”
“Neal Stephenson knows a thing or two about science fiction. The author of thick, best-selling novels that cross genres but slant toward sci-fi, Stephenson also writes about technology and has worked part time on a private space company.
He is also tired of dystopian science fiction movies and video games. ‘A few weeks ago I think I actually groaned out loud when I was watching Oblivion and saw the wrecked Statue of Liberty sticking out of the ground,” he tells Morgan Warstler in an interview.
A proponent of the thesis that we have ‘lost our faith in technology to bring progress’ and ‘lost our ability to get important things done’ on an Apollo mission scale, Stephenson sees the ubiquity of dystopian visions as a cultural expression. Whereas it was once ‘refreshing, and extremely hip, to see depictions of futures that were not as clean and simple as Star Trek,’ we now experience ‘a strange state of affairs in which people are eager to vote with their dollars, pounds and Euros for the latest tech [like iPhones], but they flock to movies depicting a relentlessly depressing view of the future, and resist any tech deployed on a large scale, in a centralized way.’“
