Excerpts

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“We Needed A Place Where Ray Could Store Everything He Refuses To Throw Away”

May 21, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

The Los Angeles family home of Ray Bradbury, who thought it imperative that humans leave Earth, has just been put on the market at a cool $1.495 million. From Carolyn Kellogg at the Los Angeles Times:

“His three-bedroom, 2500-square-foot house, built in 1937, is painted a cheery yellow. It has three bathrooms, hardwood floors, and sits on a generously sized 9,500-square-foot lot. It is loaded with original details, the sort that were part of the texture of the author’s daily life.

‘I’m surrounded by my metaphors,’ he explained in a 2001 video shot in the house’s converted basement, which was crammed with books and ephemera. ‘I realized, all this ‘junk’ here, I couldn’t live without.’

Around 1960, Bradbury and his wife, Maggie, bought the house in Cheviot Hills for a few reasons: Their family was growing, Bradbury was making more money writing, and it had the kind of space writers crave.

‘Ray has saved everything since his first birthday,’ Maggie told The Times in 1985. ‘I try to throw out newspapers and magazines and whatever can be thrown out. Ray is a pack rat. He refuses to let anything go. When we bought our house 25 years ago, it had a large basement, and that was the irresistible ingredient, because we needed a place where Ray could store everything he refuses to throw away.’

For many years, Bradbury kept an office in Beverly Hills where he wrote (and sometimes napped). When he got older, he used the basement space in Cheviot Hills to write. ‘I feel very comfortable here,’ he said in another 2001 video clip.”

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A peek inside Bradbury’s office, 1968:

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“It Could Be Serving Ads And Other Content On Refrigerators, Car Dashboards, Thermostats, Glasses, And Watches”

May 21, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The electricity that has allowed Google to power an attempt a latter-day Bell Labs has always been ads, and the company wants to make sure it doesn’t run out of juice. Maybe someday the search giant will be making astounding sums of cash from fleets of driverless taxis or brain chips, but for now it needs to get ads to your eyeballs. From Rolfe Winkler at the WSJ: 

“Advertising may be coming to your thermostat and lots of other strange places, courtesy of Google.

In a December letter to the Securities and Exchange Commission, which was disclosed Tuesday, the search giant said that it could be serving ads and other content on ‘refrigerators, car dashboards, thermostats, glasses, and watches, to name just a few possibilities.’

Google made the statement to help justify why it shouldn’t disclose revenue generated from mobile devices, a figure the SEC had requested and that companies like Facebook and Twitter both disclose. Google argued that it doesn’t make sense to break out mobile revenue since the definition of mobile will ‘continue to evolve’ as more ‘smart’ devices roll out.

‘Our expectation is that users will be using our services and viewing our ads on an increasingly wide diversity of devices in the future,’ the company said in the filing.”

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“When You’re In The Oil (Or Weapons) Business, The Stakes Are A Lot Higher On Individual Deals”

May 21, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The opening question of an Ask Me Anything that Gawker’s Hamilton Nolan moderated with journalist Ken Silverstein, author of The Secret World of Oil:

“Question:

Is the oil industry actually more corrupt than other major global industries? If so, why?

Ken Silverstein:

Yes, it actually is. The only industry that’s remotely as corrupt is weapons and partly for the same reason. If you’re selling widgets or paper towels or T-shirts, you make a relatively small amount of money on a lot of contracts. When you’re in the oil (or weapons) business, the stakes are a lot higher on individual deals. You may be chasing an energy concession worth tens of billions of dollars that could be generating revenue, and profits, for decades. That encourages you to use any tactic that will reel in that deal, and that often means paying off government officials. Keith Myers, a London-based consultant and former BP executive, told me, ‘Corruption isn’t endemic in the energy business because people in the industry are more corrupt or have lower morals but because you’re dealing with huge sums of capital. A million dollars here or there doesn’t make any difference to the overall economics of a project, but it can make a huge difference to the economics of a few individuals who can delay or stop or approve the project.’

A related reason is that a lot of the energy resources that we want to run our factories and heat our homes and fill our gas tanks is sitting in Third World countries headed by corrupt governments. Or as our illustrious former vice president and Halliburton exec, Dick Cheney, once put it, ‘The good Lord didn’t see fit to put oil and gas only where there are democratic regimes.'” 


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“Most Store The Studied Material In A So-Called Memory Palace”

May 20, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

In a New York Times report by Benedict Carey about lessons learned at the inaugural Extreme Memory Tournament, which was held recently in San Diego, the upshot is not that some have remarkably elastic recall, but that they thrive at visualization and focus. I would still think, however, that such abilities are more pronounced in some brains than others. An excerpt:

“‘We found that one of the biggest differences between memory athletes and the rest of us,’ said Henry L. Roediger III, the psychologist who led the research team, ‘is in a cognitive ability that’s not a direct measure of memory at all but of attention.’

The technique the competitors use is no mystery.

People have been performing feats of memory for ages, scrolling out pi to hundreds of digits, or phenomenally long verses, or word pairs. Most store the studied material in a so-called memory palace, associating the numbers, words or cards with specific images they have already memorized; then they mentally place the associated pairs in a familiar location, like the rooms of a childhood home or the stops on a subway line.

The Greek poet Simonides of Ceos is credited with first describing the method, in the fifth century B.C., and it has been vividly described in popular books, most recently Moonwalking With Einstein, by Joshua Foer.

Each competitor has his or her own variation. ‘When I see the eight of diamonds and the queen of spades, I picture a toilet, and my friend Guy Plowman,’ said Ben Pridmore, 37, an accountant in Derby, England, and a former champion. ‘Then I put those pictures on High Street in Cambridge, which is a street I know very well.’

As these images accumulate during memorization, they tell an increasingly bizarre but memorable story. ‘I often use movie scenes as locations,’ said James Paterson, 32, a high school psychology teacher in Ascot, near London, who competes in world events. ‘In the movie Gladiator, which I use, there’s a scene where Russell Crowe is in a field, passing soldiers, inspecting weapons.'”

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“The Government Should Think Of And Organize Roads As a Public Utility”

May 20, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

From “Electric Avenue,” David M. Levison’s Foreign Affairs piece about how EVs can gain ground on cars powered by internal-combustion engines, a passage about the state’s potential role in reducing automobile emissions to zero:

“If technological progress is coupled with smart government policy, then these high-tech dreams could become everyday reality. When it comes to funding research on alternative-fuel vehicles, the United States has pursued the right strategy. The federal government has wisely avoided putting all its eggs in one basket, instead spreading research grants across a variety of technologies, most of which do not seem terribly promising but each of which has its partisans. Many small bets are more likely to find a winner than a few large ones; this is not the time for a new Manhattan Project or Apollo program.

As for consumer incentives, the U.S. government provides an infant-industry subsidy of $2,500 in tax credits for buyers of plug-in electric vehicles and has in the past provided other subsidies for buyers of fuel-efficient vehicles. Several U.S. states and some foreign countries provide additional subsidies.

A better, although more politically difficult, policy would be to charge those who burn gasoline and diesel fuel for the full economic and social cost of their decision. Right now, pollution is essentially free in the United States; drivers don’t pay anything for the emissions that come from their tailpipes, even if they’re driving a jalopy from the 1970s. If the government were to charge people for the health-damaging pollutants their cars emit and enact a carbon tax, the amount of pollution and carbon dioxide produced would fall. Consumers would drive less, retire their old clunkers, and be more likely to purchase electric vehicles. (An increase in oil prices — due to a lack of new discoveries, increasing demand in the developing world, or something else — would have the same effect.)

The United States already has a modest gas tax, which, although it was not designed for this purpose, does have the side effect of disincentivizing carbon emissions. But many economists favor a full-fledged carbon tax on fuels, the revenue of which could be used to fund environmental agencies’ efforts to mitigate damages from pollution and climate change. It could be offset by tax cuts elsewhere. Yet if raising taxes were politically easy, this would have been done long ago.

The government cannot rely on the gas tax forever. Since its 1919 debut, in Oregon, the tax has come to serve as the main source of road funding at the state and federal levels. Already, transportation funding is beginning to shrink due to improvements in fuel economy, and the Highway Trust Fund is teetering on the brink of insolvency. With the rise of alternative-fuel vehicles, the current funding arrangement will fail.

The immediate solution is for policymakers to take the politically unpopular step of raising the gas tax. In the long run, however, something else will need to be done. There is no reason to move away from the tax now, but as gasoline engines eventually lose market share, the government should think of and organize roads as a public utility, like electricity and natural gas. That would mean making drivers pay user fees, such as a per-mile charge that varied by the time of day and the type of vehicle used.”

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“That Is A Nasty Complication For Economists Trying To Figure Out The Most Appropriate Way To Respond To Climate Change”

May 20, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

From “Weighing the Future,” an Economist piece about how the dismal science can frame the argument for sacrificing now to combat climate change when the worst effects might not be felt for centuries:

“But all of these changes will be felt most severely decades or centuries down the road: after our children, and our children’s children, are gone.

That is a nasty complication for economists trying to figure out the most appropriate way to respond to climate change. Some economists, like Martin Weitzman, reckon that significant investment may be justified now as a form of insurance. There is a risk that climate change will happen faster or be more costly than we anticipate, possibly threatening humanity’s very existence. Whether or not it makes sense to pay to cut emissions in order to enjoy the benefits of slower warming, it is worth taking action now in order to reduce the odds of a civilisation-ending outcome.

Though that argument makes quite a lot of sense, it does leave some economists unsatisfied. Surely the costs of warming are high enough that it’s worth cutting emissions to stop it, whether or not it threatens our very existence, right?

It seems like that ought to be the case. But to suss that out, we have to make an assumption about discount rates—that is, how much we, today, should value benefits received well down the line—in order to compare costs today to benefits tomorrow.

If one believes that humanity should take drastic action now even though it might slow economic growth, one has to assume that future costs will be very, very big or that people living today place significant value on benefits realised 50 or 100 or 500 years down the line. And that strikes many dismal scientists as implausible. It is easy enough to imagine that people living today care about benefits that might accrue to them in their old age, or that of their children or grandchildren. But look much beyond a century and the beneficiaries become too distant to count much in our mental calculus.”

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“Had These Cars Ever Gotten A Ticket?”

May 20, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

If you need more proof that software-driven cars will be safer than those with humans behind the wheel, it should be noted that the Google self-driving vehicles have yet to get a ticket. Not one. From Alexis C. Madrigal at the Atlantic:

“On a drive in a convoy of Google’s autonomous vehicles last week, a difficult driving situation arose.

As our platoon approached a major intersection, two Google cars ahead of us crept forward into the intersection, preparing to make left turns. The oncoming traffic took nearly the whole green light to clear, so the first car made the left as the green turned to yellow. The second, however, was caught in that tough spot where the car is in the intersection but the light is turning, and the driver can either try to back up out of the intersection or gun it and make the left, even though he or she or it knows the light is going to turn red before the maneuver is complete. The self-driving car gunned it, which was the correct decision, I think. But it was also the kind of decision that was on the borderline of legality.

It got me wondering: had these cars ever gotten a ticket driving around Mountain View, where they’ve logged 10,000 miles?

‘We have not cited any Google self-driving cars,’ Sergeant Saul Jaeger, the press information officer at the Mountain View Police Department, told me. They hadn’t pulled one over and let the vehicle go, either, to Jaeger’s knowledge.

I wondered if that was because of a pre-existing agreement between Google and the department, but Jaeger said, ‘There is no agreement in place between Google and the PD.’

Google confirmed that they none of their cars had ever been ticketed in Mountain View or elsewhere.”

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“Saying That Deep Blue Doesn’t Really Think Is Like Saying An Airplane Doesn’t Really Fly Because It Doesn’t Flap Its Wings”

May 20, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Following up the earlier post about computers and consciousness, here’s an excerpt from “Yes, Computers Can Think,” a 1997 New York Times article by Drew McDermott written in the wake of the machines conquering Kasparov:

“When people say that human grandmasters do not examine 200 million move sequences per second, as the computer does, I ask them, ‘How do you know?’ The answer is usually that human grandmasters are not aware of considering so many options. But humans are unaware of almost everything that goes on in our minds.

I tend to agree that grandmasters search in a different way than Deep Blue does, but whatever method they use, if done by a computer, would seem equally ‘blind.’

For example, some scientists believe that the masters’ skill comes from an ability to compare their current position against, say, 10,000 positions they’ve studied. We call their behavior insightful because they are unaware of the details; the right position among the 10,000 ‘just occurs to them.’ If a computer did the same thing, the trick would be revealed; we could examine its data to see how laboriously it checks the 10,000 positions. Still, if the unconscious version yields intelligent results, and the explicit algorithmic version yields essentially the same results, are not both methods intelligent?

So what shall we say about Deep Blue? How about: It’s a ‘little bit’ intelligent. Yes, its computations differ in detail from a human grandmaster’s. But then, human grandmasters differ from one another in many ways.

A log of the machine’s computations is perfectly intelligible to chess masters; they speak the same language, as it were. That’s why the I.B.M. team refused to give the game logs to Mr. Kasparov during the match: It would have been the same as bugging the hotel room where the computer ‘discussed’ strategy with his seconds.

Saying that Deep Blue doesn’t really think is like saying an airplane doesn’t really fly because it doesn’t flap its wings.

Of course, this advance in artificial intelligence does not indicate that any Grand Unified Theory of Thought is on the horizon. As the field has matured, it has focused more and more on incremental progress, while worrying less and less about some magic solution to all the problems of intelligence. There are fascinating questions about why we are unaware of so much that goes on in our brains, and why our awareness is the way it is. But we can answer a lot of questions about thinking before we need to answer questions about awareness.

It is entirely possible that computers will come to seem alive before they come to seem intelligent. The kind of computing power that fuels Deep Blue will also lead to improved sensors, wheels and grippers that will allow machines to react in a more sophisticated way to things in their environment, including us. They won’t seem intelligent, but we may think of them as a weird kind of animal — one that can play a very good game of chess.”

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“Do Outstanding Minds Differ From Ordinary Minds In Any Special Way?”

May 19, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Humans experience consciousness even though we don’t have a solution to the hard problem. Will we have to crack the code before we can make truly smart machines–ones that not only do but know what they are doing–or is there a way to translate the skills of the human brain to machines without figuring out the mystery? From Marvin Minsky’s 1982 essay, “Why People Think Computers Can’t“:

“CAN MACHINES BE CREATIVE?

We naturally admire our Einsteins and Beethovens, and wonder if
computers ever could create such wondrous theories or symphonies. Most
people think that creativity requires some special, magical ‘gift’ that
simply cannot be explained. If so, then no computer could create – since
anything machines can do most people think can be explained.

To see what’s wrong with that, we must avoid one naive trap. We mustn’t
only look at works our culture views as very great, until we first get good
ideas about how ordinary people do ordinary things. We can’t expect to
guess, right off, how great composers write great symphonies. I don’t
believe that there’s much difference between ordinary thought and
highly creative thought. I don’t blame anyone for not being able to do
everything the most creative people do. I don’t blame them for not being
able to explain it, either. I do object to the idea that, just because we can’t
explain it now, then no one ever could imagine how creativity works.

We shouldn’t intimidate ourselves by our admiration of our Beethovens
and Einsteins. Instead, we ought to be annoyed by our ignorance of how
we get ideas – and not just our ‘creative’ ones. Were so accustomed to the
marvels of the unusual that we forget how little we know about the
marvels of ordinary thinking. Perhaps our superstitions about creativity
serve some other needs, such as supplying us with heroes with such
special qualities that, somehow, our deficiencies seem more excusable.

Do outstanding minds differ from ordinary minds in any special way? I
don’t believe that there is anything basically different in a genius, except
for having an unusual combination of abilities, none very special by
itself. There must be some intense concern with some subject, but that’s
common enough. There also must be great proficiency in that subject;
this, too, is not so rare; we call it craftsmanship. There has to be enough
self-confidence to stand against the scorn of peers; alone, we call that
stubbornness. And certainly, there must be common sense. As I see it, any
ordinary person who can understand an ordinary conversation has
already in his head most of what our heroes have. So, why can’t
‘ordinary, common sense’ – when better balanced and more fiercely
motivated – make anyone a genius,

So still we have to ask, why doesn’t everyone acquire such a combination?
First, of course, it sometimes just the accident of finding a novel way to
look at things. But, then, there may be certain kinds of difference-in-
degree. One is in how such people learn to manage what they learn:
beneath the surface of their mastery, creative people must have
unconscious administrative skills that knit the many things they know
together. The other difference is in why some people learn so many more
and better skills. A good composer masters many skills of phrase and
theme – but so does anyone who talks coherently.

Why do some people learn so much so well? The simplest hypothesis is
that they’ve come across some better ways to learn! Perhaps such ‘gifts’
are little more than tricks of ‘higher-order’ expertise. Just as one child
learns to re-arrange its building-blocks in clever ways, another child
might learn to play, inside its head, at rearranging how it learns!

Our cultures don’t encourage us to think much about learning. Instead
we regard it as something that just happens to us. But learning must itself
consist of sets of skills we grow ourselves; we start with only some of them
and and slowly grow the rest. Why don’t more people keep on learning
more and better learning skills? Because it’s not rewarded right away, its
payoff has a long delay. When children play with pails and sand, they’re
usually concerned with goals like filling pails with sand. But once a child
concerns itself instead with how to better learn, then that might lead to
exponential learning growth! Each better way to learn to learn would lead
to better ways to learn – and this could magnify itself into an awesome,
qualitative change. Thus, first-rank ‘creativity’ could be just the
consequence of little childhood accidents.

So why is genius so rare, if each has almost all it takes? Perhaps because
our evolution works with mindless disrespect for individuals. I’m sure no
culture could survive, where everyone finds different ways to think. If
so, how sad, for that means genes for genius would need, instead of
nurturing, a frequent weeding out.”

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“Part Of The Sexual Revolution Came About Because Of The Automobile”

May 19, 2014 in Excerpts, Film, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

In a Guardian piece by Andrew Pulver about David Cronenberg, who’s at Cannes for the screening of his latest film, Maps to the Stars, the director asserts that the automobile deserves a place alongside the Pill in green-lighting the sexual revolution. And now that tablets and smartphones are more important than cars, what does that say about us? From Pulver’s article:

“Cronenberg was also quizzed on his fondness for sex scenes set in cars, with one journalist pointing out it went all the way back to his JG Ballard adaptation Crash. Cronenberg replied, not entirely seriously: ‘Crash was suppressed by Ted Turner [CEO of TBS, parent company of Crash’s US distributor Fine Line] because he said it would encourage them to have sex in cars. I said: there’s an entire generation of Americans who have been spawned in the back seats of 1954 Fords. I doubt I invented sex in cars. You have to remember, part of the sexual revolution came about because of the automobile, because young people could get away from their parents, and that was freedom. I don’t think I’m breaking any new territory.

‘I mean… why wouldn’t you? There are such great cars around.'”

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In 1979, David Cronenberg discusses casting porn star Marilyn Chambers:

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“Whereas The Cloud Is ‘Up There’ In The Sky Somewhere…The ‘Fog’ Is Close To The Ground, Right Where Things Are Getting Done”

May 19, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Christopher Mims, now at the Wall Street Journal, has a new column that explains the basics of so-called “fog computing,” likely the next step beyond cloud computing as the Internet becomes the Internet of Things. An excerpt:

“Modern 3G and 4G cellular networks simply aren’t fast enough to transmit data from devices to the cloud at the pace it is generated, and as every mundane object at home and at work gets in on this game, it’s only going to get worse.

Luckily there’s an obvious solution: Stop focusing on the cloud, and start figuring out how to store and process the torrent of data being generated by the Internet of Things (also known as the industrial Internet) on the things themselves, or on devices that sit between our things and the Internet.

Marketers at Cisco Systems Inc. have already come up with a name for this phenomenon: fog computing.

I like the term. Yes, it makes you want to do a Liz Lemon eye roll. But like cloud computing before it—also a marketing term for a phenomenon that was already under way—it’s a good visual metaphor for what’s going on.

Whereas the cloud is ‘up there’ in the sky somewhere, distant and remote and deliberately abstracted, the ‘fog’ is close to the ground, right where things are getting done. It consists not of powerful servers, but weaker and more dispersed computers of the sort that are making their way into appliances, factories, cars, street lights and every other piece of our material culture.”

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“That Was A Big Tactical Mistake”

May 19, 2014 in Excerpts | Permalink

David Carr might be the best and most lucid writer working for any of the companies that remain in what used to be known as the “newspaper business.” I could read him endlessly. In his latest column, Carr scrutinizes the fiasco of Jill Abramson’s firing. The whole episode has been astoundingly tone-deaf on the part of management. When you live in a country where none of the 44 Presidents have been women, and one gender has always enjoyed clear advantage in salary, you have to realize that the abrupt dismissal of the first female executive editor because of “management issues” is going to be incendiary. Especially when you consider the notoriously difficult personalities of some of the men who’ve previously held that post.

Based on his intra-office reportage, Carr doesn’t believe Abramson’s firing was caused by a scuffle over pay inequality or other gender issues. And while Carr self-identifies as a “company man,” he’s also brutally honest about himself and everyone else. He clearly wrote what his research truly found. 

Questions Carr doesn’t address: Was Abramson paid less than her male counterparts of similar stature and tenure during her years at the Times? Are other women there compensated on par with men? While the Times certainly doesn’t want their salary structure wholly transparent, the company should form a panel of ten female and minority journalists and managers who are privy to the salary of every Times employee. This committee should meet with the publisher and HR at regular intervals to question what they see as inequities. Perhaps that would dispel the deep concerns some women working at the Times must now have.

From Carr:

“Jill rose as a woman in a patriarchal business and a male-dominated organization by being tough, by displaying superlative journalistic instincts and by never backing up for anyone.

Some might suggest that these traits are all in the historical job description of a man editing The New York Times, but Arthur concluded ‘she had lost the support of her masthead colleagues and could not win it back.’ I like Jill and the version of The Times she made. But my reporting, including interviews with senior people in the newsroom, some of them women, backs up his conclusion.

When he announced Jill and Dean Baquet’s appointment in 2011, Mr. Sulzberger was rightfully proud of his dream team, two talented journalists to lead the paper who were not white men. But while there may have been a dream, there was never a real team.

Jill did a six-month tour of The Times’s digital endeavors before assuming the editorship, and was publicly supportive of a recent groundbreaking report on innovation at The New York Times. But the report plainly stated that the paper was lagging in that area, and according to several executives in the newsroom she took some of its findings personally.

Perhaps that is part of the reason she tried to bring in Janine Gibson, a senior editor at The Guardian, as a co-managing editor for digital. That was a big tactical mistake, at least in terms of office management. Dean was not aware that Jill had made an offer to Ms. Gibson, and he was furious and worried about how it would affect not only him but the rest of the news operation as well. (All the talk about pay inequity and her lawyering up to get her due was a sideshow in my estimation.)”

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“Have You Made A Conscious Effort To Block Out Some Of That Information When You Are Writing?”

May 18, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

In a Guardian Q&A tied to his new book, Joshua Ferris tells interviewer Tim Adams about being a novelist in the Internet Age:

“Question:

The Internet in the book is often seen as a conversely destructive force. Is that your experience?

Joshua Ferris:

I think it’s a force of anxiety. Anyone who wants to be completely sure of their information – personal, political, historical – is faced with a huge number of sources willing to provide it. It can be a very dubious place. A hall of mirrors with diminishing returns.

Question:

Have you made a conscious effort to block out some of that information when you are writing?

Joshua Ferris:

I don’t belong to social media at all. Not for any principled reason, but because I don’t want to spend the time on it. I do think books are harder to read when you move away from the quick cuts of the internet. You have to reach back for your attention span. If you’ve spent two hours looking at 6,000 very different web pages it’s difficult to concentrate on a single story that requires sustained attention. I don’t think books are going to go away. I think maybe they’re going to become a more fine taste.

Question:

Do you think the pervasiveness of that screen culture also makes novels harder to write?

Joshua Ferris:

Not if the novelist is a novelist. The determined novelist is just interested in the fact that she must write novels.”

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“Snowden Confessed That Some Of His Political Ideas Had Been Gleaned From Video Games”

May 18, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

There’s probably something a little wrong with someone who would be a whistleblower, and a free society is usually richer for it. The question to ask about Edward Snowden and Glenn Greenwald is not whether they’re perfect people, whether they’re heroes, but if America is better off overall for their actions. From Geoff Dyer’s well-written Financial Times review of Greenwald’s new book:

“Ever since then Greenwald, who left the Guardian last October, has had a long line of reporters queueing outside his house in Rio de Janeiro to hear the story (I am one of the guilty parties). Yet he has somehow still managed to make the tale seem fresh. The first third of his book is a genuinely gripping account of his encounters with Snowden. Jason Bourne meets The Social Network: the film rights for this one will sell themselves.

Snowden instructed Greenwald to find the meeting room in his Kowloon hotel with a plastic alligator on the floor. He entered carrying a Rubik’s Cube (‘unsolved’) and responded to a prepared question about the hotel food. Back in Snowden’s room and with their mobile phones in the fridge to prevent prying ears, the former lawyer Greenwald questioned him for five hours. Snowden confessed that some of his political ideas had been gleaned from video games, which provided the lesson ‘that just one person, even the most powerless, can confront great injustice.’

The book adds little fresh material on the NSA but, by putting all the reporting in one place, Greenwald gives an effective sense of the sheer scope of information that is being hoovered up. In one particularly clumsy slide, the NSA brags that its goals include: ‘Sniff it All,’ ‘Know it All,’ ‘Exploit it All,’ ‘Collect it All.’

In selecting Greenwald as his main media interlocutor, Snowden chose well. Greenwald has pursued the story with passion, ensuring that the documents have achieved the widest possible impact. He has also been a tireless defender of Snowden, even after his recent disastrous appearance on a Vladimir Putin call-in show.

But that single-mindedness, mixed with self-regard, is also Greenwald’s great weakness. He lives in a world of black and white, where all government officials are venal and independent journalists are heroes. ‘There are, broadly speaking, two choices: obedience to institutional authority or radical dissent from it,’ he writes.”

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“It Is Better To Think Of Happiness As One Utility Among Many”

May 18, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

In a Boston Globe essay, economist Edward Glaeser argues that happiness should be a goal but not the goal. An excerpt:

“What we know now, however, is that the mistake lies in thinking happiness is the be-all and end-all to judging how effective a municipality is operating for its citizens. In a sense, putting happiness above all else is just as foolish as economists who think money is the only objective or doctors who can’t imagine anything that trumps health. Happiness, money, and health are all good goals, but they are rarely the only things people are striving for.

Because, if quality of life is so important, why do people choose to keep living — and moving — to ‘unhappy’ cities? If people in Rust Belt cities like Milwaukee or Detroit are so dissatisfied, why don’t they just move to a new place where they’d be more happy? Because most humans are willing to sacrifice happiness and satisfaction if the price is right — and we’re probably better off for it.

The debate over whether happiness should be life’s ultimate currency is ancient. Greek philosopher Epicurus opined ‘that pleasure is the end and aim,’ while his contemporary Epictetus countered, ‘What is our nature? To be free, noble, self-respecting . . . We must subordinate pleasure to these principles.’ More recently, Jeremy Bentham, the 18th century British thinker, popularized the notion that humans should maximize pleasure and minimize pain. Kant argued that our goal should not be happiness, which does not automatically follow moral behavior, but rather act so as to be worthy of happiness.

Most people, however, are less theoretical and more practical in terms of what they’re willing to trade off for happiness. In fact, it is better to think of happiness as one utility among many, rather than a supreme desideratum.”

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“It Is Now Commonplace For Those In The Field To Consider Anything From Smoking To Parenting To The Impact Of The Contraceptive Pill”

May 16, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Everything is quantified and measured and analyzed now–or soon will be–but that wasn’t always the case. The recently deceased economist Gary Becker believed his discipline could be brought to bear on all aspects of life. The opening of a defense of his mindset from fellow economist Tim Harford at the Financial Times:

“Perhaps it was inevitable that there would be something of the knee-jerk about the reaction to the death of the Nobel Prize-winning economist Gary Becker. Published obituaries acknowledged his originality, productivity and influence, of course. But there are many who lament Becker’s economic imperialism – the study of apparently non-economic aspects of life. It is now commonplace for those in the field to consider anything from smoking to parenting to the impact of the contraceptive pill. That is Gary Becker’s influence at work.

Becker makes a convenient bogeyman. It did not help that he could be awkward in discussing emotional issues – despite his influence inside the economics profession, he was not a slick salesman outside it. So it is easy to caricature a man who writes economic models for discrimination, for suicide and for the demand for children. How blinkered such a man must be, the critics say; how intellectually crude and emotionally stunted.

The criticism is unfair. Gary Becker’s economic imperialism was an exercise in soft power. Becker’s view of the world was not that economics was the last word on all human activity. It was that no matter what the subject under consideration, economics would always have something insightful to add. And for many years it fell to Becker to find that insight.”

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“The Space Age Proved To Be A False Dawn”

May 16, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The moon landing was supposed to be the beginning of the Space Age, but the giant leap turned out to be a small step. A mission to Mars, let alone a full-fledged settlement in space, was shelved. But billionaire entrepreneurs weaned on sci-fi are taking aim again at the stratosphere. The opening of Jessa Gamble’s Guardian article “How Do You Build a City in Space?“:

“Science fiction has delivered on many of its promises. Star Trek videophones have become Skype, the Jetsons’ food-on-demand is materialising through 3-D printing, and we have done Jules Verne one better and explored mid-ocean trenches at crushing depths. But the central promise of golden age sci-fi has not yet been kept. Humans have not colonised space.

For a brief moment in the 1970s, the grandeur of the night sky felt interactive. It seemed only decades away that more humans would live off the Earth than on it; in fact, the Space Shuttle was so named because it was intended to make 50 round trips per year. There were active plans for expanding civilisation into space, and any number of serious designs for building entire cities on the moon, Mars and beyond.

The space age proved to be a false dawn, of course. After a sobering interlude, children who had sat rapt at the sight of the moon landings grew up, and accepted that terraforming space – once briefly assumed to be easy – was actually really, really hard. Intense cold war motivation flagged, and the Challenger and Columbia disasters taught us humility. Nasa budgets sagged from 5% of the US federal budget to less than 0.5%. People even began to doubt that we’d ever set foot on the moon: in a 2006 poll, more than one in four Americans between 18 and 25 said they suspected the moon landing was a hoax.

But now a countercurrent has surfaced. The children of Apollo, educated and entrepreneurial, are making real headway on some of the biggest difficulties. Large-scale settlement, as opposed to drab old scientific exploration, is back on the menu.”

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“The Gigafactory Will Take That To Another Level”

May 16, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

From Dana Hull at the San Jose Mercury News, more information about Elon Musk’s Gigafactory, which he believes can cut battery costs by 30%, a key to making Teslas more affordable:

“The planned $5 billion gigafactory is key to Tesla’s strategy of manufacturing a more affordable, mass-market electric car. Tesla has not finalized a location but is looking at several states, including Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico and Texas. California is also being considered but is regarded as a long shot because of the lengthy time required for the permitting process.

In an onstage interview with venture capitalist Ira Ehrenpreis, an early investor in Tesla who sits on its board of directors, Musk said that vertically integrating the battery production makes economic sense.

‘The gigafactory will take that to another level,’ he said. ‘You’ll have stuff coming directly from the mine, getting on a rail car and getting delivered to the factory, with finished battery packs coming out the other side. The cost-compression potential is quite high if you are willing to go all the way down the supply chain.’

But the gigafactory will not just supply batteries for Tesla’s electric cars: Stationary battery packs will be provided to SolarCity, the San Mateo solar-installation company run by Musk’s cousins, and other renewable energy companies in the solar and wind industries.”

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“It Instills A Terrible Confidence In Children”

May 16, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

In this 1977 Canadian talk show, Fran Lebowitz, selling her book Metropolitan Life, plays on a familiar theme: Her complicated relationship with children. She was concerned that digital watches and calculators and other new technologies entitled kids (and adults also) to a sense of power they should not have. She must be pleased with smartphones today.

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“The Damage To Health From Addiction Is Minimal”

May 16, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech, Videos | Permalink

William S. Burroughs, in 1977, offering questionable advice regarding drugs, though, in all fairness, he had conducted a great deal of field research. Heroin use certainly didn’t diminish his powers with Junky. The prose is flawless.

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“There Are Several Concerns About Human Activities On The Moon”

May 15, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

With Russia announcing dubious plans for colonizing the moon by 2030, Noah Davis of Pacific Standard interviewed physicist Dr. Nadine G. Barlow about the pros, cons and costs of such an endeavor. An exchange about the dark side of the proposed mission:

“Question:

Are there unintended consequences we might not be considering if we colonize the moon?

Dr. Nadine G. Barlow:

There are several concerns about human activities on the moon. The lunar day is about 29 Earth days long, which means most places on the lunar surface receive about two weeks of daylight followed by two weeks of night. This places strong constraints on possible energy sources (power by solar energy would not work without development of some very effective energy storage technologies) and will affect human circadian rhythms to a greater extent than we see even with shift workers here on Earth. The Apollo missions to the moon between 1969 and 1972 showed that the lunar dust is very abrasive, sticks to everything, and may be toxic to humans—machinery is likely to need constant maintenance and techniques will need to be developed to keep the astronauts from bringing dust into the habitats on their spacesuits after surface activities. Growing crops on the moon will present its own challenges between the long day/night cycles and the need to add nutrients/bacteria to the lunar soil. Surface activities will kick up dust from the surface, enhancing the thin veneer of particles that make up the lunar atmosphere and transporting the dust over larger distances to cause even more damage to machinery. The moon’s atmosphere is so thin that is provides no protection from micrometeorite bombardment or radiation—both of these issues will need to be addressed in habitat design and maintenance. Finally we know that astronauts living for extended periods of time in the microgravity environment of orbiting space stations often suffer physiological issues, particularly upon return to Earth. We don’t know if colonists living for extended periods of time in the 1/6 gravity of the moon will suffer similar physiological problems. And of course there is always the question of how humans will react psychologically to life in a confined habitat in such an alien environment.”

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“This Is Still The Prevailing View Of Mob Behavior, But It Turns Out To Be Wrong”

May 15, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

In the new Aeon essay, “The Intimacy of Crowds,” Michael Bond argues that riotous mobs are often actually quite rational and goal-oriented, despite the seeming disorder of the melee. The opening:

“There’s nothing like a riot to bring out the amateur psychologist in all of us. Consider what happened in August 2011, after police killed Mark Duggan, a 29-year-old man from the London suburb of Tottenham. Thousands took to the streets of London and other English towns in the UK’s worst outbreak of civil unrest in a generation. When police finally restored order after some six days of violence and vandalism, everyone from the Prime Minister David Cameron to newspaper columnists of every political persuasion denounced the mindless madness, incredulous that a single killing, horrific as it was, could spark the conflagration at hand. The most popular theory was that rioters had surrendered their self-awareness and rationality to the mentality of the crowd.

This has been the overriding view of crowd behaviour since the French Revolution and the storming of the Bastille. The 19th-century French criminologist Gabriel Tarde likened even the most civilised of crowds to ‘a monstrous worm whose sensibility is diffuse and who still acts with disordered movements according to the dictates of its head’. Tarde’s contemporary, the social psychologist Gustave Le Bon, tried to explain crowd behaviour as a paralysis of the brain; hypnotised by the group, the individual becomes the slave of unconscious impulses. ‘He is no longer himself, but has become an automaton who has ceased to be guided by his will,’ he wrote in 1895. ‘Isolated, he may be a cultivated individual; in a crowd, he is a barbarian… a grain of sand amid other grains of sand, which the wind stirs up at will.’

This is still the prevailing view of mob behaviour, but it turns out to be wrong.”

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“McDonald’s Is Certainly A Grand Unifier”

May 15, 2014 in Excerpts, Urban Studies | Permalink

The subtext to workers’ righteous attempt to get McDonald’s to pay a living wage is, of course, that these are not starter jobs for kids anymore but careers. This disturbing new normal is unifying global workers in surprising ways–for now, at least. Even many of these low-paying service positions are in the crosshairs of automation. From Julia Carrie Wong at the Guardian:

“In 1996, Thomas Friedman put forward a grand theory of capitalism, economic development and foreign relations: ‘No two countries that both have a McDonald’s have ever fought a war against each other.’ (He was, by the way, totally wrong.)

The unifying power of McDonald’s took on a new meaning on Thursday, however, as thousands of fast-food workers across the globe began to walk off the job or hold protests against McDonald’s and other fast-food employers. The coordinated action is the latest escalation in the campaign that began in New York City in November 2012, when about 200 fast-food workers went on strike to demand hourly wages of $15 and the right to form a union.

The so-called ‘Fight for 15’ spread across the US, thanks to backing from the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) – and organizers expect strikes and protests in 150 US cities and at least 33 countries on Thursday.

With 1.8m employees in 118 countries, McDonald’s is certainly a grand unifier; only Walmart employs more private-sector workers worldwide. But instead of dishing out peace and prosperity the way Friedman and other proponents of neoliberalism promised, McDonald’s has been spreading low wages, abusive conditions and union-busting.”

“Support For Sharia Is Widespread Across The Arab World, But To Different Degrees”

May 15, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

Shadi Hamid, a Brookings Fellow and author of a new book about contemporary Middle Eastern Islamists, just did an Ask Me Anything at Reddit. A few exchanges follow.

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Question:

I’ve always wondered about what the popular perception of Sharia law is among ordinary muslims, like in Saudi Arabia. Is that actually the system that they want to live under, or it is more imposed by the ruling class?

Shadi Hamid:

Support for sharia is widespread across the Arab world, but to different degrees. A lot of interesting polling data on this. In a 2012 Pew poll, 61% of Egyptians said they preferred the “model of religion in government” of Saudi Arabia over just 17% for Turkey’s. And, somewhat remarkably, in the 2010 Arab Barometer, 62% of Jordanians said they would support “a system governed by Islamic law in which there are no political parties or elections.” In countries, like Tunisia, that have experienced [often forced] secularization, the numbers are lower. Of course, this provokes more than a few questions – it’s one thing to believe in Islamic law in theory and another thing to actually back in practice. How aspirational is this? Are these sentiments shaped by social pressure, a sense that good Muslims have to say they support Islamic law? That needs to be taken into account as well. But, it is fair to say that many of these societies deeply conservative and illiberal in how they view the role of religion in public life.

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Question:

When was the last time you were in Egypt? Has there been a noticeable change in peoples’ attitudes towards one another and towards democracy?

Shadi Hamid:

When I was in Egypt in August, just a few days before the Rabaa massacre actually, it was a pretty shocking, and dispiriting, experience. You know, you read about rise of fascism in Europe after WWI in grad school, but it’s really something to see a kind of bloodlust – the desire to kill your countrymen – up close, from people you know and even care about, your friends. I saw that in Egypt and it was clear then the scars would take not just years, but possibly decades to heal. It’s brother against brother. Mother against son. It’s sectarianism without the sects, which in a way is more frightening because you can’t clearly define who your enemy is. It’s a difficult question but a vital one – how did so many Egyptians lose their humanity, lose their ability to empathize with their fellow citizens? Where exactly did this desire for blood come from. That’s why I think looking at religion and ideology is crucial because it’s those sorts of raw, existential divides – about the nature and identity of the State – that lead people to suspend their humanity. Egyptians would tell me: hey, you Americans with all your democracy talk and “respecting democratic outcomes.” Screw your democracy. We’re the ones who have to live with the consequences of elections… And that’s why I spent a lot of time in the book talking not just about the political and structural factors that influence ideas, but taking the ideas, aspirations, and ambitions of Islamist movements as something real and deeply felt.

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Question:

Do you think that religious sentiments comes in waves? In the 50s, the arab world was much more secular, and since, it witnessed an increase in religious fervor (as the whole world is doing), to reach the today’s peak. Do you think religiosity will be decreasing in the future?

Shadi Hamid:

This is where I think the Arab world, or even “Islam,” may be a bit distinctive. I see the era of secular nationalism in the 1950s and 60s as an aberration, a kind of exception to the rule. If you look at the broader sweep of Islamic history (and, granted, that’s risky going in a short comment like this), you find that Islam and Islamic law have always been part of the public discourse. Yes, you often a separation between the Caliph, or the executive, on one hand and the religious clerics on the other, but never a separation of religion from politics. Unlike in Christianity, where you have a (debatable) tradition of “leave unto Caesar what is,” Prophet Mohamed was a politician, a theologian, and a warrior all wrapped into one. Muslims aren’t necessarily bound by history, but we can’t pretend it doesn’t matter.

Also, there have been any number of attempts to force secularization, most notably in Turkey and Tunisia. But that didn’t work either. Over time, religion-friendly parties and then Islamists and then neo-Islamists rose to power through democratic elections in Turkey. There was a popular desire to erode the constraints of an aggressively secular, or laic, state, and religiously-oriented movements drew on that. In Tunisia, decades of secularization didn’t stop an Islamist party, Ennahda, from rising to power within a year of the 2011 revolution. And that was after Ennahda being pretty much eradicated from Tunisian society. Which makes it all the more striking.•

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“He Revealed A Preternatural Talent For Playing, Testing, And Evaluating Games”

May 14, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Nintendo, a 19th-century Japanese playing-card company that became an American video-game sensation nearly a hundred years after its founding, is one of the subjects of Blake J. Harris’ new book, Console Wars, which Grantland has excerpted. A piece about how in the 1980s Nintendo presciently identified the existence of a ravenous appetite of fans for not just a piece of pop culture but for a community built around it, a phenomenon that later exploded on the Internet:

“[Gail] Tilden was at home, nursing her six-week-old son, when [Minoru] Arakawa called and asked her to come into the office the next day for an important meeting. So the following day, after dropping off her son with some trusted coworkers, she went into a meeting with Arakawa. The appetite for Nintendo tips, hints, and supplemental information was insatiable, so Arakawa decided that a full-length magazine would be a better way to deliver exactly what his players wanted.

Tilden was put in charge of bringing this idea to life. She didn’t know much about creating, launching, and distributing a magazine, but, as with everything that had come before, she would figure it out. What she was unlikely to figure out, however, was how to become an inside-and-out expert on Nintendo’s games. She played, yes, but she couldn’t close her eyes and tell you which bush to burn in The Legend of Zelda or King Hippo’s fatal flaw in Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!! For that kind of intel, there was no one better than Nintendo’s resident expert gamer, Howard Phillips, an always-smiling, freckle-faced videogame prodigy.

Technically, Phillips was NOA’s warehouse manager, but along the way he revealed a preternatural talent for playing, testing, and evaluating games. After earning Arakawa’s trust as a tastemaker, he would scour the arcade scene and write detailed assessments that would go to Japan. Sometimes his advice was implemented, sometimes it was ignored, but in the best-case scenarios he would find something hot, such as the 1982 hit Joust, alert Japan’s R&D to it, and watch it result in a similar Nintendo title — in this case a 1983 Joust-like game called Mario Bros. As Nintendo grew, Phillips’s ill-defined role continued to expand, though he continued to remain the warehouse manager. That all changed, however, when he was selected to be the lieutenant for Tilden’s new endeavor.

In July 1988, Nintendo of America shipped out the first issue of Nintendo Power to the 3.4 million members of the Nintendo Fun Club. Over 30 percent of the recipients immediately bought an annual subscription, marking the fastest that a magazine had ever reached one million paid subscribers.”

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Nintendo Arm Wrestling, 1985:

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