Excerpts

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“Once The Robots Take The Wheel Everywhere, Many Of Us Will Lose Interest In Driving Altogether”

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

Would the perfection of autonomous vehicles mean the end of car culture? Some think so, but Deep Blue hasn’t yet brought about the demise of human chess tournaments, so perhaps kings of the road won’t lose interest when they realize they’ve become pawns. A meditation on this topic from “Five Perplexing Questions About Computers in 2039” from Aviva Retkin at the BBC:

“Andreas Riener at the Institute for Pervasive Computing in Linz, Austria, has written an abstract that starts with a bold view of the future: ‘The first self-driving car cruised on our roads in 2019. Now, 20 years after, it is time to review how this innovation has changed our mobility behaviour.’

This vision is rooted in a real trend. Self-driving cars have been making headlines for several years now. They are legal to drive in the state of Nevada, and Google’s driverless car has already racked up hundreds of thousands of practice miles.

Reiner’s contribution is to explore how this will change us. He predicts that once the robots take the wheel everywhere, many of us will lose interest in driving altogether. Fewer of us will own our own cars. Those who do won’t waste as much time pimping them out or driving around just for fun. People who still love cars might have to seek their thrills in special ‘recreation parks,’ where they can drive manually in an artificial environment. ‘If the vehicles of the future are only a means to get from A to B, this car culture would get lost,’ he says.”

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“The Taut Harris Applauded Until Her Body Shook”

May 7, 2014 in Excerpts, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

In 1981, William F. Buckley and Diana Trilling investigated the ramifications of the murder of Dr. Henry Tarnower by his longtime companion, Jean Harris, a slaying which awakened all sorts of emotions about the dynamics between men and women. It also said a la great deal about our justice system.

From “Jean Harris: Murder with Intent to Love,” the 1981 Time article by Walter Isaacson and James Wilde: “Prosecutor George Bolen, 34, was cold and indignant in his summation, insisting that jealousy over Tarnower‘s affair with his lab assistant, Lynne Tryforos, 38, was the motivating factor for murder. Argued Bolen: ‘There was dual intent, to take her own life, but also an intent to do something else . . . to punish Herman Tarnower . . . to kill him and keep him from LynneTryforos.’ Bolen ridiculed the notion that Harris fired her .32-cal. revolver by accident. He urged the jury to examine the gun while deliberating. Said he: ‘Try pulling the trigger. It has 14 pounds of pull. Just see how difficult it would be to pull, double action, four times by accident.’ Bolen, who was thought by his superiors to be too gentle when he cross-examined Harris earlier in the trial, showed little mercy as he painted a vivid picture of what he claims happened that night. He dramatically raised his hand in the defensive stance he says Tarnowerused when Harris pointed the gun at him. When the judge sustained an objection by Aurnou that Bolen‘s version went beyond the evidence presented, the taut Harris applauded until her body shook.”

 

“There Is A Lingering Sense Of Confusion About Why This Book In Particular Has Grabbed The Public’s Attention”

May 7, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

More on insta-famous economist Thomas Piketty, this time from Maxine Montaigne at the Conversation, who attempts to not argue the points of Capital in the Twenty-First Century but to explain the sensation. An excerpt:

“While almost everyone seems to agree that Piketty’s work is a valuable and timely contribution to the debate on inequality, there is a lingering sense of confusion about why this book in particular has grabbed the public’s attention. In order to understand this phenomenon, it might be helpful to look back a few hundred years, at the most famous dismal scientist of them all, T. R. Malthus.

Malthus was, and is still, famous for his slightly depressing comments on humanity’s inability to provide for a growing population. What is particularly interesting though is that despite these ideas not being hugely original or even very surprising, Malthus became something of a household name in the 19th century, at least more so than any other economist at that time.

One reason for Malthus’ unusual fame was simply good timing. At the beginning of the 19th century the British public were increasingly concerned with the overcrowding of Britain’s cities, and combined with decades of low agricultural wages and a damaging war with France it’s no surprise that Malthus’ pessimism struck a chord.

It’s easy to see the parallel with Thomas Piketty today, who many see as finally providing proof of capitalism’s inherent flaws as argued vocally by the Occupy movement. And once again the timing is everything; Piketty and his colleagues have been working on the World Top Incomes Database since well before the financial crisis and subsequent recessions, but his book now seems perfectly timed in response to growing public disenchantment with the theory of ‘trickle down’ economics.”

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“The Leg-up Helped”

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

Turning something modest into something more is admirable, but what if you lack even those small advantages at the outset? That can mean a world of difference. In many cases–most?– poor people are poor because they simply don’t have money, not because of some fault within themselves. From an Economist piece about a Stony Brook professor who made micro investments of different kinds:

“Dr van de Rijt designed a series of experiments intended to look at whether giving people an arbitrary advantage over their fellows at the beginning of an endeavour led to a significantly better outcome for those people. His first experiment tested the value of a donation to a project on Kickstarter, a crowdfunding website. His second boosted the reputations of reviewers on epinions.com, a product-recommendation site. His third enhanced the status of a test group of Wikipedia editors. And his fourth added signatures to petitions posted on change.org, a site at which political campaigners can lay out their wares.

In the case of Kickstarter, Dr van de Rijt picked 200 new and unfunded projects and gave half of them, chosen at random, either 1% or 10% of their stated target. Epinion editors are paid for their work according to how their contributions are rated by users, so Dr van de Rijt picked 305 new, unrated reviews and gave 155 of them, again chosen at random, a ‘very helpful’ rating—the highest of four possible categories. The most productive Wikipedia editors sometimes win status awards from the groups of users they serve. Dr van de Rijt conferred such awards on 208 out of 521 of the top 1% of these editors. And he added a dozen signatures to 100 out of 200 ‘virgin’ petitions on change.org.

In all four tests, the leg-up helped. In the case of Kickstarter, it helped a lot.“

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“Other Countries Have Shown Growing Interest In Making Unmanned Robot Technology As Deadly As Possible”

May 7, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

Drones don’t only depart by arrive also, something America hasn’t yet had to reckon with. But it’s only a matter of time until we have to wonder whether what’s being delivered is a book or a burrito or a bomb. From Patrick Tucker at Defense One:

“Virtually every country on Earth will be able to build or acquire drones capable of firing missiles within the next ten years. Armed aerial drones will be used for targeted killings, terrorism and the government suppression of civil unrest. What’s worse, say experts, it’s too late for the United States to do anything about it.

After the past decade’s explosive growth, it may seem that the U.S. is the only country with missile-carrying drones. In fact, the U.S. is losing interest in further developing armed drone technology. The military plans to spend $2.4 billion on unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs, in 2015. That’s down considerably from the $5.7 billion that the military requested in the 2013 budget. Other countries, conversely, have shown growing interest in making unmanned robot technology as deadly as possible.”

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“The World’s First Trillionaire Could Emerge Within Just 25 Years”

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

Perhaps relatively soon emerging markets and inflation will deliver to us the world’s first trillionaire, and I bet it won’t be someone who binge watches television. From Miranda Prynne at the Telegraph:

“The world’s first trillionaire could emerge within just 25 years, financial forecasters have claimed.

Bill Gates, the Microsoft founder and richest person on Earth, is expected by many to be the first to reach trillionaire status.

If the world’s greatest fortunes continue to grow at their current rate, boosted by the rapid wealth creation in emerging markets such as India and China then Gates or one of the planet’s super-rich elite could have a trillion dollars to their name by 2039, according to some predictions.”

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“Sun Ra Learned It Was Possible For The Chaos Of Human Knowledge To Be Ordered”

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

The wonderful 3 Quarks Daily pointed me to a Smart Set essay by Stefany Anne Golberg about the inimitable Sun Ra, who’s celebrating his centennial on Saturn. An excerpt:

“Sun Ra believed that the whole of humanity was in need of waking up. He wanted to slough off old ideas and habits, brush off sleepy clothing and shake off drowsy food. Because present time mattered little to Sun Ra, they say he rarely slept. Even as a child, he would spend all his time playing the piano or composing. ‘I loved music beyond the state of liking it,’ he once said. Sun Ra was just as obsessed with books — you couldn’t see the walls of his room for the books. Books contained words and the words held a secret code that, if unraveled, revealed truths about human existence. He read the ancient texts of Egyptians, Africans, Greeks, the works of Madame Helena P. Blavatsky (with whom he once shared the initials H.P.B), Rudolph Steiner, P.D. Ouspensky, James Joyce, C.F. Volney, Booker T. Washington. He read about the lost history of the American Negro and studied the origins of language. Sun Ra knew Biblical scripture better than any preacher, read Kabbalah concepts and Rosicrucian manifestos. Through these texts Sun Ra learned it was possible for the chaos of human knowledge to be ordered. Theosophy, relativity, mathematics, physics, history, music, magic, science fiction, Egyptology, technology — all were keys to a unified existence. Ideas and music carried a reclusive black boy from Birmingham and transported him into outer space. But the most important idea Sun Ra learned from all his reading, from all the knowledge he acquired, is how puny knowledge is in the face of the unknown. We need the unknown, Sun Ra said, in order to survive.”

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In 1971, the Arkestra leader visited Egypt and Sardinia.

In 1974, space was the place:

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“Our Times Are Potentially More Dangerous Than They May Appear”

May 6, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

In a Guardian article, that holy fool Slavoj Žižek argues that it’s the unwritten rules that make for a safe planet, and the new world order of the 21st century has torn that fabric, leaving a global village that’s disconnected on a social level. Hence, Russia invades Ukraine as the world tries to formulate a reaction to a former superpower trying to clumsily relive its past glory. An excerpt:

“The ‘American century’ is over, and we have entered a period in which multiple centres of global capitalism have been forming. In the US, Europe, China and maybe Latin America, too, capitalist systems have developed with specific twists: the US stands for neoliberal capitalism, Europe for what remains of the welfare state, China for authoritarian capitalism, Latin America for populist capitalism. After the attempt by the US to impose itself as the sole superpower – the universal policeman – failed, there is now the need to establish the rules of interaction between these local centres as regards their conflicting interests.

This is why our times are potentially more dangerous than they may appear. During the cold war, the rules of international behaviour were clear, guaranteed by the Mad-ness – mutually assured destruction – of the superpowers. When the Soviet Union violated these unwritten rules by invading Afghanistan, it paid dearly for this infringement. The war in Afghanistan was the beginning of its end. Today, the old and new superpowers are testing each other, trying to impose their own version of global rules, experimenting with them through proxies – which are, of course, other, small nations and states.”

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“Our Hostesses Wear Reversible Coats Of Almond Green And Apricot, Space Helmets To Keep Out The Rain, Red Spacesuits”

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

In 1965, Braniff Airlines unveiled Emilio Pucci-designed NASA-ish unis for flight attendants.

An excerpt from Pucci’s 1992 New York Times obituary: “Mr. Pucci, who was the Marchese di Barsento, was born in Naples, into an aristocratic Italian family. He lived and worked in the Pucci Palace in Florence.

An enthusiastic sportsman who was on the Italian Olympic ski team in 1932, he also raced cars and excelled in swimming, tennis and fencing. His emergence as a fashion designer happened somewhat accidentally.

He was an Italian bomber pilot in World War II and he continued in the air force after the war, holding the rank of captain. On leave in Switzerland in 1947, he was spotted on the ski slopes by Toni Frissel, a photographer, who was impressed by the snugness of his ski garb, which was custom made of stretch fabrics.

When photographs of Mr. Pucci in his skisuit appeared in Harper’s Bazaar, he was besieged by American manufacturers who wanted to produce it. He decided instead to market the ski clothes himself. They were among the first styles made of stretch fabrics, and Lord & Taylor was among the first to promote them.

By 1950, Mr. Pucci was at the forefront of the fledgling Italian fashion industry. His forte in the beginning was sports clothes, but he soon moved into other fashions, including brilliantly patterned silk scarves. Encouraged by Stanley Marcus, one of the owners of Neiman-Marcus, he began making blouses and then dresses of the patterned material.”

“It Achieved An Efficiency Of 2,824 Miles Per Gallon”

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

Two innovations that would disrupt markets, improve consumer experience and cause a great deal of unemployment. They are necessary improvements and they will hurt.

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Being able to get thousands of miles per gallon in cars would be the greatest triumph ever for environmentalism. Not close to reaching the market, however. From Belinda Lanks at Businessweek:

“A three-wheeled, teardrop-shaped car has won Shell’s (RDSA) Eco-marathon Americas competition, a yearly contest that pits teams of students against each other in a race to build energy-efficient vehicles.

The winning group, from Université Laval in Quebec, overcame technical setbacks, including excess friction short circuits, to achieve an efficiency of 2,824 miles per gallon. To put that in perspective, the prototype could travel from New York to Los Angeles on less than a gallon of fuel. And that figure is still well below the 3,587 miles per gallon the same school achieved last year. (Université Laval has won five out of the last six Shell competitions.)”

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Fancy soaps, shampoos and cosmetics have always been a hustle. Soon you can have a supply at the ready whenever you like, for a relative pittance. From Alyson Shontell at Business Insider:

“Grace Choi was at Harvard Business School when she decided to disrupt the beauty industry. She did a little research and realized that beauty brands create and then majorly mark up their products by mixing lots of colors.

‘The makeup industry makes a whole lot of money on a whole lot of bulls—,’ Choi said at TechCrunch Disrupt this week. ‘They charge a huge premium on something that tech provides for free. That one thing is color.’

By that, she means color printers are available to everyone, and the ink they have is the same as the ink that makeup companies use in their products. She says the ink is FDA-approved.

Choi created a mini home printer, Mink, that will retail for $300 and allow anyone to print makeup by ripping the color code off color photos on the internet.”

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“Sad To Say, There’s Method In Their Fraudulence”

May 5, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

Paul Krugman is concerned that the Affordable Care Act has been damaged by a concerted conservative effort to defame it with lies. I wonder if this will end up being a long-term concern. The greatest benefit, I think, of a decentralized media is that while politicized bullshit still works, it has a pretty short shelf life. The Republican playbook, in which coded language could sway the masses, doesn’t have much of a lasting impact in the Information Age. That’s not to say that the GOP won’t do well in midterm elections–that’s usually the way for the party out of the Oval Office. But Obamacare isn’t going away, and the Republicans are going to have a steep uphill climb in the next national election. From Krugman’s “Inventing a Failure“:

“Now comes the latest claim — that many of the people who signed up for insurance aren’t actually paying their premiums. Obviously this claim is part of a continuing pattern. It also, however, involves a change in tactics. Previous attacks on Obamacare were pretty much fact-free; this time the claim was backed by an actual survey purporting to show that a third of enrollees hadn’t paid their first premium.

But the survey was rigged. (Are you surprised?) It asked insurers how many enrollees had paid their first premium; it ignored the fact that the first premium wasn’t even due for the millions of people who signed up for insurance after March 15.

And the fact that the survey was so transparently rigged is a smoking gun, proving that the attacks on Obamacare aren’t just bogus; they’re deliberately bogus. The staffers who set up that survey knew enough about the numbers to skew them, which meant that they have to have known that Obamacare is actually doing O.K.

So why are Republicans doing this? Sad to say, there’s method in their fraudulence.

First of all, it fires up the base. After this latest exercise in deception, we can be fairly sure that Republican leaders know perfectly well that Obamacare has failed to fail. But the party faithful don’t. Like anyone who writes about these issues, I get vast amounts of mail from people who know, just know, that insurance premiums are skyrocketing, that far more people have lost insurance because of Obummercare than have gained it, that all the horror stories are real, and that anyone who says otherwise is just a liberal shill.

Beyond that, the constant harping on alleged failure works as innuendo even if each individual claim collapses in the face of evidence. A recent poll by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that a majority of Americans know that more than eight million people enrolled in health exchanges; but it also found a majority of respondents believing that this was below expectations, and that the law was working badly.”

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“Aging Is Just Another Disease”

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

Gerontologist/optimist Aubrey de Grey believes someone alive in 2014 will live to 1000 years old, and I bet it ends up being Donald Sterling. He’ll be 850 years old with a 600-year-old mistress because he likes them much, much younger.

Technology may be that close to (largely) defeating death or de Grey may see the future as almost being here when it’s still in the far distance. From Charlotte Allen at the Weekly Standard:

“The British-born de Grey, with a doctorate in biology from Cambridge, is also the single most colorful figure in the living-forever movement, where colorful figures generously abound. “I look as though I’m in my 30s,” he informed me after we settled, first into a cluttered conference room dominated by an enormous scribbled-over whiteboard, and then into a low-ceilinged lounge whose mélange of hard-bounce chairs and sofas looks as though it was scrounged from sidewalk discards. And maybe he does look that young, but it’s hard to tell, because his waist-length, waterfall-style beard​—​a de Grey trademark​—​gives him the look of an extremely spry Methuselah, who, according to the Bible, made it only to 969 years. De Grey is actually of the phenotype Ageless British Eccentric: English Rose cheeks, piercing blue eyes, and someone-please-make-him-a-sandwich slenderness; his tomato-red shirt and gray slacks hang from angular shoulders and legs. Bony frames that verge on gauntness are a hallmark of the living-forever movement, most of whose members hew to severe dietary restrictions in order to prolong their lives while they wait for science to catch up with death. De Grey, by contrast, claims to eat whatever he likes and also to drink massive quantities of carb-loaded English ale, working it all off by punting on the River Cam in the four months a year he spends doing research back at Cambridge. (During the rest of the year he lives in Los Gatos, a picturesque Victorian town in the Santa Cruz Mountains 14 miles southeast of Mountain View.)

De Grey subscribes to the reigning theory of the live-forever movement: that aging, the process by which living things ultimately wear themselves out and die, isn’t an inevitable part of the human condition. Instead, aging is just another disease, not really different in kind from any of the other serious ailments, such as heart failure or cancer, that kill us. And as with other diseases, de Grey believes that aging has a cure or series of cures that scientists will eventually discover. ‘Aging is a side effect of being alive,’ he said during our interview. ‘The human body is exactly the same as a car or an airplane. It’s a machine, and any machine, if you run it, will effect changes on itself that require repairs. Living systems have a great deal of capacity for self-repair, but over time some of those changes only accumulate very slowly, so we don’t notice them until we are very old.'”

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“The Ability To Recognize Faces Has Long Been A Benchmark For Artificial Intelligence”

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

You’re most likely already in the system, and it’s too late to opt out. All those profile photos, Instagrams and selfies aren’t just poses but also proof. You’ll never be a stranger again. Never. From Luke Dormehl’s Guardian article about facial recognition:

“This summer, Facebook will present a paper at a computer vision conference revealing how it has created a tool almost as accurate as the human brain when it comes to saying whether two photographs show the same person – regardless of changes in lighting and camera angles. A human being will get the answer correct 97.53% of the time; Facebook’s new technology scores an impressive 97.25%. ‘We closely approach human performance,’ says Yaniv Taigman, a member of its AI team.

Since the ability to recognise faces has long been a benchmark for artificial intelligence, developments such as Facebook’s ‘DeepFace’ technology (yes, that’s what it called it) raise big questions about the power of today’s facial recognition tools and what these mean for the future.

Facebook is not the only tech company interested in facial recognition. A patent published by Apple in March shows how the Cupertino company has investigated the possibility of using facial recognition as a security measure for unlocking its devices – identifying yourself to your iPhone could one day be as easy as snapping a quick selfie.

Google’s deepest dive into facial recognition is its Google Glass headsets. Thanks to the camera built into each device, the headsets would seem to be tailormade for recognising the people around you. That’s exactly what third-party developers thought as well, since almost as soon as the technology was announced, apps such as NameTag began springing up. NameTag’s idea was simple: that whenever you start a new conversation with a stranger, your Google Glass headset takes a photo of them and then uses this to check the person’s online profile. Whether they share your interest in Werner Herzog films, or happen to be a convicted sex offender, nothing will escape your gaze. ‘With NameTag, your photo shares you,’ the app’s site reads. ‘Don’t be a stranger.'”

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“There Are No Fundamental Limits To What Can Be Achieved”

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

Stephen Hawking thinks Artificial Intelligence might be the worst thing ever, unless, of course, it’s the best. (Perhaps it could be both?) Hawking certainly wouldn’t be alive without it. A lot of us wouldn’t be. From the physicist’s cautionary tale in the Independent:

“Artificial-intelligence (AI) research is now progressing rapidly. Recent landmarks such as self-driving cars, a computer winning at Jeopardy! and the digital personal assistants Siri, Google Now and Cortana are merely symptoms of an IT arms race fuelled by unprecedented investments and building on an increasingly mature theoretical foundation. Such achievements will probably pale against what the coming decades will bring.

The potential benefits are huge; everything that civilisation has to offer is a product of human intelligence; we cannot predict what we might achieve when this intelligence is magnified by the tools that AI may provide, but the eradication of war, disease, and poverty would be high on anyone’s list. Success in creating AI would be the biggest event in human history.

Unfortunately, it might also be the last, unless we learn how to avoid the risks. In the near term, world militaries are considering autonomous-weapon systems that can choose and eliminate targets; the UN and Human Rights Watch have advocated a treaty banning such weapons. In the medium term, as emphasised by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee in The Second Machine Age, AI may transform our economy to bring both great wealth and great dislocation.

Looking further ahead, there are no fundamental limits to what can be achieved.”

 

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“The Last Frontier Is In Our Heads”

May 4, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

Sometimes notions about Japan can be generalized too much, but it would be tough to argue that the population isn’t graying, nationalistic and homogenous. Further, its economic and diplomatic position in the world is uneasy, in part because of the rise of an open and ambitious China. Two exchanges from Hiroki Manabe’s new Asahi Shimbun interview with Joseph Caron, the former Canadian ambassador to Japan.

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“Question:

Do you have any recommendations for Japan in regards to dealing with China?

Joseph Caron:

This is where I see interesting parallels between Canada and Japan, even though the situations are very different. Canada was created in 1867, and Japan’s Meiji Restoration was in 1868. At almost the same time, we in Canada were faced with a continental country emerging from civil war and considering taking over the continent, while Japan had opened to an international environment that promised opportunity and threats.

Many Canadians did not like the idea of being closely associated with the U.S., because they themselves, their parents or grandparents were from Britain. Most Canadians even then lived within 100 kilometers of the U.S. border, so we had to find ways to adjust. It was a real struggle.

Similarly, Japan needs to find ways to adjust to its international situation with China. Japan, South Korea and every other country in the region has to contend with China. Japan is struggling with this reality. What we are seeing in China is what we saw from the United States from the 1880s through the 1920s. There are parallels in the kind of challenges Japan is facing.”

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“Question:

Why do you think young Japanese today are reluctant to go abroad?

Joseph Caron:

When I was in China I spoke at universities in both English and French, and I was blown away by the quality of the students I encountered. The students could clearly ask good questions in either English or French. In the same way, the next generation of Japanese have to become truly cosmopolitan.

Even though Japan has 127 million people, its population is shrinking, so the next generation is going to need greater skills and become truly international. The last frontier is in our heads. And one thing that can be done to bridge that final frontier is to have more Japanese students go abroad, and for more international students to go to Japan.”

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“He Expressed A Willingness To Take A Discount”

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

When I read the recent Businessweek profile of Boston Red Sox owner John Henry, it reminded me of something that drives me a little batty. In January, Sox pitcher Jon Lester said that he would take a “hometown discount” to remain with the team rather than trying to get fair market value. That’s a phrase your hear sometimes that overjoys many fans and sportswriters because the player is making a sacrifice for the organization, and by extension, the fans. But it’s ridiculous and bad economics.

Why exactly would Lester give a billionaire like Henry a hometown discount? If it’s in the player’s best interests to accept a lesser contract earlier because of fear of injury, so be it. But he should never take a “discount” to accommodate an owner. That’s just silly. If Henry doesn’t want to pay market value, that’s fine, it’s his decision, but he shouldn’t be given corporate welfare from a player any more than team owners should have their stadiums paid for in part by taxpayers. This isn’t 1904 and it’s not the Boston Beaneaters: Billionaires should have to navigate the free market like everyone else. From ESPN in January:

“Red Sox pitcher Jon Lester, who is eligible for free agency after the 2014 season, emphatically stated Thursday that his desire is to remain with Boston, and he expressed a willingness to take a discount in order to do so.

‘These guys are my No. 1 priority,’ Lester said during media availability at the Boston Baseball Writers’ Association of America awards dinner. ‘I want to be here ’til they rip this jersey off my back.

Lester said he not only expects to have to take a discount in order to sign an extension with the team, but he is willing to do so.

‘It’s like Pedey [Dustin Pedroia, Red Sox second baseman]. He left a lot of money on the table to stay here. That’s what he wanted to do. I understand that. That’s my choice, that’s his choice.'”

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“This First American Psychedelic Movement Began With An Anonymous Article Published In 1874”

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

Speaking of William James tripping at Harvard, here’s the opening of “The Nitrous Oxide Philosopher,” Dmitri Tymoczko’s 1996 Atlantic article about the philosopher’s experiments in alternate states of consciousness:

“He has short hair and a long brown beard. He is wearing a three-piece suit. One imagines him slumped over his desk, giggling helplessly. Pushed to one side is an apparatus out of a junior-high science experiment: a beaker containing some ammonium nitrate, a few inches of tubing, a cloth bag. Under one hand is a piece of paper, on which he has written, ‘That sounds like nonsense but it is pure on sense!’ He giggles a little more. The writing trails away. He holds his forehead in both hands. He is stoned. He is William James, the American psychologist and philosopher. And for the first time he feels that he is understanding religious mysticism.

The psychedelia of the 1960s was foreshadowed by events in the waning years of the nineteenth century. This first American psychedelic movement began with an anonymous article published in 1874 in The Atlantic Monthly. The article, which was in fact written by James, reviewed The Anaesthetic Revelation and the Gist of Philosophy, a pamphlet arguing that the secrets of religion and philosophy were to be found in the rush of nitrous oxide intoxication. Inspired by this thought, James experimented with the drug, experiencing extraordinary revelations that he immediately committed to paper.

What’s mistake but a kind of take?
What’s nausea but a kind of -ausea?
Sober, drunk, -unk , astonishment. . . .
Agreement–disagreement!!
Emotion–motion!!! . . .
Reconciliation of opposites; sober, drunk, all the same!
Good and evil reconciled in a laugh!
It escapes, it escapes!
But–
What escapes, WHAT escapes?

This experience, which in James’s words involved ‘the strongest emotion’ he had ever had, remained with him throughout his life. “

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“There Is Now An Almost Ceaseless Murmuring About The Future Of Narrative Prose”

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

The novel will be different, but it will be. And, no, it won’t again have the cultural primacy it once did–enjoyed by the minority but able to hold sway over the masses–but nothing in the culture will truly have primacy. It’s a free-for-all now. In most ways, that’s better. From Will Self’s Guardian article, “The Novel Is Dead (This Time It’s for Real)“:

“Literary critics – themselves a dying breed, a cause for considerable schadenfreude on the part of novelists – make all sorts of mistakes, but some of the most egregious ones result from an inability to think outside of the papery prison within which they conduct their lives’ work. They consider the codex. They are – in Marshall McLuhan’s memorable phrase – the possessors of Gutenberg minds.

There is now an almost ceaseless murmuring about the future of narrative prose. Most of it is at once Panglossian and melioristic: yes, experts assert, there’s no disputing the impact of digitised text on the whole culture of the codex; fewer paper books are being sold, newspapers fold, bookshops continue to close, libraries as well. But … but, well, there’s still no substitute for the experience of close reading as we’ve come to understand and appreciate it – the capacity to imagine entire worlds from parsing a few lines of text; the ability to achieve deep and meditative levels of absorption in others’ psyches. This circling of the wagons comes with a number of public-spirited campaigns: children are given free books; book bags are distributed with slogans on them urging readers to put books in them; books are hymned for their physical attributes – their heft, their appearance, their smell – as if they were the bodily correlates of all those Gutenberg minds, which, of course, they are.

The seeming realists among the Gutenbergers say such things as: well, clearly, books are going to become a minority technology, but the beau livre will survive. The populist Gutenbergers prate on about how digital texts linked to social media will allow readers to take part in a public conversation. What none of the Gutenbergers are able to countenance, because it is quite literally – for once the intensifier is justified – out of their minds, is that the advent of digital media is not simply destructive of the codex, but of the Gutenberg mind itself. There is one question alone that you must ask yourself in order to establish whether the serious novel will still retain cultural primacy and centrality in another 20 years. This is the question: if you accept that by then the vast majority of text will be read in digital form on devices linked to the web, do you also believe that those readers will voluntarily choose to disable that connectivity? If your answer to this is no, then the death of the novel is sealed out of your own mouth.”

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“It Is Not A Country’s Natural Resources But Its Capabilities To Generate More Productive Technologies That Determine Its Prosperity”

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

Economist Ha-Joon Chang, who’s authored the first title of the new Pelican imprint, explains the importance of anchovies and guano and technology, in a Financial Times diary post. An excerpt:

“Despite its small size, the anchovy is arguably the most important fish in the world. It is eaten in large quantities everywhere and in so many different ways: raw (a delicacy in some parts of Korea); dried (in Korea and Japan); cured (around the Mediterranean); fried (all over Asia, including India, Indonesia, and Korea); as fermented sauce (not just in Korea, Vietnam, or Thailand but also in ancient Rome – garum); and even drunk (all over the world, through the Worcester sauce in a Bloody Mary). Impressive though the culinary role it has played in so many different cultures may be, the anchovy’s economic role used to be even greater – at least in Peru.

In the mid-19th century, Peru had an economic boom based on the export of guano, namely, desiccated seabird droppings, deposited over thousands of years by cormorants and boobies, whose main food source was the anchovies migrating along the Pacific coast of South America. Rich in nitrate and phosphorous, guano was a highly prized fertiliser. It was also a key ingredient in the manufacture of gunpowder. This was a time when Europe and North America needed both fertiliser and gunpowder in large quantities.

Unfortunately, the guano boom came to an abrupt end in the early 20th century, when German scientist Fritz Haber, inventor of poison gases used in the first world war, developed a method of isolating nitrogen from the air to make ammonia, using high-voltage electricity. With this invention, the mass production of artificial fertiliser became possible, deposing guano from its throne in the fertiliser kingdom. The price of guano fell and Peru’s export earnings plummeted, dealing a huge blow to the economy.

The Peruvian story shows that it is not a country’s natural resources but its capabilities to generate more productive technologies that determine its prosperity; your natural resources may become far less valuable if others invent synthetic substitutes. Such technological capabilities are almost always acquired through industrialisation, which is why few countries have remained rich in the long run without successful industrialisation.”

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“This Would Provide Them With A Unique Selling Proposition In A Crowded Market”

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

After becoming an insta-celebrity for revealing a great rack in Robin Thicke’s unavoidable “Blurred Lines” video, model Emily Ratajkowski was asked what she’d like to do with her newfound fame. She didn’t hope to parlay it into a career as a pop star or leading lady. She declared, “I want to be a brand.” That’s a thing that not only companies, but people, aspire to now, hoping to sell themselves as much as a product. It’s not just the car you purchase, but also the driver in the commercial, in a sense. An excerpt from a new Economist piece about a recently deceased leader in the birthing of this unnatural phenomenon:

“Wally Olins started his career as an officer in one of these companies: as a history graduate of Oxford University he could, in those days, hardly be a private. He spent five years running Ogilvy & Mather’s office in Mumbai (and kept close ties with India for the rest of his life). But when he returned to England in the early 1960s he was disillusioned with his profession’s prevailing ideas. He decided to form a new company with a young designer called Michael Wolff. And he turned Wolff Olins into the command centre of a brand revolution.

He told his clients they needed to think more seriously about the collective identity of their organisation: if nurtured, this would provide them with a unique selling proposition in a crowded market, and an emotional connection to their customers. This changed both the focus of advertising and the relationship between the admen and their clients. Brand-building, Mr Olins saw, is not just an add-on which the company can buy when it wants to launch a new product. It is an integral part of its long-term strategy that guides the sort of products it rolls out.

Mr Olins spent the rest of his life broadening and deepening this insight.”

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“Bitcoin Is A Mad, Technoutopian Fever Dream That Will End In Tears, If It Hasn’t Already”

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

Do those working on Wall Street really have to break the law to do things they shouldn’t, things that can hurt us all? It seems like money influencing elected (and non-elected) officials can make malfeasance beyond prosecution–legal, even. And because rules governing such behaviors are so complicated, if you’re not working in that industry or reporting on it, you really don’t have the time to understand the fine print. That allows enough wiggle room to bring down an economy. Jesse Eisinger, Pulitzer Prize-winning financial reporter, tried to break down big finance during an Ask Me Anything at Reddit. A few exchanges follow.

___________________________

Question:

Is the criminal behavior limited to theft/fraud, or are there specific types of financial transactions corporations engage in that are/should be outlawed?

Jesse Eisinger:

Fraud writ large yes. There were many misrepresentations to the public that I think were worth deeper, more aggressive investigation. I write about the Lehman Brothers executives’ representations of their liquidity in the weeks and months leading up to their collapse, which was clearly factually and materially inaccurate. Did they know it at the time? I don’t believe the DoJ adequately investigated that question. And Lehman isn’t alone.

___________________________

Question:

What do you foresee as the next bubble/crisis? What can be done now to stop it?

Jesse Eisinger:

Always dangerous to predict the next bubble. But we have febrile debt markets now, with junk bonds yielding too little for the risks. We are starting to see M&A overheat. Tech and biotech stocks sported absurd valuations, esp earlier this year. Greek sovereign debt seems to have recovered way too much. We have bubbly pockets almost everywhere in the capital markets. I would worry about China and the European banks as the nexus of the next crisis.

__________________________

Question:

What would you consider the biggest mistake of your career?

Jesse Eisinger:

I have made so many mistakes, I’ve given speeches about them. Fortunately, I’ve never made the kind of huge factual error that meant the story required retraction. Thank God.

One of my best stories was also one of my biggest mistakes. In Oct 2007, I wrote for Conde Nast Portfolio that the Wall Street investment banks were going to fail. I wrote that it would be Bear Stearns first, then Lehman Bros, and maybe even Merrill, Morgan Stanley and even Goldman. Pretty good, right? But I didn’t follow up on it, probe deeper, write more. So I kind of blew the opportunity of a lifetime to really own the story of the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression. Oh well.

___________________________

Question:

What are your thoughts on Bitcoin and its potential to eliminate the socialization of risk by the taxpayer that corporations have taken advantage of?

Jesse Eisinger:

Bitcoin is a mad, technoutopian fever dream that will end in tears, if it hasn’t already.•

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“People Either Got That Joke Or They Didn’t”

May 1, 2014 in Excerpts | Permalink

Speaking of the original Saturday Night Live, I’ve always been fascinated by the dark powers of the late, great Michael O’Donoghue, television’s Torquemada, who was the show’s first head writer. On the Playboy site, Paul Slansky recalls his 1983 article about Mr. Mike, published when the comic decided to deliver himself into the warm embrace of Hollywood, when the man consumed by mass murderers wished go mainstream, something which could never, ever have worked. An excerpt:

“O’Donoghue, as any serious comedy fan knows, was present at the creation of the two dominant comic institutions of the Seventies: the National Lampoon and Saturday Night Live. As a performer on the latter, he clawed his way into the national psyche with his ‘impressions’ of how Mike Douglas, Tony Orlando, Elvis Presley and the Mormon Tabernacle Choir might react if 18-inch-long steel needles were suddenly plunged into their eyes. As it happened, they all reacted pretty much the same way—by flailing violently about the stage, clutching at their eyes and emitting bloodcurdling shrieks of pain.

O’Donoghue quickly became known as the sicko of Seventies comedy, the only man who set out to disturb his audience on such a primal level—needles in eyes, for God’s sake!—and then dared them to laugh anyway. ‘People either got that joke or they didn’t,’ he has said. ‘There wasn’t anybody who said, ‘Well, I sort of liked it.”

Then came the creepy Mr. Mike and his ‘Least Loved Bedtime Stories.’ Describing the grisly demise of a soft, furry animal, lingering fondly over a particularly gruesome detail, Mr. Mike was obviously no stranger to madness. Again, the challenge to the audience: Is this too scary for you? How about a photo album called The Vietnamese Baby Book? Wanna hear a song called Cancer for Christmas?

‘People often attack me for my black humor,’ O’Donoghue told an interviewer a few years ago. ‘Now, if I were immortal, then it would be unethical for me to make fun of these pathetic human beings who have coronaries and pitch forward and piss blood on the rug. But, as it happens, I’m one of them, and it’s gonna happen to me also, so I feel I have a perfect right to rant about whatever I want.’

Now, after years of trying to get his emotional life into some semblance of order, O’Donoghue is ready to play the game. He wants to hear his rants echoing throughout the pop culture, to become widely known as the genius his friends and fans have long believed him to be. He also wants to make a lot of money. With his remaining hair cut severely short, his eyes inaccessible behind ice-blue reflecting glasses and his skeletal six-foot frame somehow conveying both extreme fragility and enormous strength, O’Donoghue will cut a striking figure in the Hollywood community.

He is already making his presence felt. Single Women, his mordant country song about the pickup-bar scene, was a big hit for Dolly Parton and is soon to be a made-for-TV movie. He is creating a Twilight Zone clone called Factory of Fear for cable television. And he is co-writing and directing a sequel to a movie most people thought was unsequelable, Easy Rider, in which he intends to bring Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda back from the dead for one last bike ride through an America in ruins.”

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“This Man’s Been Run Over By A Steamroller”

May 1, 2014 in Excerpts, Videos | Permalink

Sad to hear the passing of Al Feldstein, who edited Mad magazine for William M. Gaines during its glory years. He launched a million gags at parents, teachers, advertisers, politicians, capitalists and militarists. Below is a 1974 unaired pilot of a Mad TV spin-off that was deemed too crude to broadcast though it was far from vulgar.

Shows you how groundbreaking SNL was the following year. No more suggesting irreverence on TV. Nor more winking or nodding like Laugh-In. No more innuendos or “betting your sweet bippy.” The real deal in your living room at last.

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“Taking Utter Delight In Others’ Physical Misfortune Was Finally Frowned Upon”

April 30, 2014 in Excerpts, Urban Studies | Permalink

The freak show, that alluringly lurid exhibition and moral abomination, with its bearded ladies, conjoined twins and hunger artists, seemed to die a slow and necessary death in the 20th century. But did it, really? While disabilities rights closed the sideshow tent (except for a few remnants like Howard Stern’s radio show), reality TV has allowed for the commodification of the emotionally troubled and hopelessly addicted, their afflictions on the inside but just as real, their drama sold to titillate, distract and make observers feel superior. It’s the dime museum in the age of the bitcoin. From Zachary Crockett’s Priceonomics piece “The Rise and Fall of Circus Freakshows“:

“By the 1890s, freakshows began to wane in popularity; by 1950, they had nearly vanished.

For one, curiosity and mystery were quelled by advances in medicine: so-called ‘freaks’ were now diagnosed with real, scientifically-explained diagnoses. The shows lost their luster as physical and medical conditions were no longer touted as miraculous and the fanciful stories told by showmen were increasingly discredited by hard science. As spectators became more aware of the grave nature of the performers’ conditions, wonder was replaced by pity.

Movies and television, both of which rose to prominence in the early 20th century, offered other forms of entertainment and quenched society’s demand for oddities. People could see wild and astonishing things from the comfort of a theatre or home (by the 1920s), and were less inclined to spend money on live shows. Media also made realities more accessible, further discrediting the stories showmen told: for instance, in a film, audience members could see that the people of Borneo weren’t actually as savage as advertised by P.T. Barnum.

But the true death chime of the freakshow was the rise of disability rights. Simply put, taking utter delight in others’ physical misfortune was finally frowned upon.”

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“A Repeat Of the Keynesian Era Is Unlikely”

April 30, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

Have not yet read Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century, so I have to reserve judgement, though I’m always skeptical about anyone who believes they’ve cracked the code of economics, which, like nature, seems almost beyond understanding–just too many variables and black swans. But I’m still looking forward to it. Here’s an excerpt from Paul Mason at the Guardian explaining why the economist believes the relative equality of the postwar period is unlikely to recur:

“For Piketty, the long, mid-20th century period of rising equality was a blip, produced by the exigencies of war, the power of organised labour, the need for high taxation, and by demographics and technical innovation.

Put crudely, if growth is high and the returns on capital can be suppressed, you can have a more equal capitalism. But, says Piketty, a repeat of the Keynesian era is unlikely: labour is too weak, technological innovation too slow, the global power of capital too great. In addition, the legitimacy of this unequal system is high: because it has found ways to spread the wealth down to the managerial class in a way the early 19th century did not.

If he is right, the implications for capitalism are utterly negative: we face a low-growth capitalism, combined with high levels of inequality and low levels of social mobility. If you are not born into wealth to start with, life, for even for the best educated, will be like Jane Eyre without Mr Rochester.”

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