Excerpts

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“Do You Want To Know Something Completely Archaic And Silly?”

April 30, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Sports | Permalink

Baseball’s All-Star Game voting uses the latest technology: Paper ballots are carried by Pony Express to the General Store where they’re calculated on an abacus. Commissioner Selig then reads the results which are recorded onto a wax cylinder and played from a talking machine over the wireless. It’s a big improvement from when Charles Lindbergh used to barnstorm American cities in his aeroplane and drop leaflets with the tabulations over ballyards. From Phil Mackey at ESPN:

“But do you want to know something completely archaic and silly?

Chris Colabello — one of baseball’s best run producers through the first 30 days this season — isn’t even on Major League Baseball’s All-Star ballot.

Go ahead and take a look for yourself.

Josh Willingham, despite having played only a handful of games due to injury, is on it. So is Pedro Florimon, whose slugging percentage (.173) is lower than his weight (180).

The Colabello omission is more of a knock on MLB’s often archaic thinking than it is on the Twins.

Here’s how the process works: During the early part of spring training, each MLB front office submits projected starters at each position. Twins assistant GM Rob Antony, who was in charge of this process for the Twins, listed Joe Mauer as the first baseman, Oswaldo Arcia, Aaron Hicks and Willingham as the outfielders, and Jason Kubel as the DH. This is what they projected at the time, and if not for injuries to Arcia and Willingham, it’s possible Colabello wouldn’t have nearly as many at-bats.

OK, that’s fine. But why can’t MLB adjust the ballot on the fly? Presumably because they already printed out millions of hanging-chad paper ballots to be distributed throughout ballparks in an era where two out of every three adults owns a smartphone in this country.

MLB can’t simply add Colabello to the online ballot?

‘Well no, that’s not the way we’ve always done it…’

We have apps on our smartphones that allow us to record high-definition videos, we have apps that allow us to cash checks, we have apps that allow us to make dinner and movie reservations, and we have apps that essentially replace TVs, radios and books.

Yet, if we want to send Colabello to the All-Star Game at Target Field, we need to write his name in the old-fashioned way…”

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“He Predicts That Google Is Seeking To Develop Computers That Can Serve As Butlers In The Home”

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

From the Asahi Shimbun, more perspective on Google’s recent interest in Japanese robotics:

“While the future plans of Google are not totally clear, the company apparently wants to incorporate all future-generation robotic technology. Google Chairman Eric Schmidt has written about a future in which each U.S. household owns several multifunction robots.

Norio Murakami, who once served as the head of the Japanese arm of Google, predicts that Google is seeking to develop computers that can serve as butlers in the home.

Those robots would find answers over the Internet to questions raised by its master as well as perform such tasks as cleaning and cooking.

In 2011, Google proposed technology that it called cloud robotics. Under that concept, robots in households and factories would be connected to a gigantic brain in cyberspace. That would mean nothing short of Google controlling the brains used in all robots.

The idea clashes somewhat with mainstream thinking in Japan, where robots have primarily been considered as a manufacturing tool.

Changing demographics also place greater expectations on robots.

Rodney Brooks, a co-founder of U.S.-based iRobot Corp., noted that many advanced nations face a growing population of senior citizens and a declining number of young people. He said robots hold the key for resolving manpower problems such as how to inspect and repair social infrastructure, especially in Japan.”

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“Any Amateur Could Take A Shot At Glory By Taking A Punch From The Best Fighter In The World”

April 30, 2014 in Excerpts, Sports, Urban Studies | Permalink

John L. Sullivan wanted to fight John Q. Public and vice versa. The boxing icon couldn’t get his mustache trimmed without some galoot taking a swing at him, so in the early 1880s the pugilist toured the country on an ass-kicking expedition. From Christopher Klein at the Public Domain Review:

“After imbibing the adulation inside his saloon on the evening of September 26, 1883, the hard-hitting, hard-drinking Sullivan waded through the throng of fawning fans outside and stepped into a waiting carriage that sprinted him away to a waiting train. The man who had captured the heavyweight championship nineteen months prior had departed on many journeys before, but no man had ever set out on such an ambitious adventure as the one he was about to undertake.

For the next eight months, Sullivan would circle the United States with a troupe of the world’s top professional fighters. In nearly 150 locales, John L. would spar with his fellow pugilists but also present a sensational novelty act worthy of his contemporary, the showman P.T. Barnum. The reigning heavyweight champion would offer as much as $1,000 ($24,000 in today’s dollars when chained to the Consumer Price Index) to any man who could enter the ring with him and simply remain standing after four three-minute rounds.

The ‘Great John L.’ was challenging America to a fight.

Sullivan’s transcontinental ‘knocking out’ tour was gloriously American in its audacity and concept. Its democratic appeal was undeniable: Any amateur could take a shot at glory by taking a punch from the best fighter in the world. Furthermore, the challenge, given its implicit braggadocio that defeating John L. in four rounds was a universal improbability, was an extraordinary statement of supreme self-confidence from a twenty-four-year-old who supposedly bellowed his own declaration of independence: ‘My name is John L. Sullivan, and I can lick any son-of-a-bitch alive!'”

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“This, After All, Has Become The Richest Nation In The World”

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

No one should confuse the challenges of abundance with those of poverty, but Qatar, which has no true winter but a good deal of discontent, is a great case study in human psychology. When the earth unexpectedly offers up everything we could ever want, does it become clear that what we need is something else? From Matthew Teller in BBC Magazine:

“From desperate poverty less than a century ago, this, after all, has become the richest nation in the world, with an average per-capita income topping $100,000 (£60,000).

What’s less well understood is the impact of such rapid change on Qatari society itself.

You can feel the pressure in Doha. The city is a building site, with whole districts either under construction or being demolished for redevelopment. Constantly snarled traffic adds hours to the working week, fuelling stress and impatience.

Local media report that 40% of Qatari marriages now end in divorce. More than two-thirds of Qataris, adults and children, are obese.

Qataris benefit from free education, free healthcare, job guarantees, grants for housing, even free water and electricity, but abundance has created its own problems.

‘It’s bewildering for students to graduate and be faced with 20 job offers,’ one academic at an American university campus in Qatar tells me. ‘People feel an overwhelming pressure to make the right decision.’

In a society where Qataris are outnumbered roughly seven-to-one by expatriates, long-term residents speak of a growing frustration among graduates that they are being fobbed off with sinecures while the most satisfying jobs go to foreigners.

The sense is deepening that, in the rush for development, something important has been lost.”

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“I Am As Embarrassed By The New Atheists As Many Christians Are Embarrassed By The Evangelical Fundamentalists”

April 29, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

The Philosopher’s Beard has its facial hair in a knot over the prominence of New Atheism. The opening of an essay assailing the evangelical strain of the seeming non-evangelical:

“The New Atheist movement that has developed from the mid 2000s around the ‘four horsemen of the apocalypse’ – Hitchens, Dennett, Harris, Dawkins, and various other pundits, has had a tremendous public impact. Godlessness has never had a higher public profile. How wonderful for unbelievers like me? Hardly. I am as embarrassed by the New Atheists as many Christians are embarrassed by the evangelical fundamentalists who appoint themselves the representatives of Christianity.

It has often been noted that the New Atheist movement has contributed no original arguments or ideas to the debate about religion. But the situation is worse than this. The main achievement of New Atheism – what defines it as a more or less coherent movement – is its promulgation of a particular version of atheism that is quasi-religious, scientistic, and sectarian. New Atheism been so successful in redefining what atheism means that I find I must reject it as an identity. My unbelief is apathetic and simply follows from my materialism – I don’t see why I should care about the non-existence of gods. What the New Atheists call ‘rationality’ is an impoverished way of understanding the world that excludes meanings and values. At the political level, the struggle for secularism requires more liberalism, not more atheism.”

“Christ, Lincoln, Hitler”

April 29, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Sports | Permalink

Larry King, who continues, just did an Ask Me Anything at Reddit. Three exchanges follow; the JFK anecdote might be true or it might be a tall tale like a lot of King’s yarns.

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Question:

If you could interview just one person from world history, who would it be and why?

Larry King:

Currently living it would be Fidel Castro. From World History, Christ, Lincoln, Hitler.

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Question:

What do you think about the Donald Sterling decision the commissioner just made?

Larry King:

I completely agree with what Adam Silver did today. He was outstanding. I am a Clipper fan, I wasn’t going to let my children go to the game tonight, but now they will go. I know Donald Sterling, I’m embarrassed for him, I like his wife very much and she deserves better. This was a great decision. Great for the league, great for society. This is a historic day. Go Clippers!

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Question:

Larry, I read that you once crashed your car into John F. Kennedy before he was President. What’s the story behind this?

Larry King:

It was a Sunday morning, and I was a young disc jockey in Miami Beach. Me and 3 friends of mine were going to drive up to Palm Beach, in 1958, we rolled up to Palm Beach in a convertible, I was driving, and it was a beautiful Sunday morning. And I was looking up, looking at all the beautiful homes, and suddenly I bumped into a car stopped at a red light. I was only going about 10 miles an hour. The guy in the car jumped out, walked over to me, and said “how could you hit me!? there’s nobody on the road, it’s a beautiful day, how could you hit me?!” and I said “I’m sorry, we were looking up, I apologize, do you want my license.” And he said “no, I’m Senator Kennedy, I’m going to run for President in 2 years, and I want the 4 of you to raise your hands and swear you’ll vote for me.” Which we did. So that’s the story.

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“What Brings Them Together Is A Common Belief That Government Is The Opposite Of Freedom”

April 29, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

Nothing chills my heart more than listening to two hardcore Libertarians discuss how things should be. They seem blissfully unaware that their ideology would devastate so many people, and they get very whiny when you point this out. And they love discussing unintended consequences, as if it were the greatest evil. It’s just an excuse to never try to improve things and pretend ownership of the moral high ground. 

From “A Libertarian Utopia,” Livian Gershon’s Aeon article about those aspiring to create a laissez-faire Shangri-La in New Hampshire, if they can ever come to a consensus among themselves:

“If you really want to talk about what it means to oppose the government, the place to start isn’t with Republicans. It’s with the one group in the US political landscape that absolutely promises to take our rhetoric about freedom seriously: libertarians. Libertarians really do believe that government is the problem, as Ronald Reagan said back in 1981, and they’ve decided to get rid of it, or at least shrink it dramatically.

Enter Liberty Forum – an annual conference organised by the Free State Project, a group of activists who are trying to get 20,000 libertarians to move to the state of New Hampshire, where I live. These are people who gladly pit themselves not just against the welfare state or the regulation of business, but against military spending, state-funded schools, federal highways and government-issued money.

The Free State Project began life in 2001 with a call-to-arms by Jason Sorens, then a political science PhD student at Yale. Sorens suggested that a few thousand activists could radically change the political balance in the small state. ‘Once we’ve taken over the state government, we can slash state and local budgets, which make up a sizeable proportion of the tax and regulatory burden we face every day,’ he wrote. ‘Furthermore, we can eliminate substantial federal interference by refusing to take highway funds and the strings attached to them.’

Sorens’ views — which focus on problems with taxes and regulations and don’t dispute the government’s role in protecting commerce and conducting foreign policy – suggest a more-Republican-than-the-Republicans sort of outlook. But some people who’ve responded to his call subscribe to an entirely different ideology: an anarchism that sees government as a tool of wealthy capitalists. The rest fall somewhere in between. Free Staters say that what brings them together is a common belief that government is the opposite of freedom.”

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“There’s Not A Single Aspect Of Human Life That Doesn’t Have The Potential To Be Totally Transformed By These Technologies”

April 29, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Videos | Permalink

An excerpt from Richard C. Lewontin’s just-published New York of Review of Books piece “The New Synthetic Biology: Who Gains?” which looks at recent writing on the field, which will not ultimately be contained by regulation and will be messy:

“In modern times Craig Venter, the head of the J. Craig Venter Institute, announced the creation of a living, functioning, self-reproducing artificial bacterial cell containing a laboratory-produced DNA sequence that, according to Laurie Garrett’s Foreign Affairs essay ‘Biology’s Brave New World,‘ ‘moved, ate, breathed, and replicated itself.’

An element that was not yet present in the early-nineteenth-century interest in the artificial creation of life was the possibility of great financial profit. Biotechnology was still a century and a half in the future. Garrett characterizes Venter not only as the most powerful man in biotechnology but as the richest. The J. Craig Venter Institute has already worked with fuel companies and the pharmaceutical industry to create microorganisms that could produce new fuels and vaccines.

What did concern those in the nineteenth century who imagined the possibility of the artificial creation of life, a concern that is at the core of Shelley’s Frankenstein, is the nemesis that is the inevitable consequence of the creators’ hubris. We now face the same problem on a huge scale. In an interview in 2009, quoted by Garrett, Venter declared, ‘There’s not a single aspect of human life that doesn’t have the potential to be totally transformed by these technologies in the future.’ Not a single aspect! Does that mean he is promising me that I might literally live forever?

Nothing in history suggests that those who control and profit from material production can really be depended upon to devote the needed foresight, creativity, and energy to protect us from the possible negative effects of synthetic biology. In cases where there is a conflict between the immediate and the long-range consequences or between public and private good, how can that conflict be resolved? Can the state be counted on to intervene when a private motivation conflicts with public benefit, and who will intervene when the state itself threatens the safety and general welfare of its citizens? Garrett provides a frightening real-life example.

In 2011 two scientists, one from Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam and one from the University of Wisconsin, independently reported that they had turned a bird flu virus, H5N1, which could very occasionally be transmitted from birds to humans, causing their death in about 60 percent of cases, into a strain that could be directly passed easily between laboratory mammals. Were this virus then capable of infecting humans, a catastrophe would occur, judging from the infamous flu epidemic of 1918, which killed more than 50 million people, about 2.5 percent of the world’s population.”

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Frost-Venter, 2012:

 

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“The Computer Will Be Unbeatable In Five Or 10 Years”

April 28, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Sports | Permalink

Excerpts from two Sports Illustrated articles about Garry Kasparov tangling with Deep Blue: Th first is a jokey piece supposedly written by the IBM chess computer itself after losing a five-game series to the Russian in 1996, and the second is a matter-of-fact declaration of the rise of the machines in 1997, when the laughter stopped for good.

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From “I Was a Just a Pawn!” February 26, 1996:

“When I was just a chip, my motherboard used to tell me, ‘D.B., if you can’t process something nice, don’t process it at all.’ But Mom never went through what I went through last week, when world chess champion Garry Kasparov humiliated me, an IBM supercomputer, four games to two.

All week I kept hearing these grandmasters and chess nerds saying, ‘Deep Blue’s advantage is that he doesn’t feel pressure, emotion or anxiety.’ Yeah, right. I’d like them to spend a week in my outlet. You want pressure? It took six years to build me, man! They had a five-person team doing nothing but programming me for this one match. I can consider 200 million moves in one second! Kasparov can do, what, one, maybe two? IBM does not put five guys on a project for six years and expect to lose. That’s how you end up at the employee Montessori, with kids sticking jelly doughnuts in your serial ports.

I can hear all the snickering around the office now. I hear the other mainframes calling me Deep Blue It and whispering about how, any day now, the guys in the white coats are going to come and give me the big drag-and-drop. I’ll tell you what: If I had coasters, I’d get over there and teach them all about megahurts.

Sure, I lost, but how come nobody ever mentions that no computer had ever won one single regulation game from a world chess champion before I did? I won the first game from Kasparov. Stick that in your hi-memory! And how about the fact that I wasn’t even in the room with Kasparov the whole match. I wasn’t! They made me stay in this crummy room in Yorktown Heights, N.Y., while some little guy in Philadelphia typed Kasparov’s moves into a desktop and fed them to me through a phone line. Let me ask you this: How good would Troy Aikman be if he had to read defenses from some Marriott 800 miles away? You talk about mo-dumbs.”

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From “Tangled Up in Blue,” May 19, 1997:

“In his 12-year reign as world chess champion, Garry Kasparov has earned a reputation for both brilliance and aggressiveness. He is widely considered the greatest player in history. But on Sunday afternoon, after resigning the sixth and deciding game of his match with the IBM supercomputer known as Deep Blue, Kasparov sat slumped and glassy-eyed as he awaited questions in a midtown Manhattan ballroom. ‘He looks like a DMV photo,’ cracked international master Mike Valvo.

Kasparov’s capitulation shocked everyone, coming just one hour into a game that he needed to draw in order to tie the match. Things had gone much differently 15 months ago, when Kasparov defeated an earlier version of Deep Blue 4-2 in Philadelphia. But since then IBM’s computer scientists had enlisted the help of four grandmasters, and this latest teaming of technology and human intelligence threw Kasparov some curves. In Game 5, for example, no one anticipated that with one of Kasparov’s pawns poised to reach the last file and become a queen, Deep Blue would simply ignore it and launch an attack with its own king. That stunning shift of focus set up a perpetual check and forced Kasparov to offer a draw.

‘The computer will be unbeatable in five or 10 years,’ says Frederick Friedel, an expert on artificial intelligence and computer chess who served as one of Kasparov’s seconds. ‘Garry will understand much more about chess, but he will still lose because he will make mistakes.'”

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“What Looks Chaotic And Random On A City Street To The Human Eye Is Actually Fairly Predictable To A Computer”

April 28, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Elon Musk recently stated that in the near term, only 90% of driving can be completely autonomous. Judging by a new post on the Google blog, that company is consumed by the other 10%. An excerpt:

“Jaywalking pedestrians. Cars lurching out of hidden driveways. Double-parked delivery trucks blocking your lane and your view. At a busy time of day, a typical city street can leave even experienced drivers sweaty-palmed and irritable. We all dream of a world in which city centers are freed of congestion from cars circling for parking (PDF) and have fewer intersections made dangerous by distracted drivers. That’s why over the last year we’ve shifted the focus of the Google self-driving car project onto mastering city street driving.

Since our last update, we’ve logged thousands of miles on the streets of our hometown of Mountain View, Calif. A mile of city driving is much more complex than a mile of freeway driving, with hundreds of different objects moving according to different rules of the road in a small area. We’ve improved our software so it can detect hundreds of distinct objects simultaneously—pedestrians, buses, a stop sign held up by a crossing guard, or a cyclist making gestures that indicate a possible turn. A self-driving vehicle can pay attention to all of these things in a way that a human physically can’t—and it never gets tired or distracted.

As it turns out, what looks chaotic and random on a city street to the human eye is actually fairly predictable to a computer. As we’ve encountered thousands of different situations, we’ve built software models of what to expect, from the likely (a car stopping at a red light) to the unlikely (blowing through it). We still have lots of problems to solve, including teaching the car to drive more streets in Mountain View before we tackle another town, but thousands of situations on city streets that would have stumped us two years ago can now be navigated autonomously.”

“He Also Hopes His Printers Can Be Used To Build Skyscrapers In The Future”

April 28, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

BBC is reporting that the Chinese firm WinSun has built giant 3D printers which can create 10 concrete houses in a day. They’re admittedly not glorious living or anything, but it’s still impressive. An excerpt:

“The cheap materials used during the printing process and the lack of manual labour means that each house can be printed for under $5,000, the 3dprinterplans website says.

‘We can print buildings to any digital design our customers bring us. It’s fast and cheap,’ says WinSun chief executive Ma Yihe. He also hopes his printers can be used to build skyscrapers in the future. At the moment, however, Chinese construction regulations do not allow multi-storey 3D-printed houses, Xinhua says.”

“Pelicans Hugely Influenced The Nation’s Intellectual Culture”

April 28, 2014 in Books, Excerpts | Permalink

Of the handful of new titles coming this May from the revived line of Pelican Books, the one I’m most excited about is The Domesticated Brain by the experimental psychologist Bruce Hood. The beloved publisher of inexpensive, high-minded titles for the masses is the subject of a Guardian piece by Paul Laity. An excerpt:

“It was the beginning of an illustrious era. Nearly 3,000 Pelicans took flight during the following five decades, covering a huge range of subjects: many were specially commissioned, most were paperback versions of already published titles. They were crisply and brilliantly designed and fitted in a back pocket. And they sold, in total, an astonishing 250m copies. Editions of 50,000, even for not obvious bestsellers, were standard: a 1952 study of the Hittites – the ancient Anatolian people – quickly sold out and continued in print for many years. (These days a publisher would be delighted if such a book made it to 2,000.) The Greeks by HDF Kitto sold 1.3m copies; Facts from Figures, ‘a layman’s introduction to statistics,’ sold 600,000. Many got to the few hundred thousand mark.

‘The Pelican books bid fair,’ Lane wrote in 1938, ‘to become the true everyman’s library of the 20th century … bringing the finest products of modern thought and art to the people.] They pretty much succeeded. Some were, as their publisher admitted, ‘heavy going’ and a few were rather esoteric (Hydroponics, anyone?). But in their heyday Pelicans hugely influenced the nation’s intellectual culture: they comprised a kind of home university for an army of autodidacts, aspirant culture-vultures and social radicals.

In retrospect, the whole venture seems linked to a perception of social improvement and political possibility. Pelicans helped bring Labour to power in 1945, cornered the market in the new cultural studies, introduced millions to the ideas of anthropology and sociology, and provided much of the reading matter for the sexual and political upheavals of the late 60s and early 70s.

The film writer David Thomson, who worked as an editor at Penguin in the 60s, has recalled that as an employee ‘you could honestly believe you were doing the work of God … we were bringing education to the nation; we were the cool colours on the shelves of a generation.’ It was all to do ‘with that excited sense that the country might be changing.”

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“Winning In Baseball Is Becoming A Lot Like Winning In Futures Trading”

April 27, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Sports | Permalink

From Joshua Green’s Businessweek profile of Boston Red Sox savior John Henry, a thumbnail sketch of the owner who initially married a Moneyball mentality to a big-market budget and has since overseen the franchise as its remade itself as a relatively austere and even more analytical organization:

“For so prominent a figure, Henry is a bit of a mystery. He limits contact with the press and, when he does communicate, prefers e-mail. In person, he’s so reserved that it often appears as if he’s working out a difficult algebraic formula in his head. Which is what he may, in fact, be doing. ‘He’s the most mathematically talented person I’ve ever met,’ says Lucchino, the team’s co-owner and chief executive officer. ‘I think that element of the game very much appeals to him. And he’s a competitive guy. He wants to win. He wants to measure his success. When you put it all together, he’s got more dimensions than most baseball owners.’

As different as he may seem, Henry captures baseball’s current era. A mathematical whiz who made a fortune as a pioneering trader of commodities futures, he’s part of a wave of owners from the financial world that’s sweeping professional sports. In baseball, this includes Tampa Bay Rays owner Stuart Sternberg, a former Goldman Sachs partner, and Milwaukee Brewers owner Mark Attanasio, founder of the investment firm Crescent Capital Group. All are keenly attuned to the statistical revolution that has upended the game and compete as vigorously against each other as anyone on Wall Street. Last year, Henry shut down his commodities trading firm to concentrate on his many other endeavors. In addition to the Globe (where I’m a contributor), he and his partners own the English Premier League soccer team Liverpool and a stake in Nascar’s Roush Fenway Racing team. But just as his trading algorithms did, baseball has furnished him with the most spectacular payoffs.

Henry provides an especially good lens into how the game is changing and why the Red Sox appear poised for further success. It isn’t just that financial types are applying their smarts to baseball, it’s that baseball success has come to hinge less on signing expensive stars, as George Steinbrenner’s Yankees once did, and much more on making smarter bets than the competition on which young players will emerge as the next stars. Winning in baseball is becoming a lot like winning in futures trading.”

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“Darwin’s Dice Have Rolled Badly For Earth”

April 27, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

While I have plenty of concerns about technology, I don’t understand those who equate it with evil and biology with good. I’m not sure that biology doesn’t have a programmed endgame in mind for us that technology might, perhaps, counter. From E.O. Wilson’s 2005 Cosmos article, “Is Humanity Suicidal?“:

“Unlike any creature that lived before, humans have become a geophysical force, swiftly changing the atmosphere and climate as well as the composition of the world’s fauna and flora.

Now in the midst of a population explosion, this species has doubled in number to more than 6 billion during the past 50 years. It is scheduled to double again in the next 50 years. No other single species in evolutionary history has even remotely approached the sheer mass in protoplasm generated by humanity.

Darwin’s dice have rolled badly for Earth. It was a misfortune for the living world in particular, many of our scientists believe, that a carnivorous primate and not some more benign form of animal made the breakthrough.

Our species retains hereditary traits that add greatly to our destructive impact. We are tribal and aggressively territorial, intent on private space beyond minimal requirements and oriented by selfish sexual and reproductive drives. Cooperation beyond the family and tribal levels comes hard. Worse, our liking for meat causes us to use the Sun’s energy at low efficiency.” 

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“It’s doomsday”:

“But Who Are Those Men Meticulously Taking Notes?”

April 27, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

Kim Jong-un, a dipshit throwback to last-century tyrants, is probably most interesting for his propaganda and media control. In time, he will get his, but until then his every word is recorded by a cadre of men with antiquated tools (pens and notepads), who are assigned the task of recording his every word. They’re not journalists but players upon a world stage. Like umbrella holders for a movie star, these minions are as much form as function, meant to establish the despot’s importance. From Kathryn Westcott’s BBC explanation of this spectacle:

“In the photographs – from the country’s official Central News Agency (KCNA) – Kim Jong-un observes a unit of women conducting a multiple-rocket launching drill. He strides around a fishery station. He gives a pilot on flight training a pep talk. He enjoys the facilities at a renovated youth camp.

But who are those men meticulously taking notes? They’re not journalists, but soldiers, party members or government officials, says Prof James Grayson, Korea expert at the University of Sheffield. What is happening is a demonstration of the leader’s supposed power, knowledge, wisdom and concern, says Grayson. It’s ‘on-the-spot guidance,’ something instigated by his grandfather Kim Il-sung in the 1950s. ‘It’s part of the image of the great leader offering benevolent guidance,’ says Grayson.”

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“How Do Robots Have Sex?”

April 27, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

From “Robocopulation” an Economist article about scientists trying to figure out polymorphism with the aid of rodent robots:

“‘How do robots have sex?’ sounds like the set-up line for a bad joke. Yet for Stefan Elfwing, a researcher in the Neural Computation Unit of Japan’s Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST), it is at the heart of discovering how and why multiple (or polymorphic) mating strategies evolve within the same population of a species. Because observing any species over hundreds of generations is impractical, Dr Elfwing and other scientists are increasingly using a combination of robots and computer simulation to model evolution. And the answer to that opening question? By swapping software ‘genotypes’ via infrared communications, ideally when facing each other 30cm apart. Not exactly a salty punchline.

Charles Darwin was intrigued by polymorphism in general and it still fascinates evolutionary biologists. The idea that more than one mating strategy can coexist in the same population of a species seems to contradict natural selection. This predicts that the optimum phenotype (any trait caused by a mix of genetic and environmental factors) will cause less successful phenotypes to become extinct.

Yet in nature there are many examples of polymorphic mating strategies within single populations of the same species, resulting in phenomena such as persistent colour and size variation within that population. Male tree lizards, for instance, use three different mating strategies correlated with throat colour and body size, and devotees of each manage to procreate.

Simulations alone can unintentionally overlook constraints found in the physical world, such as how far a critter looking for a mate can see. So the OIST team based their simulations on the actual behaviour of small, custom-made ‘cyber-rodent’ robots. This established their physical limitations, such as how they must align with each other to mate and the extent of their limited field of view.”

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“Although He Stops Short Of Embracing Marx’s Baleful Vision, Piketty Ultimately Lands On The Pessimistic End Of The Spectrum”

April 25, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

I put up a post just a couple of weeks ago about Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century, and since then it’s quickly become an unlikely blockbuster, sold out in brick-and-mortar stores and ranked #1 on Amazon, the latest green shoot in the Occupy mindset which blossomed in these scary financial times. At Foreign Affairs, economist Tyler Cowen provides a well-written review of the work, which he finds impressive but (unsurprisingly) disagrees with in fundamental ways. The opening:

“Every now and then, the field of economics produces an important book; this is one of them. Thomas Piketty’s tome will put capitalist wealth back at the center of public debate, resurrect interest in the subject of wealth distribution, and revolutionize how people view the history of income inequality. On top of that, although the book’s prose (translated from the original French) might not qualify as scintillating, any educated person will be able to understand it — which sets the book apart from the vast majority of works by high-level economic theorists.

Piketty is best known for his collaborations during the past decade with his fellow French economist Emmanuel Saez, in which they used historical census data and archival tax records to demonstrate that present levels of income inequality in the United States resemble those of the era before World War II. Their revelations concerning the wealth concentrated among the richest one percent of Americans — and, perhaps even more striking, among the richest 0.1 percent — have provided statistical and intellectual ammunition to the left in recent years, especially during the debates sparked by the 2011 Occupy Wall Street protests and the 2012 U.S. presidential election.

In this book, Piketty keeps his focus on inequality but attempts something grander than a mere diagnosis of capitalism’s ill effects. The book presents a general theory of capitalism intended to answer a basic but profoundly important question. As Piketty puts it:

‘Do the dynamics of private capital accumulation inevitably lead to the concentration of wealth in ever fewer hands, as Karl Marx believed in the nineteenth century? Or do the balancing forces of growth, competition, and technological progress lead in later stages of development to reduced inequality and greater harmony among the classes, as Simon Kuznets thought in the twentieth century?’

Although he stops short of embracing Marx’s baleful vision, Piketty ultimately lands on the pessimistic end of the spectrum. He believes that in capitalist systems, powerful forces can push at various times toward either equality or inequality and that, therefore, ‘one should be wary of any economic determinism.’ But in the end, he concludes that, contrary to the arguments of Kuznets and other mainstream thinkers, ‘there is no natural, spontaneous process to prevent destabilizing, inegalitarian forces from prevailing permanently.’ To forestall such an outcome, Piketty proposes, among other things, a far-fetched plan for the global taxation of wealth — a call to radically redistribute the fruits of capitalism to ensure the system’s survival. This is an unsatisfying conclusion to a groundbreaking work of analysis that is frequently brilliant — but flawed, as well.”

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“The Meeting Of Andy Warhol And A Computer At The Dawn Of The Digital Age Is Hugely Suggestive”

April 25, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Andy Warhol, that cyborg, was the messenger who got shot. He lived long enough, however, to participate in the early moments of the computer explosion, commissioned by Amiga to create a digital portrait of Debbie Harry. The fascinating visual artist Cory Arcangel has recovered some of Warhol’s other Amiga art. From Jonathan Jones at the Guardian:

“Thanks to the curiosity of Cory Arcangel – one of today’s most important artists working with digital technologies – a forgotten hoard of Warhol artworks has been rescued from old Amiga disks by students who ingeniously hacked into the defunct software.

The works Warhol created to commission in 1985 to help launch the Amiga 1000 computer are not earth-shattering in themselves. He essentially recreated some of his paintings as digital images.

But the meeting of Andy Warhol and a computer at the dawn of the digital age is hugely suggestive. Warhol, after all, is the man who flirted with being a machine. He wore a metallic silver wig and made paintings on a production line, with assistants silkscreening found photographs onto canvas.

This computer-like style was eerie. Yet it was not the real him. In reality, Andy Warhol was a talented draughtsman, a secret Catholic and a compassionate historian of his times. He pretended to be a machine because that was the best way he found to capture the way the world was changing. From canned soup to instant pictures, Warhol took the pulse of the age as America became a society of consumers and celebrity watchers. He portrayed reality so truly he seemed to invent it – as if one artist could create the celebrity age.

Warhol was a reporter who simply told the truth.”

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“It Won’t Be Much Longer Before We Start Creating Synthetic Animals For The Real World”

April 25, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

George Dvorsky’s io9 post “This Could Be the First Animal to Live Entirely Inside A Computer” examines neuroscientist Stephen Larson’s attempts to create a virtual worm, which has massive implications for the future of medicine and so much else. An excerpt:

“To be fair, scientists , namely the exceptionally small free-living bacteria known as Mycoplasma genitalia. It’s an amazing accomplishment, but the pathogen — with its 525 genes — is one of the world’s simplest organisms. Contrast that with E. coli, which has 4,288 genes, and humans, who have anywhere from 35,000 to 57,000 genes.

Scientists have also created synthetic DNA that can self-replicate and an artificial chromosome from scratch. Breakthroughs like these suggest it won’t be much longer before we start creating synthetic animals for the real world. Such endeavors could result in designer organisms to help in the manufacturing of vaccines, medicines, sustainable fuels, and with toxic clean-ups.

There’s a very good chance that many of these organisms, including drugs, will be designed and tested in computers first. Eventually, our machines will be powerful enough and our understanding of biology deep enough to allow us to start simulating some of the most complex biological functions — from entire microbes right through to the human mind itself (what will be known as whole brain emulations).

Needless to say we’re not going to get there in one day. We’ll have to start small and work our way up. Which is why Larson and his team have started to work on their simulated nematode worm.”

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“I’d Like To Introduce To You A Most Unusual Young Man”

April 24, 2014 in Excerpts, Sports, Videos | Permalink

Stunt cyclist Evel Knievel, destined for amazing fame but just an opening act at this point, makes his debut on Wide World of Sports in 1967.

“He’s Not a Bird, He’s Not a Plane” is a fun profile of the late, great motorcycle daredevil from the February 5, 1968 issue of Sports Illustrated. The piece was penned by Gilbert Rogin, a novelist who was also SI‘s managing editor.

The article relays what a sensation Knievel was in the ’60s and ’70s. He dressed like Elvis and escaped death like Houdini, although the dark side of his appeal was the sick fascination of watching what would happen if he couldn’t avert disaster, as he jumped his motorcycle over rows of cars, hotel fountains and actual rivers.

Knievel had none of the sociopolitical significance of Muhammad Ali, but he shared the boxer’s keen understanding of Hollywood, hoopla and the hard sell. He went through a lot of money, broken bones, personal problems, a rock opera and a late-life religious conversion before his death in 2007. In Rogin’s piece, Knievel touted his desire to jump across the Grand Canyon (which never happened). A brief excerpt about his not-so-successful jump over the fountains at Caesar’s Palace on the last day of 1967:

“On New Year’s Eve, Knievel jumped the ornamental fountains in front of Caesars Palace in Las Vegas, which are billed as the World’s Largest Privately Owned Fountains. Several weeks earlier he had said, ‘I know I can jump these babies, but what I don’t know is whether I can hold on to the motorcycle when it lands. Oh, boy, I hope I don’t fall off.’

Knievel’s fears were justified. Shortly after the motorcycle hit the landing ramp, he fell and rolled 165 feet across an asphalt parking lot. Knievel is now in Southern Nevada Memorial Hospital, recovering from compound fractures of the hip and pelvis. ‘Everything seemed to come apart,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t hang on to the motorcycle. I kept smashing over and over and over and over and over, and I kept saying to myself, ‘Stay conscious, stay conscious.’ But, hey, I made the fountains!’”

“Animals Are Hardly Strangers To Our Courts”

April 24, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Considering the appalling way we treat animals apart from a couple of cute ones we are very protective of, it’s worth pondering if non-human creatures should have legal recourse. Historically, animals have taken part in court systems, though as defendants, not plaintiffs. From Charles Siebert’s New York Times Magazine article, “Should a Chimp Be Able to Sue Its Owner?“:

“Animals are hardly strangers to our courts, only to the brand of justice meted out there. In the opening chapters of [Steven] Wise’s first book, Rattling the Cage: Toward Legal Rights for Animals, published in 2000, he cites the curious and now largely forgotten history, dating at least back to the Middle Ages, of humans putting animals on trial for their perceived offenses, everything from murderous pigs, to grain-filching rats and insects, to flocks of sparrows disrupting church services with their chirping. Such proceedings — often elaborate, drawn-out courtroom dramas in which the defendants were ostensibly accorded the same legal rights as humans, right down to being appointed the best available lawyers — were essentially allegorical rituals, a means of expunging evil and restoring some sense of order to a random and disorderly world.

Among the most common nonhuman defendants cited by the British historian E. P. Evans in his 1906 book, The Criminal Prosecution and Capital Punishment of Animals, were pigs. Allowed to freely roam the narrow, winding streets of medieval villages, pigs and sows sometimes maimed and killed infants and young children. The ‘guilty’ party would regularly be brought before a magistrate to be tried and sentenced and then publicly tortured and executed in the town square, often while being hung upside down, because, as Wise explains it in Rattling the Cage, ‘a beast . . . who killed a human reversed the ordained hierarchy. . . . Inversion set the world right again.’

The practice of enlisting animals as unwitting courtroom actors in order to reinforce our own sense of justice is not as outmoded as you might think. As recently as 1906, the year Evans’s book appeared, a father-son criminal team and the attack dog they trained to be their accomplice were prosecuted in Switzerland for robbery and murder. In a trial reported in L’Écho de Paris and The New York Herald, the two men were found guilty and received life in prison. The dog — without whom, the court determined, the crime couldn’t have been committed — was condemned to death.

It has been only in the last 30 years or so that a distinct field of animal law — that is laws and legal theory expressly for and about nonhuman animals — has emerged.”

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“Some People Object That Nudges Are A Form Of Unacceptable Paternalism”

April 24, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Corporations don’t just nudge–they push hard. Trying to get us to consume products that are often injurious to us, they attack with constant messages to trigger our behavior. That’s considered freedom. But it’s stickier when governments try to influence us with sin taxes, default agreements and helpful reminders. That’s called a nanny state. Sometimes I like such initiatives (cigarette taxes) and sometimes I don’t, but they influence us less and to healthier ends than corporations do. From Cass Sunstein’s new Guardian article about nudging:

“The beauty of nudges is that when they are well chosen, they make people’s lives better while maintaining freedom of choice. Moreover, they usually don’t cost a lot, and they tend to have big effects. In an economically challenging time, it is no wonder that governments all over the world, including in the US and UK, have been showing a keen interest in nudging.

Inevitably, we have been seeing a backlash. Some people object that nudges are a form of unacceptable paternalism. This is an objection that has intuitive appeal, but there is a real problem with it: nudging is essentially inevitable, and so it is pointless to object to nudging as such.

The private sector nudges all the time. Whenever a government has websites, communicates with its citizens, operates cafeterias, or maintains offices that people will visit, it nudges, whether or not it intends to. Nudges might not be readily visible, but they are inevitably there. If we are sceptical about official nudging, we might limit how often it occurs, but we cannot possibly eliminate it.

Other sceptics come from the opposite direction, contending that in light of what we know about human errors, we should be focusing on mandates and bans. They ask: when we know people make bad decisions, why should we insist on preserving freedom of choice?“

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“Technology Is An Existential Disposition”

April 24, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Americans have always viewed technology (and anti-technology) in romantic terms. In a New Atlantis piece, Benjamin Storey argues that Alexis de Tocqueville didn’t give tech in the U.S. the short shrift but instead viewed it as a poetic impulse as much as an economic one. An excerpt: 

“For Tocqueville, technology is not a set of morally neutral means employed by human beings to control our natural environment. Technology is an existential disposition intrinsically connected to the social conditions of modern democratic peoples in general and Americans in particular. On this view, to be an American democrat is to be a technological romantic. Nothing is so radical or difficult to moderate as a romantic passion, and the Americans Tocqueville observed accepted only frail and minimal restraints on their technophilia. We have long since broken many of those restraints in our quest to live up to our poetic self-image. Understanding the sources of our fascination with the technological dream, and the distance between that dream and technological reality, can help revitalize the sources of self-restraint that remain to us.

That Tocqueville presents much of his commentary on technology in the chapter of Democracy in America entitled ‘Of Some Sources of Poetry among Democratic Nations‘ already indicates why his analysis of technology has been less well received than his analysis of town government or the tyranny of the majority. What, after all, does technology have to do with poetry? Wouldn’t Tocqueville have done better to offer a systematic analysis of ‘the material bases of American life,’ in the manner of an economic or industrial historian, as Garry Wills suggests?

To see what exactly poetry has to do with technological progress, we must first seek to understand Tocqueville’s account of the nature of poetry and the human need for it. We must then turn to his account of the appeal of the poetry of technology to the psychic passions of democratic man. Finally, we must consider his analysis of why democratic peoples would take an argument about the hard facts of economics or industry more seriously as a mode of understanding the question of technology than his own reflections on poetry. By doing so, we can understand something about our typical mode of self-understanding and the distinctive kind of blindness to ourselves to which we are most prone.”

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“He Placed A 120-Foot-Long Banana Split In The Outfield”

April 24, 2014 in Excerpts, Sports, Urban Studies | Permalink

From Robert Andrew Powell’s Grantland article about El Paso betting heavily on minor league baseball and a new (seemingly needless) downtown stadium, a beautifully written passage about how Vietnam vet Jim Paul purchased a struggling Double A franchise for $1000 in 1974 and drew up the Veeck-ian blueprint for the wry, family-friendly entertainment success that the bush leagues have become:

“On the blackboard, Paul mapped out Kazoo Night. Ten-Cent Beer Night. Country Days, of course, and also an appearance by a then-obscure touring mascot called the San Diego Chicken. At one game, Paul tried to set a record for the most soap bubbles blown at one time. He placed a 120-foot-long banana split in the outfield, handed plastic spoons to every kid in attendance, and invited them to race out and eat as much ice cream as they could. When creditors repossessed the stadium’s organ — money was always tight — Paul bought a tape recorder at Radio Shack and began playing the Rolling Stones and Janis Joplin over the loudspeakers. After Diablos home runs, fans placed dollar bills in the batter’s helmet, in gratitude. The ballpark was renamed the Dudley Dome even though it remained roofless. The PA announcer relayed statistics — “No team scores more runs with two outs than the Diablos!” — that he simply made up.

The Diablos, a Double-A team, began drawing overflow crowds even while the team trudged along in last place. The Texas League named Paul its executive of the year. Twelve months later, he won executive of the year for all of the minor leagues. A winter marketing seminar he launched in El Paso grew exponentially as his methods proved successful. The athletic directors of schools such as Notre Dame and LSU began showing up, joining executives from baseball clubs as big as the Houston Astros.”

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“Why Does China’s Ruling Single Party Still Call Themselves Communist When They Are So Clearly Anything But?”

April 23, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Urban Studies | Permalink

Shanghai during WWII.

Shanghai during WWII.

NPR Shanghai correspondent Frank Langfitt just did an excellent Ask Me Anything on Reddit. A few exchanges follow.

______________________

Question:

How “free and open” does the regular Chinese citizen feel? I remember talking to some older Chinese people who had immigrated to Canada who were still a little worried about being openly critical about the Chinese government. In other words, do regular citizens feel safe in being able to speak openly about government policy and issues or is there still a feeling of paranoia?

Frank Langfitt:

With friends and even strangers Chinese are much more open with their political views than they were a generation ago. On a 20 minute taxi ride in Shanghai, you can get a very thoughtful deconstruction of Chinese politics and the party. But if you take out your tape recorder, everything changes.

______________________

Question:

What kinds of things do regular Chinese citizens think about the USA that isn’t correct?

Frank Langfitt:

Chinese know America much better than we know China and their knowledge is improving. One question i get a lot of in recent years is will the U.S. and China go to war. There is a fear that a conflict between China and Japan over the islands in the East China Sea will draw in the U.S. I’ve found this sort of talk really unsettling and revealing about how some ordinary Chinese sea the geopolitics of their country’s rise.

Question:

Do you think, China and Japan will go to a war of some type?

Frank Langfitt:

i really hope not. it would be a disaster. #2 and #3 economies at war in north asia. And #1 economy has defense treaty with #3. Yikes.

______________________

Question:

What is the most disgusting thing you have seen in China (I heard kids take shit directly on the street)?

Frank Langfitt:

Not sure what is most disgusting thing i’ve seen, but kids do relieve themselves on the streets sometimes and this has become a really interesting phenomenon. As more Chinese travel, occasionally this will happen on a subway outside the country, say Hong Kong or Taiwan and it goes viral and creates a big controversy inside and outside the country.

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Question:

How bad is the smog really? Have you had to do a lot to adjust to it?

Frank Langfitt:

It depends on where you are. Beijing is at times not habitable for creatures with lungs. there is no way to exaggerate conditions there. Shanghai is much better, largely because we are on the East China Sea and the winds clear out the smog. We have lots of blue sky days and all the glass and steel shimmers and the city looks great. Back in December, though, we had terrible air and we stayed inside the apartment for four days and just blasted the air filters.

_______________________

Question:

Why does China’s ruling single party still call themselves Communist when they are so clearly anything but? They still have Mao on bank notes, yet their modern society is an ongoing contradiction of the values he espoused. How do everyday Chinese people and the elites reconcile their hypercapitalist current system with their “communist” party government?

Frank Langfitt:

Great, great question. The Communist Party knows it is not Communist, but can’t dump the name because it is key to its legitimacy. There is a story — perhaps apocryphal — in which the former premier Zhu Rongji asked an American politician what was the one thing the Communist Party could do to change its image in the eyes of Americans. The politician said: “change the name.” Zhu shook his head and said they just couldn’t do that. Chinese people are supremely pragmatic, much to their credit, and they are happy to take advantage of a capitalist-style economy that helps them improve their lives and are less hung up on what things are called.•

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