Excerpts

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“[Iran] Doesn’t Want To Turn Its Back On The World”

March 17, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Iran, 1960s.

Iran, 1960s.

As the world’s attention is fixed on Ukraine and parts unknown (wherever the missing Malaysian jetliner is), BBC’s Chief International Correspondent Lyse Doucet just conducted an Ask Me Anything at Reddit about another area of global interest, Iran. A few exchanges follow.

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Question:

What is the biggest misconception we have about life in Iran?

Lyse Doucet:

Iran is one of the most hospitable places in the world. And Iranians are also among the most inventive people I have had the pleasure to spend time with. Please don’t see it as a dark and hostile place. There are different views about the world, but it doesn’t want to turn its back on the world.

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Question:

How do Iranian women feel about their status in society compared to what it was before the Islamic revolution?

Lyse Doucet:

Women’s issues have always been at the heart of Iranian politics since the 1979 Islamic revolution. There have been advances in some areas including access to education including at University level, information and access to birth control, availability of some jobs, but not others. Women are still barred from many high level positions. Many women are hoping for greater freedoms after last year’s election of the reformist President Rouhani. But, like most Iranians, they are also just hoping that sanctions will be lifted and their daily lives will improve…

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Question:

How do you think Irans’ nuclear program is going to pan out?

Lyse Doucet:

That is the big question. on this visit i noticed that iranians, across the political spectrum, expressed support for a comprehensive nuclear deal..but that will require tough choices, on all sides..it’s still not clear there will be a deal by late July..but what is clear is that there will be a lot of work to try to reach one..

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Question:

Why do you think the general attitude of the West (western media) towards Iran has been changing in a positive way in the past few months?

Lyse Doucet:

..perhaps because more journalists are now being given visas to visit Iran ..and also because of the success of the nuclear negotiations so far..Also, the new leadership of President Rouhani and his Foreign Minister Javad Zarif are engaging with the world with a different tone.

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Question:

Would you tell us about your Internet experience in Iran?

Lyse Doucet:

I was suprised by how widely used the internet was including social media. Iranians are very inventive. They’ve found ways around the blocks on sites like twitter and facebook. To my relief, I was able to access my email account and use twitter. And Iranians, of all political persuasions, quoted my posts .

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Question:

What is daily life like for the young people of Iran and how does it compare to what we see in the Western world? Do they play video games, go insane over singers/bands, care about fashion and gossip?

Lyse Doucet:

Iranians are sometimes justifiably upset when we imagine they are somehow different from the rest of us. There is a very lively music scene, the fashion is fab (Iranian women even develop glamourous hair styles for their head scarves), Iranians of all political views are on the internet, talking to themselves and to the world. But they would like their restrictions to be lifted, and to have more freedom to come and go.•

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Iran Air TV ad that ran in the U.S. in the 1970s. Because of political fallout from the Islamic Revolution, the final flight from NYC was November 7, 1979.

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“The Houston Astrodome Will Physically Separate Itself From The Planet Which We Call Earth And Will Fly”

March 17, 2014 in Excerpts, Sports, Urban Studies | Permalink

Putting up a post about the building of the Houston Astrodome reminded me of this old one about a young guru who believed in 1973 that he could levitate the enclosed stadium.

The world was strange in 1973, even stranger than it is today. That was the year of the three-day festival, Millennium ’73, when thousands of Vietnam War protestors gathered at the Houston Astrodome to hear the words of 15-year-old Shri Guru Maharaj Ji, who they believed was God. The attendees also thought that perhaps they could use their spiritual powers to levitate the stadium and make it fly, which would somehow stop the war.

i found a three-and-a-half-minute clip from the David Loxton documentary The Lord of the Universe, which captures some of the madness surrounding the teenage guru, who later changed his name to Prem Rawat. This segment particularly examines how the controversial event caused a deep rift between Chicago Seven member Rennie Davis and leaders of the Left, including Abbie Hoffman. 

“There Were Colt .45s That Fired Blanks At The Ground”

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

Putting up a post about speculative, futuristic baseball stadiums reminded me of two facts about the building of the Houston Astrodome during the 1960s:

  1. At the 1962 groundbreaking ceremony of what was then called the Harris County Domed Stadium, civic leaders and local pols didn’t dig shovels into the ground but instead fired blanks from Colt .45 revolvers into the soil. (The Houston Astros were originally called the Colt .45s.)
  2. In preparing for the opening the stadium in 1965, the grounds crew vacuumed the field while dressed in spacesuits. 

It was a strange pair of christenings, marked first by the technology of the past and then of the future.

“Recent News Reports Have Portrayed Guccione As A Broken Man”

March 16, 2014 in Excerpts | Permalink

The late magazine publisher Bob Guccione, whose face and pants were both made of leather, was profiled in Vanity Fair in 2005 by his former Viva editor, Patricia Bosworth, at a time when the erstwhile porn king was in steep decline, as cancer and creditors, not critics and censors, were his chief concerns. Say what you will about him, but pornography being readily available on screens in shirt pockets and on top of laps is proof Guccione understood the extent of our urges long before we did. Even as he was losing his personal battle, he had won the war. The opening:

“I‘m frankly amazed at my own optimism,” says Bob Guccione, the 74-year-old pioneering pornographer and founder of Penthouse magazine. “Whenever I’m facing a crisis—and I’m certainly facing a crisis now—I just fight harder. I know I’m going to survive.”

Recent news reports have portrayed Guccione as a broken man. Having lost his entire Penthouse empire, he is said to be destitute, camping out in just four rooms of his princely home, on East 67th Street in Manhattan, spending most of his days curled up in bed asleep or watching CNN.

“An exaggeration,” he croaks, attempting to smile. “Exaggeration,” repeats his special assistant, Jane Homlish, to make sure he is understood. In 1998, a doctor performed laser surgery on Guccione’s tongue in an experimental cancer treatment, so it is hard to understand him when he speaks. Because he has difficulty swallowing, a liquid nutrient called Boost is piped into his stomach.

And yet he looks trim, tanned, and healthy. His skin positively glows, and he appears almost serene, except for the dark, haunted eyes that glare out from under his thick, grizzled brows. The reason he sleeps during the day, he says, is that he is up until four in the morning working on projects and his oil paintings.

He has just given me a tour of his mansion, one of the city’s largest private homes, which he designed himself. He uses the entire place—he even had a small dinner party here recently. He’s especially proud of the mosaic-lined swimming pool on the ground floor, flanked by two lead Napoleonic sphinxes, each with a Marie Antoinette head. They’re at the far end of the pool. On the floor below is a fully equipped gym. There’s also a huge paneled screening room, a winding marble staircase up to the “ballroom,” and a double living room with antique-mirror walls. Part of a great carved fireplace that once belonged to the architect Stanford White is in Guccione’s bedroom.

The mortgage on the house is now owned by Mexican businessman Dr. Luis Enrique Molina, who literally saved Bob from eviction in February 2004 by paying $24 million to his creditors. Bob says he doesn’t know how long he’ll remain here, since he and his girlfriend, April Warren, are the only occupants of the house’s 45 rooms. He still has 6 servants (down from 22), in addition to Homlish, who says she has no plans to leave him.

She was working with Guccione when I first met him, in 1974. He hired me as the executive editor of Viva, a sister publication of Penthouse that was billed as ‘the world’s most sophisticated erotic magazine for women.’ That was during Guccione’s glory days, when he was said to be one of the richest men in the world. According to a report in the New York Post last October, Penthouse has earned $4 billion since 1965, when Guccione founded it. During that time Guccione has squandered about $500 million of his personal fortune on bad investments and risky ventures.

Today, Penthouses circulation is down to 400,000 from a 1979 high of 4.7 million, a victim of X-rated videos and pornographic Web sites.•

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“Instead Of Rising Out Of The City, The Stadium Sinks Into It”

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

Sports Illustrated asked Populous, the stadium designer responsible for the two expensive clunkers currently housing the New York baseball teams, to imagine stadia of the future, the future being the 2030s. “Living Park,” a more organic and communal structure, is the answer the firm returned. An excerpt from Tim Newcomb’s article:

“Looking forward, there’s no need for the high-arching concrete and steel that separate today’s stadiums from the city around them. [Designers Brian] Mirakian anticipates ‘transformative stadiums that will really build a community.’ The glass structures horseshoed around Living Park, for example, aren’t just premium seating, but also serve to combine the city and stadium. A street front on one side that hosts everything from offices and apartments to retail and restaurants turns into a stadium portal on the backside, offering stellar views onto the field. Instead of rising out of the city, the stadium sinks into it.

Trending data suggested increased urban densification, giving Mirakian the idea to create a linear park environment that allows the building to play as the central theme—a place activated during a game, but where the community can gather at any time, during either the season or offseason. In this case, the building itself is defined by the edges of the city, acting as a window into the building on game days. There’s no need for fanciful facades, as the stadium instead flows with the park and city.”

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“They Flourished For Millions Of Years, Then Vanished From Our Planet Just As Humans Emerged”

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

Human ambitions are deadly, perhaps for ourselves, and certainly for other species. But did our mere presence, even before industrialization and digitalization and globalization, kill off some of the planet’s most impressive creatures? The opening of Robin McKie’s Guardian piece, “What Killed Off the Giant Beasts – Climate Change or Man?“:

“They were some of the strangest animals to walk the Earth: wombats as big as hippos, sloths larger than bears, four-tusked elephants, and an armadillo that would have dwarfed a VW Beetle. They flourished for millions of years, then vanished from our planet just as humans emerged from their African homeland.

It is one of palaeontology’s most intriguing mysteries and will form the core of a conference at Oxford University this week when delegates will debate whether climate change or human hunters killed off the planet’s lost megafauna, as these extinct giants are known.

‘Creatures like megatherium, the giant sloth, and the glyptodon, a car-sized species of armadillo, disappeared in North and South America about 10,000 years ago, when there were major changes to climates – which some scientists believe triggered their extinctions,’ said Yadvinder Malhi, professor of ecosystem science at Oxford, one of the organisers of the conference, Megafauna and Ecosystem Function.

‘However, it is also the case that tribes of modern humans were moving into these creatures’ territories at these times – and many of us believe it is too much of a coincidence that this happened just as these animals vanished. These creatures had endured millions of years of climate change before then, after all. However, this was the first time they had encountered humans.'”

 

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“Innovation Can Actually Be Your Enemy In Health Care If You Are Not Careful”

March 16, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

I really enjoyed Jeff Goodell’s Rolling Stone interview with Bill Gates, though I wish there were clarifying follow-up questions in two areas.

The first concerns Gates’ critique of Snowden’s info leak. Does he feel similarly about the Pentagon Papers? Would he also be opposed to an illegal leak if it exposed an Abu Ghraib situation?

The second regards the technologist’s comments about poverty in America. It comes across that Gates may believe that there aren’t Americans who are truly poor, but I doubt he really thinks that.

Here’s a rather technocratic exchange about U.S. healthcare reform and the impact new science and technologies will have on the system:

“Rolling Stone:

Well, there certainly is plenty of frustration with our political system.

Bill Gates:

But I do think, in most cases, when you get this negative view of the situation, you’re forgetting about the innovation that goes on outside of government. Thank God they actually do fund basic research. That’s part of the reason the U.S. is so good [at things like health care]. But innovation can actually be your enemy in health care if you are not careful.

 Rolling Stone:

How’s that?

Bill Gates:

If you accelerate certain things but aren’t careful about whether you want to make those innovations available to everyone, then you’re intensifying the cost in such a way that you’ll overwhelm all the resources.

 Rolling Stone:

Like million-dollar chemotherapy treatments.

Bill Gates:

Yeah, or organ transplants for people in their seventies from new artificial organs being grown. There is a lot of medical technology for which, unless you can make judgments about who should buy it, you will have to invade other government functions to find the money. Joint replacement is another example. There are four or five of these innovations down the pipe that are huge, huge things.

 Rolling Stone:

Yeah, but when people start talking about these issues, we start hearing loaded phrases like ‘death panels’ and suggestions that government bureaucrats are going to decide when it’s time to pull the plug on Grandma.

Bill Gates:

The idea that there aren’t trade-offs is an outrageous thing. Most countries know that there are trade-offs, but here, we manage to have the notion that there aren’t any. So that’s unfortunate, to not have people think, ‘Hey, there are finite resources here.'”

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“Many People Will Resist The First Generation Of Elective Implants”

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

Yes, eventually you’ll have the implant, and those brain chips may arrive in two waves: initially for the treatment of chronic illness and then for performance enhancement. Because of the military’s interest in the latter, however, those waves might come crashing down together. From “The Future of Brain Implants,” an article by Gary Marcus and Christof Koch in the Wall Street Journal:

“Many people will resist the first generation of elective implants. There will be failures and, as with many advances in medicine, there will be deaths. But anybody who thinks that the products won’t sell is naive. Even now, some parents are willing to let their children take Adderall before a big exam. The chance to make a ‘superchild’ (or at least one guaranteed to stay calm and attentive for hours on end during a big exam) will be too tempting for many.

Even if parents don’t invest in brain implants, the military will. A continuing program at Darpa, a Pentagon agency that invests in cutting-edge technology, is already supporting work on brain implants that improve memory to help soldiers injured in war. Who could blame a general for wanting a soldier with hypernormal focus, a perfect memory for maps and no need to sleep for days on end? (Of course, spies might well also try to eavesdrop on such a soldier’s brain, and hackers might want to hijack it. Security will be paramount, encryption de rigueur.)

An early generation of enhancement implants might help elite golfers improve their swing by automating their mental practice. A later generation might allow weekend golfers to skip practice altogether. Once neuroscientists figure out how to reverse-engineer the end results of practice, “neurocompilers” might be able to install the results of a year’s worth of training directly into the brain, all in one go.

That won’t happen in the next decade or maybe even in the one after that. But before the end of the century, our computer keyboards and trackpads will seem like a joke; even Google Glass 3.0 will seem primitive.”

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“The Main Difference Between Robots That Have Gone Before And The Newer Variety Is Autonomy”

March 14, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

No publication birthed on the Internet is better than Aeon, a provocative stream of essays about technology, consciousness, nature, the deep future, the deep past and other fundamental concerns of life on Earth. In a world of brief tweets and easy access, the site asks the long and hard questions. Two great recent examples: Michael Belfiore’s “The Robots Are Coming,” a look at society when our silicon sisters no longer have an OFF switch; and Ross Andersen’s “Hell on Earth,” an examination of how infinite life extension will impact the justice system. (And if you’ve never read Andersen’s work about philosopher Nick Bostrom, go here and here.) Excerpts from these essays follow.

From “The Robots Are Coming”:

“Robots in the real world usually look nothing like us. On Earth they perform such mundane chores as putting car parts together in factories, picking up our online orders in warehouses, vacuuming our homes and mowing our lawns. Farther afield, flying robots land on other planets and conduct aerial warfare by remote control.

More recently, we’ve seen driverless cars take to our roads. Here, finally, the machines veer toward traditional R U R territory. Which makes most people, it seems, uncomfortable. A Harris Interactive poll sponsored by Seapine Software, for example, announced this February that 88 per cent of Americans do not like the idea of their cars driving themselves, citing fear of losing control over their vehicles as the chief concern.

The main difference between robots that have gone before and the newer variety is autonomy. Whether by direct manipulation (as when we wield power tools, or grip the wheel of a car) or via remote control (as with a multitude of cars and airplanes), machines have in the past remained firmly under human control at all times. That’s no longer true and now autonomous robots have even begun to look like us.

I got a good, long look at the future of robotics at an event run by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (known as the DARPA Robotics Challenge, or DRC Trials), outside Miami in December. What I saw by turns delighted, amused, and spooked me. My overriding sense was that, very soon, DARPA’s work will shift the technological ground beneath our feet yet again.”

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From “Hell on Earth”:

“It is hard to avoid the conclusion that Hitler got off easy, given the scope and viciousness of his crimes. We might have moved beyond the Code of Hammurabi and ‘an eye for an eye’, but most of us still feel that a killer of millions deserves something sterner than a quick and painless suicide. But does anyone ever deserve hell?

That used to be a question for theologians, but in the age of human enhancement, a new set of thinkers is taking it up. As biotech companies pour billions into life extension technologies, some have suggested that our cruelest criminals could be kept alive indefinitely, to serve sentences spanning millennia or longer. Even without life extension, private prison firms could one day develop drugs that make time pass more slowly, so that an inmate’s 10-year sentence feels like an eternity. One way or another, humans could soon be in a position to create an artificial hell.

At the University of Oxford, a team of scholars led by the philosopher Rebecca Roache has begun thinking about the ways futuristic technologies might transform punishment. In January, I spoke with Roache and her colleagues Anders Sandberg and Hannah Maslen about emotional enhancement, ‘supercrimes’, and the ethics of eternal damnation. What follows is a condensed and edited transcript of our conversation.

Ross Andersen:

Suppose we develop the ability to radically expand the human lifespan, so that people are regularly living for more than 500 years. Would that allow judges to fit punishments to crimes more precisely?

Rebecca Roache:

When I began researching this topic, I was thinking a lot about Daniel Pelka, a four-year-old boy who was starved and beaten to death [in 2012] by his mother and stepfather here in the UK. I had wondered whether the best way to achieve justice in cases like that was to prolong death as long as possible. Some crimes are so bad they require a really long period of punishment, and a lot of people seem to get out of that punishment by dying. And so I thought, why not make prison sentences for particularly odious criminals worse by extending their lives?

But I soon realised it’s not that simple. In the US, for instance, the vast majority of people on death row appeal to have their sentences reduced to life imprisonment. That suggests that a quick stint in prison followed by death is seen as a worse fate than a long prison sentence. And so, if you extend the life of a prisoner to give them a longer sentence, you might end up giving them a more lenient punishment.

The life-extension scenario may sound futuristic, but if you look closely you can already see it in action, as people begin to live longer lives than before. If you look at the enormous prison population in the US, you find an astronomical number of elderly prisoners, including quite a few with pacemakers. When I went digging around in medical journals, I found all these interesting papers about the treatment of pacemaker patients in prison.”

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“I Think The Country’s Okay, And Hopefully It Will Survive”

March 14, 2014 in Excerpts, Film, Politics | Permalink

In an interview conducted by Marlow Stern of the Daily Beast, Robert Duvall runs down Johnny Depp, True Detective, James Gray and one of my all-time favorite films, Network. Here’s an exchange about American history and politics:

“The Daily Beast:

Republicans in Hollywood seem to get a lot of flack and be a bit marginalized. Has it ever been tough, for you, to be a Republican in Hollywood?

Robert Duvall:

Let me say it this way: my wife’s from Argentina, she’s been here for a while, and she’s very smart. She calls herself a ‘tree-hugging Republican,’ but she might even vote Democrat next time because the Republican Party is a mess. I’ll probably vote Independent next time. I think it was Jack Kerouac who said something like, ‘Don’t run down my country. My people are immigrants, so I believe in this country with all its faults. To me, it’s a big country that’s made mistakes.’ Some of the bleeding-heart left-wing, extreme left-wing, are actually different from liberals. That movie The Butler? It’s very inaccurate. JFK had one of the worst Civil Rights voting records. And the Rockefellers were much more liberal with the blacks. All the atrocities in the South were committed by the Democratic Party, but now, everything’s been turned around in a strange way. Some of these very conservative Republicans… I don’t know, man. I believe in a woman’s choice. I believe in certain things. I hear they booed Rick Perry last night on the Jimmy Kimmel Show. But it’s a great country. We’ve done bad things. Slavery was terrible. One-third of all Freedmen in New Orleans fought for the South. I can’t figure that out. Those things aren’t told in the history books. There’ve been lots of contradictions and this and that. But I think the country’s okay, and hopefully it will survive.”

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“The Elevator Only Goes Down”

March 13, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Putting up a post about the Pew Research Center’s “Digital Life in 2025” reminded me of a piece Douglas Coupland published in Toronto’s Globe and Mail in 2010 called “The Radical Pessimist’s Guide to the Next 10 Years.” It’s a dark and dystopic list of 45 things you need to know even if you’d rather not. Coupland was joking but only a little. Here are a half-dozen choice predictions:

38) Knowing everything will become dull

It all started out so graciously: At a dinner for six, a question arises about, say, that Japanese movie you saw in 1997 (Tampopo), or whether or not Joey Bishop is still alive (no). And before long, you know the answer to everything.

20) North America can easily fragment quickly as did the Eastern Bloc in 1989

Quebec will decide to quietly and quite pleasantly leave Canada. California contemplates splitting into two states, fiscal and non-fiscal. Cuba becomes a Club Med with weapons. The Hate States will form a coalition.

16) ‘You’ will be turning into a cloud of data that circles the planet like a thin gauze

While it’s already hard enough to tell how others perceive us physically, your global, phantom, information-self will prove equally vexing to you: your shopping trends, blog residues, CCTV appearances – it all works in tandem to create a virtual being that you may neither like nor recognize.

6) The middle class is over. It’s not coming back

Remember travel agents? Remember how they just kind of vanished one day?

That’s where all the other jobs that once made us middle-class are going – to that same, magical, class-killing, job-sucking wormhole into which travel-agency jobs vanished, never to return. However, this won’t stop people from self-identifying as middle-class, and as the years pass we’ll be entering a replay of the antebellum South, when people defined themselves by the social status of their ancestors three generations back. Enjoy the new monoclass!

3) The future is going to happen no matter what we do. The future will feel even faster than it does now

The next sets of triumphing technologies are going to happen, no matter who invents them or where or how. Not that technology alone dictates the future, but in the end it always leaves its mark. The only unknown factor is the pace at which new technologies will appear. This technological determinism, with its sense of constantly awaiting a new era-changing technology every day, is one of the hallmarks of the next decade.

1) It’s going to get worse

No silver linings and no lemonade. The elevator only goes down. The bright note is that the elevator will, at some point, stop.•

“I Don’t Make Eye Contact With Anybody”

March 13, 2014 in Excerpts, Urban Studies | Permalink

The oil-soaked boomtown of Williston, North Dakota, with its 0.3% unemployment rate during a national recession, is both dream and curse. It’s not exactly Deadwood, but lawlessness and a raft of social problems have attended the latter-day gold rush. From multimedia reporting by Jude Sheerin and Anna Bressanin at BBC News Magazine:

“The male-to-female ratio here is widely estimated to be about 10:1. Many women do not feel safe walking the streets alone.

Bailey Moreland, 25, a barista at Meg-A-Latte coffee shop, carries a stun gun everywhere she goes.

She has had men hit on her even after she points out that she is not only heavily pregnant but happily engaged.

‘Being in a bar, going to the gas station, walking on the street, you’ll get hooted and hollered at,’ she says.

‘I don’t make eye contact with anybody.’

But for many in a nation still bruised by recession, the modern-day gold rush here is a symbol of America’s genius for reinvention.

One of them is Carl Trudel, a 37-year-old maintenance man at the Fox Run motorhome park on the city outskirts.

He sold everything he had after the property market went bust in Florida to migrate north in 2012.

The singleton’s loyal companion in the trailer he calls home is his dog, Dooley. He lavishes affection on the Staffordshire terrier.

Living in Williston is ‘not easy’ and can be ‘very lonely,’ says Trudel.

Yet despite its rowdy bars, runaway prices, long queues at the laundrette or petrol station, and the often-bare supermarket shelves, he seems content.

‘If you have the ambition, the plan, the skills, you will make it here,” insists Trudel. ‘It’s really up to you.

‘But absolutely the American dream is here. That’s why I’m here. And so far it’s happening. Absolutely.'”

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“Stop Thinking Your Grandchildren Will Be OK No Matter How Wasteful Or Destructive You May Be, Since They Can Go To A Nice New Planet On A Spaceship”

March 13, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

From Kurt Vonnegut’s 1988 missive to the people of 2088, via Letters of Note, the guidance wise political leaders would give to citizens in regards to Mother Nature:

  1. Reduce and stabilize your population.
  2. Stop poisoning the air, the water, and the topsoil.
  3. Stop preparing for war and start dealing with your real problems.
  4. Teach your kids, and yourselves, too, while you’re at it, how to inhabit a small planet without helping to kill it.
  5. Stop thinking science can fix anything if you give it a trillion dollars.
  6. Stop thinking your grandchildren will be OK no matter how wasteful or destructive you may be, since they can go to a nice new planet on a spaceship. That is really mean, and stupid.
  7. And so on. Or else.

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“There Will Be No Consequences Of These People’s Actions Beyond Those That They Inflict Upon Each Other”

March 13, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

I have doubts that Mars One will actually blast off in 2024 (or ever), let alone become a global reality show, but let’s say it does. What will govern this handful of astronauts should lawlessness occur as the cameras beam the crimes back to Earth? That’s what Anders Herlitz of Practical Ethics wonders.

I wonder something else: How will viewers respond when one of the astronauts dies onscreen on a strange and lonely planet? Since these transplanted Martians won’t be returning, death is a given. If the Apollo 11 astronauts had died on the moon, much of the world would have been inconsolable. Would that be the case now? Has reality TV, in all its glorious stupidity, prepared us for bad things happening to foolhardy people? Is the melding of the real and the fictional so ingrained in us now that the blow will be softened? And if so, does that say something good about us (sophistication, maturity, acceptance) or something bad (desensitization)?

From Herlitz:

“I wonder what happens when the first crime is committed. We are going to put four persons inside a spaceship. They will travel with this spaceship for a year. As they arrive to Mars, they will live together in a confined space for the foreseeable future. I wonder what happens when property rights for the first time are violated. What happens when Ann cheats Charlie and jumps out of the vessel before him, thus becoming the first man on Mars, even though they had an agreement that Charlie would be the first? What happens when the first punch is thrown? What happens when the first rape occurs, when the first murder is committed? There will be no law enforcement in any conventional sense. One wonders: will there even be laws? But perhaps more important: since the crew will not return to earth, there will be no consequences of these people’s actions beyond those that they inflict upon each other. And all of this will be broadcasted. We are about to put four volunteers from around the world in a small capsule, give them resources enough to survive for a very long time, and send them to a different planet on which they will live their lives, and we broadcast all this for the world to see. I wonder if this will not so much be a giant leap for mankind, as it will be the materialisation of Lord of the Flies in the arenaTM. Will this be a giant leap backward, where we turn space into a postmodern amphitheatre, and gather gladiators from around the world to meet there?”

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“Humans Will Be In A World In Which Decisions Are Being Made By An Active Set Of Cooperating Devices”

March 12, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The Pew Research Center released its “Digital Life in 2025” report. Here are two items from its “15 Theses About the Digital Future,” neither of which is particularly surprising.

From “More-hopeful theses”:

• Information sharing over the Internet will be so effortlessly interwoven into daily life that it will become invisible, flowing like electricity, often through machine intermediaries.

David Clark, a senior research scientist at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, noted, “Devices will more and more have their own patterns of communication, their own ‘social networks,’ which they use to share and aggregate information, and undertake automatic control and activation. More and more, humans will be in a world in which decisions are being made by an active set of cooperating devices. The Internet (and computer-mediated communication in general) will become more pervasive but less explicit and visible. It will, to some extent, blend into the background of all we do.”

Joe Touch, director at the University of Southern California’s Information Sciences Institute, predicted, “The Internet will shift from the place we find cat videos to a background capability that will be a seamless part of how we live our everyday lives. We won’t think about ‘going online’ or ‘looking on the Internet’ for something — we’ll just be online, and just look.understood.”

From “Less-hopeful theses”:

• Dangerous divides between haves and have-nots may expand, resulting in resentment and possible violence.

Oscar Gandy, an emeritus professor at the Annenberg School, University of Pennsylvania, explained, “We have to think seriously about the kinds of conflicts that will arise in response to the growing inequality enabled and amplified by means of networked transactions that benefit smaller and smaller segments of the global population. Social media will facilitate and amplify the feelings of loss and abuse. They will also facilitate the sharing of examples and instructions about how to challenge, resist, and/or punish what will increasingly come to be seen as unjust.”

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“Abe Lincoln Would Not Have Done It”

March 12, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

President Abraham Lincoln, refined man that he was, always turned down requests to appear on faux talk shows on the Internet. But here are some other things he agreed to do (courtesy of Carl Sandburg’s Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years):

Judge cockfights:

“The Clary’s Grove boys called on [Lincoln] sometimes to judge their horse races and cockfights, umpire their matches and settle disputes. One story ran that Lincoln was on hand one day when an old man had agreed, for a gallon jug of whisky, to be rolled down a hill in a barrel. And Lincoln talked and laughed them out of doing it. He wasn’t there on the day, as D.W Burner told it, when the gang took an old man with a wooden leg, built a fire around the wooden leg, and held the man down until the wooden leg was burned off.”

Wrestle for the entertainment of knife-wielding gamblers:

“Offut talked big about Lincoln as a wrestler, and Bill Clary, who ran a saloon thirty steps north of the Offut store, bet Offut that Lincoln couldn’t throw Jack Armstrong, the Clary’s Grove champion. Sports from miles around came to a level square next to Offut’s store to see the match; bets of money, knives, trinkets, tobacco, drinks were put up, Armstrong, short and powerful, aimed from the first to get in close to his man and use his thick muscular strength. Lincoln held him off with long arms, wore down his strength, got him out of breath, surprised and ‘rattled.’ They pawed and clutched in many holds and twists till Lincoln threw Armstrong and had both shoulders to the grass.”

Drink whiskey from bungholes:

“When a small gambler tricked Bill Greene, Lincoln’s helper at the store, Lincoln told Bill to bet him the best fur hat in the store that he [Lincoln] could lift a barrel of whisky from the floor and hold it while he took a drink from the bunghole. Bill hunted up the gambler and made the bet. Lincoln sat squatting on the floor, lifted the barrel, rolled it on his knees till the bunghole reached his mouth, took a mouthful, let the barrel down–and stood up and spat out the whisky.”

Press barefoot boys’ muddy soles to the ceiling:

“He put barefoot boys to wading in a mud puddle near the home trough, pulled them up one by one, carried them to the house upside down, and walked their muddy feet across the ceiling. The stepmother came in, laughed at their foot tracks, told Abe he ought to be spanked–and he cleaned the ceiling so that it looked new.”

“There Is A Difference Between What People Say Loosely Or In Speeches And What We Publish”

March 12, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

Last year Seymour Hersh made comments about the official U.S. government report regarding the Obama bin Laden killing, labeling it as “bullshit.” It was taken to mean initially that the journalist believed the terrorist hadn’t actually been eliminated, but he quickly clarified, saying that bin Laden was dead but that the White House version of the mission was fantastical. In a wide-ranging New Republic interview conducted by Isaac Chotiner, New Yorker editor David Remnick pushes back at his contributor’s assertion. An excerpt:

“Isaac Chotiner:

Speaking of Hersh, he claims that the U.S. government’s story of the Osama bin Laden raid is bullshit. What do you say to that given that your magazine ran a piece that relied heavily on government sources?

David Remnick:

I thoroughly stand by the story we published.

Isaac Chotiner:

And his comments?

David Remnick:

Look, there is a difference between what people say loosely or in speeches and what we publish. All I can be in charge of is what we publish. I have enormous respect for him.

Isaac Chotiner:

Hersh wrote a piece a few months back hinting that the rebels were the ones who used chemical weapons in Syria. Why did that run in the London Review of Books and not The New Yorker?

David Remnick:

Or The Washington Post. I have worked with Sy on many dozens of pieces and am proud of that work. And a lot of those pieces had the potential to break a lot of crockery. I was willing, and am still willing, to go to the wall with investigative journalism. But if he and I disagree, it is not an easy thing. I hope we will work again together. I hope you will print this: I wish him all the best, and I think he is one of the great journalists of our age.”

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“Technologists And Science-Fiction Writers Have Speculated About A Future In Which Humans Meld With Machines”

March 12, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Some aren’t looking to defeat the robots but to join them. They want no confrontation.

Members of the Grinder subculture aren’t waiting for science and technology to perfect and normalize the melding of humans and machines but are instead taking matters into their own hands, one magnetized fingertip at a time. From “Who Wants to Be a Cyborg?” Alex Mayyasi’s Priceonomics post which begins with an anecdote about early adopter Rich Lee:

“If you ask Lee why he did this, as we did, he’ll reply, ‘I realized that if I want to be a cyborg, I have to do it myself.’

Lee recognizes that this ‘is not a goal that everyone has now.’ But he is not alone in his ambition. Lee associates with a loose-knit community of ‘grinders,’ people interested in augmenting their human bodies with implanted technology. Other enthusiasts have implanted magnets in their fingertips so that they can feel electromagnetic fields, placed a device that sends biomedical data to the Internet via bluetooth under the skin of their forearm, and built hardware that allows them to experience color as sound.

For decades, technologists and science-fiction writers have speculated about a future in which humans meld with machines. New technologies like Google Glass, meanwhile, lead to comparisons with The Terminator and speculation that it is the first step down the path to an augmented reality.

The grinder community, however, is not waiting for the future to arrive; they’re building it by tinkering with their own bodies. And their first, do-it-yourself steps toward becoming cyborgs show that humans can already modify or augment their experience to a surprising degree.”

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“The Web Is A — Primarily Neutral — Tool For Humanity”

March 12, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, who gave us the web and refuses to take it back no matter how nicely we ask, just did an AMA at Reddit. A few exchanges follow.

___________________________

Question:

Do you ever look at the stuff on the web now and feel like Robert Oppenheimer?

Tim Berners-Lee:

No, not really. The web is a — primarily neutral — tool for humanity. When you look at humanity you see the good and the bad, the wonderful and the awful. A powerful tool can be used for good or ill. Things which are really bad are illegal on the web as they are off it. On balance, communication is good think I think: much of the badness comes from misunderstanding.

___________________________

Question:

Edward Snowden- Hero or Villain?

Tim Berners-Lee:

Because he ✓ had no other alternative ✓ engaged as a journalist / with a journalist to be careful of how what was released, and ✓ provided an important net overall benefit to the world, I think he should be protected, and we should have ways of protecting people like him. Because we can try to design perfect systems of government, and they will never be perfect, and when they fail, then the whistleblower may be all that saves society.

___________________________

Question:

What are your thoughts on the increased surveillance on internet based mediums like GCHQ’s monitoring of all the Yahoo video chats. Do you personally think it should be controlled, non existent or fine the way it is now?

Tim Berners-Lee:

I think that some monitoring of the net by government agencies is going to be needed to fight crime. We need to invent a new system of checks and balances with unprecedented power to be able to investigate and hold the agencies which do it accountable to the public.

___________________________

Question:

What other names did you consider other than the world wide web?

Tim Berners-Lee:

Mine of Information, The Information Mine, The Mesh

None had quite the right ring. I liked WWW partly because I could start global variable names with a W and not have them clash with other peoples’ (in a C world) …in fact I used HT for them)

___________________________

Question:

What was one of the things you never thought the internet would be used for, but has actually become one of the main reasons people use the internet?

Tim Berners-Lee:

Kittens.•

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“Information Took The Place Of LSD”

March 11, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Give me more and more information. I love it, even if I can’t remember it all. But in an Aeon essay, Douglas Hine argues that a surfeit of information infuses us with a sense of ennui. An excerpt:

“This line from counterculture to cyberculture is not the only one we can draw through the prehistory of our networked age, nor is it necessarily the most important. But it carried a disproportionate weight in the formation of the culture and politics of the web. When the internet moved out of university basements and into public consciousness in the 1990s, it was people such as Brand, Kevin Kelly (founding editor of Wired) and John Perry Barlow (founding member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation) who were able to combine the experience of years spent in spaces such as the WELL with the ability to tell strong, simple stories about what this was and why it mattered.

Information took the place of LSD, the magic substance whose consumption could transform the world

The journalist John Markoff, himself an early contributor to the WELL, gave a broader history of how the counterculture shaped personal computing in his book What the Dormouse Said (2005). As any Jefferson Airplane fan can tell you, what the Dormouse said was: ‘Feed your head! Feed your head!’ The internet needed a story that would make sense to those who would never be interested in the TCP/IP protocol, and the counterculture survivors gave it one – the great escapist myth of their era: turn on, tune in, drop out. In this new version of the fable, information took the place of LSD, the magic substance whose consumption could transform the world.

The trouble is that information doesn’t nourish us. Worse, in the end, it turns out to be boring.”

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“We Will Find Harmony With The Robots”

March 11, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The automation of the workforce is good in the long run but difficult until the new normal becomes, well, normal. How can a roboticized economy and a free-market economy coexist? New industries will be created, of course, but there still may be a shortfall in employment. One solution: an economic output tax. From Rachel Emma Silverman at the WSJ:

“Carl Bass, the chief executive of Autodesk, acknowledged that workplace automation has eliminated or reduced many manufacturing jobs, and will continue to do so in the future, leading to major shifts in the labor market. Entire industries, such as trucking, will eventually be disrupted by robotic advances like self-driving cars, he said. (Bass cited the book, The Second Machine Age, by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee as a source for this robot-heavy scenario.)

But, Bass asked: ‘Are the jobs lost to automation ones that you would want for your children?’ Few parents, he said, dreamed their kids would someday become fuel pumpers or elevator operators, jobs already replaced by automation. In the next 30 years, Bass added, smart machines and robots will outnumber humans on the planet.

Bass presented some outlandish ideas to help societies deal with the structural changes generated by a robot-heavy workforce, including taxing economic output rather than income, or implementing a ‘negative income tax,’ in which governments pay citizens a stipend in order to guarantee a level of income.

‘With our creativity and imagination, we will find harmony with the robots,’ Bass said.”

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“He Would Reminisce About The Time When He Was Young, And California Was Still The Fruit Bowl Of The United States”

March 11, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Steve Jobs, that grandiose dreamer, didn’t just want to build Apple a new campus, he wanted to create a new California–or recreate the old one. From Cathleen McGuigan’s interview with the project’s architect, Norman Foster:

“Architectural Record:

The Apple headquarters you’ve designed for Cupertino, California, will have 12,000 employees in one building.

Norman Foster:

You could compare that with a typical university of the same size. Traditionally, you’re probably talking at least 16 or 17 buildings. The Apple building will occupy the site much more tightly than what was there. It was the former Hewlett-Packard site, and, just in the last month, we demolished all the buildings that were there. It was a large number of them. [The new Apple construction will cover 13 percent of the site, while the two dozen former HP buildings, in total, covered much more, according to Foster’s office.]

Architectural Record:

So what made the form of a ring the logical choice for this building?

Norman Foster:

It’s interesting how it evolved. First of all, there was a smaller site. Then, as the project developed, and the Hewlett-Packard site became available, the scale of the project changed.

Meanwhile, the reference point for Steve [Jobs] was always the large space on the Stanford campus—the Main Quad—which Steve knew intimately. Also, he would reminisce about the time when he was young, and California was still the fruit bowl of the United States. It was still orchards.

We did a continuous series of base planning studies. One idea which came out of it is that you can get high density by building around the perimeter of a site, as in the squares of London. And in the case of a London square, you create a mini-park in the center. So a series of organic segments in the early studies started to form enclosures, all of which were in turn related to the scale of the Stanford campus. These studies finally morphed into a circular building that would enclose the private space in the middle—essentially a park that would replicate the original California landscape, and parts of it would also recapture the orchards of the past. The car would visually be banished, and tarmac would be replaced by greenery, and car parks by jogging and bicycle trails.

Remember, the main building caters to 12,000 people, but the wellness center—the fitness center—is probably responding to the needs of the entire Apple community in Silicon Valley, which is 20,000-something. Also, another building on the site is the presentation center, which will allow Apple to do the kind of things like product launches that otherwise would require space in San Francisco or wherever. And, a bit like the airport, where you have one building—although it is in itself quite large—it is essentially compact.”

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“How Did They Know Where We Were Sitting?”

March 10, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Disney theme parks have always been something of a totalitarian state, a paranoid experience, with omnipresent surveillance, and undercover security clad in tourist wear ready to pounce on any wrongdoing. They’re watching you to make sure you don’t interrupt the happiness. (And don’t even try to die there.) So it’s not surprising that the company is going all in on Big Data, hoping to extract information from visitors to help decide which rides will be added or menu items subtracted–and who knows what else. From Christopher Palmeri at Businesswek:

“Jason McInerney and his wife, Melissa, recently tapped their lunch orders onto a touchscreen at the entrance to the Be Our Guest restaurant at Florida’s Walt Disney World Resort and were told to take any open seat. Moments later a food server appeared at their table with their croque-monsieur and carved turkey sandwiches. Asks McInerney, a once-a-year visitor to Disney theme parks: ‘How did they know where we were sitting?’

The answer was on the electronic bands the couple wore on their wrists. That’s the magic of the MyMagic+, Walt Disney’s $1 billion experiment in crowd control, data collection, and wearable technology that could change the way people play—and spend—at the Most Magical Place on Earth. If the system works, it could be copied not only by other theme parks but also by museums, zoos, airports, and malls. ‘It’s a complete game changer,’ says Douglas Quinby, vice president for research at PhoCusWright, a travel consulting firm.

That would suit Disney just fine, as it expands its global empire of theme parks and kicks up efforts to fend off rivals. The most formidable is Comcast’s (CMCSA) Universal Studios, which this summer will unveil a massive expansion of its hit Wizarding World of Harry Potter attraction at its parks near Walt Disney World.

One hitch for Disney could be if devotees such as the McInerneys find MyMagic+ confining, confusing, or even a bit creepy.”

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“Just How Well Does Your Office Soda Machine Know You?”

March 10, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Smart vending machines are only nominally interested in your coins–even your bitcoins. What they really want is the true coin of the realm, the most valuable currency of the day: information. We aren’t the children of Marx and Coca-Cola but of Orwell and Red Bull. The opening of an Avram Piltch NBC News piece:

“Just how well does your office soda machine know you? A network of smart, connected vending machines will soon use facial recognition, NFC and a membership program to market and sell everything from food to electronics on their giant touch screens. The product of software giant SAP, these new high-tech machines will also use cloud technology and data analysis to make sure they stay stocked with your favorite drink and get repaired as soon as they break.

SAP Senior Director Carston Kress showed us a sample machine, which had a giant color touch screen in lieu of a window. The display had a rotating animation of snack items (sodas, candy bars, etc) on top of a lime green background. The top of the machine also had a camera, which it uses for facial recognition in order to see who it’s marketing to.

‘For example, you have a group of people like us, three men and a woman,’ Kress said. ‘This would be recognized by the machine and it can now drive a personalized campaign to the audience that stands in front of it.'”

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“They Were The Social And Political Activists”

March 10, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The Pill first drove free love and then the free market. Being able to delay pregnancy made it possible for women to pursue previously unavailable educational and professional opportunities. But ever since birth control became readily accessible in 1960, one unfair question has persisted: Can they have it all? Fact is, no one can have it all. A male CEO with children probably isn’t spending as much time with them as is necessary. Everyone who wants a work life and a family life juggles and balances, not just women.

In a New York Review of Books piece about Alison Wolf’s The XX Factor, Marcia Angell writes about an unintended consequence of women moving primarily from the community into the workforce:

“But there is something more serious these couples are giving up—civic engagement—and Wolf has a chapter on that, called ‘Something to Regret?’ ‘Earlier generations of educated women,’ she writes, ‘worked largely in schools, or volunteered in the community, because little else was on offer.’ They were the social and political activists. Now paid employment has largely displaced volunteering in the community. Moreover, many ambitious women no longer become teachers, except at the college level, because the pay and prestige are greater in other professions. Wolf quotes from an interview with sociologist and political scientist Theda Skocpol: ‘Women were the ones who stood up for welfare, and made the case for the public good, for everyone. Now it’s all so narrow.’

Obviously, we can’t and shouldn’t return to a time when women were expected to tend to the needs and welfare of the community gratis because they had no other options and no one else would do it. But we do need to modify the cult of overwork, in child rearing as well as in careers, to make room for highly educated women and their husbands to be more active citizens. In particular, I wish upper-middle-class women were stronger advocates for the rights of less privileged women, both in their own country and abroad.”

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