Excerpts

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“Are We Finally Seeing The Dawn Of The Hydrogen Age? Not So Fast.”

March 3, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

There will soon be thousands of hydrogen cars available for purchase (largely in California) from major automakers, but why? The refueling infrastructure is sorely lacking and these alternative vehicles don’t have momentum the way EVs currently do. From Basem Wasef at Popular Mechanics:

“The basic principle behind hydrogen fuel cells is fairly simple: Hydrogen atoms are stripped of their electrons to generate electricity and then combined with oxygen to form water as a by-product. Mainstream deployment of fuel-cell vehicles, though, has proved to be complex. Compared with liquid fuels, hydrogen is tough to transport and store. And without a meaningful number of vehicles on the road, there’s been no incentive to build hydrogen fuel infrastructure. Now new initiatives in California and across the U.S. are pushing for a long-awaited expansion of the refueling network. And with the debut of three promising hydrogen-fuel-cell vehicles from Honda, Hyundai, and Toyota, consumers will have new options beginning in 2014. Are we finally seeing the dawn of the hydrogen age? Not so fast.

Why Now?

The current hydrogen push has less to do with consumer demand than with government incentives that treat fuel-cell vehicles (FCV) as equal to or better than electric vehicles.”

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Jack Nicholson betting on hydrogen in 1978:

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“The Fact That Writers Really Don’t Mean A Goddamn Thing To Nine-Tenths Of The Population Doesn’t Hurt”

March 2, 2014 in Books, Excerpts | Permalink

Philip Roth, one of the top five American novelists ever, is done, done, done with the form and believes that all of civilization will soon be finished with it. One question from a Q&A he just did with the New York Times:

“Question:

You belong to an exceptional generation of postwar writers, who defined American literature for almost half a century: Bellow, Styron, Updike, Doctorow, DeLillo. What made this golden age happen and what made it great? Did you feel, in your active years, that these writers were competition or did you feel kinship — or both? And why were there so few female writers with equal success in that same period? Finally: What is your opinion of the state of contemporary American fiction now?

Philip Roth:

I agree that it’s been a good time for the novel in America, but I can’t say I know what accounts for it. Maybe it is the absence of certain things that somewhat accounts for it. The American novelist’s indifference to, if not contempt for, ‘critical’ theory. Aesthetic freedom unhampered by all the high-and-mighty isms and their humorlessness. (Can you think of an ideology capable of corrective self-satire, let alone one that wouldn’t want to sink its teeth into an imagination on the loose?) Writing that is uncontaminated by political propaganda — or even political responsibility. The absence of any ‘school’ of writing. In a place so vast, no single geographic center from which the writing originates. Anything but a homogeneous population, no basic national unity, no single national character, social calm utterly unknown, even the general obtuseness about literature, the inability of many citizens to read any of it with even minimal comprehension, confers a certain freedom. And surely the fact that writers really don’t mean a goddamn thing to nine-tenths of the population doesn’t hurt. It’s inebriating.

Very little truthfulness anywhere, antagonism everywhere, so much calculated to disgust, the gigantic hypocrisies, no holding fierce passions at bay, the ordinary viciousness you can see just by pressing the remote, explosive weapons in the hands of creeps, the gloomy tabulation of unspeakable violent events, the unceasing despoliation of the biosphere for profit, surveillance overkill that will come back to haunt us, great concentrations of wealth financing the most undemocratic malevolents around, science illiterates still fighting the Scopes trial 89 years on, economic inequities the size of the Ritz, indebtedness on everyone’s tail, families not knowing how bad things can get, money being squeezed out of every last thing — that frenzy — and (by no means new) government hardly by the people through representative democracy but rather by the great financial interests, the old American plutocracy worse than ever.

You have 300 million people on a continent 3,000 miles wide doing the best they can with their inexhaustible troubles. We are witnessing a new and benign admixture of races on a scale unknown since the malignancy of slavery. I could go on and on. It’s hard not to feel close to existence here. This is not some quiet little corner of the world.”

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“The Computer Has Caused Garry To Act In Strange Ways”

March 2, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Sports | Permalink

Garry Kasparov held off machines but only for so long. He defeated Deep Thought in 1989, and believed a computer could never best him. But by 1997 Deep Blue turned him–and humanity–into an also-ran in some key ways. The chess master couldn’t believe it at first–he assumed his opponent was manipulated by humans behind the scene, like the Mechanical Turk, the faux chess-playing machine from the 18th century. But no sleight of hand was needed.

Below are the openings of three Bruce Weber New York Times articles written during the Kasparov-Deep Blue matchup which chart the rise of the machines.

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From “Computer Defeats Kasparov, Stunning the Chess Experts” on May 5:

“Responding to defeat with the pride and tenacity of a champion, the I.B.M. computer Deep Blue drew even yesterday in its match against Garry Kasparov, the world’s best human chess player, winning the second of their six games and stunning many chess experts with its strategy.

Joel Benjamin, the grandmaster who works with the Deep Blue team, declared breathlessly: ‘This was not a computer-style game. This was real chess!’

He was seconded by others.

‘Nice style!’ said Susan Polgar, the women’s world champion. ‘Really impressive. The computer played a champion’s style, like Karpov,’ she continued, referring to Anatoly Karpov, a former world champion who is widely regarded as second in strength only to Mr. Kasparov. ‘Deep Blue made many moves that were based on understanding chess, on feeling the position. We all thought computers couldn’t do that.'”

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From “Wary Kasparov and Deep Blue Draw Game 3” on May 7: 

“Garry Kasparov, the world chess champion, opened the third game of his six-game match against the I.B.M. computer Deep Blue yesterday in peculiar fashion, by moving his queen’s pawn forward a single square. Huh?

‘I think we have a new opening move,’ said Yasser Seirawan, a grandmaster providing live commentary on the match. ‘What should we call it?’

Mike Valvo, an international master who is a commentator, said, ‘The computer has caused Garry to act in strange ways.’

Indeed it has. Mr. Kasparov, who swiftly became more conventional and subtle in his play, went on to a draw with Deep Blue, leaving the score of Man vs. Machine at 1 1/2 apiece. (A draw is worth half a point to each player.) But it is clear that after his loss in Game 2 on Sunday, in which he resigned after 45 moves, Mr. Kasparov does not yet have a handle on Deep Blue’s predilections, and that he is still struggling to elicit them.”

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From “Swift and Slashing, Computer Topples Kasparov” on May 12:

“In brisk and brutal fashion, the I.B.M. computer Deep Blue unseated humanity, at least temporarily, as the finest chess playing entity on the planet yesterday, when Garry Kasparov, the world chess champion, resigned the sixth and final game of the match after just 19 moves, saying, ‘I lost my fighting spirit.’

The unexpectedly swift denouement to the bitterly fought contest came as a surprise, because until yesterday Mr. Kasparov had been able to summon the wherewithal to match Deep Blue gambit for gambit.

The manner of the conclusion overshadowed the debate over the meaning of the computer’s success. Grandmasters and computer experts alike went from praising the match as a great experiment, invaluable to both science and chess (if a temporary blow to the collective ego of the human race) to smacking their foreheads in amazement at the champion’s abrupt crumpling.

‘It had the impact of a Greek tragedy,’ said Monty Newborn, chairman of the chess committee for the Association for Computing, which was responsible for officiating the match.

It was the second victory of the match for the computer — there were three draws — making the final score 3 1/2 to 2 1/2, the first time any chess champion has been beaten by a machine in a traditional match. Mr. Kasparov, 34, retains his title, which he has held since 1985, but the loss was nonetheless unprecedented in his career; he has never before lost a multigame match against an individual opponent.

Afterward, he was both bitter at what he perceived to be unfair advantages enjoyed by the computer and, in his word, ashamed of his poor performance yesterday.

‘I was not in the mood of playing at all,’ he said, adding that after Game 5 on Saturday, he had become so dispirited that he felt the match was already over. Asked why, he said: ‘I’m a human being. When I see something that is well beyond my understanding, I’m afraid.'”

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“Even In Apple’s Unrelenting Culture, Cook’s Meetings Stood Out As Harsh”

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

Apple CEO Tim Cook is clearly a bright and talented guy, but until the company delivers a product post-Jobs that wows and not just new iterations of the same old things, he’ll be judged with suspicion. And even though he seems to be more progressive than his late boss in terms of charitable giving and environmentalism, he’s apparently just as scary when in business mode. From Haunted Empire: The Job After Steve Jobs, Yukari Iwatani Kane’s new book which has been excerpted in the Wall Street Journal:

“Meetings with Cook could be terrifying. He exuded a Zenlike calm and didn’t waste words. ‘Talk about your numbers. Put your spreadsheet up,’ he’d say as he nursed a Mountain Dew. (Some staffers wondered why he wasn’t bouncing off the walls from the caffeine.) When Cook turned the spotlight on someone, he hammered them with questions until he was satisfied. ‘Why is that?’ ‘What do you mean?’ ‘I don’t understand. Why are you not making it clear?’ He was known to ask the same exact question 10 times in a row.

Cook also knew the power of silence. He could do more with a pause than Jobs ever could with an epithet. When someone was unable to answer a question, Cook would sit without a word while people stared at the table and shifted in their seats. The silence would be so intense and uncomfortable that everyone in the room wanted to back away. Unperturbed, Cook didn’t move a finger as he focused his eyes on his squirming target. Sometimes he would take an energy bar from his pocket while he waited for an answer, and the hush would be broken only by the crackling of the wrapper.

Even in Apple’s unrelenting culture, Cook’s meetings stood out as harsh. On one occasion, a manager from another group who was sitting in was shocked to hear Cook tell an underling, ‘That number is wrong. Get out of here.’

Cook’s quarterly reviews were especially torturous because Cook would grind through the minutiae as he categorized what worked and what didn’t, using yellow Post-its. His managers crossed their fingers in the hopes of emerging unscathed. ‘We’re safe as long as we’re not at the back of the pack,’ they would say to each other.

Cook demonstrated the same level of austerity and discipline in his life as he did in his work. He woke up at 4:30 or 5 a.m. and hit the gym several times a week. He ate protein bars throughout the day and had simple meals like chicken and rice for lunch.

His stamina was inhuman. He could fly to Asia, spend three days there, fly back, land at 7 a.m. at the airport and be in the office by 8:30, interrogating someone about some numbers.

Cook was also relentlessly frugal. For many years, he lived in a rental unit in a dingy ranch-style building with no air conditioning.”

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“The Earth Is About To Become A Lot Less ‘Natural'”

March 2, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Sports | Permalink

What’s easier, de-extincting an average example of a bygone species or engineering a superior version of one still in existence?

The counterintuitive answer is that they may be equally difficult even though it might be assumed the latter would be relatively simpler. Creating a Mammoth from scratch could be no harder than “building” another Secretariat. Those new mammoths, however, won’t be exactly the same as their “ancestors” nor would a new champion be exactly like the Triple Crown winner of yore. There are just too many variables. But exactitude isn’t as important as progress. These creatures will be new and different, and the same will be said eventually of enhanced humans. That’s where we’re headed. It’s a brave new world, and a fraught one, but we probably won’t survive without such experimentation.

Excerpts follows from two new articles: “The Mammoth Cometh,” Nathaniel Rich’s excellent New York Times Magazine piece which will surely have a place on my “Great 2014 Nonfiction Pieces Online For Free” list if I’m still doing this blog by the end of the year; and “Can Science Breed the Next Secretariat?” Adam Piore and Katie Bo Williams’ Nautilus article about recreating an incredibly rare natural mutation.

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From “The Mammoth Cometh”:

There is no authoritative definition of “species.” The most widely accepted definition describes a group of organisms that can procreate with one another and produce fertile offspring, but there are many exceptions. De-extinction operates under a different definition altogether. Revive & Restore hopes to create a bird that interacts with its ecosystem as the passenger pigeon did. If the new bird fills the same ecological niche, it will be successful; if not, back to the petri dish. ‘It’s ecological resurrection, not species resurrection,’ Shapiro says. A similar logic informs the restoration of Renaissance paintings. If you visit The Last Supper in the refectory of the Convent of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan, you won’t see a single speck of paint from the brush of Leonardo da Vinci. You will see a mural with the same proportions and design as the original, and you may feel the same sense of awe as the refectory’s parishioners felt in 1498, but the original artwork disappeared centuries ago. Philosophers call this Theseus’ Paradox, a reference to the ship that Theseus sailed back to Athens from Crete after he had slain the Minotaur. The ship, Plutarch writes, was preserved by the Athenians, who “took away the old planks as they decayed, putting in new and stronger timber in their place.” Theseus’ ship, therefore, “became a standing example among the philosophers . . . one side holding that the ship remained the same, and the other contending that it was not the same.”

What does it matter whether Passenger Pigeon 2.0 is a real passenger pigeon or a persuasive impostor? If the new, synthetically created bird enriches the ecology of the forests it populates, few people, including conservationists, will object. The genetically adjusted birds would hardly be the first aspect of the deciduous forest ecosystem to bear man’s influence; invasive species, disease, deforestation and a toxic atmosphere have engineered forests that would be unrecognizable to the continent’s earliest European settlers. When human beings first arrived, the continent was populated by camels, eight-foot beavers and 550-pound ground sloths. “People grow up with this idea that the nature they see is ‘natural,’ ” Novak says, “but there’s been no real ‘natural’ element to the earth the entire time humans have been around.”

The earth is about to become a lot less “natural.” Biologists have already created new forms of bacteria in the lab, modified the genetic code of countless living species and cloned dogs, cats, wolves and water buffalo, but the engineering of novel vertebrates — of breathing, flying, defecating pigeons — will represent a milestone for synthetic biology. This is the fact that will overwhelm all arguments against de-extinction. Thanks, perhaps, to Jurassic Park, popular sentiment already is behind it. (“That movie has done a lot for de-extinction,” Stewart Brand told me in all earnestness.) In a 2010 poll by the Pew Research Center, half of the respondents agreed that “an extinct animal will be brought back.” Among Americans, belief in de-extinction trails belief in evolution by only 10 percentage points. “Our assumption from the beginning has been that this is coming anyway,” Brand said, “so what’s the most benign form it can take?”

What is coming will go well beyond the resurrection of extinct species. For millenniums, we have customized our environment, our vegetables and our animals, through breeding, fertilization and pollination. Synthetic biology offers far more sophisticated tools. The creation of novel organisms, like new animals, plants and bacteria, will transform human medicine, agriculture, energy production and much else.•

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From “Can Science Breed the Next Secretariat?”:

Any trainer with good horse sense could have told you that Trading Leather was something special before he raced from the pack, overtook Galileo Rock, and galloped to victory in the prestigious Irish Derby last June. All one needed to do was take in the magnificent crevasse of muscle running down the back of his hindquarters, the length and architecture of his limbs, his inimitable dignity of motion.

But the legendary trainer who bred him, Jim Bolger, 72, had an extra reason to believe his prized colt was suited for the mid-distance race on the storied track at County Kildare. Bolger had Trading Leather tested for the “speed gene.” He knew, like an expectant mother who has an embryo tested to find out the sex of her baby, what distance Trading Leather was optimally suited to run and at about what age he’d be ready to run it.

Genetics testing has arrived in the world of thoroughbred horse racing. Bolger, whose name is synonymous with success in the fickle game of horse racing, has called it “the most important thing that has happened to breeding since it began over 300 years ago.” The speed gene is now central to the decisions Bolger makes every year when he sits down to pencil out which of his roughly 100 thoroughbreds to mate, and when to begin training his most promising yearlings. Merging specific gene types from his sires and mares, he believes, can result in new lines of lucrative champions. He’s so sure of the science behind the speed gene that he opened a company to sell a speed gene test to his fellow breeders and trainers.

Genetic testing has long been a dream of the sports industry. Since the human genome was mapped in 2000, sports scientists have been racing to identify genes that contribute to athletic superiority. The first test purporting to evaluate human athletic potential hit the market in Australia back in 2004 (arriving in the United States in 2008), a year after a team of researchers published a study linking a single gene to a type of muscle fiber involved in producing the explosive, short-duration bursts of energy needed for sports like power lifting and sprints. This January, Uzbekistan became the first nation to announce a plan to use genetic tests to evaluate future Olympians. The tests of children as young as 10 will be overseen by a team of geneticists who have been studying the genes of the nation’s best athletes for two years, and are preparing a report detailing 50 genes that will form the basis of their talent search.

Every new announcement of a ‘sports gene’ seems to stir up a debate about science and culture, nature and nurture. Can genes account for athletic performance? Are they any match for expert training?•

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“Today The Idea, If Not Quite The Practice, Of Living In Space Is Coming Back Into Fashion”

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

The greatest thing about colonies on Mars? No taxes. It’s even better than the Cayman Islands. Mitt Romney could yet be President. Seriously, a lot of megarich people have their heads in the sky, seeing space living as both a sound investment and a bold adventure. As Elon Musk says: “I’d like to die on Mars, just not on impact.” The opening of John Sunyer’s well-written Financial Times article about private wealth reheating the Space Race:

“Here we are more than a decade into the 21st century and we’re still not there. To be a child of the 1960s and 1970s was to daydream not only about travelling in space but also about settling there, indefinitely. National space agencies planned inflatable lunar cities. Space was where we were all going to live and work – Moon bases and hotels, everything in Stanley Kubrick’s futuristic 2001: A Space Odyssey. This was the era of the space race and of humanity’s first orbiting residences.

To young people today this is old news: they know that the Americans went to the Moon, just as they know the Romans built straight roads. Manned space flight lost its glamour; Nasa lost its way, its ambition severely weakened by funding cuts; and we gave up on the idea that living in space was the next step in humankind’s evolution. As Buzz Aldrin, the second man on the Moon, tells me: ‘After the Apollo lunar missions, America lost its love of space – there was no concentrated follow-up and we didn’t have any clear objectives.’

Still, not all hope is lost for wide-eyed space cadets. Today the idea, if not quite the practice, of living in space is coming back into fashion. If the 20th century space race was about the might of the US government, the space race today is about something that could be even more powerful – private wealth.”

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“We Can Easily Spot Prejudice In Others, But We’re Oblivious To Our Own”

February 28, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

It’s no surprise that once President Obama adopted Heritage Foundation ideas for his signature health-care legislation that conservatives turned on policies that originated with them. A great deal of political bias–or any kind of prejudice–comes from a seemingly natural, perhaps evolutionary, inclination to favor who and what reminds us of ourselves. Even a degree of self-knowledge doesn’t seem to mitigate this tendency. Everything, including the jury system, is compromised by such urges. The opening of “What, Me Biased?” by Tom Jacobs at Pacific-Standard:

“Pretty much all of us are prone to ‘bias blindness.’ We can easily spot prejudice in others, but we’re oblivious to our own, insisting on our impartiality in spite of any and all evidence to the contrary.

Newly published research suggests this problem is actually worse than we thought. It finds that even when people use an evaluation strategy they concede is biased, they continue to insist their judgments are objective.

‘Recognizing one’s bias is a critical first step in trying to correct for it,’ writes a research team led by Emily Pronin and Katherine Hansen of Princeton University. ‘These experiments make clear how difficult that first step can be to reach.'”

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“What If I Told You That You Could Read The Massive Book In Less Than Five Hours?”

February 28, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech, Videos | Permalink

350 words per minute.

I’m pretty sure I don’t want to read 350 words per minute (as displayed above) let alone a 1000, but it’s possible to do with little effort if you use a mobile app like Spritz which presents books to your eyes not a page at a time but one rapid-fire word after another. From Williams Pelegrin at Digital Trends:

“If you ever wanted to read A Game of Thrones, odds are you were put off by the sheer number of pages each book in the series contains. For example, it is 819 pages worth of reading. Especially if you’re a slow reader, that doesn’t sound like a very fun number of pages. What if I told you that you could read the massive book in less than five hours? Spritz allows you to do just that.

In ‘Stealth Mode’ for roughly three years, Spritz enables people to read words as they appear one at a time, in rapid succession. With Spritz, you can read anywhere from 250 to 1,000 words per minute.”

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Steve Allen, in 1979, selling the Evelyn Wood Reading Dynamics course:

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“Projecting Evolutionary Change May Not Be Beyond Our Reach”

February 28, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Data is opportunity, and biological information processed by computational models may even be able to forecast some evolutionary courses. From William Herkewitz in Popular Mechanics:

“With the flu, every year is a rapid arms race. Countless numbers of viruses are pushed to mutate and spread over and over again, transforming until they can finally evade the human antibodies that have built up to fight off their predecessors. This shifting landscape poses a particular problem for the people in charge of reformulating the annual flu vaccine. How do you prepare for the onslaught of a virus that doesn’t exist yet?

Two computational biologists have just unveiled the first computer model that forecasts the yearly changes in the worldwide populations of flu viruses. As they report today in Nature, their model will have immediate impact in the development of flu vaccines—and proves that in some cases, projecting evolutionary change may not be beyond our reach.

‘We don’t actually predict new mutations in the flu virus,’ says Marta Luksza, one of the scientists at Columbia University, ‘Our model only considers the rise and fall of families of closely related viruses.’ Still, the computer model has proven that it can with 93 percent accuracy predict which families will harbor the most widespread viruses in the upcoming year.”

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“This Has A Huge Impact Beyond Tesla”

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

Elon Musk apparently grew a little flustered recently during a Tesla earnings call when he was asked almost to the exclusion of everything else about his plans to build Gigafactory, the world’s largest battery factory. But he’d better get used to it because the work’s implications go far beyond electric cars and could be repurposed into virtually every other industry. From Alan Ohnsman at Businessweek:

“Tesla has dubbed the project the ‘gigafactory,’ and it would make Musk a force in both U.S. manufacturing and electric power. The plant he envisions would have more capacity than any other to make lithium-ion batteries.

‘This has a huge impact beyond Tesla,’ said Harley Shaiken, a labor economist at the University of California, Berkeley. ‘It gives enormous legitimacy to battery production and the future of the electric car because that lies in the battery. It’s high stakes, high technology.’

Tesla plans an investment of $4 billion to $5 billion by 2020 and will fund about $2 billion of the total, the Palo Alto, California-based company said in a presentation on its website. The convertible bond offering could grow to $1.84 billion, according to a separate statement.”

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“As Long As The Second-Hand Clothing Industry Thrives, Africa’s Economy Is Unlikely To Improve”

February 27, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Urban Studies | Permalink

A good portion of the clothes charitable Americans place in drop boxes provided by the Salvation Army and other non-profits winds up being resold in sub-Saharan Africa. That provides impoverished people in that region with ultra-cheap clothes, but it also might be stymieing garment industries in those nations. An unintended consequence, sure, though perhaps taking away this market would have unforeseen consequences as well. We should give, but give as intelligently as possible. Give now to help with immediate needs, while working to incentivize future markets. From Shannon Whitehead at Medium:

“People will argue that the second-hand clothing industry in Africa is booming. And, on the surface, it is — over one-third of Sub-Saharan Africans wear second-hand. The reality, though, is that for as long as the second-hand clothing industry thrives, Africa’s economy is unlikely to improve.

According to Professor Garth Frazer from the University of Toronto, no country has ever achieved a sustainable per capita national income (at a level associated with a developing economy) without also achieving a clothing-manufacturing workforce that employs at least 1 percent of the population.

Over the years, certain African nations have attempted to ban or restrict the influx of Western clothing imports. In an effort to give existing industries a chance and to maintain traditional culture, countries such as South Africa, Uganda and Nigeria have tried to implement regulation. While it’s done some good for those countries, it hasn’t provided a solution.

Simply put, as long as we, the consumer, continue to buy and discard at our current rate, there will be a market for our wasted fashion.”

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“It Provides The Highest Degree Of User Interaction To Track Your Oral Care Habits”

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

Bacteria in your mouth has a direct path to your heart, but technology also wants a way to your beloved chest muscle. The opening of Samuel Gibbs’ new Guardian article about a bluetooth toothbrush:

“Oral B’s new app controlled Bluetooth 4.0 toothbrush makes sure you brush your teeth properly, lets your dentist peek at your brushing habits and personalises your brushing.

The toothbrush connects to the free Oral B app for the iPhone and Android, and will track your every brush stroke, collect data and chart your progress while giving you real-time guidance on how to get the job done faster and better.

‘It provides the highest degree of user interaction to track your oral care habits to help improve your oral health, and we believe it will have significant impact on the future of personal oral care, providing data-based solutions for oral health, and making the relationship between dental professionals and patients a more collaborative one,’ said Wayne Randall, global vice president of Oral Care at Procter and Gamble.

The smart bathroom

Oral B sees the connected toothbrush, launched as part of Mobile World Congress’s Connected City exhibition, as the next evolution of the smart bathroom.”

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“Peek’s Abnormal Brain Wiring Certainly Came At A Cost”

February 26, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Understanding consciousness is the “hard problem” because the human brain is such a mystery, and that’s if we’re talking about an average model. Savant brains are even tougher nuts to crack, with their clear paths to long-term memory, which makes for amazing gifts and a difficultly in grasping everyday skills. And without comprehending the basics and variations of brain function, without solving the mysteries therein, can we truly understand humans, let alone create significant AI?

The opening of “Where Do Savant Skills Come From?” Scott Barry Kaufman’s Scientific American post:

“There’s a scene in the 1988 movie Rain Man in which Raymond Babbitt (played by Dustin Hoffman) recites a waitress’s phone number. Naturally the waitress is shocked. Instead of mental telepathy, Raymond had memorized the entire telephone book and instantly recognized the name on her nametag.

Hoffman’s character was heavily influenced by the life of Kim Peek, a real memory savant who recently passed away. Peek was born without a corpus callosum, the fibers that connect the right and left hemispheres of the brain. He was also born missing parts of the cerebellum, which is important for motor control and the learning of complex, well-rehearsed routines.

When Peek was 9 months old, a doctor recommended he be institutionalized due to his severe mental disability. By the age of 6, when Peek had already memorized the first eight volumes of the family encyclopedia, another doctor recommended a lobotomy. By 14, Peek completed a high school curriculum.

Peek’s abnormal brain wiring certainly came at a cost. Though he was able to immediately move new information from short-term memory to long-term memory, there wasn’t much processing going on in between. His adult fluid reasoning ability and verbal comprehension skills were on par with a child of 5, and he could barely understand the meaning in proverbs or metaphors. He also suffered deficits in the area of self-care: he couldn’t dress himself or brush his teeth without assistance.

But what Peek lacked in brain connections and conceptual cognitive functioning, he more than made up for in memory.“

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“This Is Depressing Stuff. It’s Also A Glimpse Of The Future.”

February 26, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

As a species, we’re a disaster for other living things on Earth, and, perhaps, ultimately, for ourselves as well.

Even those of us who are vegan are bad news for our non-human neighbors because you don’t need a gun or a slaughterhouse to do plenty of damage. Like the body, the planet is resilient, and species have always disappeared by the multitude, but how much is too much? The opening of “Killing Machines” an Economist review of New Yorker writer Elizabeth Kolbert’s book, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History:

“BLEAK headlines abound about species on the brink. Monarch butterflies in Mexico are struggling. So are starfish in America, vultures in South Asia and coral reefs everywhere.

This is depressing stuff. It’s also a glimpse of the future. As the climate warms, catastrophe looms. Yet it is oddly pleasurable to read Elizabeth Kolbert’s new book, which offers a ramble through mass extinctions, present and past. Five such episodes in the past 450m years have wiped out plant and animal life on huge scales. A sixth appears to be upon us.

Ms Kolbert, who writes for the New Yorker, uses case studies to document the crisis. Setting out for Panama to investigate a vanishing species of frog, she learns that amphibians are the world’s most imperilled class of animal. Close to her home in New England, a fast-spreading fungus has left bat corpses strewn through caves. On a tiny island off Australia’s coast, she laments the degradation of the Great Barrier Reef by ocean acidification, sometimes known as global warming’s ‘evil twin.’

A new geological epoch may have arrived. Some scientists have dubbed it the ‘Anthropocene’ after its human perpetrators.”

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“The sixth extinction is being caused by an invasive species”:

“It Might Not Have Been A Hallucination That I Experienced”

February 26, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Like Michel Siffre, who embedded himself in caverns and glaciers decades ago to test the human limits in isolation in advance of Apollo missions, journalist Kate Greene spent four months training in the exquisite malaise of a simulated NASA Mars mission in Hawaii, lying in wait–for what?–near the silent mouth of a volcano. It was so much like sleep that dreams–or something like them–began. The opening of “Planet Boredom,” Greene’s Aeon article about her experience:

“What follows is an account of an instance where I, a person of relatively sound mind and body, could not believe the evidence before my own eyes. It might not have been a hallucination that I experienced, but it was surely a great jolt of consciousness. The scene: I’m in my closet-sized cabin, inside a white dome built to house a crew of six for four months as part of an isolation experiment. As a crew, we are working and living as ‘explorers’ stationed on the surface of ‘Mars’. Our colony is lifelike and NASA-funded, but it is situated in a place quite a bit closer to home, on a remote slope of a Hawai’ian volcano.

It’s only a couple weeks before we are to be released, and I’m sitting on my bed with my laptop, sorting data from a sleep study I’ve been conducting on myself and my crewmates for the past three months. My cabin door is open. From the corner of my eye, I see a stranger walk into the washroom a few meters away. It’s odd, I think, for a stranger to be here. Our doors are not locked during the day, but our habitat is positioned in an isolated area, at a high elevation, far away from paved roads and pedestrians. The sight of an unfamiliar person nonchalantly using our facilities is enough to jack up my senses to high alert.

I watch as the stranger goes into the washroom and splashes water on his face. Do I know him? Why can’t I tell? If he is an intruder, why is he here? And what will he do when he’s done freshening up and sees me staring at him? I have three male crewmates and the man washing his face looks like none of them. Our crew commander shaves his head while this man has thick brown hair, slicked back. Another crewmate almost always wears buttoned-up long-sleeved shirts. The stranger is in a baggy black T-shirt. My third male crewmate is larger than the unfamiliar man and has curly red hair and a beard. This man is clean-shaven.

Finally, the stranger steps out of the bathroom and confronts me. ‘What,’ he says, less a question, more a bark. His voice kicks me to reality. It’s Simon, our red-headed engineer who has evidently shorn his beard and lost more weight over the mission than I had previously noticed.

Still, my heart is racing and a surge of blood warms me from earlobe to fingertip. ‘I didn’t know who you were,’ I say. He nods and gives a slight smile. We both laugh uneasily at the absurd thought of an intruder. It’s almost too impossible for us to imagine.

And it was shortly thereafter, as the tail end of my terror entwined with the emergent joy of relief, that I notice I hadn’t felt anything so strongly in months. I had been living in a kind of torpor.”

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“A Hungarian Team Has Created The First Drones That Can Fly As A Coordinated Flock”

February 26, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Two new reports about drone development, which can aid in shipping goods–or things that aren’t so good.

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From “Autonomous Drones Flock Like Birds,” by Ed Young at Nature:

“A Hungarian team has created the first drones that can fly as a coordinated flock. The researchers watched as the ten autonomous robots took to the air in a field outside Budapest, zipping through the open sky, flying in formation or even following a leader, all without any central control.

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The aircraft, called quadcopters because they have four rotors, navigate using signals from Global Positioning System (GPS) receivers, communicate their positions to one another via radio and compute their own flight plans. They were created by a team of scientists led by Tamás Vicsek, a physicist at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest.

‘This is remarkable work,’ says Iain Couzin, who studies collective animal behaviour at Princeton University in New Jersey. ‘It is the first outdoor demonstration of how biologically inspired rules can be used to create resilient yet dynamic flocks. [It suggests] we will be able to achieve large, coordinated robot flocks much sooner than many would have anticipated.'”

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From “Rolls-Royce Drone Ships Challenge $375 Billion Industry: Freight,” by Isaac Arnsdorf at Bloomberg:

“In an age of aerial drones and driver-less cars, Rolls-Royce Holdings Plc is designing unmanned cargo ships.

Rolls-Royce’s Blue Ocean development team has set up a virtual-reality prototype at its office in Alesund, Norway, that simulates 360-degree views from a vessel’s bridge. Eventually, the London-based manufacturer of engines and turbines says, captains on dry land will use similar control centers to command hundreds of crewless ships.

Drone ships would be safer, cheaper and less polluting for the $375 billion shipping industry that carries 90 percent of world trade, Rolls-Royce says.”

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“Although I Regret The Unnecessary Killing Of Dogs And Cats, I Don’t Think That Should Be Your Main Focus”

February 25, 2014 in Excerpts | Permalink

I don’t look at Gawker very much anymore, unless, of course, the site has an interview with moral philosopher Peter Singer and allows him to do an Ask Me Anything with readers. Singer is the author of the great book Practical Ethics and has sharp and controversial opinions about animal rights and charitable giving, among other topics. Beginning March 1, the Princeton professor is offering a MOOC ethics course. Below are excerpts from the post by Hamilton Nolan in which Singer answers a couple of Gawker questions and a couple from readers.

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Gawker:

What are the implications of your thoughts on charity for the arts? It seems that your position tends to cause outrage among fans of the arts who think that you’re not counting the arts as a real charity.

Peter Singer:

I’m not saying the arts are not a real charity, I’m just saying that in the world as it is, it’s not a charity that I would give the highest priority to. I think it’s great for people to promote and encourage the arts. But I do think you have to look at the world we live in. And if we could get out of the situation where we have a billion people living in extreme poverty, if we could meet basic needs… and provide some minimal education and health care and so on, then I think would be the time to say, “Yeah, let’s help to promote the arts.” But I just don’t think that the differences you make by donating to a museum or an art gallery really compare to the differences you make by donating to the charities that fight global poverty.

Gawker:

Sometimes you’re perceived as not having gratitude for charitable donations from the rich, i.e., saying someone like Bill Gates could donate more money. Is there a role for gratitude in your ethics?

Peter Singer:

Sure. I think there’s a place for—I’m not sure gratitude is quite the right word—I would say rather appreciation and recognition are what we should give to Bill Gates. And it’s true that Bill Gates and Melinda Gates could give more, but I don’t spend a lot of time saying that or criticizing them, because I think what they’re doing is fantastic. I think they have made a huge difference to the world, they’ve saved millions of lives, they’ve set an example of what wealthy people can be doing. They’re not saints or angels, but nor am I.

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Reader Question:

What can we do as a species to stop the needless and endless slaughter of dogs/cats in America?

Peter Singer:

Look, I like dogs and cats too, but the numbers matter… in the US, nearly 10 BILLION animals – chickens, pigs, cows – are slaughtered for food each year, and that’s completely unnecessary too, plus they mostly have MUCH worse living conditions than dogs and cats. That’s why, although I regret the unnecessary killing of dogs and cats, I don’t think that should be your main focus – and if you are actively participating in the slaughter of chickens, pigs and cows by eating them, you really have no basis to object to the killing of dogs and cats.

Reader Question:

What would you say is a more valuable use of time: Working for a huge corporation for the sake of making as much money as you can so you can give it to or finance your own charity of your choice, or leaving the corporate world and taking on a life of relative poverty devoted to directly helping those in need, like becoming a nun or something? Are one of those inherently more valuable, less harmful, or a better use of time and energy in your opinion?

Peter Singer:

Depends.. on the corporation and what it is doing, and whether you can have any influence on that.. also on whether you will be able to maintain your giving despite being part of a culture that doesn’t give a lot… But there are good arguments for saying that “earning to give” can, in the right circumstances, be the most effective thing one can do. See www.80000hours.org for more discussion.

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“Just How Demanding Do We Want Our Technologies To Be?”

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

Timothy Wu writes really thoughtful posts about technology for the New Yorker’s “Elements” blog that I enjoy reading even though I usually disagree with them philosophically. Case in point: His latest piece questions whether the ease of technology will weaken us. I agree that certain abilities disappear without focus and repetition, but I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing. Some tools are intended to teach and others just to provide utility. (And I think both kinds will exist as long as we exist.) I don’t think our minds aren’t meant to naturally handle a fixed set of immutable tasks but to continually evolve past them into more significant challenges. I remember hearing senior citizens complain about digital watches when I was a child. “Kids today don’t even know how to tell time,” they’d say. Most of those children grew up to be much more sophisticated thinkers than their elders. Perhaps pocket watches or wind-up wrist models looked classier and provided more aesthetic satisfaction, but it’s good we had the option to move past them. Evolution will always lead us to new tools and our challenges will change, but I think finding challenges is hardwired into us. The opening of Wu’s piece:

“In the history of marketing, there’s a classic tale that centers on the humble cake mix. During the nineteen-fifties, there were differences of opinion over how ‘instant’ powdered cake mixes should be, and, in particular, over whether adding an egg ought to be part of the process. The first cake mixes, invented in the nineteen-thirties, merely required water, and some people argued that this approach, the easiest, was best. But others thought bakers would want to do more. Urged on by marketing psychologists, Betty Crocker herself began to instruct housewives to ‘add water, and two of your own fresh eggs.’

The cake-mix debate may be dated, but its central question remains: Just how demanding do we want our technologies to be? It is a question faced by the designers of nearly every tool, from tablet computers to kitchen appliances. A dominant if often unexamined logic favors making everything as easy as possible. Innovators like Alan Kay and Steve Jobs are celebrated for making previously daunting technologies usable by anyone. It may be hard to argue with easy, yet, as the add-an-egg saga suggests, there’s something deeper going on here.

The choice between demanding and easy technologies may be crucial to what we have called technological evolution.”

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“These Are Issues That Fundamentally Affect Peoples’ Lives”

February 25, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Urban Studies | Permalink

After Hurricane Sandy devastated so many people in Queens and on Staten Island in 2012, the federal government gave New York City millions to help rebuild the houses of the newly homeless (and those remaining in barely livable, damaged homes). Mayor Bloomberg set up a program called Build It Back, staffed offices with workers, and for the next 15 months not a single home was rebuilt by the program as people in need, people still struggling along in shelters, were stonewalled. NOT A SINGLE HOME. The Rapid Repair project which restored electrical and boiler service was a good use of money, but Build It Back has been a fiasco.

You read about this colossal failure in the local newspapers sometimes, but not much. It’s been treated as a minor subplot. What I have noticed is that a lot of newsprint has been devoted to nitpicking newly inaugurated Bill de Blasio over small matters since he got into office. Perhaps that’s just locals being wary of what’s unfamiliar or maybe some moneyed interests are worried about tax increases. Perhaps it’s a little of both.

No one knows yet if de Blasio will be a good mayor or not, but he did make a solid (if obvious) call in replacing the failed official in charge of the Build It Back program. Perhaps some people can still get help. From “De Blasio and the Motorcade Sideshow,” a Sally Goldenberg article in Capital:

“When a CNN reporter asked him Monday whether he believes the press is treating him unfairly, de Blasio began by saying he can ‘take the heat,’ then criticized reporters for focusing on ‘sideshows,’ instead of announcements about Hurricane Sandy rebuilding, and his court fight to keep open Long Island College Hospital. (The LICH story was covered widely, despite the detail flap.)

‘These are issues that fundamentally affect peoples’ lives and I think that’s where the public debate should reside,’ he said. ‘And I think too much of the time debate veers away into, you know, sideshows.'”

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“Some Elected Officials Ask How Far Scientists Plan To Go In Their Efforts To Engineer Humans”

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

Sooner or later–and probably sooner–genetic engineering in humans is going to be a reality, despite fears of such things. Especially since a lot of those fears are dubious. Science and technology are imperfect, but so is nature. If we can avoid congenital disease or defect, we should. And, yes, there will be a temptation to abuse these advances as there always are, but you can’t hold back progress for that reason. For all the thousands of people who’ve been helped by science to become parents, isn’t it worth it to put up with the occasional Octomom? From a New York Times article by Sabrina Tavernise about the intersection of genetic therapy and human fertility:

“Such genetic methods have been controversial in the United States, where critics and some elected officials ask how far scientists plan to go in their efforts to engineer humans, and question whether such methods might create other problems later on.

‘Every time we get a little closer to genetic tinkering to promote health — that’s exciting and scary,’ said Dr. Alan Copperman, director of the division of reproductive endocrinology and infertility at Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York. ‘People are afraid it will turn into a dystopian brave new world.’

He added that the current meeting and discussion was an attempt at ‘putting together a framework for us to prepare for this genetic revolution.’

‘The most exciting part, scientifically,’ he said, ‘is to be able to prevent or fix an error in the genetic machinery.'”

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“It Was As If He Were A Thing — A Thing That Pleased Me”

February 25, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Urban Studies | Permalink

As difficult as it is to comprehend the horror that slavery ever existed at all, it really stuns that it still exists now. The opening of a Priceonomics blog post by Zachary Crockett about the Mauritanian slave trade:

“Abdel Nasser Ould Ethmane received his first slave when he was seven years old. It was the afternoon of his circumcision — his right of passage into early manhood — and he had the liberty to pick any gift imaginable. ‘It was as if I were picking out a toy,’ he recalls. ‘It was as if he were a thing — a thing that pleased me.’

With the point of a finger, Abdel selected a small boy with almond eyes and skin the color of coal to be his slave until death.

Abdel is a resident of the Islamic Republic of Mauritania in western North Africa, where this is commonplace. In fact, Mauritania has the highest proportional population of slaves in the world: as many as 680,000 of the country’s 3.4 million people — 20% of the population — are considered ‘property.'”

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2 Things About Alec Baldwin’s “Retirement”

February 25, 2014 in Excerpts, Videos | Permalink

How fortunate would we be if Alec Baldwin really did just act and not appear in public otherwise, as he promised in an article in New York magazine? He’s so gifted at acting and such a dipshit at everything else in life that it would be the best situation all around. We wouldn’t have to listen to his barking ego anymore, and he could spend more time with his wife. But Governor Baldwin will be back. He needs us because he needs someone to hate besides himself.

Two amusing things from the article:

  • In one passage, Baldwin reveals that during the run-up to Orphans’ opening night, he told the play’s director, Dan Sullivan, that he would have to choose between him and Shia LaBeouf. No third, more-appetizing option, like drinking a mixture of Clorox and blood, was offered.
  • I do, however, salute Baldwin for his cruel one-liner about Mika Brzezinski, the co-host of Morning Joe, the unceasingly insipid MSNBC wake-up program which features a chucklehead for a host and a parade of plagiarizers, mediocrities and well-compensated hacks for guests. Mika, an opponent of twerking, seems to have been chosen to sit beside Scarborough so that her befuddlement would make him appear adequate, the way a hemophiliac makes someone with a broken foot seem fortunate. From Baldwin:

“Morning Joe was boring. Scarborough is neither eloquent nor funny. And merely cranky doesn’t always work well in the morning. Mika B. is the Margaret Dumont of cable news.”

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“We Are In A New Normal After Snowden”

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

It’s difficult to legislate widespread behavior. Prohibition didn’t work because people kept drinking. They voted with their actions. They same is true about spying, about invasions of what we formerly considered privacy. Perhaps laws can prohibit some government intrusions, but our technology makes it too tempting for it to stop completely. Of course, the power has passed into the hands of the people as well, which has forced a transparency on government that it did not want. At the moment when people are most worried about the government having too much control, the reverse is actually happening. It’s falling away. And it’s not really about Snowden or Manning but about humans and our nature. We want to know. We like to watch. 

From Eli Lake’s Daily Beast article about James Clapper, the nation’s top intelligence officer who has come to realize the hard way that information now flows down a two-way street:

“Clapper also acknowledges that the very human nature of the bureaucracy he controls virtually insures that more mass disclosures are inevitable. ‘In the end,’ he says, ‘we will never ever be able to guarantee that there will not be an Edward Snowden or another Chelsea Manning because this is a large enterprise composed of human beings with all their idiosyncrasies.’

Ben Rhodes, deputy national security adviser for strategic communications, concurs: ‘I do think he recognizes that we are in a new normal after Snowden where we can’t operate with the expectation where nothing will get out,” he said. ‘If you are going to be dealing with the world where there are these disclosures you have to be more transparent to make the case to the public what you are doing and not doing.'”

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“Soldiers Are Developing Some Unorthodox Relationships With Their Machines”

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

I’m glad Newsweek is a thing again. The opening of a really good Kyle Chayka article from that publication about the frontlines of carbon-silicon relations, in the U.S. military, where cooperation, not competition, is key:

“For a glimpse at the future of human-robot interactions, it might be better to look at what’s happening in the United States military than analyzing Her, in which Joaquin Phoenix’s character falls in love with an OS voiced by Scarlett Johansson. Throughout every department of our armed forces, autonomous robots are playing a larger role in every aspect of warfare than ever before, and soldiers are developing some unorthodox relationships with their machines. Just ask Danielle.

Danielle was a TALON, a remotely operated robot used for reconnaissance in combat, as well as in tough-to-reach terrain like rocky canyons and caves. Connor, an Army sergeant, recalled that while deployed in Afghanistan, soldiers had to hole up inside their trucks each night, packing several humans as well as piles of equipment including robots into a small space. ‘Everything had to be locked up, so our TALON was in the center aisle of our truck,’ he recalls. ‘Our junior guy named it Danielle so he’d have a woman to cuddle with at night.’ Sadly, the romance was not to last: ‘Danielle got blown up,’ Connor says.

Just as World War II pilots gave their planes names like Memphis Belle, and decorated them with nose art, today’s soldiers are naming their robots after movie stars, musicians and ex-girlfriends. Brady, another Army sergeant, called his TALON Elly. ‘I talked to her, when I was at the controls. I’d be coaxing her, ‘C’mon honey,” he says. ‘They’re kind of part of the family.’ Ben, an Air Force staff sergeant, says that when one robot was detonated by an IED, his team ‘recovered the components, the carcass, if you will, and brought it back to base. The next day there was a sign out in front that said, ‘Why did you kill me? Why?’

From holding elaborate funerals for robots, complete with 21-gun salutes, valor medals, and memorial markers, to identifying with them as ‘an extension of our own personality,’ as Simon, a Marine sergeant, says, soldiers are now working effectively with robots on a more intimate level than in perhaps any other field, saving human lives in the process. The anecdotes above are from a series of interviews by University of Washington PhD Julie Carpenter, who studies human-robot interaction (the subjects’ names were changed to preserve their anonymity). The explosive ordnance disposal personnel Carpenter interviewed were, she says, ‘treating robots in ways that don’t fit neatly into how we treat other tools.'”

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‘There’s A Pride In What I Do That Other People Share Because I’m Local”

February 24, 2014 in Excerpts, Film, Videos | Permalink

On the heels of Sid Caesar dying, another comedy legend, Harold Ramis, has passed away. He died at the relatively young age of 69 from a rare autoimmune disease. The greatest comedy screenwriter of his era, Ramis was an SCTV alumnus who penned Animal House, Groundhog Day (which he also directed), Caddyshack (directed this one, too), Ghostbusters, Stripes, Analyze This and Meatballs, among others. Hollywood comedy from the late ’70s forward poured from his pen, although he always considered himself a Chicago guy and moved back to the Second City in his 60s.

My first thought when I head about Ramis’ passing was that I hope he and Bill Murray, his great collaborator from whom he was sadly estranged, had made amends. But that’s an unfair demand we put on famous people that we don’t put on ourselves. I think of people who were important to me at one point who I’m estranged from, and no one makes a big fuss about that. Changing and growing–and growing away, sometimes–is a natural part of life. Death makes us wish it wasn’t true, but it is.

The opening of Ramis’ obituary in his hometown newspaper, the Chicago Tribune:

“Harold Ramis was one of Hollywood’s most successful comedy filmmakers when he moved his family from Los Angeles back to the Chicago area in 1996. His career was still thriving, with Groundhog Day acquiring almost instant classic status upon its 1993 release and 1984’s Ghostbusters ranking among the highest-grossing comedies of all time, but the writer-director wanted to return to the city where he’d launched his career as a Second City performer.

‘There’s a pride in what I do that other people share because I’m local, which in L.A. is meaningless; no one’s local,’ Ramis said upon the launch of the first movie he directed after his move, the 1999 mobster-in-therapy comedy Analyze This, another hit. ‘It’s a good thing. I feel like I represent the city in a certain way.’

Ramis, a longtime North Shore resident, was surrounded by family when he died at 12:53 a.m. from complications of autoimmune inflammatory vasculitis, a rare disease that involves swelling of the blood vessels, his wife Erica Mann Ramis said.

He was 69. Ramis’ serious health struggles began in May 2010 with an infection that led to complications related to the autoimmune disease, his wife said. Ramis had to relearn to walk but suffered a relapse of the vasculitis in late 2011, said Laurel Ward, vice president of development at Ramis’ Ocean Pictures production company.”

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Ramis with David Letterman in 1983:

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