Excerpts

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“I Think We Haven’t Yet Had The Revelation That Will Really Set People Off”

February 9, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

I guess I’m remarkably jaded because from the minute the Patriot Act became law, I assumed there would be large-scale surveillance by our government. What’s more, most Americans probably wanted it and likely still do.

Wikipedia’s Jimmy Wales commenting on NSA surveillance in an interview with Carole Cadwalladr in the Guardian:

“Carole Cadwalladr:

You’ve spoken out publicly about the NSA revelations, but how surprised were you when that first headline hit? Or did you suspect something like that was going on?

Jimmy Wales:

I was surprised by the scale, by some of the revelations. I was surprised – as Google was – that they were tapping into lines inside, between the data centres of Google. That’s pretty amazing. And hacking Angela Merkel’s phone – that was a surprise. But I think we haven’t yet had the revelation that will really set people off.

Carole Cadwalladr:

You’ve said that you’re going to start encrypting communications on Wikipedia as a result…

Jimmy Wales:

We have done. It’s not completely finished yet but the only thing that GCHQ, hopefully, can see is that you’re looking at Wikipedia. They can’t see which article you’re reading. It’s not the government’s business to know what everybody is reading.”

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“The Main Article In The Spring Issue Deals With Space Colonies”

February 7, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

A 1979 CoEvolution with an R. Crumb cover.

A 1979 CoEvolution with an R. Crumb cover.

The earlier post about Ken Kesey mentioned Stewart Brand’s 1974-84 periodical, The CoEvolution Quarterly. The Spring 1976 issue, which focused, much to Lewis Mumford’s consternation, on space colonies, was written up in the Harvard Crimson. An excerpt:

“THE MAIN ARTICLE in the Spring issue deals with space colonies. It runs 48 pages, featuring 76 famous people or friends of Stewart Brand (guiding light of The Catalog and editor of The Quarterly) writing on what they think about the possibilities of building cities in space. The article includes not only such popular scientists as Carl Sagan, Lewis Mumford, and Buckminister Fuller, but also Richard Brautigan and poet Gary Snyder.

It seems rather pointless and maybe just a little silly to discuss cities in space when New York is in such a predicament, and to Brand’s credit, he publishes viewpoints radically dissimilar from his own, which is that these cities can’t come soon enough. Mumford states that, ‘I regard space colonies as another pathological manifestation of the culture that has spent all its resources expanding the nuclear means of exterminating the human race. Such proposals are only technological disguises for infantile fantasies.'”

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“The Gas Appears To Have Been Used In Past Olympics”

February 7, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Sports | Permalink

Athletes have always cheated and always will, and the more we try to pretend that isn’t true, the more we guide policy marked by hypocrisy. We shouldn’t pretend that some athletes are pure and others aren’t. Especially since the testing is so uneven: Only about half the 2012 Olympians were actually tested, and some possess genetics that allow them to dope at will with impunity. Most of the area is gray, not black and white. 

From an Economist article about competitors who try to gain competitive advantage by inhaling xenon:

“Athletes are allowed to live or train at altitude, or sleep in a low-oxygen tent, in order to stimulate red-cell production. If xenon treatment is merely replicating low-oxygen environments by replacing oxygen with xenon, then its use to enhance athletic performance is permissible.

The use of xenon by athletes certainly has government blessing. A document produced in 2010 by the State Research Institute of the Ministry of Defence sets out guidelines for the administration of the gas to athletes. It advises using it before competitions to correct listlessness and sleep disruption, and afterwards to improve physical recovery. The recommended dose is a 50:50 mixture of xenon and oxygen, inhaled for a few minutes, ideally before going to bed. The gas’s action, the manual states, continues for 48-72 hours, so repeating every few days is a good idea. And for last-minute jitters, a quick hit an hour before the starting gun can help.

The benefits, the manual suggests, include increasing heart and lung capacity, preventing muscle fatigue, boosting testosterone and improving an athlete’s mood. Similar benefits have been noted in papers in Russian scientific journals, and in conference presentations describing tests of xenon on mountain climbers, paddlers, soldiers and pilots.

And the gas appears to have been used in past Olympics.”

“Kesey Runs Laughing After The Tractor”

February 7, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Film | Permalink

In 1976, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest opened to tremendous critical acclaim, but author Ken Kesey, who adapted his own novel for the film version, felt ripped off financially and planned on suing the film’s producers Michael Douglas and Saul Zaentz. Kesey was simultaneously having a feud with Whole Earth Catalog legend Stewart Brand. From John Riley’s People profile from that year about the litigious writer who was at the time running his own cattle farm in Oregon:

In 1959, at a VA hospital in California, Kesey volunteered as a subject for early unpublicized experiments on the effects of LSD. That experience, plus a subsequent job there as night attendant in a psychiatric ward, enabled him to write convincingly about the fictional Randle McMurphy and the other cuckoos nesting in the pages of his first novel.

A more celebrated brush with bedlam was Kesey’s life with the Merry Pranksters—the name given a group of young drug-takers he teamed up with in the mid-’60s. In the Pranksters’ short-circuited philosophy of life, a person was “either on the bus or off the bus”—a doper or a drag. No one was more emphatically “on the bus” than Kesey himself, who owned the actual 1939 International Harvester vehicle in which the Pranksters tripped across the U.S.A. (Tom Wolfe described the bizarre journey of these psychedelic sharpshooters in his 1968 book The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.)

But things change. These days Kesey, now 40, has turned from raising Cain to raising cattle and is a member of the PTA in Pleasant Hill, a small farming community five miles from Eugene.

A recent visitor finds Kesey, in greasy coveralls, heaving bales of hay to his 30 head of beef. One, a crazy Angus steer named Sonofabitch, has broken through a casually constructed fence to reach the lush grass near some blueberry bushes. Soon the animal returns, bawling, and farmer Kesey watches the bucolic scene with apparent contentment. He signals his 9-year-old daughter, Sunshine, to drive the Ford tractor back toward the converted red barn that is their home. He chases down a calf named Frivol. Then, cradling the long-legged creature in his powerful arms, Kesey runs laughing after the tractor.•

 

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“If You Had A Bad Run…For A Moment It Hurts”

February 7, 2014 in Excerpts, Sports, Videos | Permalink

Paul Ryan’s excellent, impressionistic 1969 documentary, “Ski Racer,” which uses bold editing and FM radio rock to profile that era’s world-class downhill racers. One of the pros included is Vladimir “Spider” Sabich who would die horribly in 1976, the victim not of a fall but of amour fou.

From the 1974 Sports Illustrated article, “The Spider Who Finally Came In From The Cold“:

“In selling the tour, the sales pitch is not pegged strictly to exciting races and the crack skiers but also to its colorful personalities. There is Sabich, who flies, races motorcycles and figures that a night in which he hasn’t danced on at least one tabletop is a night wasted. Jim Lillstrom, Beattie’s P.R. man, also enjoys checking off some of the other characters.Norway’s Terje Overland is known as the Aquavit Kid for the boisterous postvictory celebrations he has thrown. He’s also been known to pitch over a fully laden restaurant table when the spirits have so moved him. Then there is the poet, Duncan Cullman, of Twin Mountain, N.H., author of The Selected Heavies of Duncan Duck, published at his own expense, who used to travel the tour with a gargantuan, bearded manservant. And Sepp Staffler, a popular Austrian, who plays guitar and sitar and performs nightly at different lounges in Great Gorge, N.J. when he isn’t competing. The ski tour also has its very own George Blanda. That would be blond, wispy Anderl Molterer, the 40-year-old Austrian, long a world class racer and still competitive.

Pro skiing’s immediate success, however, seems to depend on an authentic rivalry building up between Sabich and [Billy] Kidd, who are close friends but whose living styles are as diverse as snow and sand. Sabich is freewheeling on his skis as well as on tabletops. Kidd is thoughtful, earnest, a perfectionist. Spider has his flying, his motorcycles and drives a Porsche 911-E. Billy paints and now drives a Volvo station wagon. Spider enjoys the man-to-man challenge of the pro circuit. Billy harbors some inner doubts regarding his ability to adapt to it.”

“Machine Washing Is Like Trying To Clean Your Clothes By Giving It A Bath”

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

Where does the washing machine rank in the pantheon of revolutionary inventions? After the wheel and printing press, sure, but it holds a prominent place. The machines have improved over decades, but the fundamentals have remained stubbornly the same. In our lifetimes, I would wager that the soaking-and-circulating tub method will fall into obsolescence. From Tuan C. Nguyen at the Smithsonian blog:

“The electric washing machines are right up there with automobiles and personal computers. With the press of a button, a load of laundry that had once taken in excess of four hours to clean was reduced to a 40-minute automated process. Some economists have even credited the time-saving appliance with precipitating the rise of women in the workforce during the 1950s, as homemakers were suddenly freed up to take up other pursuits.

But for all its necessary convenience, the conventional washing machine has remained, to this day, a resource-intensive technology that requires as much as 55 gallons of water per load and electricity to heat the water. Nor is it even the most efficient method for removing stains. ‘Machine washing is like trying to clean your clothes by giving it a bath,’ explains Jonathon Benjamin, a longtime industry executive and head of Xeros Cleaning’s North American operations. ‘Not all the dirt gets washed away as some of it just gets moved around in all that water.’  

Since 2010, the UK-based startup has been introducing into several markets a radical, nearly-waterless machine that allegedly leaves clothes cleaner while using 72 percent less water, cutting energy costs by as much as 47 percent. The Xeros cleaning system, found at select athletic clubs, drop-off cleaners and Hyatt hotels, does this by swapping out water for tiny plastic beads specially-engineered to absorb dirt directly—and therefore more effectively—from fabric.”

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“It Is Merely Part Of An Odyssey”

February 7, 2014 in Excerpts, Sports, Videos | Permalink

If Bruce Jenner really has sexual-reassignment surgery as the tabloids have speculated, it would be the first reasonable thing he’s done since winning a gold medal in 1976. As Sochi opens, here’s a repost of an item about one of America’s greatest Olympians.

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Why the fuck did Bruce Jenner do it to himself? This 1976 short film profiles him becoming the greatest athlete in the world, before the divorces, the Village People, the cosmetic surgeries and the Kardashians–before he performed reverse alchemy, going from gold to plastic.

“Computers Attained More Prominent Physical Locations Within A Room”

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

I’ve never watched a single episode of Law & Order. Never. Seems impossible, I know. But artist Jeff Thompson did something amazing with the long-running series’ 456 episodes, documenting every appearance of a computer in the history of the show, which premiered, as did the World Wide Web, in 1990. In doing so, Thompson charted the program’s unintentional chronicling of a society in transformation. From Rebecca J. Rosen at the Atlantic:

“…Most of the technology on the show seems to have come as an afterthought. ‘No one was probably thinking about, you know, what kind of mouse should we use, or where should it go in the room,’ says Thompson. They just represented whatever was the norm of the time, and, in doing so, documented details of computer history that perhaps no one at the time could have articulated—details that were so commonplace they went totally unnoticed.

For instance, when computers appear on Law & Order in the early ’90s they are often not on. Who at the time would have said, ‘We have these new machines in the office. We only turn them on when we need to use them, and they are off the rest of the time.’ The fact that computers tended to be off is only noticeable in light of today’s habit of leaving them on, even during a task that is not specifically on a computer (which may not even happen that often anyway). People’s work-streams were not computer-based, and computers only were booted up for a specific task.

Another shift Thompson noticed is that over time, computers attained more prominent physical locations within a room. Early on, computers tended to be off to the side, on a specialized desk, perhaps for many people to share, using it for one specific task. If a character had his or her own computer, it would be located on a separate table behind his or her desk, not on the desk itself. It’s not until 1995 that the first computer makes the leap from behind the desk to its central ‘desktop’ position we all are so familiar with today.”

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“I Can’t Visualize Living With The Knowledge That A Computer Is Stronger Than The Human Mind”

February 6, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Sports | Permalink

Usain Bolt runs really fast, for a human. Slow for a sheep.

Similarly, humans play chess really well for humans, but we’re inferior when competing on a wider playing field, when AI is introduced. That means we must redefine the way we view our role in the world.

Before the shift was complete and computers became our partners–our betters, in some unnerving ways–Garry Kasparov still had a fighting chance and so did you and I. At the end of the 1980s, the chess champion was able to stave off the onslaught, if only for a little while longer, when challenged by Deep Thought. From an article by Harold C. Schonberg in the October 23, 1989 New York Times:

“Yesterday Gary Kasparov, the world chess champion, played Deep Thought, the world computer chess champion, in a two-game match. He won both games handily, to nobody’s surprise, including his own.

Two hours before the start of the first game, held at the New York Academy of Art at 419 Lafayette Street in Manhattan, he held a conference for some 75 journalists representing news organizations all over the world. They were attracted to the event because of the possibility of an upset and the philosophical problems an upset would cause. Deep Thought, after all, has recently been beating grandmasters. Does this mean that the era of human chess supremacy is drawing to a close?

Yes, in the opinion of computer and chess experts.

The time is rapidly coming, all believe, when chess computers will be operating with a precision, rapidity and completeness of information that will far eclipse anything the human mind can do. In three to five years, Deep Thought will be succeeded by a computer with a thousand times its strength and rapidity. And computers scanning a million million positions a second are less than 10 years away. As for the creativity, intuition and brilliance of the great players, chess computers have already demonstrated that they can dream up moves that make even professionals gasp with admiration. It may be necessary to hold championship chess matches for computers and separate ones for humans. …

Mr. Kasparov, unlike many of the experts, was even doubtful that a computer could ever play with the imagination and creativity of a human, though he did look ahead to the next generation of computers and shuddered at what might be coming. Deep Thought can scan 720,000 positions a second. The creators of Deep Thought have developed plans for a machine that can scan a billion positions a second, and it may be ready in five years.

‘That means,’ grinned Mr. Kasparov, ‘that I can be champion for five more years.’ More seriously, he continued: ‘But I can’t visualize living with the knowledge that a computer is stronger than the human mind. I had to challenge Deep Thought for this match, to protect the human race.'”

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“What you have here is the phenomenon of how we define ourselves in relationship to the machine”:

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“Once A Brain Has Been Imaged, Can You Effectively Play Back That Information, Like A Tape?”

February 6, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

“This Guy Wants To Help You Download Your Brain” is Monica Heisey’s Vice interview with Russell Hanson, who’d like you to do a backup of your most important files, to make a copy of your gray matter in case of accident or virus. An excerpt:

“Question:

So once a brain has been imaged, can you effectively play back that information, like a tape?

Russell Hanson:

A single snapshot is a static image, so you can’t play something back that doesn’t have a time series associated with it. Conceivably, you could ‘rewind’ just as you can peer back in time into your memories. The way different people access different pieces of their memories is hierarchical and everything is built upon prior experience, so you would have to build a special kind of ‘relative knowledge engine’ that needs to construct the mechanism of accessing the memories for each person individually. Research has shown that the brain is very poor at telling wall-clock time, and is affected by all sorts of things, like whether we caused an event or not. So no—you can’t really ‘play back’ the information in the kind of frame-by-frame or second-by-second manner we’re used to with audio or visual recordings.

Question:

The connectome, from my understanding, is simply the documentation of connections, but provides no information about what is being passed between neurons at these points. If you can’t play back or otherwise access the information in your brain, what’s the use to the average person of having a map of their brain’s pathways?

Russell Hanson:

The goal of the work is to build the infrastructure to make this data usable and interesting. It is pretty clear that having the brain map is a necessary first component to ‘playing back’ or ‘running’ a meaningful dynamical simulation of a brain, whether it’s a mouse, fly, or human. We decided to tackle this engineering challenge first before the other one—that’s being worked on by other very capable groups. In its simplest form, this research will surely inform treatments for devastating diseases like Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, autism, depression, and others—research that the governmental funding agencies have a long history of supporting.”

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“Putin Did Not Choose Sochi By Chance”

February 6, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Sports, Videos | Permalink

Few things fascinate me as much as the Olympics, for the actual sports, sure, but also for the politics and sociology that permeate the Games, the way countries use the event to attempt to remake themselves, the things that are said through ceremony rather than words. And, of course, of equal interest is what’s communicated despite the best efforts of countries to stifle them (e.g., Jesse Owens leaving Hitler in the dust in 1936).

From “Why Sochi?” Christian Caryl’s New York Review of Books piece, a brief explanation of why oh why such an unlikely locale would play host to the world:

“In all the comment about this month’s Sochi Olympics, there is bewilderment above all about Sochi itself: Why on earth would the Kremlin decide to host the Games in an underdeveloped place where terrorists lurk nearby—a place that a front-page New York Times story this week describes as ‘the edge of a war zone’?

The answer is not as complicated as it may seem. Vladimir Putin comes from St. Petersburg. He rules from Moscow. But it is the North Caucasus that launched him on his path to the summit of Russian power. Anyone who wants to understand the many controversies now roiling around Sochi must start with this fundamental political fact.

Russia launched its Olympic bid in 2006, a moment when Putin was basking in his hard-won status as the leader who had finally vanquished the long-running rebellion in Chechnya. Putin did not choose Sochi by chance. He believed that presiding over an Olympic miracle in the foothills of the Caucasus Mountains, not far from places that had been battlefields a few years before, would cement his triumph over historical enemies.”

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Japan announces its postwar recovery at the 1964 Games:

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“Today’s Reformers Think New Technology Renders This Old Argument Redundant”

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

If history has taught us anything, it’s that trying to hold off the future does not work. The Industrial Revolution was frightening, but countries that resisted (or lacked the wherewithal to join) were left behind. The rest of us grew richer (if unevenly). The same is true of the Computer Age, with all its challenges. Avoid it at your own peril. People argue against technology until the technology gets so good that the argument is silenced. Better to try to “reform from within” than smash the machines. From a new Economist article about the teaching of mathematics:

“Maths education has been a battlefield before: the American ‘math wars’ of the 1980s pitted traditionalists, who emphasised fluency in pen-and-paper calculations, against reformers led by the country’s biggest teaching lobby, who put real-world problem-solving, often with the help of calculators, at the centre of the curriculum. A backlash followed as parents and academics worried that the ‘new math’ left pupils ill-prepared for university courses in mathematics and the sciences. But as many countries have since found, training pupils to ace exams is not the same as equipping them to use their hard-won knowledge in work and life.

Today’s reformers think new technology renders this old argument redundant. They include Conrad Wolfram, who worked on Mathematica, a program which allows users to solve equations, visualise mathematical functions and much more. He argues that computers make rote procedures, such as long division, obsolete. ‘If it is high-level problem-solving and critical thinking we’re after, there’s not much in evidence in a lot of curriculums,’ he says.”

“The News Market Will Expand By 2020 To About 5 Billion People Worldwide”

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

Even if Broadway disappeared, there’d always be theater. We need stories. The same is true of newspapers and journalism. Reportage is rarely what we’d like it to be–and those reading the news are rarely ideal themselves–but the process will always march on. Via Johana Bhuiyan and Nicole Levy at Capital New York, some predictions for the near-term future of news from Marc Andreessen:

  • The news market will expand by 2020 to about 5 billion people worldwide, consuming mostly on mobile devices.
  • News organizations that report broadly at an extremely gross scale, or very deeply at a small scale, will thrive on the new eyeballs.
  • Advertising remains the best way to make newsgathering profitable but publishers need to take responsibility for the quality of their ads, or work with partners in the ad tech field who do.
  • Subscription models, as well as conferences and events, are here to stay: “Many consumers pay $ for things they value much of the time. If they’re unwilling to pay, ask Q, are they really valuing?”

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“Robots Are Just The Most Visible Piece Of This Miraculous Turnaround Of A City On The Brink”

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

Detroit had RoboCop while Pittsburgh had actual robots. Guess which erstwhile industrial giant remade itself in post-manufacturing America and which one fell into complete disrepair? From “The Robots That Saved Pittsburgh,” by Glenn Thrush at Politico:

“‘Roboburgh,’ the boosterish moniker conferred on the city by the Wall Street Journal in 1999 and cited endlessly in Pittsburgh’s marketing materials ever since, may have been premature back then, but it isn’t now: Pittsburgh, after decades of trying to remake itself, today really does have a new economy, rooted in the city’s rapidly growing robotic, artificial intelligence, health technology, advanced manufacturing and software industries. It’s growing in population for the first time since the 1950s, and now features regularly in lists like ‘the Hottest Cities of the Future’ and ‘Best Cities for Working Mothers.’ ‘The city is sort of in a sweet spot,’ says Sanjiv Singh, a [Red] Whittaker acolyte at Carnegie Mellon who is working on the first-of-its-kind pilotless medical evacuation helicopter for the Marines. ‘It has the critical mass of talent you need, it’s still pretty affordable and it has corporate memory—the people here still remember when the place was an industrial powerhouse.’

Improbably for a blue-collar town that seemed headed for the scrap heap when its steel industry collapsed, Pittsburgh has developed into one of the country’s most vibrant tech centers, a hotbed of innovation that can no longer be ignored by the industry’s titans. Carnegie Mellon is Google’s biggest rival in the race to build a driverless car, partnering with GM to build a robot Cadillac that has been humanlessly tooling around Route 19, just outside city limits. In 2011, Google opened a posh, 40,000-square-foot office in an old Nabisco factory in the city’s East Liberty neighborhood, ramping up last year to 350 people, with more on the way. Bill Gates and other Silicon Valley moguls have invested millions of dollars in Aquion Energy, a start-up spun out of CMU that is developing next-generation batteries and producing them in nearby Westermoreland County, not China. Apple, RAND and Intel also have outposts in town and Disney, which has tapped the university’s computer and robotics talent for years, is partnering with the school to improve cinematic graphics and to develop hominid robots that can gently hand objects to people by predicting the movement around them. All told, Pittsburgh’s tech and education sectors now account for some 80 percent of the high-wage jobs in the city, and robots are just the most visible piece of this miraculous turnaround of a city on the brink.”

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“Snagging Those Daily Doubles Offers Him A Massive Statistical Advantage”

February 5, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Sports | Permalink

Arthur Chu has recently won money and attention for doing something on Jeopardy! that even Watson didn’t attempt: gaming the system–hacking it in a sense. IBM’s robot beat the humans the old-fashioned way, never using out-of-ordinary strategy to circumvent the spirit of the game or disrupt it. Contestant Chu has done just that. For instance: He pursues Daily Doubles he knows he can’t answer, betting a miniscule amount on them, absorbing a nominal loss and scrubbing them off the board so that the other players can’t gain from them. And that’s just one of his “tricks,” all legal if unorthodox, intended to not break the rules but the bank. 

From “Meet the Man Who Hacked Jeopardy,” Jason Schreier’s Kotaku interview with a champion for the search-engine age:

“So what makes Chu so unusual? While most players will start from the top of each column on the Jeopardy board and progress sequentially as question difficulty increases, Chu picks questions at random, using what’s called the Forrest Bounce to hunt for the three Daily Doubles, which are often scattered among the harder questions in every game. Instead of moving from the $200 question to the $400 question and so forth, Chu might bounce between all of the $1,600 or $2,000 questions—not the kind of strategy you often see on Jeopardy.

Chu does this for two reasons. For one, it throws everyone off balance. ‘It’s a lot more mentally tiring to have to jump around the board like that,’ Chu told me.

More importantly, snagging those Daily Doubles offers him a massive statistical advantage. Since Daily Doubles allow players to bet up to their entire bankrolls, just one can swing an entire Jeopardy match—and Chu’s strategy is to control them all, even just to prevent other players from using them.

‘The only chance you have to give yourself an edge—the only moment of power, or choice you have in Jeopardy is choosing the next clue if you got the last one right,’ Chu said.”

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“The Key Issue Is How Vulnerable They Are To Such Waves Of Creative Destruction”

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

At the New Yorker blog, John Cassidy tries to handicap which company will likely be around in 20 or 30 years, Microsoft or Facebook. I suppose my answer is it doesn’t really matter since there’s little chance either will be influential even if they’re still in business at that point. But it’s still a fun exercise. From Cassidy:

“As Brian Arthur, an economist at the Sante Fe Institute, explained many years ago, the technology industry is different from most other businesses, where incumbents, such as Toyota and Hilton, build up franchises that are difficult to dislodge but which don’t take over the entire market. The tech industry, on the other hand, is defined by successive waves of innovation, and it operates more like a long-running lottery, with the prize for each drawing being a temporary monopoly. Microsoft is Microsoft because, back in the eighties, it won the lottery for the operating-system market. Facebook is Facebook because it won the lottery for the social-networking market.

In the technology world, market leaders, generally speaking, don’t get dislodged by competitors who build a better or cheaper version of their product. Eventually, though, they do tend to get displaced by companies that create, or popularize, a new technology that shifts the entire industry in a different direction. (Look at what digital cameras did to Eastman Kodak.) In assessing the long-term prospects of technology firms, the key issue is how vulnerable they are to such waves of creative destruction. And in conducting such an assessment, short-term indicators, such as growth rates and recent movements in stock prices, can be misleading.“

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“I Believe That There’s No End To How Much We Can Track Each Other”

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

Kevin Kelly, one of the tech thinkers I admire most, was recently profiled by the New York Times’ wonderfully dyspeptic David Carr, and now he’s participated in an excellent Q&A at John Brockman’s Edge.org. 

I think if you read this blog with any regularity, you know I believe that legislation won’t control or alter surveillance and snooping, won’t stem the flow of information any more than Prohibition stopped the flow of alcohol. Everybody is drinking; everybody’s drunk. That topic is addressed in the first question of the interview:

“Edge:

How can we have a world in which we are all watching each other, and everybody feels happy?

Kevin Kelly:

The question that I’m asking myself is, how far will we share, when are we going to stop sharing, and how far are we going to allow ourselves to monitor and surveil each other in kind of a coveillance? I believe that there’s no end to how much we can track each other—how far we’re going to self-track, how much we’re going to allow companies to track us—so I find it really difficult to believe that there’s going to be a limit to this, and to try to imagine this world in which we are being self-tracked and co-tracked and tracked by governments, and yet accepting of that, is really hard to imagine.

How does this work? How can we have a world in which we are all watching each other, and everybody feels happy? I don’t see any counter force to the forces of surveillance and self-tracking, so I’m trying to listen to what the technology wants, and the technology is suggesting that it wants to be watched. What the Internet does is track, just like what the Internet does is to copy, and you can’t stop copying. You have to go with the copies flowing, and I think the same thing about this technology. It’s suggesting that it wants to monitor, it wants to track, and that you really can’t stop the tracking. So maybe what we have to do is work with this tracking—try to bring symmetry or have areas where there’s no tracking in a temporary basis. I don’t know, but this is the question I’m asking myself: how are we going to live in a world of ubiquitous tracking?”•

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“What Would Happen If We Began Trading With Cuba Again?”

February 5, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Videos | Permalink

I can’t help but feel that Libertarians have a blind spot for the deep immorality embedded into their philosophy. Yet, it’s not like I disagree with everything Libertarian. For instance: I concur with George Mason economist Bryan Caplan that the U.S. embargo of Cuba has been detrimental to both countries. It should be stopped immediately. A few exchanges from Caplan’s Ask Me Anything at Reddit follow.

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Question:

What would happen if we began trading with Cuba again?

Bryan Caplan:

They’d quickly get a lot richer, and we’d get some very nice vacations. In the longer run, the chance that Communism in Cuba would collapse or collapse into mere rhetoric is high.

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Question:

Do you feel that the rise of China is beneficial to the interests of the United States?

Bryan Caplan:

When countries produce cheap stuff to sell us, it is good for us. And rich countries are very rarely militarily aggressive, at least once they’ve been rich for a full generation.

Question:

Is the U.S. a counterexample?

Bryan Caplan:

Not really. Most dominant powers throughout history have been far more aggressive. The U.S. today is scared to lose a few thousand soldiers. Why? Because rich people value their lives. Thankfully!

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Question:

What books have influenced you and your career?

Bryan Caplan:

Atlas Shrugged, For a New Liberty, Economic Sophisms, The Armchair Economist, The Bell Curve, The Myth of Democratic Failure, The Nurture Assumption, and Modern Times. Mike Huemer’s been a massive influence on me, but mostly his articles, especially “Moral Objectivism.”

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Question:

With the drought in Southern California is it possible the state is overpopulated? Meaning we have to halt immigration into the south west?

Bryan Caplan:

No. Just raise the price of water!•
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In 1959, Ed Sullivan interviews Fidel Castro:

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“Those Aren’t Things We Believe Are Happening To Innocent People”

February 5, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Sports, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Richard Jewell wasn’t exactly traduced like Joseph K., but who but Kafka could have written of his experience at the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta, where he was knocked sidelong by a rush to judgement? Just months after Ted Kaczynski was apprehended for the Unabomber explosions and had provided the template of an awkward and unshaven villain, the FBI brought another lone madman to justice, and it was Jewell–although it wasn’t really him at all.

Go here to watch Adam Hootnick’s new ESPN short doc, “Judging Jewell.”

From “The Ballad of Richard Jewell,” Marie Brenner’s 1997 Vanity Fair article:

“It took 10 minutes to pluck Jewell’s thick auburn hair. Then the F.B.I. agents led him into the kitchen and took his palm prints on the table. ‘That took 30 minutes, and they got ink all over the table,’ Bryant said. Then Bazar told Bryant they wanted Jewell to sit on the sofa and say into the telephone, ‘There is a bomb in Centennial Park. You have 30 minutes.’ That was the message given by the 911 caller on the night of the bombing. He was to repeat the message 12 times. Bryant saw the possibility of phony evidence and of his client’s going to jail. ‘I said, ‘I am not sure about this. Maybe you can do this, maybe you can’t, but you are not doing this today.”

All afternoon, Jewell was strangely quiet. He had a sophisticated knowledge of police work and believed, he later said, ‘they must have had some evidence if they wanted my hair.… I knew their game was intimidation. That is why they brought five agents instead of two.’ He felt “violated and humiliated,” he told me, but he was passive, even docile, through Bryant’s outburst. He thought of the bombing victims—Alice Hawthorne, the 44-year-old mother from Albany, Georgia, at the park with her stepdaughter; Melih Uzunyol, the Turkish cameraman who died of a heart attack; the more than 100 people taken to area hospitals, some of whom were his friends. ‘I kept thinking, These guys think I did this. These guys were accusing me of murder. This was the biggest case in the nation and the world. If they could pin it on me, they were going to put me in the electric chair.”

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“Two Decades On The Size Of The Audience For The Literary Novel Will Be About The Size Of The Group Who Read Latin Poetry”

February 4, 2014 in Books, Excerpts | Permalink

I’m starting to believe that Philip Roth is serious about his retirement from writing novels. Of course, he’s spoken recently about how he feels the novel itself is “retiring.” It’s kind of difficult to argue based on the evidence, based on how much storytelling has changed, how much more it will likely soon change. I still hold out hope, still think words will be everywhere. Maybe careers won’t be literary anymore, but I believe there will still be literature of high quality. The opening of Alison Flood’s new Guardian piece about the great novelist in (at least) repose:

A happily retired Philip Roth is spending his days swimming, watching baseball and nature-spotting, revelling in the fact that ‘there’s more to life than writing and publishing fiction,’ according to a new interview.

Reiterating his bleak view about the future of literature – that ‘two decades on the size of the audience for the literary novel will be about the size of the group who read Latin poetry’ – the 80-year-old Roth told Stanford scholar Cynthia Haven that his disengagement from the world of writing is still very much in evidence. Asked by Haven if he really believes his talent – which has won him the Man Booker International prize and made him a perennial contender for the Nobel – will ‘let [him] quit’ writing, Roth responded: ‘You better believe me, because I haven’t written a word of fiction since 2009.’

‘I have no desire to write fiction,’ said the Pulitzer prize-winning literary giant. ‘I did what I did and it’s done. There’s more to life than writing and publishing fiction. There is another way entirely, amazed as I am to discover it at this late date.’

Instead: ‘I swim, I follow baseball, look at the scenery, watch a few movies, listen to music, eat well and see friends. In the country I am keen on nature.’

He is also studying 19-century American history.•

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“In The 21st Century, It Is The Internet That Passes Through Chattanooga, And At Lightning Speed”

February 4, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Chattanooga, long famed for speeding trains and infamous for unabated pollution, began remaking itself back when the Internet was still the ArpaNet by cornering the market on a new type of speed. From “Fast Internet Is Chattanooga’s New Locomotive,” by Edward Wyatt in New York Times:

“CHATTANOOGA, Tenn. — For thousands of years, Native Americans used the river banks here to cross a gap in the Appalachian Mountains, and trains sped through during the Civil War to connect the eastern and western parts of the Confederacy. In the 21st century, it is the Internet that passes through Chattanooga, and at lightning speed.

‘Gig City,’ as Chattanooga is sometimes called, has what city officials and analysts say was the first and fastest — and now one of the least expensive — high-speed Internet services in the United States. For less than $70 a month, consumers enjoy an ultrahigh-speed fiber-optic connection that transfers data at one gigabit per second. That is 50 times the average speed for homes in the rest of the country, and just as rapid as service in Hong Kong, which has the fastest Internet in the world.

It takes 33 seconds to download a two-hour, high-definition movie in Chattanooga, compared with 25 minutes for those with an average high-speed broadband connection in the rest of the country. Movie downloading, however, may be the network’s least important benefit.

‘It created a catalytic moment here,’ said Sheldon Grizzle, the founder of the Company Lab, which helps start-ups refine their ideas and bring their products to market. ‘The Gig,’ as the taxpayer-owned, fiber-optic network is known, “allowed us to attract capital and talent into this community that never would have been here otherwise.'”

“After About A Week Of Coding, Zuckerberg Launched thefacebook.com Last Wednesday Afternoon”

February 4, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Facebook, that thing that helps you pretend, turns ten today, which seems an appropriate age for the site’s maturity level. The opening of the first article written about the social network, a piece by Alan J. Tabak published in the February 9, 2004 Harvard Crimson:

“When Mark E. Zuckerberg ’06 grew impatient with the creation of an official universal Harvard facebook, he decided to take matters into his own hands.

After about a week of coding, Zuckerberg launched thefacebook.com last Wednesday afternoon. The website combines elements of a standard House face book with extensive profile features that allow students to search for others in their courses, social organizations and Houses.

‘Everyone’s been talking a lot about a universal face book within Harvard,’ Zuckerberg said. ‘I think it’s kind of silly that it would take the University a couple of years to get around to it. I can do it better than they can, and I can do it in a week.’

As of yesterday afternoon, Zuckerberg said over 650 students had registered use thefacebook.com. He said that he anticipated that 900 students would have joined the site by this morning.

‘I’m pretty happy with the amount of people that have been to it so far,’ he said. ‘The nature of the site is that each user’s experience improves if they can get their friends to join it.'”

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“This Fake Downtown Will Feature Building Facades, Parked Vehicles, Traffic Signals…”

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

I don’t really think it’s necessary to build a faux downtown to give drivereless cars a test run, but that’s the plan in Michigan. Just seems an unnecessary intermediary step considering that Google already has its models on the real roads. From John Gallagher at the Detroit Free Press:

“As vehicles learn to drive themselves minus human control, the place they’ll learn is on the University of Michigan’s north campus in Ann Arbor.

Today, Gov. Rick Snyder and other officials touted a new $6.5-million, 32-acre site to be built on U-M’s north campus as a test center for technologies for autonomous, or self-driving, vehicles.

Peter Sweatman, director of U-M’s Transportation Research Institute, said this fake downtown will feature building facades, parked vehicles, traffic signals, a tunnel, bicycle lanes and other realistic elements of an actual Michigan streetscape.

The idea, Sweatman said, is to test self-driving technology in realistic conditions that can be measured and controlled with precision.

‘The future of the automotive industry is connected and automated, and we’re going to create that future right here in Michigan,’ Sweatman said during a news conference with Snyder at the North American International Auto Show.”

“Have I Done The Great Thing I Was Supposed To Do?”

February 3, 2014 in Excerpts, Film | Permalink

Tears poured from my eyes the second I heard about Philip Seymour Hoffman’s death yesterday. You? 

Three paragraphs about the things that drives us, sometimes down, when we’ve satisfied basic needs, when we realize that we crave something more even if we can’t exactly name it, from Alex Pappademas’ excellent Grantland postmortem of the great actor and his puzzling, painful collapse from within:

“Hoffman starred in two films that premiered at this year’s Sundance Film Festival. In John Slattery’s grim, ’70s-set drama God’s Pocket, he didn’t look well. It’s strange to say that about an actor who was never afraid to let the camera look upon his pasty, freckled body as a catastrophe, but this was different. He had some weight on him, and appeared to be feeling every ounce of it. His voice was a low, heartsick rumble, the sound of a hangover made flesh. Hoffman conveyed this kind of suffering onscreen better than most working actors — it wasn’t the only thing he could do, but you could always count on him to do it. This didn’t seem like craft, though. He seemed like he was playing through pain.

I wrote a profile of Hoffman once, years ago, when he was promoting 2005’s Capote. We ate lunch in the West Village and smoked cigarettes on the street. I’ve lost the transcript and the story’s not online, which is probably for the best. But at one point I remember asking him some real JV-ball actor-interview question about what, if anything, he felt he had in common with Truman Capote. Hoffman thought about it for a second, and then talked about how Capote was 35 when he started reporting the story that became In Cold Blood, and how there comes a time in every man’s life, around your mid-thirties, when you start to ask yourself, Have I done the great thing I was supposed to do? Am I ever going to do it?

I was about 28 when I wrote that story. I’m 36 now, and I think about that conversation literally every day. I sit at my desk and I look at the dry-erase board above my desk, at the titles of as-yet-unwritten things in green ink, and I ask myself that question. And I think about Hoffman still struggling with it, despite everything he’d achieved by the time I met him. Capote was his first high-profile lead after a decade or so of lauded work in supporting roles, and people were predicting he’d win the Oscar for it, which he did. And he still felt that way, at least enough that it became his way into Truman Capote. Something about that is comforting to me. Or it was, anyway.”

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“The Results Load In Front Of Your Left Eye”

February 3, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Using invasiveness to battle criminality, a Google Glass app allows you to scan a stranger’s eyes and know within moments whether that person has been registered with a sex-offender database. Of course, the greater moral question will come when an app can look into eyes and determine what that person might be about to do, not only what they’ve done in the past. From “Through a Face Scanner Darkly,” Betsy Morais at the New Yorker blog:

“Anonymity forms a protective casing. When it’s punctured, on the street or at a party, the moment of recognition falls somewhere on a spectrum of delight and horror. Soon enough, though, technology will see to it that we can no longer expect to disappear into a landscape of passing faces.

NameTag, an app built for Google Glass by a company called FacialNetwork.com, offers a face scanner for encounters with strangers. You see somebody on the sidewalk and, slipping on your high-tech spectacles, select the app. Snap a photo of a passerby, then wait a minute as the image is sent up to the company’s database and a match is hunted down. The results load in front of your left eye, a selection of personal details that might include someone’s name, occupation, Facebook and/or Twitter profile, and, conveniently, whether there’s a corresponding entry in the national sex-offender registry.”

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