Excerpts

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“Texas Would Appear To Be Committed To Organ Conscription”

January 21, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

In “The Texas Flautist and the Fetus,” a variation on Judith Jarvis Thomson’s “violinist analogy” thought experiment about abortion, Dominic Wilkinson of Practical Ethics points out the unintended moral precedent set by the Texas law which says that pregnant brain-dead woman Marlise Munoz must be kept alive over the objections of her family:

“The Texan law seems to accept that the woman’s interests are reduced by being in a state close to death (or already being dead). It appears to be justified to ignore her previous wishes and to cause distress to her family in order to save the life of another. If this argument is sound, though, it appears to have much wider implications. For though brain death in pregnant women is rare, there are many patients who die in intensive care who could save the lives of others– by donating their organs. Indeed there are more potential lives at stake, since the organs of a patient dying in intensive care may be used to save the life of up to seven other people.

If it is justified to continue life support machines for Marlise Munoz against her and her family’s wishes, it would also appear be justified to remove the organs of dying or brain dead patients in intensive care against their and their family’s wishes. Texas would appear to be committed to organ conscription.”

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“It’s Finger Lickin’ Good”

January 21, 2014 in Excerpts, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

I was on the subway yesterday, and the woman sitting next to me told her friend that she would only eat free-range chicken because that was the ethical thing to do. If I were a chicken, my main objection to slaughterhouses would not be the accommodations. I would be happy to stay in cramped quarters provided that you did not brutally murder my family and I at the end of our visit.

We sometimes rationalize our behavior as “ethical” without changing the worst part of it because we want to believe we’re thoughtful people while still doing exactly what is most enjoyable for us.

Here’s a 1963 clip of Colonel Harland Sanders, the Pol Pot of the chicken world, guesting on What’s My LIne?

From “Demand Grows for Hogs That Are Raised Humanely Outdoors,” by Stephanie Strom in the New York Times:

“Several factors are driving the appetite for pasture-raised pork, grocers and chefs say. Consumers are increasingly aware of and concerned about the conditions under which livestock is raised, and somewhat more willing to pay higher prices for meat certified to have come from animals that were humanely raised.

Big food businesses from McDonald’s to Oscar Mayer and Safeway have promised to stop selling pork from pigs raised in crates over the next decade. Smithfield Farms, one of the country’s largest pork processors, announced this month that it was encouraging all contractors raising hogs on its behalf to move to the use of group pens, which have to be big enough for several pigs to live in comfortably, with space to walk around and bed down.

The restaurant chain Chipotle and some prominent chefs like Dan Barber and Bill Telepan, both of whom have restaurants in Manhattan, have begun using meats from animals that were humanely raised. Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s do a brisk business in such meat.”

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“I Realize That Computers Are In Their Infancy, But They’re Pretty Pathetic”

January 20, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Film, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

In 1987, when Omni asked Bill Gates and Timothy Leary to predict the future of tech and Robert Heilbroner to speculate on the next phase of economics, David Byrne was asked to prognosticate about the arts two decades hence. It depends on how you parse certain words, but Byrne got a lot right–more channels, narrowcasting, etc. One thing I think he erred on is just how democratized it all would become. “I don’t think we’ll see the participatory art that so many people predict, Some people will use new equipment to make art, but they will be the same people who would have been making art anyway.” Kim and Snooki and cats at piano would not have been making art anyway. Certainly you can argue that reality television, home-made Youtube videos and fan fiction aren’t art in the traditional sense, but I would disagree. Reality TV and the such holds no interest for me on the granular level, but the decentralization of media, the unloosing of the cord, is as fascinating to me as anything right now. It’s art writ large, a paradigm shift we have never known before. It’s democracy. The excerpt:

“David Byrne, Lead Singer, Talking Heads:

The line between so-called serious and popular art will blur even more than it already has because people’s altitudes are changing. When organized religion began to lose touch with new ideas and discoveries, it started failing to accomplish its purpose in people’s lives. More and more people will turn to the arts tor the kind of support and inspiration religion used to of- fer them. The large pop-art audience remains receptive to the serious content they’re not getting from religion. Eventually some new kind of formula — an equivalent of religion — will emerge and encompass art, physics, psychiatry, and genetic engineering without denying evolution or any of the possible cosmologies.

I think that people have exaggerated greatly the effects new technology has on the arts and on the number of people who will make art in the future. I realize that computers are in their infancy, but they’re pretty pathetic, and I’m not the only one who’s said that. Computers won’t take into account nuances or vagueness or presumptions or anything like intuition.

I don’t think computers will have any important effect on the arts in 2007. When it comes to the arts they’re just big or small adding machines. And if they can’t ‘think,’ that’s all they’ll ever be. They may help creative people with their bookkeeping, but they won’t help in the creative process.

The video revolution, however, will have some real impact on the arts in the next 20 years. It already has. Because people’s attention spans are getting shorter, more fiction and drama will be done on television, a perfect medium for them. But I don’t think anything will be wiped out; books will always be there; everything will find its place.

Outlets for art, in the marketplace and on television, will multiply and spread. Even the three big TV networks will feature looser, more specialized programming to appeal to special-interest groups. The networks will be freed from the need to try to please everybody, which they do now and inevitably end up with a show so stupid nobody likes it. Obviously this multiplication of outlets will benefit the arts.

I don’t think we’ll see the participatory art that so many people predict. Some people will use new equipment to make art, but they will be the same people who would have been making art anyway. Still, I definitely think that the general public will be interested in art that was once considered avant-garde.

I can’t stand the cult of personality in pop music. I don’t know if that will disappear in the next 20 years, but I hope we see a healthier balance between that phenomenon and the knowledge that being part of a community has its rewards as well.

I don’t think that global video and satellites will produce any global concept of community in the next 20 years, but people will have a greater awareness of their immediate communities. We will begin to notice the great artistic work going on out- side of the major cities — outside of New York, L.A., Paris, and London.”•

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“Music and performance does not make any sense”:

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“Yet Some Now Fear That A New Era Of Automation Enabled By Ever More Powerful And Capable Computers Could Work Out Differently”

January 20, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Automation and robotics will make us wealthy in the aggregate, but how will most of us share in those riches if employment becomes scarce? In the past, technological innovation has disappeared jobs, but others have come along to replace them, often in fields that didn’t even exist before. But what happens if the second part of the shift never arrives? From “The Onrushing Wave” in the Economist:

“For much of the 20th century, those arguing that technology brought ever more jobs and prosperity looked to have the better of the debate. Real incomes in Britain scarcely doubled between the beginning of the common era and 1570. They then tripled from 1570 to 1875. And they more than tripled from 1875 to 1975. Industrialisation did not end up eliminating the need for human workers. On the contrary, it created employment opportunities sufficient to soak up the 20th century’s exploding population. Keynes’s vision of everyone in the 2030s being a lot richer is largely achieved. His belief they would work just 15 hours or so a week has not come to pass.

Yet some now fear that a new era of automation enabled by ever more powerful and capable computers could work out differently. They start from the observation that, across the rich world, all is far from well in the world of work. The essence of what they see as a work crisis is that in rich countries the wages of the typical worker, adjusted for cost of living, are stagnant. In America the real wage has hardly budged over the past four decades. Even in places like Britain and Germany, where employment is touching new highs, wages have been flat for a decade. Recent research suggests that this is because substituting capital for labour through automation is increasingly attractive; as a result owners of capital have captured ever more of the world’s income since the 1980s, while the share going to labour has fallen.

At the same time, even in relatively egalitarian places like Sweden, inequality among the employed has risen sharply, with the share going to the highest earners soaring. For those not in the elite, argues David Graeber, an anthropologist at the London School of Economics, much of modern labour consists of stultifying ‘bullshit jobs’—low- and mid-level screen-sitting that serves simply to occupy workers for whom the economy no longer has much use. Keeping them employed, Mr Graeber argues, is not an economic choice; it is something the ruling class does to keep control over the lives of others.

Be that as it may, drudgery may soon enough give way to frank unemployment.”

“Seeing Ghosts Demonstrated How The Mind-Eye Coordination That Generated Vision Could Break Down”

January 20, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

From “Trick of the Eye,” Iwan Rhys Morus’ wonderful Aeon essay about the nature and value of optical illusions:

“People who said that they saw ghosts really did see them, according to Brewster. But they were images produced by the (deluded) mind rather than by any external object: ‘when the mind possesses a control over its powers, the impressions of external objects alone occupy the attention, but in the unhealthy condition of the mind, the impressions of its own creation, either overpower, or combine themselves with the impressions of external objects’. These ‘mental spectra’ were imprinted on the retina just like any others, but they were still products of the mind not the external world. So ghosts were in the eye, but put there by the mind: ‘the ‘mind’s eye’ is actually the body’s eye’, said Brewster.

Seeing ghosts demonstrated how the mind-eye co-ordination that generated vision could break down. Philosophical toys such as phenakistiscopes and zoetropes — which exploited the phenomenon of persistence of vision to generate the illusion of movement — did the same thing. The thaumatrope, first described in 1827 by the British physician John Ayrton Paris, juxtaposed two different images on opposite sides of a disc to make a single one by rapid rotation — ‘a very striking and magical effect’. A popular Victorian version had a little girl on one side, a boy on the other. They were positioned so that their lips met in a kiss when the disc rotated.

zoetrope45The daedaleum (later renamed the zoetrope), invented in 1834 by the mathematician William George Horner, was ‘a hollow cylinder … with apertures at equal distances, and placed cylindrically round the edge of a revolving disk’ with drawings on the inside of the cylinder. The device produced ‘the same surprising play of relative motions as the common magic disk does when spun before a mirror’. (The ‘magic disk’ was the phenakistiscope, invented a few years earlier by the Belgian natural philosopher Joseph Plateau). In the zoetrope, the viewer looked through one of the slits in the rotating cylinder to see a moving image — often, a juggling clown or a horse galloping. In the phenakistiscope, they looked through a slit in the rotating disc to see the moving image reflected in a mirror. Faraday, too, experimented with persistence of vision.

Brewster’s kaleidoscope was another philosophical toy that fooled the eye. Brewster described it as an ‘ocular harpsichord’, explaining how the ‘combination of fine forms, and ever-varying tints, which it presents in succession to the eye, have already been found, by experience, to communicate to those who have a taste for this kind of beauty, a pleasure as intense and as permanent as that which the finest ear derives from musical sounds’. The kaleidoscopic illusion was supposed to teach the viewer how to see things properly; it was also, interestingly, meant to be a technology that could mechanise art. It ‘effects what is beyond the reach of manual labour’, said Brewster, exhibiting ‘a concentration of talent and skill which could not have been obtained by uniting the separate exertions of living agents.’“

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“Even She Hadn’t Expected The Cash To Make Much Difference”

January 20, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Cherokee reservation, North Carolina, 1939.

Did you grow up sort of poor? I did. Not on food stamps but close. Not in the projects but a couple of buildings away. It leaves a mark. The general theory of poverty has long been that if a poor person received a windfall of cash, it wouldn’t matter because the poverty resides within them. They would be back to square one and in need in no time. A study by Duke epidemiologist Jane Costello about casino money being dispensed to previously poor Cherokee Indians pushed back at that idea to an extent that surprised even the academic herself. From Moises Velasquez-Manoff’s New York Times op-ed, “What Happen When the Poor Receive a Stipend?“:

“When the casino opened, Professor Costello had already been following 1,420 rural children in the area, a quarter of whom were Cherokee, for four years. That gave her a solid baseline measure. Roughly one-fifth of the rural non-Indians in her study lived in poverty, compared with more than half of the Cherokee. By 2001, when casino profits amounted to $6,000 per person yearly, the number of Cherokee living below the poverty line had declined by half.

The poorest children tended to have the greatest risk of psychiatric disorders, including emotional and behavioral problems. But just four years after the supplements began, Professor Costello observed marked improvements among those who moved out of poverty. The frequency of behavioral problems declined by 40 percent, nearly reaching the risk of children who had never been poor. Already well-off Cherokee children, on the other hand, showed no improvement. The supplements seemed to benefit the poorest children most dramatically.

When Professor Costello published her first study, in 2003, the field of mental health remained on the fence over whether poverty caused psychiatric problems, or psychiatric problems led to poverty. So she was surprised by the results. Even she hadn’t expected the cash to make much difference. ‘The expectation is that social interventions have relatively small effects,’ she told me. ‘This one had quite large effects.’

She and her colleagues kept following the children. Minor crimes committed by Cherokee youth declined. On-time high school graduation rates improved. And by 2006, when the supplements had grown to about $9,000 yearly per member, Professor Costello could make another observation: The earlier the supplements arrived in a child’s life, the better that child’s mental health in early adulthood.”

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“After A Miserable Year, Obama’s Presidency Is On The Clock”

January 19, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Politics, Sports | Permalink

I’m there whenever David Remnick focuses on politics or boxing or writers. Other topics also, but those three in particular. The New Yorker EIC touches on that trio of subjects in a piece about President Obama, who is trying to sprint to the finish line rather than run out the clock. Three quick clips from the early stages of the article follow.

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Obama spent his flight time in the private quarters in the nose of the plane, in his office compartment, or in a conference room. At one point on the trip from Andrews Air Force Base to Seattle, I was invited up front for a conversation. Obama was sitting at his desk watching the Miami Dolphins–Carolina Panthers game. Slender as a switch, he wore a white shirt and dark slacks; a flight jacket was slung over his high-backed leather chair. As we talked, mainly about the Middle East, his eyes wandered to the game. Reports of multiple concussions and retired players with early-onset dementia had been in the news all year, and so, before I left, I asked if he didn’t feel at all ambivalent about following the sport. He didn’t.

“I would not let my son play pro football,” he conceded. “But, I mean, you wrote a lot about boxing, right? We’re sort of in the same realm.”

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When Obama leaves the White House, on January 20, 2017, he will write a memoir. “Now, that’s a slam dunk,” the former Obama adviser David Axelrod told me. Andrew Wylie, a leading literary agent, said he thought that publishers would pay between seventeen and twenty million dollars for the book—the most ever for a work of nonfiction—and around twelve million for Michelle Obama’s memoirs. (The First Lady has already started work on hers.) Obama’s best friend, Marty Nesbitt, a Chicago businessman, told me that, important as the memoir might be to Obama’s legacy and to his finances, “I don’t see him locked up in a room writing all the time. His capacity to crank stuff out is amazing. When he was writing his second book, he would say, ‘I’m gonna get up at seven and write this chapter—and at nine we’ll play golf.’ I would think no, it’s going to be a lot later, but he would knock on my door at nine and say, ‘Let’s go.’ ” Nesbitt thinks that Obama will work on issues such as human rights, education, and “health and wellness.” “He was a local community organizer when he was young,” he said. “At the back end of his career, I see him as an international and national community organizer.’

Yet no post-Presidential project—even one as worthy as Ulysses S. Grant’s memoirs or Jimmy Carter’s efforts to eradicate the Guinea worm in Africa—can overshadow what can be accomplished in the White House with the stroke of a pen or a phone call. And, after a miserable year, Obama’s Presidency is on the clock. Hard as it has been to pass legislation since the Republicans took the House, in 2010, the coming year is a marker, the final interval before the fight for succession becomes politically all-consuming.

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Obama’s advisers are convinced that if the Republicans don’t find a way to attract non-white voters, particularly Hispanics and Asians, they may lose the White House for two or three more election cycles. And yet Obama still makes every effort to maintain his careful, balancing tone, as if the unifying moment were still out there somewhere in the middle distance. “There were times in our history where Democrats didn’t seem to be paying enough attention to the concerns of middle-class folks or working-class folks, black or white,” he said. “And this was one of the great gifts of Bill Clinton to the Party—to say, you know what, it’s entirely legitimate for folks to be concerned about getting mugged, and you can’t just talk about police abuse. How about folks not feeling safe outside their homes? It’s all fine and good for you to want to do something about poverty, but if the only mechanism you have is raising taxes on folks who are already feeling strapped, then maybe you need to widen your lens a little bit. And I think that the Democratic Party is better for it. But that was a process. And I am confident that the Republicans will go through that same process.”•

 

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“The Company May Even Go So Far As To Load Products Onto Trucks And Have Them ‘Speculatively Shipped To A Physical Address'”

January 19, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Considering that predictive searching is within reach of our fingertips at all times, and Amazon’s warehouses are data-rich operations, I assumed the “anticipatory ordering” was already a highly developed thing–that the company moved products around the country (and the world) based on prognostications made by previous ordering patterns. But apparently it’s only the newest thing, and it may ultimately go a very aggressive step further than I thought it would. From Kwame Opam at the Verge:

“Drawing on its massive store of customer data, Amazon plans on shipping you items it thinks you’ll like before you click the purchase button. The company today gained a new patent for ‘anticipatory shipping,’ a system that allows Amazon to send items to shipping hubs in areas where it believes said item will sell well. This new scheme will potentially cut delivery times down, and put the online vendor ahead of its real-world counterparts.

Amazon plans to box and ship products it expects customers to buy preemptively, based on previous searches and purchases, wish lists, and how long the user’s cursor hovers over an item online. The company may even go so far as to load products onto trucks and have them ‘speculatively shipped to a physical address’ without having a full addressee. Such a scenario might lead to unwanted deliveries and even returns, but Amazon seems willing to take the hit.”

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“They Are Scientists Dissecting The World’s Most Popular Game”

January 19, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Sports | Permalink

In 1977, the year the Apple II was introduced, Tom Landry, coach of the Dallas Cowboys, was the focus of a People magazine article due to his forward-thinking reliance on computer data. Today the other kind of football (soccer) has joined, in earnest, the information revolution. And that makes a lot of sense. I’m not enough of a fan of the world’s game to say this with complete assuredness, but I think it’s likely that because of the size of the field and ball and the pace of the game, final scores are often as influenced by luck as by skill. (Chris Anderson and David Sally agree.) And single- or double-elimination tournaments seem particularly meaningless statistically, so it’s best to grasp whatever edge you can. From “The Winning Formula,” Joao Medeiros’ Wired UK piece about data’s entry into the Premier League, a passage about one coach who was an early adapter:

“Some managers, however, did get it — and one in particular was Clive Woodward. He had been the coach of England’s World Cup-winning rugby team in 2003, and in 2005 had been offered a one-year contract to serve as Southampton’s director of football. He had been the first coach to adapt Prozone to rugby, installing it at Twickenham four years before the World Cup, which allowed him to collect data on how England and its opponents played. ‘When I first saw it I was fascinated because I’d never seen a game where you’re looking down and just see dots and data and movement,’ Woodward says. ‘It removed a lot of the preconceived notions we had about how other teams played. It made a big difference when we started to see them as data, as opposed to teams we had never beaten before.’ Once, after his players insisted that there was no space on the field to run into, Woodward took a printout of a Prozone freeze-frame taken 24 seconds into a match against France. It showed both teams around the ball in a small area on the pitch and acres of unoccupied space everywhere else. He stuck it on board with the message: ‘The space is the green stuff.’

‘Clive would challenge me at every level,’ says Wilson about Woodward’s time at Southampton. ‘He would ask questions about every aspect of the game: why do we spend so much time working out how to score goals and not how to stop them? I would try to explain to him what they’re doing and he’d just keep asking why.’ Woodward and Wilson tried things such as filming players striking the ball, to study technique from a biomechanical perspective. Those initiatives, however, never had much impact. Redknapp left before the end of the year and Woodward departed at the end of his contract. Wilson had left the club shortly before Woodward, convinced that there was a better way of running a club. ‘Woodward believed that evidence, be it video or statistics or any kind of data, was fundamental to how you prepare a team,’ Wilson says. Woodward remains his biggest influence. ‘He taught me that we didn’t have to do things just because they had always been done in a certain way.’

Today, 19 of the 20 Premier League teams use Prozone. Each has its own team of performance analysts and data scientists looking for the indicators that quantify player performance, the events that determine matches and trends that characterise seasons. They are scientists dissecting the world’s most popular game, looking at data from Prozone and other sources to understand what dictates the difference between winning and losing. In the environment of the multimillion-pound Premier League, clubs don’t just want a competitive advantage, they need it.”

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“There’s Risk In Everything We Do In Life”

January 19, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

While it seems a stretch that the Mars One project will actually deliver a handful of earthlings to our neighboring planet by 2023, more than 150,000 people, even very young ones, have applied to “die on Mars.” Whether the colony becomes a reality or not, it still makes for a fascinating experiment in psychology. From a Guardian interview with ready-to-launch 20-year-old student Ryan Macdonald:

“Guardian:

Why did you sign up?

Ryan Macdonald:

The main reason for me is that I think that on Mars I can accomplish more than I could on Earth. In three weeks, a single person on the surface of Mars could accomplish all of the science that all of the rovers over the past five years have already managed to achieve. If we want to ever prove definitively whether there is life on Mars, we will have to send someone there.

Guardian:

What are your expectations for the Mars One project?

Ryan Macdonald:

The real thing that encourages me is the inspiration factor: what the impact would be back on Earth of my going to Mars. Remember, the Apollo programme is what inspired the generation of scientists and engineers back on Earth who developed computers and smartphones and all the technology that improved our lives. Similarly, a mission to Mars would inspire a whole new generation of scientists on Earth, which would make life better for everyone.

Guardian:

What are you expecting when you first land on Mars?

 Ryan Macdonald:

Survival will have to be the first priority. Initially for the first year or so, it’ll mainly be construction; linking everything together, establishing the equipment, maintaining the solar panels, and things like that. We’ll be bringing some basic canned food to keep us going until we start actually growing our own food. In the long term it’ll be hydroponically grown vegetables and insects for protein. Potentially, later on you could bring some frozen fish eggs and start a little pond. I’d like to find a way to grow some tea on Mars. I think that’s very important for the sanity of all the people there. Once the tea is sorted out, the science would then begin properly.

Guardian:

Are you worried or scared at all?

Ryan Macdonald:

There’s risk in everything we do in life. I say I’ve applied to go to live on Mars, not to go to die on Mars. We all die eventually, of course. Actually the fact is that because things are going to be so strictly controlled, for example the diet of the people who go and the air they breathe, assuming that there is no major equipment failure, people will live longer on Mars than on Earth.”•

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“Albert Einstein Was A Pretty Cool Guy”

January 19, 2014 in Excerpts, Film | Permalink

In order to promote The Monuments Men, which has received a coveted February release date, Bill Murray, a complicated man, just did an Ask Me Anything at Reddit. A few exchanges follow.

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Question:

If you could go back in time and have a conversation with one person, who would it be and why?

Bill Murray:

That’s a grand question, golly.

I kind of like scientists, in a funny way. Albert Einstein was a pretty cool guy. The thing about Einstein was that he was a theoretical physicist, so they were all theories. He was just a smart guy. I’m kind of interested in genetics though. I think I would have liked to have met Gregor Mendel.

Because he was a monk who just sort of figured this stuff out on his own. That’s a higher mind, that’s a mind that’s connected. They have a vision, and they just sort of see it because they are so connected intellectually and mechanically and spiritually, they can access a higher mind. Mendel was a guy so long ago that I don’t necessarily know very much about him, but I know that Einstein did his work in the mountains in Switzerland. I think the altitude had an effect on the way they spoke and thought.

But I would like to know about Mendel, because i remember going to the Philippines and thinking ‘this is like Mendel’s garden’ because it had been invaded by so many different countries over the years, and you could see the children shared the genetic traits of all their invaders over the years, and it made for this beautiful varietal garden.”

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Question:

Do you still talk to your deaf/mute assistant? If so, does he pretend like he can understand what you’re saying?

Bill Murray:

Well, we didn’t part well. I don’t communicate with her, she was a she. I was sort of ambitious thinking that I could hire someone that had the intelligence to do a job but didn’t have necessarily speech or couldn’t quite hear or spoke in sign language. She was a bright person and witty but she had never been away from her home before and even though I tried to accommodate more than I understood when I first hired her, she was very young in her emotional self and the emotional component of being away from her home was lacking. I tried my best, but I was working all day. She was lovely and very smart, but there’s a lot of frustration when you meet people who can’t speak well. Being completely disabled in that area causes a great amount of frustration, and this was going back 30 years or so before ether were the educational components that there are today. It didn’t go particularly well for me, but for a few weeks she really was a light and had a real spirit to her. She was like one of your own kids that never had a job, and then they get a job and realize that certain things are expected, and you can’t react to everything you don’t like or care about. So the first time you have a job and someone says ‘you have to do this’ – it was more complicated than she imagined. We were both optimistic, but it was harder than either of us expected to make it work.

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Bill Murray:

Someone asked “what movie was the most fun to act in” and deleted their comment, so here goes:

Well, I did a film with Jim Jarmusch called Broken Flowers, but I really enjoyed that movie. I enjoyed the script that he wrote. He asked me if I could do a movie, and I said ‘I gotta stay home, but if you make a movie that i could shoot within one hour of my house, I’ll do it.’

So he found those locations. And I did the movie.

And when it was done, I thought “this movie is so good, I thought I should stop.” I didn’t think I could do any better than Broken Flowers, it’s a film that is completely realized, and beautiful, and I thought I had done all I could do to it as an actor. And then 6-7 months later someone asked me to work again, so I worked again, but for a few months I thought I couldn’t do any better than that.

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Question:

What do you think of the current SNL cast?

Bill Murray:

They’re good. I don’t know them as well as I knew the previous one. But i really feel like the previous cast, that was the best group since the original group. They were my favorite group. Some really talented people that were all comedians of some kind or another. You think about Dana Carvey, Will, Hartman, all these wonderful funny guys. But the last group with Kristen Wiig and those characters, they were a bunch of actors and their stuff was just different. It’s all about the writing, the writing is such a challenge and you are trying to write backwards to fit 90 minutes between dress rehearsal and the airing. And sometimes the writers don’t get the whole thing figured out, it’s not like a play where you can rehearse it several times. So good actors – and those were really good actors, and there are some great actors in this current group as well I might add – they seem to be able to solve writing problems, improvisational actors, can solve them on their feet. They can solve it during the performance, and make a scene work. It’s not like we were improvising when we made the shows, but you could feel ways to make things better. And when you get into the third dimension, as opposed to the printed page, you can see ways to solve things and write things live that other sorts of professionals don’t necessarily have. And that’s why I like that previous group. So this group, there are definitely some actors in this group, I see them working in the same way and making scenes go. They really roll very nicely, they have great momentum, and it seems like they are calm in the moment.

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Question:

How do you feel about recreational marijuana?

Bill Murray:

Well that’s a large question, isn’t it? Because you’re talking about recreation, which everyone is in favor of. You are also talking about something that has been illegal for so many years, and marijuana is responsible for such a large part of the prison population, for the crime of self-medication. And it takes millions and billions of dollars by incarcerating people for this crime against oneself as best can be determined. People are realizing that the war on drugs is a failure, that the amount of money spent, you could have bought all the drugs with that much money rather than create this army of people and incarcerated people. I think the terror of marijuana was probably overstated. I don’t think people are really concerned about it the way they once were. Now that we have crack and crystal and whatnot, people don’t even think about marijuana anymore, it’s like someone watching too many videogames in comparison. The fact that states are passing laws allowing it means that its threat has been over-exaggerated. Psychologists recommend smoking marijuana rather than drinking if you are in a stressful situation. These are ancient remedies, alcohol and smoking, and they only started passing laws against them 100 years ago.

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Question:

What was the oddest experience you had in Japan?

Bill Murray:

The oddest… well, I was eating at a sushi bar. I would go to sushi bars with a book I had called “Making out in Japanese.” it was a small paperback book, with questions like “can we get into the back seal?” “do your parents know about me?” “do you have a curfew?”

And I would say to the sushi chef ‘Do you have a curfew? Do your parents know about us? And can we get into the back seat?’

And I would always have a lot of fun with that, but that one particular day, he said “would you like some fresh eel?” and I said “yes I would.” so he came back with a fresh eel, a live eel, and then he walked back behind a screen and came back in 10 seconds with a no-longer-alive eel. It was the freshest thing I had ever eaten in my life. It was such a funny moment to see something that was alive that no longer was alive, that was my food, in 30 seconds.•

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“This Machine Is Capable Of Quite Impressive Feats”

January 19, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

In the 1960s, long before Boston Dynamics was creating robotic men and their best friends for the military (and now for Google), GE offered up an elephantine machinery to the Army. It could do some heavy lifting but was a cumbersome thing and not autonomous as an operator was required in the carriage.

From “They’re Robots? They’re Beasts!” Scott Kirsner’s 2004 New York Times article which shows just how much investment in the sector has grown in a decade:

“Replicating biology isn’t a breeze, and some think that despite the well-publicized introduction of Sony’s toy dog, Aibo, in 1999, useful biomimetic robots may still be many years off.

‘What has been a surprise to me is how hard it has been to make progress,’ said Shankar Sastry, a professor at the University of California who has been helping to design robotic flies, fish and the wall-climbing gecko.

Another challenge is the sporadic nature of project financing, which predominantly originates with government agencies like the National Science Foundation, NASA and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, better known as Darpa.

‘I hate to gripe, but funding is hard to get these days,’ said Dr. [Howie] Choset, designer of snakebots that can slither up stairways or down drainage pipes.”

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“I Am Not Sure If I Consider Any One Book My Most Important”

January 19, 2014 in Books, Excerpts | Permalink

I read a lot of Thomas Mann in school and really enjoyed most of it, though I will acknowledge that Doctor Faustus sailed right over my teenaged head. Does anyone now write like Mann or, say, Nabakov? Should they? Theirs was a denser type of literature that seems mostly absent now. Those complexities are found more in visual culture today. The opening of a 1955 interview Frederic Morton of the New York Times did with Mann just two months before the writer died:

Travemuende, Germany — Thomas Mann’s eightieth birthday–June 6–might suggest an aged Olympian gazing distantly upon the world from his Lake Zurich retreat. The picture, however, is not entirely accurate. Before meeting this writer, for example, the Nobel prize winner had just delivered speeches on Schiller in Stuttgart and Weimar, negotiated possible film sales of Buddenbrooks and The Magic Mountain in Goettingen and spoken on the North German radio. Soon after the interview he was to receive Honorary Citizenship of his native city (Luebeck), be the object of a number of official birthday fêtes in Zurich, launch a lecture tour in Holland and, last not least, complete his Felix Krull, which recently appeared (442 pages strong and briskly subtitled “First Volume of the Memoirs”) to a volley of German critical huzzahs.

Travemuende, the Baltic Sea resort in which this writer cornered the octogenarian, was supposed to provide a brief lull for the Herr Doktor. (In Germany, where every solvent person with spectacles is presumed to possess a Ph.D., Thomas Mann goes by the title of the Herr Doktor.) His hotel suite, though, could have been the opening-night dressing room of Mary Martin. Flowers, telephone calls, telegrams and she whom even Miss Martin could never boast of, namely Katja Mann. For to interview Herr Doktor means invariably also to interview Frau Doktor, his attractive and most vivacious wife, whose conversational impulses have a wonderful way of advancing, instead of interrupting, a causerie. On this visit she wore a smart (one is almost tempted to say snappy) turquoise velvet jacket with embroidered sleeves. During the talk she directed traffic between a messenger boy, a hotel official, the interviewer and a maid pouring tea.

In the midst of it all, the master. Clad in business gray, hands factually folded, he looked about fifteen years younger than his age and much more (there’s no help for the word) bourgeois than even his photographs. In fact, he resembled a Hanseatic grain merchant pondering, in the solitude of his office, wheat futures on the Hamburg bourse. His actual problem, just put to him by the visitor, was a little different.

“I am not sure if I consider any one book my most important,” he said in his precise but measuredly cadenced High German. “The longest and, to my mind, richest work is the Joseph tetralogy, but perhaps–” the Mann smile like the Mann phrase often has a decorous ambiguity, regretful and self-ironical at the same time “–perhaps I like ‘Joseph’ best by way of overcompensation. Because of its size it is the last read of my major works, you know.” He turned to light a cigar. “Then of course there is the Faustus which put the heaviest strain on my resources and in that sense is closest to me. And there is ‘Tonio Kroeger’; it is the most private and emotionally most autobiographical thing that I have ever done.”•

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“The Gold Deposits At The Site He And Jibila Were Discussing May Be Worth Billions Of Dollars”

January 17, 2014 in Excerpts, Film, Politics, Urban Studies | Permalink

For the past six years or so, Jeffrey Wright, one of the best actors on the planet, has been trying to extract precious minerals from the earth in Sierra Leone, hoping to aid the impoverished region. It’s an uncommon, perhaps quixotic, quest. It’s real life and it’s a movie. The opening of “Jeffrey Wright’s Gold Mine,” an article in the New York Times Magazine by Daniel Bergner:

“‘This is a relationship that could bring us all the things we desire,’ Jeffrey Wright said. He was sitting with Samuel Jibila under an awning rigged from rusty metal sheets in front of Jibila’s decrepit house in Sierra Leone. Jibila is the traditional ruler — the paramount chief — of Penguia, a little domain of jungly hills and dusty villages 250 miles from the capital. Wright is an actor who lives in Brooklyn. He has won a Tony, an Emmy and a Golden Globe and most recently appeared as Beetee in The Hunger Games: Catching Fire. And for the last decade, he has been traveling to this isolated area near the Guinea border to run his small gold-exploration company, Taia Lion Resources. He wanted to maintain Jibila’s faith in his company, in his plans, but Jibila, who was surrounded by lesser chiefs in glossy robes, wasn’t feeling faithful.

Since 2003, Wright has brought in geologists to sample Penguia’s soil and streams. He leases the exploration rights here from the national government. The gold deposits at the site he and Jibila were discussing may be worth billions of dollars. He says that mining will be a boon to everyone; that the operation will put many hundreds of people to work, not counting the small shops and other businesses that will bloom; that company employees will have a real chance to rise; that paved roads will replace cratered tracks. Transformation will come to a territory so undeveloped that when the rare vehicle needs to cross a river not far from Jibila’s home, the driver pulls onto a raft and ferrymen tug the vessel across with a rope.

But despite this vision and these promises, no metamorphosis has come to Penguia.”

 

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“The Car Has A Cockpit Wide Enough Only For The Driver”

January 17, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

No old technologies were harmed in the making of Elio Motors’ $6,800, three-wheel car, an automobile that uses pre-existing tech but is able to get 84 MPG (highway) because of its unique design and size. It’s set to reach the market in 2015. From Rob Lever at Yahoo! News:

“An engineer by training, [Paul] Elio began the firm in 2008 and recently took over an abandoned General Motors plant in Louisiana — one which had been producing the gas-guzzling Hummer.

In order to deliver the best fuel economy, the car has a cockpit wide enough only for the driver, with a passenger seat in the rear. It has two wheels in front and tapers in the rear to a single wheel.

‘Front-to-back seating, that’s the key to mileage,’ Elio told AFP.

This makes it principally a one-person car, but Elio said the vehicle is a good solution for the millions who drive along to work or leisure events.

Elio readily admits there is no special technology in the car — it has a three-cylinder internal combustion gasoline engine, power windows, air conditioning and anti-lock brakes. While it does not have some of the on-board electronic gadgety found in other vehicles, drivers can connect their smartphones for navigation, apps and more.”

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“They Were Known As Lady Wrestlers, And Many People Found Them Hard Not To Watch”

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

I interviewed the now-deceased lady wrestler The Fabulous Moolah some years ago, and I was glad it was a phoner so she couldn’t gouge my eyes. I was fascinated by someone who did what was then considered a very unladylike thing beginning in the harsh years of the Great Depression, though I knew going in that her stories would largely be bullshit. Wrestlers who came of age when the entertainment still had one foot inside the carnival tent never really told the truth because they were so committed to selling a ruse–that something fake was real. They were actors who never exited that stage. The things she did say that were true, however, were stranger than fiction. For instance: “When I was known as ‘Slave Girl,’ I managed the wrestler Elephant Boy, and he’s a priest in Ohio now, you know?” No, I did not know. This was new information.

I asked Moolah (real name: Lillian Ellison) if she considered herself a feminist, and she got a little flustered–perhaps annoyed. It occurred to me later that she thought I was asking her if she was a lesbian. I quickly explained what “feminist” meant, and things moved forward again. Moolah’s close friend, housemate and fellow ferocious wrestler Johnnie Mae Young just passed away at 90. From her obituary by William Yardley in the New York Times:

“Before thongs and silicone and spray tans made women’s wrestling the overtly sexualized spectacle that is now orchestrated by W.W.E., Ms. Young was among the most famous in a colorful cast of women who first rose to prominence in the 1940s, in part because World War II reduced the number of men who wrestled professionally. They were known as lady wrestlers, and many people found them hard not to watch.

‘When I first started wrestling professionally, the men didn’t like the girls,’ Ms. Young said, ‘because we would go out and steal the show.’

Crowds loved to hate her. Organizers sometimes shielded the ring with chicken wire to help protect her from the rotten eggs and vegetables people would throw. Other wrestlers were intimidated by her techniques and her titles.

By the late 1960s, she had become the National Wrestling Alliance’s first national women’s champion. In the late 1990s, W.W.E. hired her and her longtime friend Lillian Ellison, better known as the Fabulous Moolah, whom she had trained.

Ms. Young fought much younger wrestlers and starred in campy skits with young male wrestlers that suggested that her prowess went beyond the ring. Some of her older opponents said the work tainted the legacy of women in wrestling. Ms. Young paid no attention.”

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“There Is No Vaccine To Protect Against It And, In The Most Severe Cases, No Cure”

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

Mets first baseman Ike Davis caught Valley Fever in Arizona two years ago during the offseason, and he hasn’t been the same player since, though that may have more to do with a long swing than a lung illness. But those in the West who don’t have to worry about hitting a slider are also catching the fungal disease, in increasingly scary numbers, and the sinister spores have compromised not just their job performances but their very lives. From “Death Dust,” an article by Dana Goodyear in the New Yorker, a description of a disease aided in its spread by real-estate development and changes in demographics:

“Cocci is endemic to the desert Southwest—California, Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, Texas—and to the semi-arid parts of Central and South America. Digging—building, drilling, tilling, clearing—stirs it up, and dry, hot, windy conditions, a regional feature intensified by climate change, disperse it. In recent years, infections have risen dramatically. According to the Centers for Disease Control, from 1998 to 2011 there was a tenfold increase in reported cases; officials there call it a ‘silent epidemic,’ far more destructive than had been previously recognized. Its circumscribed range has made it easy for policymakers to ignore. Though it sickens many times more people than West Nile virus, which affects much of the country, including the Northeast, it has received only a small fraction of the funding for research. ‘The impact of valley fever on its endemic populations is equal to the impact of polio or chicken pox before the vaccines,’ John Galgiani, an infectious-disease physician who directs the Valley Fever Center for Excellence, at the University of Arizona in Tucson, says. ‘But chicken pox and polio were worldwide.’

In 2012, valley fever was the second-most-reported disease in Arizona; two-thirds of the country’s cases occur in the state. There is no vaccine to protect against it and, in the most severe cases, no cure. The population of Phoenix has grown by ten per cent in the past decade, and newcomers have no acquired immunity. The elderly and the immune-compromised—including pregnant women—are most susceptible; for unknown reasons, otherwise healthy African-Americans and Filipinos are disproportionately vulnerable to severe and life-threatening forms of the disease. (In one early study, Filipino men were estimated to be a hundred and seventy-five times as likely as white men to get sick from cocci, and a hundred and ninety-two times as likely to die from it.) But, as one specialist told me, ‘if you breathe and you’re warm-blooded, you can get this.'”

“Government Is Necessary. The Tools Of Policy Are Indispensable.”

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

Jeffrey Sachs is depicted by some as a dependency-creating subsidizer and by others as an extreme free-marketer–neither seems particularly apt. In a Reddit AMA to promote a free online course on sustainable development, the Columbia professor answers some critics (Angus Deaton, Naomi Klein, Dambisa Moyo) and questions about the global war on poverty.

_____________________

Question:

I’m fascinated by the new environmental technologies like billboards pulling drinking water from the air, or Mexico City’s smog eating paint. What technology do you look at as having great potential?

Jeffrey D. Sachs:

Probably the single most important breakthrough in recent years has been the dramatic decline in price of photovoltaics, which have fallen by a factor of 100X since 1977. 1 Watt of PV now costs less than $1 dollar. This will make possible an enormous upscaling of solar power in many parts of the world.

_____________________

Question:

I read The End of Poverty and I have to say, I am a huge fan of that book. I often cite your work to support ideas like that sweat-shops aren’t necessarily the evil they’re portrayed to be. Since the book, how much, in your eyes, has changed in the world? Do you feel like leaders sat up and took notice? 

Jeffrey D. Sachs:

The most important thing that’s happened since 2005 is that the idea of ending extreme poverty has actually begun to take hold. People see the success of China in ending poverty, the start of real poverty reduction in Africa, and the power of the new ICT technologies. Because of this optimism, the World Bank Development Committee voted in April to take on the goal of ending extreme poverty globally by 2030. So the idea is there, step by step.

_____________________

Question:

I’ve always argued that if agricultural subsidies were cut around the world it would be more effective in lifting people from poverty than all aid combined. It seems that lately developing countries have also gotten into the ag subsidy trap. Is it possible we’ve reached a point where reducing global ag subsidies might hurt the poor more than it helps them?

Jeffrey D. Sachs:

Ending AG subsidies, while generally a good idea, won’t solve as much as one might think, because the main beneficiaries will be large food-exporting countries, such as Brazil, not the poorest countries. Still, it’s typically a good thing to do. The subsidies are rarely fair or effective.

_____________________

Question:

When the government or culture in an area does not support elimination of poverty, have you seen other ways to make substantial progress, or is the government/leadership really the key to success or failure?

Jeffrey D. Sachs:

Government is necessary. The tools of policy (taxes, regulation, public subsidies of science, public investment) are indispensable. They are not the only things that matter, but without government, broad-based and sustained development is not really possible. Of course, governments do not need to be perfect. Thank goodness!!!•

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“I Believe In Heaven, And I Believe In Hell”

January 16, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Billy James Hargis was a twentieth-century American evangelical entrepreneur writ large: charismatic, ultra-conservative, segregationist, anti-communist, anti-feminist, anti-gay, McCarthy supporter, charged with abusing tax-exempt status, accused of sexual misconduct by male and female students at the Christian college he founded, etc. He sat for an interview with Tom Snyder in the late 1970s to address a number of topics, including his sex scandal. A polished TV presenter, the “hillbilly preacher” comes across well despite everything. During the conversation, the two refer to Pat Robertson as the “Johnny Carson of Evangelism.”

From Hargis’ 2004 obituary in the Economist: “For four years, starting in 1953, he launched a million hydrogen balloons from West Germany towards the east. They contained verses of Scripture, sent ‘to succour the poor starved captives of communism.’ Rather less lightly, he himself hit the pulpit across America and in ‘foreign lands,’ perfecting his own style of shouting, flailing and sweating with an energy alarming in a man of his girth.

As televangelists do, he also set up courses and centres of learning: the National Anti-Communist Leadership School, the Christian Crusade Anti-Communist Youth University and, in Tulsa, the American Christian College. A naive reporter once asked him what was taught there. Why, Mr Hargis answered, ‘anti-communism, anti-socialism, anti-welfare state, anti-Russia, anti-China, a literal interpretation of the Bible and states’ rights.’ As if he had needed to ask.

After a while the authorities, stirred up by the Evil One, got interested in him. The Christian Crusade was a supposedly religious charity with tax-exempt status; yet Mr Hargis’s work seemed mostly political. Its purposes were allegedly altruistic; yet Mr Hargis drew a salary of $25,000 from it, besides his utility bills, his house, his clothes, his colour TV, his travelling expenses and his dry-cleaning bills. In 1964 the tax-exemption was withdrawn by the Internal Revenue Service, and his reputation spoiled.

Seven years later, sex reared its head. For Mr Hargis, adopted and brought up in crushing Christian poverty in Texas, fun had meant daily Bible-readings and, once a week, gospel choir. He gave the impression that nothing had ever changed. The targets of his daily wrath were not only homosexuals and women’s libbers but the blatantly sexual pop-gods of the day: ‘When the Beatles thrust their hips forward while holding their guitars and shout, ‘Oh Yeah!!’ who cannot know what they really mean?’

Yet in 1974 both male and female students at the American Christian College, and three male members of the college choir, the All-American Kids, claimed Mr Hargis had deflowered them.”

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“Sen. Dianne Feinstein Says She Once Found A Drone Peeking Into The Window Of Her Home”

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

Richard Feynman famously asked the seminal nano question: Why can’t we write the entire 24 volumes of the Encyclopaedia Britannica on the head of a pin? But the past isn’t the only thing that can get small; the same holds true for what’s unfolding this very day, this very instant. And what will become of us when drones are the size of fleas and you can barely see them, can’t see them at all? From Kathryn A. Wolfe at Politico:

“Sen. Dianne Feinstein says she once found a drone peeking into the window of her home — the kind of cautionary tale she wants lawmakers to consider as they look at allowing commercial drone use.

The California Democrat offered few details about the incident when speaking about it Wednesday afternoon, during a Senate Commerce Committee hearing on drone policy at which she appeared as a special witness. But she used the episode to implore lawmakers to ‘proceed with caution.’

Feinstein said she encountered the flying robot while a demonstration was taking place outside her house. She said she went to the window to peek out — and ‘there was a drone right there at the window looking out at me.’

She held her hand inches from her face to indicate how close it was.”

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“Might These ‘Good, Honest Citizens’ With Nothing To Hide Ever Imagine That They Might Feel A Challenge To Be A Whistleblower”

January 16, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

I was neither awed nor upset by Edward Snowden’s NSA leaking for a few reasons: 1) From the moment the Patriot Act passed, we had given our government a “by whatever means necessary” standard, 2) I think most Americans have embraced being watched and feel safer that way (though I don’t), 3) The technological tools of today (and certainly those of tomorrow) cannot be controlled by legislation, 4) Technology is a doubled-edged sword, and the government will be spied on as much as it spies. The power has been disseminated and it will be used, if not always well. To paraphrase Chance Gardner: “We like to watch.”

I have a great fear of imprisoning whistleblowers. We need those who will risk themselves to stop Watergates and Abu Ghraibs. And while Snowden may have stated the obvious and ironically ended up living in Russia, the ultimate surveillance state, he wasn’t wrong.

In a new Ask Me Anything at Reddit, Pentagon Papers leaker and staunch Snowden supporter Daniel Ellsberg answers an oft-asked question: Why should those with nothing to hide fear surveillance?

“Question:

I’m curious how you respond when people tell you that ‘they have nothing to hide.’ How do you help them see that this isn’t a valid argument for why they shouldn’t be concerned?

Daniel Ellsberg:

Do they want to live in a democracy, with checks and balances, restraints on Executive power? (They may not feel that they care, though I would say they should; but if they do, it’s relevant to the question that follows). Do they really believe that real democracy is viable, when one branch of government, the Executive, knows or can know every detail of every private communication (or credit card transaction, or movement) of: every journalist; every source to every journalist; every member of Congress and their staffs; every judge, at every level up to the Supreme Court? Do they think that every one of these people ‘has nothing to hide,’ nothing that could be used to blackmail them or manipulate them, or neutralize their dissent to Executive policies, or influence voting behavior? Is investigative journalism, or aggressive Congressional investigation of the Executive, or court restraints on Executive practices, really possible with that amount of transparency to the Executive of their private and professional lives and associations? And without any of those checks, the kind of democracy you have is that of the German Democratic Republic in East Germany, with its Stasi (which had a miniscule fraction of the surveillance capability the NSA has now, but enough to turn a fraction of the population of East Germany into secret Stasi informants).

Might these ‘good, honest citizens’ with nothing to hide ever imagine that they might feel a challenge to be a whistleblower, or a source to a journalist or Congressperson, or engage in associations or parties critical of the current administration? As The Burglary recounts, it was enough to write a letter to a newspaper critical of the FBI to get on J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI list for potential detention or more active surveillance. And once on, hard or impossible to get off. (See ‘no fly’ lists today ).”

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“We Have Barely Begun To Understand The Mind From Inside”

January 15, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Edge asked dozens of scientists, theorists and journalists this question: “What Scientific Idea Is Ready for Retirement?” There are responses from Gary Marcus, Rodney Brooks, Kevin Kelly, etc. In his answer, David Gelernter continues to take aim at Singularitarians:

“The Grand Analogy

Today computationalists and cognitive scientists—those researchers who see digital computing as a model for human thought and the mind—are nearly unanimous in believing the Grand Analogy and teaching it to their students. And whether you accept it or not, the analogy is milestone of modern intellectual history. It partly explains why a solid majority of contemporary computationalists and cognitive scientists believe that eventually, you will be able to give your laptop a (real not simulated) mind by downloading and executing the right software app. Whereupon if you tell the machine, ‘imagine a rose,’ it will conjure one up in its mind, just as you do. Tell it to ‘recall an embarrassing moment’ and it will recall something and feel embarrassed, just as you might. In this view, embarrassed computers are just around the corner.

But no such software will ever exist, and the analogy is false and has slowed our progress in grasping the actual phenomenology of mind. We have barely begun to understand the mind from inside. But what’s wrong with this suggestive, provocative analogy? My first reason is old; the other three are new.

1. The software-computer system relates to the world in a fundamentally different way from the mind-brain system. Software moves easily among digital computers, but each human mind is (so far) wedded permanently to one brain. The relationship between software and the world at large is arbitrary, determined by the programmer; the relationship between mind and world is an expression of personality and human nature, and no one can re-arrange it.

There are computers without software, but no brains without minds. Software is transparent. I can read off the precise state of the entire program at any time. Minds are opaque—there is no way I can know what you are thinking unless you tell me. Computers can be erased; minds cannot. Computers can be made to operate precisely as we choose; minds cannot. And so on. Everywhere we look we see fundamental differences.

2. The Grand Analogy presupposes that minds are machines, or virtual machines—but a mind has two equally-important functions, doing and being; a machine is only for doing. We build machines to act for us. Minds are different: yours might be wholly quiet, doing (“computing”) nothing; yet you might be feeling miserable or exalted—or you might merely be conscious.

Emotions in particular are not actions, they are ways to be. And emotions—states of being—play an important part in the mind’s cognitive work. They allow you, for instance, to feel your way to a cognitive goal. (‘He walked to the window to recollect himself, and feel how he ought to behave.’ Jane Austen, Persuasion.) Thoughts contain information, but feelings (mild wistfulness, say, on a warm summer morning) contain none. Wistfulness is merely a way to be.

Until we understand how to make digital computers feel (or experience phenomenal consciousness), we have no business talking up a supposed analogy between mind:brain and software:computer.

(Those who note that computers-that-can-feel are incredible are sometimes told: “You assert that many billions of tiny, meaningless computer instructions, each unable to feel, could never create a system that feels. Yet neurons are also tiny, ‘meaningless’ and feel nothing–but a hundred billion of those yields a brain that does feel.’ Which is irrelevant: 100 billion neurons yield a brain that supports a mind, but a hundred billion sandgrains or used tires yields nothing. You need billions of the right article arranged in the right way to get feeling.)

3. The process of growing up is innate to the idea of human being. Social interactions and body structure change over time, and the two sets of changes are intimately connected. A toddler who can walk is treated differently from an infant who can’t. No robot could acquire a human-like mind unless it could grow and change physically, interacting with society as it did.

But even if we focus on static, snapshot minds, a human mind requires a human body. Bodily sensations create mind-states that cause physical changes that create further mind-changes. A feedback loop. You are embarrassed; you blush; feeling yourself blush, your embarrassment increases. Your blush deepens.

We don’t think with our brains only. We think with our brains and bodies together. We might build simulated bodies out of software—but simulated bodies can’t interact in human ways with human beings. And we must interact with other people to become thinking persons.

4. Software is inherently recursive; recursive structure is innate to the idea of software. The mind is not and cannot be recursive.

A recursive structure incorporates smaller versions of itself: an electronic circuit made of smaller circuits, an algebraic expression built of smaller expressions.

Software is a digital computer realized by another digital computer. (You can find plenty of definitions of digital computer.) ‘Realized by’ means made-real-by or embodied-by. The software you build is capable of exactly the same computations as the hardware on which it executes. Hardware is a digital computer realized by electronics (or some equivalent medium).

Suppose you design a digital computer; you embody it using electronics. So you’ve got an ordinary computer, with no software. Now you design another digital computer: an operating system, like Unix. Unix has a distinctive interface—and, ultimately, the exact same computing power as the machine it runs on. You run your new computer (Unix) on your hardware computer. Now you build a word processor (yet another dressed up digital computer), to run on Unix. And so on, ad infinitum. The same structure (a digital computer) keeps recurring. Software is inherently recursive.

The mind is not and cannot be. You cannot ‘run’ another mind on yours, and a third mind on that, and a fourth atop the third.

In conclusion: much has been gained by mind science’s obsession with computing. Computation has been a useful lens to focus scientific and philosophic thinking on the essence of mind. The last generation has seen, for example, a much clearer view of the nature of consciousness. But we have always known ourselves poorly. We still do. Your mind is a room with a view, and we still know the view (objective reality) a lot better than the room (subjective reality). Today subjectivism is re-emerging among those who see through the Grand Analogy. Computers are fine, but it’s time to return to the mind itself, and stop pretending we have computers for brains; we’d be unfeeling, unconscious zombies if we had.”

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“They Went Around The Country And Created Computer Clubs Everyplace They Went”

January 15, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

At Medium, Walter Isaacson posted a new excerpt (which awaits your crowdsourcing) from his forthcoming book on Silicon Valley creators. His latest segment concerns the famed Homebrew Computer Club, the original cult of the microprocessor, which was spread across the country with a Johnny Appleseed approach several years before there was an Apple Computers. The first two paragraphs: 

“The Homebrew Mentality

In June 1975, the month that Gates first moved down to Albuquerque, Ed Rogers decided to send the Altair or the road showing off its marvels as if it were a carney show exhibit. His goal was to create computer clubs in towns across America, preferably filled with Altair loyalists. He tricked out a Dodge camper van, dubbed it the MITS Mobile, and sent it on a sixty-town tour up the coast of California then down to the Southeast, hitting such hotspots as Little Rock, Baton Rouge, Macon, Huntsville, and Knoxville. Gates, who went along for part of the ride, thought it was an amazingly neat marketing ploy. ‘They bought this big blue van and they went around the country and created computer clubs everyplace they went,’ he marveled. ‘Most of the computer clubs in America were created by MITs.’ Gates was at the shows in Texas, and Allen joined for the ride when they got to Alabama. At the Huntsville Holiday Inn, sixty people — a mix of hippyish hobbyists and crew-cut engineers — paid $10 to attend, then about four times the cost of a movie. The presentation lasted three hours. At the end of a display of a lunar landing game, doubters came and looked under the table assuming there were cables to some bigger minicomputer hidden underneat. ‘But once they saw it was real,’ Allen recalled. ‘the engineers became almost giddy with enthusiasm.’

One of the stops that summer was Rickeys Hyatt House in Palo Alto. There a fateful encounter occurred after Microsoft BASIC was demonstrated to a group of hackers and hobbyists from a newly-formed local group known as the Homebrew Computer Club. ‘The room was packed with amateurs and experimenters eager to find out about this new electronic toy,’ the club’s newsletter reported. Some of them were also eager to act on the hacker credo that software, like information, should be free. This was not surprising given the social and cultural attitudes — so different from the entrepreneurial zeal of those who had migrated up from Albuquerque — which had flowed together in the early 1970s leading up to the formation of the Homebrew Computer Club.”

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“Are There Patterns We Can Discern That Reveal A Bigger Truth About Human Psychology And Creative Thought?”

January 15, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

I’ve never understood people continually doing something they’re bad at. Why continue to pound your head against a wall? I guess there’s something noble in perseverance in the face of no progress, but I still find efforts exhausting.

But when it comes to those who are truly talented at their work, why do some make remarkable leaps and others flounder? Is it merely aptitude or do some climates favor rainmakers? From Alan Rocke’s Los Angeles Review of Books piece about Exceptional Creativity in Science and Technology, an exploration into creative innovation and the conditions that lead to transformative breakthroughs:

“Consider two world-changing stories that happened almost simultaneously. During the fall of 1903, on a floating platform in the Potomac River, the distinguished astronomer Samuel Langley carried out two highly touted tests of what he hoped would be the first heavier-than-air flying machine. The US Army liberally funded these experiments and the Smithsonian Institution, which Langley directed, sanctioned them. But Langley’s device crashed into the river both times, so he abandoned the project. Nine days after the second failed test, in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, two obscure Ohio bicycle mechanics successfully flew their own machine, in front of only a handful of local witnesses. With none of the funding, prestige, and resources that Langley had enjoyed, Wilbur and Orville Wright inaugurated aviation history.

Or consider a second story. In 1904, the world-famous mathematical physicist Henri Poincaré, professor at the Sorbonne in Paris, was taking significant steps toward a new conception of time and space, and defending an idea he called ‘the principle of relativity.’ But an obscure patent clerk in Bern, Switzerland scooped him. In a ridiculously short paper, published in 1905 just two months after receiving his PhD degree, this patent clerk, 26-year-old Albert Einstein, was able to frame these issues in a novel way, deriving several extraordinary new consequences. The principle of relativity proved to be just the starting point for Einstein’s revolutionary theory of relativity.

The history of creative innovation in science and technology is full of stories like these. How do we account for them? Are there patterns we can discern that reveal a bigger truth about human psychology and creative thought?”

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“Our Time Traveller Would Conclude That, In The Past Century, The Human Race Achieved A New Level Of Superintelligence”

January 14, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

In debating whether smartphones and other recent technologies, with their “prosthetic” effect on intelligence, are good or bad for us (Editor’s note: They are good for us), Tim Wu of the New Yorker sets up a fictional scenario to explain the power stashed in our shirt pockets:

“A well-educated time traveller from 1914 enters a room divided in half by a curtain. A scientist tells him that his task is to ascertain the intelligence of whoever is on the other side of the curtain by asking whatever questions he pleases.

The traveller’s queries are answered by a voice with an accent that he does not recognize (twenty-first-century American English). The woman on the other side of the curtain has an extraordinary memory. She can, without much delay, recite any passage from the Bible or Shakespeare. Her arithmetic skills are astonishing—difficult problems are solved in seconds. She is also able to speak many foreign languages, though her pronunciation is odd. Most impressive, perhaps, is her ability to describe almost any part of the Earth in great detail, as though she is viewing it from the sky. She is also proficient at connecting seemingly random concepts, and when the traveller asks her a question like ‘How can God be both good and omnipotent?’ she can provide complex theoretical answers.

Based on this modified Turing test, our time traveller would conclude that, in the past century, the human race achieved a new level of superintelligence. Using lingo unavailable in 1914, (it was coined later by John von Neumann) he might conclude that the human race had reached a ‘singularity’—a point where it had gained an intelligence beyond the understanding of the 1914 mind.

The woman behind the curtain, is, of course, just one of us. That is to say, she is a regular human who has augmented her brain using two tools: her mobile phone and a connection to the Internet and, thus, to Web sites like Wikipedia, Google Maps, and Quora.”

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