Excerpts

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“The Committee Could Still Suss Out Some Of The ‘Rough Stuff’ About Clinton”

December 6, 2013 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

I was fairly certain that a second term for President Obama wouldn’t chasten Republicans, wouldn’t make them more amenable to compromise. But I’m still pretty stunned by the intensity of the continued rejection of reason, even if only because it’s such a tactical mistake. And when GOP Chairman Reince Priebus announces a year later that the party is readying attacks on Hillary Clinton based on Benghazi, her healthcare reform attempt in the 1990s and other losing issues, you know the Right is still tone deaf to anything outside the echo chamber. 

The GOP’s major problem is that it’s become a party of antiquated zealots funded by wealthy opportunists. When you walk into a national election knowing that you will lose a large majority of women, Latinos, African-Americans, Independents, gay voters and youth voters, you have very slim margins–you are in trouble. But with money streaming in from above and angry threats being shouted from the ground, the tendency has been to make things not better but worse. You shut down the government, for instance, when the vast majority of Americans, even much of the Republican base, is vehemently opposed to such a gambit.

It’s horrible that several Americans died in the Benghazi attacks, and it’s fine to investigate what occurred to try to ensure it doesn’t happen again. But I think most adults realize that in a region exploding with discontent, instability and civil war, danger abounds. That’s very different than invading the wrong country, getting 5,000 of our soldiers killed, maybe 100,000 Iraqis and spending a trillion dollars, as the GOP did.

I don’t know if Clinton will run for President in 2016 or if she will be the Democratic nominee if she does enter the race, but I know this strategy against her isn’t a winning one, and the Republicans seem unable to divine one in a country of shifting demographics. There is the potential that 2012, when the GOP lost nine out of ten swing states, may seem to them in the near future like the good old days. 

From Talking Points Memo:

“Asked by radio host Hugh Hewitt if the RNC began to look at Clinton as the Democrats’ presumed nominee, Priebus said the RNC’s research shop already turned its attention to the former State Department leader.

‘I think that we have to be very aggressive on what she’s done or hasn’t done,’ the chairman said, according to a transcript of Hewitt’s radio show. ‘And the things that she is famous for, like a botched health care rollout in the 90s, and Benghazi, and the things that she is involved with that are or went obviously pretty badly, we need to focus in on.’

Priebus said that although the RNC was looking toward the 2014 midterms, the committee could still suss out some of the ‘rough stuff’ about Clinton.”

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“Robots Will Allow Us To Economize On Love”

December 6, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Cars can’t think and feel like horses can, but that’s okay. No deep understanding is necessary to make them superior at labor. But what about in intimacy? The opening paragraph of a post at the Philosopher’s Beard about that potential moment (hopefully in the distant future) when the term computer dating takes on a new meaning:

“The robots are coming. Even if they don’t actually think, they will behave enough like they do to take over most of the cognitive labour humans do, just as fossil-fuel powered machines displaced human muscle power in the 19th and 20th centuries. I’ve written elsewhere about the kind of changes this new industrial revolution implies for our political and moral economy if we are to master its utopian possibilities and head off its dystopian threats. But robots won’t merely be set to work out in the world; they will also move into our homes. This will have consequences for human intimacy as we now know it. Robots will not only be able to do our household chores, but care work, performing the labours of love without ever loving. I foresee two distinct tendencies. First, because robots will allow us to economise on love, inter-human intimacy may become attenuated as we have less need of each other. Second, because robots will perform care better than we can, robots may become objectively more attractive than humans as intimate companions.“

“[They] Either Applied A Blindfold To The Woman In Labor Or Extracted The Infant Under A Heavy Sheet”

December 5, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Brief and interesting history from a post at Priceonomics about the invention of childbirth-easing forceps in the 16th century, and the skullduggery employed by William Chamberlen, the surgeon behind the innovation, to maximize his profits:

“In the Chamberlen family’s day, members of the Catholic church and midwives helped women through the dangerous process of childbirth. The tools used were crude. If they used any tools at all, they used crochets and hooks in gruesome operations to remove the corpses of dead infants from their mothers, along with nooses of string. The primary goal of what passed for obstetric medicine was to keep the mother alive — preserving the health and life of an infant was beyond the available level of technology and knowledge. 

At the height of the European civil wars following the Protestant Reformation, a family of French Huguenots (followers of John Calvin, the theologian and former lawyer) developed a contraption that, in skilled hands, could deliver newborns, even in the case of an obstructed birth: forceps. 

William Chamberlen, originally an apothecary and barber-surgeon, fled France as the Bourbon monarchy began to impose regulations banning the employment of Protestants in the professions, which eventually culminated in the forced exile of the Huguenots to Protestant countries throughout Europe. He took his family to England — where he would soon invent his marvelous device, and his descendants would eventually serve kings and queens as trusted surgeons.

When a difficult birth presented itself to the Chamberlens, they would take the utmost care to obscure their methods. They ushered out the expectant mother’s family and either applied a blindfold to the woman in labor or extracted the infant under a heavy sheet. Few were permitted to know the secret of forceps, and none saw the designs for the devices that they used. Their reputation for results eventually preceded them. The original device was made of iron, with the tongs likely covered by leather. By family tradition, the Chamberlens would carry the tools in an ornate box, inlaid with gold.

The family used secrecy to reap substantial profits from their invention. “

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“Adopting A Fixed Residence Went Hand-In-Hand With Cultivating Fields And Domesticating Animals”

December 5, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

From Ian Tattersall’s Nautilus article, “In Search of the First Human Home,” which isn’t an easy assignment since the definition of “home” is a tricky thing:

“But if an archaeologist had to pick an example of the earliest structures that most resembled our modern idea of home, it would probably be the round houses built by the semi-sedentary Natufians, an ancient people who lived around the eastern end of the Mediterranean Sea (Israel, Syria, and environs) at the end of the last Ice Age, some 12,000 years ago. A typical Natufian village consisted of several circular huts each measuring about 10 to 20 feet in diameter; these villages testify to a revolutionary change in human living arrangements. Finally, people were regularly living in semi-permanent settlements, in which the houses were clearly much more than simple shelters against the elements. The Natufians were almost certainly witness to a dramatic change in society.

The end of the Ice Age was a time of transition from a hunter-gatherer mode of subsistence to an agricultural way of life. But it also involved a Faustian bargain. Adopting a fixed residence went hand-in-hand with cultivating fields and domesticating animals. It allowed families to grow, providing additional labor to till the fields. But becoming dependent on the crops they grew meant that people found themselves in opposition to the environment: The rain didn’t fall and the sun didn’t shine at the farmers’ convenience. They locked themselves into a lifestyle, and to make the field continuously productive to feed their growing families, they had to modify their landscape. Today, we carry out such modifications on a huge scale, and nature occasionally bites back, sometimes with a vengeance. Back in Natufian times, we catch a glimpse of this process in its embryonic stage.”•

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Two anti-house songs from David Byrne:

“Burning Down the House,” 1983.

“Glass, Concrete & Stone,” 2004.

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“Your Smartphone Is A Gateway Drug For You To Enter The Next Level”

December 5, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Christopher Mims at Quartz writing in defense of the Internet of Things, which he believes will soon make good on its promise thanks, in part, to the popularity of smartphones:

“In a sense the internet of things is already with us. For one thing, anyone with a smartphone has already joined the club. The average smartphone is brimming with sensors—an accelerometer, a compass, GPS, light, sound, altimeter. It’s the prototypical internet-connected listening station, equally adept at monitoring our health, the velocity of our car, the magnitude of earthquakes and countless other things that its creators never envisioned.

Smartphones are also becoming wireless hubs for other gadgets and sensors, as well as universal remote controls for your smart home (paywall). ‘You’re now carrying the perfect tool with you in the form of your smartphone, to stay connected to your physical graph,’ says Alex Hawkinson, CEO of Smartthings. (For those who don’t speak Silicon Valley English, ‘your physical graph’ means ‘your things,’ just as ‘your social graph’ means ‘your friends.’ ) ‘The psychological impact is that consumers are hyper-connected,” he adds.

In this way, your smartphone is a gateway drug for you to enter the next level, in which the internet is ‘in’ your thermostat, lights, door locks, car and wristwatch. Familiarizing consumers with this world, the thinking goes, will lead to what we’ve all been promised: a physical world that’s as malleable and responsive as the virtual one we already can’t live without.”

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“Their Priority Is To Create Wealth For Themselves—You’re Right To Be Alarmed”

December 5, 2013 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

There are things I dislike (guns and spying among them) that seem fairly impossible to control with the tools we presently have and those we will soon have. It’s almost naive to believe that we can legislate away such things. 

But here’s an idea: What if we’re in the sunset of a powerful centralized government in America? What if the same tools that are making it so easy to snoop are going to make regulation all but impossible? Perhaps the greatest concern in the future won’t be government control but a lack thereof.

An Atlantic piece by Emma Green provides coverage of “Who’s Afraid of Free Speech?” a Google event featuring E.L. Doctorow and David Simon which considered the NSA and the state of privacy. Perhaps the guests’ fears of an Orwellian state are warranted or perhaps they miss the point. Maybe 2084 has a whole different set of challenges in store for us. A passage about the complicity of information companies with a spying government:

“Doctorow, a prolific author whose work includes a fictionalized account of the Julius and Ethel Rosenberg trial, agreed: ‘They’re on the same page, as we like to say. The NSA couldn’t work without the agreement or participation of these companies. Their priority is to create wealth for themselves—you’re right to be alarmed.’ 

Google’s [Ross] LaJeunesse jumped in: ‘I really wasn’t going to interrupt the program, because I’m here to listen. But I did want to set the record straight,’ he said.

It is important, when we talk about these issues, to talk with specificity and to speak about facts. It is a real danger to conflate the actions of a government, that are not transparent, with something a company like Google does. We’re completely transparent. We give control to the users—they can use our services without signing in. If you choose to sign in, we give you complete control over that data as well. We even give you a button so that you can delete all that data at once or export it to another service.

Simon, a former Baltimore Sun journalist and the creator of the TV series The Wire, was dubious.

But is it a matter of hunting down these moments where Google … informs you that it is going to use your information in some new and varied way, and you have to negate [that use]?

I had to opt out of a program where stuff I said online could be used in advertising. That’s a rather cynical performance. Shouldn’t I have to opt into it, something that extraordinary?”

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“One Of The Main Drivers Of This Is The Rapidly Falling Cost Of Sensors”

December 4, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Smartphones, revolutionary enough for doing what they do, are also having a huge impact through the repurposing of their components, aiding development of drones and robotics. From Alistair Barr and Scott Martin’s USA Today article about Google’s latest “moonshot”:

“Google has succeeded on big long-term projects before, such as YouTube and Android, and the company’s newer moonshots, such as self-driving cars and the Glass wearable computing platform, are beginning to show early commercial promise.

Robotics has been considered an emerging technology for decades, but for the most part it has been a disappointment. That may be changing, especially in the area of drones, according to Chris Dixon, a partner at venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. 

One of the main drivers of this is the rapidly falling cost of sensors and other components that are needed to maneuver drones and other robots. 

‘The promise of robotics is finally coming to fruition through drones,’ Dixon said. ‘Several factors have come together to make them viable.’

The price of components such as GPS, cellular connections, small, energy efficient processors and tiny cameras, has dropped dramatically because they are already made in such high volume for smartphones, he explained.”

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“Enter The Electric Pen”

December 4, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

From “7 Epic Fails Brought to You By the Genius Mind of Thomas Edison,” Erica R. Hendry’s fun Smithsonian article about the master inventor’s follies:

“Electric pen

As railroads and other companies expanded in the late 19th century, there was a huge demand for tools administrative employees could use to complete tasks—including making multiple copies of handwritten documents—quicker.

Enter the electric pen. Powered by a small electric motor and battery, the pen relied on a handheld needle that moved up and down as an employee wrote. Instead of pushing out ink, though, the pen punched tiny holes through the paper’s surface; the idea was employees could create a stencil of their documents on wax paper and make copies by rolling ink over it, ‘printing’ the words onto blank pieces of paper underneath.

Edison, whose machinist, John Ott, began to manufacture the pens in 1875, hired agents to sell the pens across the Mid-Atlantic. Edison charged agents $20 a pen; the agents sold them for $30.

The first problems with the invention were purely cosmetic: the electric pen was noisy, and much heavier than those employees had used in the past. But even after Edison improved the sound and weight, problems persisted. The batteries had to be maintained using chemical solutions in a jar. ‘It was messy,’ says [Leonard]  DeGraaf.”

 

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“The ‘Enemy Within’ Is Us”

December 4, 2013 in Books, Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

We know, of course, that history didn’t start with us, but I think sometimes we forget a little. For all the many wonders of the Internet, it’s probably only increased the cultural amnesia, loading us down with so much information that it can obscure the past even as it makes it easier for us to learn about the past. 

The opening of a (gated) 1975 Garry Willis New York Review of Books piece about a collection on U.S. government spying called The Abuses of the Intelligence Agencies:

“This is a dizzying computation of all the snoopings, publicly known so far, performed by our public servants upon their putative masters. With admirable restraint the report attempts to collect and document every instance of illegal activity undertaken by our various intelligence agencies. It gives the defense offered by the agencies, the authority under which each agency operated, and the statutes apparently infringed. It is a very useful and complete handbook on official crime. We can surmise that the tally is not complete, since it arose from spot investigations, odd suits, and accidental confession. But already the count is almost self-defeating. The hundreds under surveillance, the thousands photographed, the hundreds of thousands filed. The ‘watch lists’ in readiness for emergency detention. The blacks. The kids. Hit lists. Enemies. The ‘enemy within’ is us. The deadpan recital of it all tends to dissolve in the mind. Everett Dirksen claimed, ‘A million here, a million there—in time that adds up to real money.” It doesn’t, of course, That kind of addition turns—magically, at some unthinkable number—into subtraction. We know fairly well what we are getting for $1.98. But not for forty billion. Much the same thing happens by the thousandth wiretapping or break-in recorded here.”

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“People Still Think They Can Analyze And Structure Economies As If They Were A Mechanical System”

December 4, 2013 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

If we were laying out a telephone system for America from scratch, we would never choose to put in place what is currently there, with its lines and wires mixing like a barrel of snakes  It’s a mess. But you know what? It works. Complex systems usually grow organically through trial and error, and that’s probably a good thing. It’s often better to add on then raze and rebuild. Neatness conferred upon us by central planning is illusory. Our goal shouldn’t be to enforce order but rather to opt for what works.

From a recent interview with economist John Kay at Five Books:

“Question:

You have described economics and business as the last bastions of modernism. What do you mean by that? 

John Kay:

I think they are the last bastions of the idea that you can redesign the world in accordance with a rationally designed blueprint. Modernism in the twentieth century went through areas such as art, architecture and the humanities with the idea that we could rethink everything from the ground up and that we understood enough about the world to do that. I’ve come to believe that we don’t. But people still think they can analyse and structure economies as if they were a mechanical system and that they can do the same in business. So in the same way that Le Corbusier said – wrongly – that a house is a machine for living in, it exemplifies the idea that a business or an economy can be structured from first principles in the same way.

Question:

And ignores the social context within which economies and businesses work.

John Kay:

They are organic entities that evolve over time and operate within a social context. You can’t look at them independently of that.

Question:

Are the economic and financial ructions we’ve been experiencing in recent years due in part to the failure of economists and business leaders to appreciate this?

John Kay:

You can’t understand how the financial crisis came about without understanding the politics of the relationship between the financial sector and government and the anthropology of the cultures of these organisations, or indeed without appreciating the history of bubbles and financial crises.”

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“Railroads, Bus Companies And Short-Haul Airlines Will Suffer”

December 4, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Winners and losers in a conversion to driverless cars, as predicted by Neil Winton of the Detroit News:

“The avoidance of accidents will cut insurance costs. Fuel savings will be huge from more efficient high-speed, long-distance cruising in ‘car-trains.’ Congestion avoidance will speed traffic and save fuel too. Older people won’t lose their freedom of mobility when they physically can’t drive any more. Inexperienced young people won’t be barred from driving because of crippling initial insurance costs.

There will be losers too. Obviously taxi companies will find business disappearing. Railroads, bus companies and short-haul airlines will suffer. If you can move from your home to your destination, door-to-door in the comfort of your car, who’s going to take the train, bus or plane? Hotels might be in for a shock too. If you can travel overnight to your business meeting in the morning by sleeping in the back of your self-driving Winnebago, showering and breakfasting on the way, who’d want to do it the traditional way? Big winners will include software sellers with in-car applications to entertain drivers with new time on their hands. Radio and recorded music businesses will lose a captive audience.”

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“Score One For The Machines”

December 3, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Automation is a great thing for society and wealth creation if we’re able to figure out the new normal politically, which we seem unable to do presently. I mean, we can laugh (for now) at the redundancies when a McDonald’s test restaurant duplicates service with both computer tablets and humans taking orders, but it’s obvious which of those servers will soon be eliminated. From Will Oremus at Slate:

“Score one for the machines. On Tuesday, Applebee’s announced plans to install a tablet at every table in its 1,860 restaurants across the United States. Customers will be able to use the devices to order food, pay the bill, and ignore their dining companions by playing video games.

Chili’s unveiled basically the same plan three months ago. But that doesn’t mean Applebee’s hasn’t been plotting this move for years. In fact, Applebee’s was the name that came up when my former Slate colleague Annie Lowrey first wrote about the tablets-for-restaurants idea in April 2011. Her story focused on Palo Alto-based startup E La Carte, which is in fact Applebee’s partner on the just-announced deal. Chili’s opted for a rival vendor, Ziosk.”

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“By Reason Of Its Certain And Unlimited Destructiveness It Will Tend To Bring About And Maintain Permanent Peace”

December 3, 2013 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Long before patenting an early drone system in 1915, Nikola Tesla was enabling a method for push-button war, which he envisioned as a way to scare the world into an endless state of ceasefire. Of course, it hasn’t worked out that way. The opening of a post by Steven Beschloss at the New Yorker blog:

“In September, 1898, at Madison Square Garden, Nikola Tesla revealed a new invention: a radio-controlled torpedo boat. It was the first demonstration of wireless remote control in history, and it caused, in Tesla’s words, ‘a sensation such as no other invention of mine has ever produced.’ Some witnesses believed that the Croatian inventor was using mind control.

Detailed in his patent, No. 613,809, a ‘Method of and Apparatus for Controlling Mechanism of Moving Vessels or Vehicles,’ Tesla demonstrated how radio signals can remotely trigger switches and direct a vehicle’s movement without ‘intermediate wires, cables, or other form of electrical or mechanical connection with the object save the natural media in space.’ While Tesla recognized a wide list of applications for his remote-controlled robots, including transporting objects to distant locations and establishing communication with and exploring ‘inaccessible regions,’ he presciently, albeit optimistically, zeroed in on the military potential of his invention. ‘The greatest value,’ he wrote in his patent application, will be its use in armaments and warfare, ‘for by reason of its certain and unlimited destructiveness it will tend to bring about and maintain permanent peace among nations.’

Less than two decades later, during the First World War, the Germans employed a remote-controlled motorboat packed with explosives and attached to an unspooling wire.”

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“[It’s] An Attempt By The Highest UK Authorities To Shift The Issue From Government Policies…To The Conduct Of The Press”

December 3, 2013 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The opening of a spot-on open letter from Carl Bernstein to Guardian Editor Alan Rusbridger as the latter was preparing to be questioned at parliamentary hearings:

“Dear Alan,

There is plenty of time – and there are abundant venues – to debate relevant questions about Mr Snowden’s historical role, his legal fate, the morality of his actions, and the meaning of the information he has chosen to disclose.

But your appearance before the Commons today strikes me as something quite different in purpose and dangerously pernicious: an attempt by the highest UK authorities to shift the issue from government policies and excessive government secrecy in the United States and Great Britain to the conduct of the press – which has been quite admirable and responsible in the case of the Guardian, particularly, and the way it has handled information initially provided by Mr Snowden.

Indeed, generally speaking, the record of journalists, in Britain and the United States in handling genuine national security information since World War II, without causing harm to our democracies or giving up genuine secrets to real enemies, is far more responsible than the over-classification, disingenuousness, and (sometimes) outright lying by a series of governments, prime ministers and presidents when it comes to information that rightly ought to be known and debated in a free society. Especially in recent years.”•

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Bernstein + Woodward + Buckley in 1974:

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“Our Aim Is For The Car To Be Able To Handle All Possible Traffic Scenarios By Itself”

December 3, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

One hundred driverless Volvos are soon to be deployed in Sweden in a large-scale pilot program. From Trevor Mogg at Digital Trends:

“Volvo is about to take its biggest step yet towards bringing a self-driving car to market with a pilot project that’ll put 100 such vehicles onto public roads in the Swedish city of Gothenburg.

The project, called ‘Drive Me’, will involve the autonomous cars using around 30 miles (50 km) of selected roads in the city, dealing with everyday driving conditions and situations.

The initiative, described by the car maker as ‘the world’s first large-scale autonomous driving pilot project,’ will kick off next year with customer research and technology development, with the self-driving vehicles expected to take to the roads in 2017.

‘Our aim is for the car to be able to handle all possible traffic scenarios by itself, including leaving the traffic flow and finding a safe ‘harbor’ if the driver for any reason is unable to regain control,’ Erik Coelingh, technical specialist at Volvo, said in a release.”

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“The Coming Dystopian Landscape Is All Too Real”

December 2, 2013 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Sometimes what we think is the end of the world is actually just the end of an era. We’re certainly going through a foundational change now as the Computer Age disappears one stalwart after another of the Industrial Age. But the sinking feeling isn’t just about cultural transition. Reports from one NASA scientist after another tells us that something is seriously amiss environmentally.

Todd Gitlin has a TomDispatch piece about the latest plague and one that could “infect” us all simultaneously: climate change, which is slow and insidious, until it is brutal and devastating. The opening:

“Apocalyptic climate change is upon us. For shorthand, let’s call it a slow-motion apocalypse to distinguish it from an intergalactic attack out of the blue or a suddenly surging Genesis-style flood.

Slow-motion, however, is not no-motion. In fits and starts, speeding up and slowing down, turning risks into clumps of extreme fact, one catastrophe after another — even if there can be no 100% certitude about the origin of each one — the planetary future careens toward the unlivable. That future is, it seems, arriving ahead of schedule, though erratically enough that most people — in the lucky, prosperous countries at any rate — can still imagine the planet conducting something close to business as usual.

To those who pay attention, of course, the recent bursts of extreme weather are not ‘remote’ or ‘abstract,’ nor matters to be deferred until later in the century while we worry about more immediate problems. The coming dystopian landscape is all too real and it is already right here for many millions.”

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“Without The Dedicated And Well-Documented Cosmic Explorations Of Aldous Huxley…The Decade Would Have Looked Very Different”

December 2, 2013 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

From a recent L.A. Review of Books essay by Steffie Nelson about the Los Angeles experience of Aldous Huxley, who enjoyed one final hit of acid and died the same day that JFK was assassinated:

“Huxley freely admitted that the novel as a form may not have been the best container for his prodigious flow of ideas – this is an author who was contracted, during his peak years, to produce three books a year. But Brave New World’s setting in a future where control is exerted through the monitored supply of mindless, artificial pleasure sounds uncomfortably close to our present reality. As recently as 2010, it was number three on a list of books Americans most want banned from public libraries.

I would argue that it wasn’t until Huxley moved to America — specifically, to Los Angeles — that the seeds of his lifelong fascinations with technology, pharmacology, the media, mysticism and spiritual enlightenment fully blossomed and bore fruit. It’s often said ‘The Sixties’ officially began with the death of JFK and America’s ‘loss of innocence.’ But without the dedicated and well-documented cosmic explorations of Aldous Huxley and his cohorts, the decade would have looked very different. It’s not an exaggeration to say that, without Huxley, Timothy Leary might never have tuned in and turned on, and Jim Morrison might never have broken on through.”

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Mike Wallace questions Huxley, 1958:

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“Who’s Going To Fund A Moon Hotel If There’s No Guarantee A Firm Could Own The Property It’s Built On?”

December 2, 2013 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Newt Gingrich, a tawdry and horrible man, would turn the moon into a strip mall, into a tourist trap. Some government or corporation could conceivably do just that, as there are few binding rules governing space. This point is particularly tricky right now because as China prepares to land a lunar rover, we’re at the dawn of an age which will see a slew of space projects from both the public and private sectors. Or will they actually be stymied by a lack of regulation? From Derek Mead at Vice:

“In two weeks’ time, we’ll likely cheer the third country to successfully make a soft landing on the Moon. In the next decade or two, we’re likely to welcome a whole lot more, along with the first companies to reach the Moon on their own. While it’s highly doubtful that a country would set out to build a Moon base without first figuring out if it’s legal, it’s a chicken-egg scenario.

The lack of legal clarity could hamper efforts before they solidify enough to bring about a legal review in the first place. Who’s going to fund a Moon hotel if there’s no guarantee a firm could own the property it’s built on? Given the strange history of Moon ownership claims, why would the UN make a sweeping ruling on a nascent plan? One thing is certain: As space becomes more crowded, the question of who can own it is coming ever closer to being forced.”

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“If You Give Up Manufacturing, You End Up With Haves And Have-Nots And You Get Social Polarization”

December 2, 2013 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Clive Thompson of Wired is one of those blessed journalists who’s as much of a joy to read for his lucid prose as his good ideas. In a new piece, he interviews multifaceted Canadian academic Vaclav Smil, a prolific author and a favorite of Bill Gates. An excerpt about manufacturing in America, which has been outsourced to a great degree in recent decades and in the next few will be increasingly lost to automation:

“Clive Thompson:

Let’s talk about manufacturing. You say a country that stops doing mass manufacturing falls apart. Why?

Vaclav Smil:

In every society, manufacturing builds the lower middle class. If you give up manufacturing, you end up with haves and have-nots and you get social polarization. The whole lower middle class sinks.

 Clive Thompson:

You also say that manufacturing is crucial to innovation.

Vaclav Smil:

Most innovation is not done by research institutes and national laboratories. It comes from manufacturing—from companies that want to extend their product reach, improve their costs, increase their returns. What’s very important is in-house research. Innovation usually arises from somebody taking a product already in production and making it better: better glass, better aluminum, a better chip. Innovation always starts with a product.

Look at LCD screens. Most of the advances are coming from big industrial conglomerates in Korea like Samsung or LG. The only good thing in the US is Gorilla Glass, because it’s Corning, and Corning spends $700 million a year on research.

 Clive Thompson:

American companies do still innovate, though. They just outsource the manufacturing. What’s wrong with that?

 Vaclav Smil:

Look at the crown jewel of Boeing now, the 787 Dreamliner. The plane had so many problems—it was like three years late. And why? Because large parts of it were subcontracted around the world. The 787 is not a plane made in the USA; it’s a plane assembled in the USA. They subcontracted composite materials to Italians and batteries to the Japanese, and the batteries started to burn in-flight. The quality control is not there.”

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“Why Is This Incredibly Tight-Lipped Company Suddenly Showing Off Prototypes?”

December 2, 2013 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The opening of Dan Lyons’ post which pushes back at last night’s Amazon drone-delivery reveal on 60 Minutes, which he sees as hoopla for Cyber Monday marketing and also as damage control against Brad Stone’s unflattering Bezos book, The Everything Store: 

“Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos runs one of the world’s most notoriously secretive organizations. Yet last night he went on national TV and showed off a bunch of dazzling delivery drones that he says won’t realistically arrive in the real world for another four or five years, which in realspeak means they’re a decade or more away. 

Why is this incredibly tight-lipped company suddenly showing off prototypes? The answer is that these drones were not designed to carry packages, but to give a lift to Amazon’s image.

For one thing, today is Cyber Monday, the day when everyone goes shopping online. Amazon somehow got CBS and 60 Minutes to create a 14-minute free ad spot for Amazon on the eve of this huge shopping day.”

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“The Truth In No Online Database Will Replace Your Daily Newspaper”

December 2, 2013 in Books, Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

“Why the Internet Won’t Be Nirvana” is a 1995 Newsweek article which astronomer Clifford Stoll would no doubt like to have back. Check out the last two lines in particular of the excerpt below:

“After two decades online, I’m perplexed. It’s not that I haven’t had a gas of a good time on the Internet. I’ve met great people and even caught a hacker or two. But today, I’m uneasy about this most trendy and oversold community. Visionaries see a future of telecommuting workers, interactive libraries and multimedia classrooms. They speak of electronic town meetings and virtual communities. Commerce and business will shift from offices and malls to networks and modems. And the freedom of digital networks will make government more democratic.

Baloney. Do our computer pundits lack all common sense? The truth in no online database will replace your daily newspaper, no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher and no computer network will change the way government works.

Consider today’s online world. The Usenet, a worldwide bulletin board, allows anyone to post messages across the nation. Your word gets out, leapfrogging editors and publishers. Every voice can be heard cheaply and instantly. The result? Every voice is heard. The cacophony more closely resembles citizens band radio, complete with handles, harassment, and anonymous threats. When most everyone shouts, few listen. How about electronic publishing? Try reading a book on disc. At best, it’s an unpleasant chore: the myopic glow of a clunky computer replaces the friendly pages of a book. And you can’t tote that laptop to the beach. Yet Nicholas Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Lab, predicts that we’ll soon buy books and newspapers straight over the Internet. Uh, sure.”

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“There’s No Reason They Can’t Be Used As Delivery Vehicles”

December 2, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Reports about two new uses for the domestic drone, hunting feral pigs and delivering Amazon goods, from, respectively, the Economist and 60 Minutes. 

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“WILD pigs are rooting around in a field in the dark. Partly hidden by tall grass, their tails wag happily as they snuffle around for roots and insects. A shot rings out and the biggest pig is down. The rest scatter quickly; yet a shooter picks them off one by one with uncanny accuracy.

Pigs are clever and hard to hunt; it can take a day to stalk one. But they are no match for an aerial drone such as the ‘dehogaflier’ operated by Louisiana Hog Control, a pest-extermination firm. It is a remote-controlled aircraft with a thermal-imaging camera and a laser pointer. It easily spots the pigs’ warm bodies from 400 feet and points them out to a hunter on the ground wearing night-vision goggles, who then shoots them.”

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“Conventional Wisdom Is That The Marketplace Could Never Support More Than One Female-Driven Film”

December 2, 2013 in Excerpts, Film, Urban Studies | Permalink

Strong female leads have long been limited in Hollywood because the unwritten rule said that too many movies featuring them wouldn’t sell. But hearts and minds can change generationally, and it looks like the film business is catching up to that shift. From Mike Fleming Jr. at Deadline Hollywood:

“The performance of Catching Fire and Frozen are all the more remarkable if you consider that both of these films are squarely driven by female heroines. Conventional wisdom is that the marketplace could never support more than one female-driven film, because while gals will see guy movies, it doesn’t work the other way. Well, it worked big time — both films crushed the 5-day Thanksgiving domestic gross record – and it happened shortly after another female driven film, Gravity, crossed the $500 million mark in global gross.”

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“In My Grandson’s Lifetime, Professional Boxing Will Be Banished In Most Parts Of America”

December 1, 2013 in Excerpts, Politics, Sports, Urban Studies | Permalink

Filip Bondy has an article in the New York Daily News calling for NYC to ban boxing. It’s a funny venue for such a fierce op-ed because it would never have been published while that paper’s legendary boxing writer Bill Gallo was alive. For all his good qualities, Gallo was an apologist for boxing while railing angrily against against MMA. seemingly because his career was invested in the former and not the latter. MMA is just as bad as boxing but no worse, really. I think anyone honest would be for allowing both or banning both.

While I don’t personally support either, I’m really not for prohibiting anything consenting adults want to do. But I don’t believe children should be permitted to box, which would obviously further doom a sport in steep decline. From Bondy:

“Boxing has seen its time, and thank goodness that primitive era is done. In a more enlightened age now, we are concerned with concussions and other head injuries in sports. It is therefore absurd to sanction a competition in which the chief aim is to knock the opponent into unconsciousness. Yes, car racing is dangerous, but intent matters. Yes, a few rare fighters make a fortune from boxing, but they pay a huge price. The vast majority of professional boxers are just poor, desperate minorities getting their heads ripped apart internally, synapse by synapse.

It is hypocritical for the state to allow these events to continue while banning MMA, which at least offers the possibility of victory by submission, a more humane finish. Whenever a boxer gives up, like Sonny Liston or Roberto Duran, he is mercilessly mocked for the rest of his career.

I have no doubt that in my grandson’s lifetime, professional boxing will be banished in most parts of America, as it has been, on and off, in several other countries.”

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“The Machine That Was Going To Tranquilize This Scene Was Locked Away In A Quiet Cubicle”

December 1, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

New York Times newsroom, 1942.

New York Times newsroom, 1942.

There might not always be Broadway, but they’ll always be theater. Certainly, there won’t always be printed newspapers, but there will always be journalism. Divining the formula to support important work that doesn’t produce money is the rub, of course. But I do believe it will happen, even if the transition is painful.

In 1975, in a New Yorker piece, “P-1800” (which is paywalled), John McPhee looked at that moment when the New York Times was first trying to transition from typewriters to computers, to create a work environment that was portable and largely paperless, even before that last term was coined and there became little choice in the matter. It involved not only word processing but being able to send the work via telephone line and save it to disc. The opening:

“Joseph Martin, a computer methodologist at the Times has been pursuing for years what he describes as ‘the ideal philosophy of creating a newspaper.’ According to the ideal philosophy, you start by ‘capturing the keystroke at the origin.’ Keystroke? The reporter, at the typewriter, hits the original keystrokes of a story. Martin aims to absorb them electronically, retain them in a computer, and eliminate all the laborious and manifold retypings that now occur as a piece of writing makes its way, typically, from reporters through bureaus to the home office to the desks of editors and eventually to linotype machines. The ideal philosophy also calls for the elimination of the typing paper that writers write on, which is regarded as an unnecessary and archaic encumbrance. Following suggestions of reporters and editors, and with the help of an electronics firm in Westchester, Martin has coaxed into being a device that can actually do this. The Times is just up the street from us. We went over there the other day to have a look.

In the third-floor newsroom, we found routine cacophony: a large open space as aswarm with bodies as the floor of a stock exchange, copy paper in motion everywhere, copy editors looking like physicists with crooked cigarettes and feral eyes, reporters hugging telephones or already down in the trenches–sporadic bursts of typing. The machine that was going to tranquilize this scene was locked away in a quiet cubicle. We were led to it by Joe Martin, a slim and somewhat solemn man with graying crewcut, and by Socrates Butsikares, an editor of decades’ experience on various news and feature desks, who now coordinates editorial-staff interests with those of the rest of the company and is thus deeply involved in the electronic innovation. A big man, Butsikares wore a bright-yellow shirt, and there were lemons on his tie. We were joined as well by Israel Shenker, who is an old friend of ours and is one of the Times’ bright-star reporters and most skillful writers. Shenker had not previously seen the machine that was designed to change the world.

At thirty-two pounds, it rested heavily on a table. Resembling a small blue suitcase, it was eighteen inches by thirteen by seven. It would fit under an airline seat. Its name was Teleram P-1800 Portable Terminal. Butsikares unpacked it. Its principal components were a TV-like cathode-ray tube and a freestanding keyboard that had the conventional ‘qwertyuiop’ arrangement of a typewriter keyboard plus flanking sets of keys that had designations such as ‘SCRL,’ “HOME,’ ‘DEL WORD,’ ‘DEL CHAR,’ ‘CLOSE,’ ‘OPEN,’ and ‘INSRT.’

Butsikares plugged the keyboard unit into the TV-screen unit, sat down, and began to write. As his fingers fluttered, words instantly surfaced on the screen, up to forty-four characters per line:

WASHINGTON, D.C.–President Ford said today that he would no longer ask the Congress to soak the poor while his fat-cat rich friends take away the wealth of the Republic.

‘Now, suppose you want to get a little color into this,’ Butsikares said, and he began tapping keys–marked with arrows pointing up, pointing down, pointing sideways–around the word ‘HOME.’ A tiny square of light known as the ‘cursor’ began to move up the face of the tube. It was something like the bouncing ball that used to hop from word to word in song lyrics on movie screens. It climbed to the first line, then moved left until Butsikares stopped it in the space between ‘Ford’ and ‘said.’ He tapped the ‘INSRT’ key. He then wrote:

, who was wearing his faborite blue suit and his soup-stained blue tie,

The new words came into the space after ‘Ford,’ and to accommodate them the cursor kept shoving to the right all the other words in the sentence. They went around corners and down the screen. Busikares moved the cursor until it rested upon and illuminated the ‘b’ in ‘faborite.’ He pressed the ‘DEL CHAR’ (delete character) button, and the ‘b’ vanished. He replaced it with a ‘v.’ ‘Now, suppose you want to take a word out,’ he said, and moved the cursor to the word ‘away.’ ‘All the cursor has to do is touch any part of the word,’ he went on. ‘Then you hit the ‘DEL WORD’ key, and it’s gone.’ Away went ‘away,’ and the words to either side moved to within a space of each other. Similarly, the cursor could–if directed to–eat whole lines, whole paragraphs. ‘What you have written is not set in cement,’ Butsikares said. ‘You can change anything easily. If I had my druthers, I’d rather write on this thing than on any typewriter I’ve ever seen.”•

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