Excerpts

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“If We Can Fix Hearts, And We Can Fix Badly Broken Bones, Why Can’t We Fix Part Of The Brain?”

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

In a fascinating Science interview, Emily Underwood spoke with DARPA’s Geoffrey Ling about two of the agency’s proposed brain-related projects: 1) Wireless devices that can cure neurological disorders such as PTSD, depression and chronic pain, and 2) A wireless device that repairs brain damage and restores memory loss. One exchange:

“Question:

For RAM, why did DARPA choose to focus on memory, and what kinds of memory do you hope to restore?

Geoffrey Ling:

All these [injured] guys and gals want to go back into the service. A lot of them can go back because we’ve got good prosthetic legs, and now we’ve got the prosthetic arm that’s really close to being FDA [Food and Drug Administration] approved. But the thing with brain-injured guys—the thing that really keeps them out—is they can’t remember how to do certain motor tasks like drive a car or operate machinery. Now I don’t know if we are at that point, but if we can fix hearts, and we can fix badly broken bones, why can’t we fix part of the brain? If you had to pick an area of the brain that you can fix, the memory area is the most obvious because motor-task memory is really pretty well-worked out in preclinical models. Declarative memory is very different than associative memory and emotional memory—that stuff, nobody even knows anything about it—but when you look at the work in rodents with memory motor tasks, you say ok, it’s still a big step but it’s rational.”

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“You Do Need People Crunching Numbers, But You Also Need People Going To Factories”

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

In a Financial Times article by David Pilling, unorthodox Cambridge economist Ha-Joon Chang, something of a lone wolf in the dismal science, argues against his discipline’s prevailing ways of conducting business and also explains his contention that washing machines were more revolutionary than the Internet. Two excerpts.

1.

“‘The predominant view in the profession is that there’s one particular way of doing economics. It’s basically to set up some mathematical model, the more complicated the better,’ he says, advocating instead what he calls a multidisciplinary approach. ‘In a biology department, you have people doing all sorts of different things. So some do DNA analysis, others do anatomy, some people go and sit with gorillas in the forests of Burundi, and others do experiments with rats. But they are called biologists because biologists recognise that living organisms are complex things and you cannot understand them only at one level. So why can’t economists become like that? Yes, you do need people crunching numbers, but you also need people going to factories and doing surveys, you need people watching political changes to see what’s going on.'”

2.

“What’s all this about the washing machine and the internet?

‘I was not trying to dismiss the importance of the internet revolution but I think its importance has been exaggerated partly because people who write about these things are usually middle-aged men who have never used a washing machine,’ he replies. ‘It’s human nature to think that the changes you are living through are the most momentous, but you need to put these things into perspective. I brought up the washing machine to highlight the fact that even the humblest thing can have huge consequences. The washing machine, piped gas, running water and all these mundane household technologies enabled women to enter the labour market, which then meant that they had fewer children, had them later, invested more in each of them, especially female children. That changed their bargaining positions within the household and in wider society, giving women votes and endless changes. It has transformed the way we live.'”

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“Trusted Is The Word He Used, Not Trustworthy”

December 1, 2013 in Excerpts, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

George Carlin is my favorite comic of all time, and Russell Brand has a lot of Carlin in his brain. In a new Guardian piece, Brand eviscerates Rupert Murdoch, the Scrooge McDuck of media titans who has the gall to fancy himself as a champion of the people while protecting the interests of those who despise them. An excerpt:

“Rupert Murdoch, an animatronic al-Qaida recruitment poster, in his private letter to Sun staff, after the News of the World was briefly closed for a makeover (not through remorse, or shame, no, because they couldn’t sell advertising space and because he wanted to launch the Sun on Sunday anyway because it’s cheaper to run one title than two – some guys get all the luck) referred consistently to his pride in the Sun as ‘a trusted news source’. Trusted is the word he used, not trustworthy. We know the Sun is not trustworthy and so does he. He uses the word ‘trusted’ deliberately. Hitler was trusted, it transpired he was not trustworthy. He also said of the arrested journalists, ‘everyone is innocent until proven guilty.’ Well, yes, that is the law of our country, not however a nicety often afforded to the victims of his titles, and here I refer not only to hacking but the vituperative portrayal of weak and vulnerable members of our society, relentlessly attacked by Murdoch’s ink jackals. Immigrants, folk with non-straight sexual identities, anyone in fact living in the margins of the Sun‘s cleansed utopia.”•

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Rupert Murdoch, in 1968, about to gain control of News of the World:

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“We Are Not Going To Spend Taxpayer Money To Put A Roof On The Stadium”

November 29, 2013 in Excerpts, Politics, Sports, Urban Studies | Permalink

Billionaire Ted Lerner and his family don’t seem like awful people, not the kind of wealthy folks who are lobbying on behalf of politicians who want to punish the poor. But they should stop trying to rip off the taxpayers of Washington D.C. The district already financed a stadium for the Nationals baseball team that the Lerners own, which cost locals close to a billion dollars with interest factored in, and now the patriarch is requesting a retractable roof on the stadium to also be paid for by taxpayers. Building sports stadiums for billionaires to improve the economy is a fool’s errand to begin with, but this roof business is even more egregious. This project will create zero permanent jobs and will enhance no one’s financial standing but the Lerners. It’s corporate welfare at its ugliest. If the Lerners want to enhance the value of their holdings, they should invest in them themselves. Thankfully, Mayor Gray is holding firm against this preposterous request. From the Washington Post:

“Mayor Vincent C. Gray said Tuesday that Washington Nationals owner Theodore N. Lerner pitched him earlier this year on a pricey plan to have the city build a retractable roof over Nationals Park — a proposal, Gray said, that he swiftly but politely rejected.

The private one-on-one meeting took place in the John A. Wilson Building in mid-July and lasted about 15 minutes, Gray said.

What Lerner wanted to talk about was the possibility of a roof on Nationals Park,’ the mayor (D) said. ‘That was it. There was no discussion about how much it was going to cost and no further details. I’ve had no further discussions.’

An administration official familiar with the matter but not authorized to comment publicly on it confirmed that there have been no recent talks about improvements of that scope for Nationals Park, which was built with well more than $600 million in taxpayer financing and opened in 2008.

‘The mayor was polite but unequivocal,’ the official said. ‘We are not going to spend taxpayer money to put a roof on the stadium, regardless of the cost.'”

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“The Disaster At The Fukushima Nuclear Power Station Has Made Japan Think More Seriously About Alternative Energy”

November 29, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

It’s great that we’re starting to harness the sun’s energy on Earth, but it still amazes me that we haven’t tried to build a remote solar farm closer to the star. In the wake of Fukushima, Japan is aiming to do something similar, but with the moon. From Timon Singh at Inhabitat:

“Man hasn’t been back to the moon since 1972, but that hasn’t stopped a team of Japanese engineers from developing a plan to turn our celestial neighbor into a massive solar power plant. The disaster at the Fukushima nuclear power station has made Japan think more seriously about alternative energy, and as a result Shimizu Corporation‘s crazy plan has been gaining traction. The plan calls for a massive 12 mile-wide, 6,800 mile long ‘Luna Ring’ of solar panels to be constructed on the moon’s surface. The solar belt would then harness solar power directly from the sun and then beam it straight to Earth via microwaves and lasers.

Shimizu Corporation’s plan would see 13,000 terawatts of continuous energy sent to receiving stations around the Earth, where it will be then distributed to the planet’s population. With NASA’s plans to return the moon currently on hold, Shimizu is planning on building the massive lunar construction project with robots. In fact, humans will barely be involved and will only be present in an overseeing capacity.”

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“Taking An International Flight In The 1930s Was Quite An Experience”

November 27, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

From another smart post from Matt Novak’s wonderful Paleofuture blog, this one about international air travel in the 1930s:

“Equal parts harrowing adventure and indulgent luxury, taking an international flight in the 1930s was quite an experience. But it was an experience that people who could afford it signed up for in droves.

Nearly 50,000 people would fly Imperial Airways from 1930 until 1939. But these passengers paid incredibly high prices to hop around the world. The longest flights could span over 12,000 miles and cost as much as $20,000 when adjusted for inflation.

A flight from London to Brisbane, Australia, for instance, (the longest route available in 1938) took 11 days and included over two dozen scheduled stops. Today, people can make that journey in just 22 hours, with a single layover in Hong Kong, and pay less than $2,000 for a round trip ticket.”

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“They Are Concerned About The Fact That I’m A Violent Person, Almost An Animal”

November 27, 2013 in Books, Excerpts, Sports, Urban Studies | Permalink

Few things make me sadder than Muhammad Ali being unable to speak. By the time I discovered him in my childhood, he was at the very end of his career, a legend but washed up, already slurring his speech, his motor skills screeching to a halt. For all his flaws, Ali still seemed immaculate, and I became obsessed with him. (I may have watched a.k.a. Cassius Clay a hundred times.) But I didn’t become a boxing fan because of his shaky, then quieted, voice.

So, I never paid close attention to the spectacle of Mike Tyson, the last amazing heavyweight, though it was hard to completely recuse yourself from his greatness and his badness. As Norman Mailer astutely reported, Tyson was the uneasy king of what were really just gaudy, late-century cockfights, a man crumbling inside of a sport that was crumbling.

Mike Tyson is sad for reasons beyond the usually depressing second act of retired boxers, as they endure the slowing of brains that have been treated like speed bags. His reckoning is America’s reckoning. He’s the son of broken promises, of neglect, even of the failure of our best efforts. Raised first by a prostitute and then in the cages of Spofford, he was the boy who could only really love pigeons, and later he was the chicken that came home to roost.

From Joyce Carol Oates’ New York Review of Books piece about the autobiography Tyson has co-authored with Larry Sloman:

Mike Tyson, at twenty the youngest heavyweight champion in history, and in the early, vertiginous years of his career a worthy successor to Ali, Louis, and Jack Johnson, has managed to reconstitute himself after he retired from boxing in 2005 (when he abruptly quit before the seventh round of a fight with the undistinguished boxer Kevin McBride). He became a bizarre replica of the original Iron Mike, subject of a video game, cartoons, and comic books; a cocaine-fueled caricature of himself in the crude Hangover films; star of a one-man Broadway show directed by Spike Lee, titled Undisputed Truth, and the HBO film adaptation of that show; and now the author, with collaborator Larry Sloman, of the memoir Undisputed Truth.

In his late teens in the 1980s Mike Tyson was a fervently dedicated old-style boxer, more temperamentally akin to the boxers of the 1950s than to his slicker contemporaries. In his forties, Tyson looks upon himself with the absurdist humor of a Thersites for whom loathing of self and of his audience has become an affable shtick performance. He liked to come on as crazed and dangerous, screaming in self-parody at press conferences:

I’m a convicted rapist! I’m an animal! I’m the stupidest person in boxing! I gotta get outta here or I’m gonna kill somebody!… I’m on this Zoloft thing, right? But I’m on that to keep me from killing y’all…. I don’t want to be taking the Zoloft, but they are concerned about the fact that I’m a violent person, almost an animal. And they only want me to be an animal in the ring.•

 

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“It Will Soon Be Home To Billions Of Dollars’ Worth Of Fine Art And Other Treasures”

November 27, 2013 in Excerpts, Politics, Urban Studies | Permalink

Money can be off-shored and disappeared from the taxman, but how about luxury goods? “Freeports,” as they’re called, allow the super-rich a duty-free loophole for art collections and such. From the Economist:

“PASSENGERS at Findel airport in Luxembourg may have noticed a cluster of cranes a few hundred yards from the runway. The structure being erected looks fairly unremarkable (though it will eventually be topped with striking hexagonal skylights). Along its side is a line of loading bays, suggesting it could be intended as a spillover site for the brimming cargo terminal nearby. This new addition to one of Europe’s busiest air-freight hubs will not hold any old goods, however. It will soon be home to billions of dollars’ worth of fine art and other treasures, much of which will have been whisked straight from collectors’ private jets along a dedicated road linking the runway to the warehouse.

The world’s rich are increasingly investing in expensive stuff, and ‘freeports’ such as Luxembourg’s are becoming their repositories of choice. Their attractions are similar to those offered by offshore financial centres: security and confidentiality, not much scrutiny, the ability for owners to hide behind nominees, and an array of tax advantages. This special treatment is possible because goods in freeports are technically in transit, even if in reality the ports are used more and more as permanent homes for accumulated wealth.”

“A Small But Growing Number Of Them Want To Pull The Plug On Their Utilities By Storing That Energy In Batteries”

November 27, 2013 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Excerpts from two solar-centric stories by Todd Woody at Quartz. The first, “Why SolarCity and Tesla Are Going to Replace Your Utility,” looks at how some great inventions beget others. My biggest prediction early on in this blog is that we would see the development of batteries in a way that would change our lives. There have been a lot of naysayers on the topic, but it seems to be coming true in part because of the repurposing of Tesla Motors batteries. The second piece reports that the U.S. has 43 nuclear power plants worth of solar energy in development. That’s not the same thing as a done deal, but it’s impressive.

1.

“Millions of California homeowners and businesses have installed solar panels on their roofs to generate their own electricity. Now a small but growing number of them want to pull the plug on their utilities by storing that energy in batteries and tap that power when the sun isn’t shining. And that has set off a fight over who will ultimately control the state’s power grid—California’s three big monopoly utilities or their customers empowered by companies like SolarCity and Tesla Motors. 

SolarCity, the Silicon Valley solar installer, has quietly begun to offer some homeowners a lithium-ion battery pack made by electric carmaker Tesla to store electricity generated by their rooftop photovoltaic arrays.”

2.

“The boom in solar energy in the US  in recent years? You haven’t seen anything yet. The pipeline of photovoltaic projects has grown 7% over the past 12 months and now stands at 2,400 solar installations that would generate 43,000 megawatts(MW), according to a report released today by market research firm NPD Solarbuzz. If all these projects are built, their peak electricity output would be equivalent to that of 43 big nuclear power plants, and enough to keep the lights on in six million American homes.

Only 8.5% of the pipeline is currently being installed, with most of it still in the planning stages.”

“You Don’t Get The Creation Without The Destruction”

November 26, 2013 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Two exchanges from an excellent Fortune interview that Andy Serwer conducted with Marc Andreessen.

The first one focuses on something I blogged about recently, which is the possibility of the invention of new jobs and careers that may occur on a large scale in the post-Industrial Age the way it did in the post-Agrarian Age. As Andreessen points out, though, there’s a hard and scary road getting to that point in our increasingly automated society. 

The second is Andreessen’s prediction that cars will become an on-demand, shared good that will destroy the century-old ownership model. I have my doubts about the shared aspect, though I think fleets of driverless cars on demand will become a reality in cities.

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Andy Serwer:

We all understand that the Internet revolution is inevitable at this point, but it’s also kind of controversial. There are scads of new jobs at Facebook and Twitter and other places, but what about the ones that are destroyed by the inroads of technology into every industry? Are you actually creating more than you’re destroying?

Marc Andreessen:

Jobs are critically important, but looking at economic change through the impact on jobs has always been a difficult way to think about economic progress. Let’s take a historical example. Once upon a time, 100% of the United States effectively was in agriculture, right? Now it’s down to 3%. Productivity in agriculture has exploded. Output has never been higher. The same thing happened in manufacturing 150 years ago or so. It would have been very easy to say, “Stop economic progress because what are all the farmers going to do if they can’t farm?” And of course, we didn’t stop the progress of mechanization and manufacturing, and our answer instead was the creation of new industries.

Andy Serwer:

And the same story will play out with the Internet?

Marc Andreessen:

Right. So the jobs are something that happens in the end. But what happens first are improvements in consumer welfare. This is the part that doesn’t get much attention because jobs going away is a much scarier story. Improvements in consumer welfare are more diffuse, and it’s hard to specifically call them out. But it’s a really big deal. It’s a really big deal for people to have a lot more information. It’s a really big deal for people to be able to communicate and collaborate. One of the things that’s going to be huge in the future is the ability to get educated online. That’s a wave that’s going to hit in a major way in the next 20 years, and will be a huge improvement to consumer welfare all around the world. And so the gains to anybody with a screen and a network connection are absolutely phenomenal. It’s one of those things where everybody’s life keeps getting better. But you don’t get the creation without the destruction. And so there is a lot of turbulence, and will be a lot of turbulence.

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Andy Serwer:

Speaking of cars, you’ve talked about a shared economy where people will share cars. They won’t own cars. You see a little bit of that today, but is that really the way the world’s going?

Marc Andreessen:

So this is when I get really excited. This is another example of the impact of information transparency on markets. We are 90 years or so into cars. And we drive our cars around. And we own our cars. And then when we’re not in our cars they sit parked. So the average car is utilized maybe two hours out of the day. It sits idle for 90% of the time. The typical occupancy rate in the U.S. is about 1.2 passengers per car ride. And so even when the car is in motion, three-quarters of the seats are unfilled.

And so you start to run this interesting kind of thought experiment, which is what if access to cars was just automatic? What if, whenever you needed a car, there it was? And what if other people who needed that same ride at that same time could just participate in that same ride? What if you could perfectly match supply and demand for transportation?

Taken a step further, what if you could bring delivery into it? Two people were going to drive between towns, and there was also a package that needed to go. Let’s also put that in there so we can fill a seat with a package. Just run the thought experiment and say, “What if we could fully allocate all the cars, and then what if we could have the cars on the road all the time?”

And of course the answer is a whole bunch of things fall out of it. You’d need far fewer cars. The number of cars on the road would plummet by 75% to 90%. You’d instantly solve problems like congestion. You’d instantly solve a huge part of the emissions problem. And you’d cause a huge reduction in the need for gas. And then you’d have this interesting other side effect where you wouldn’t need parking lots, at least not anywhere near the extent that you do now. And so you could turn a lot of parking lots into parks.

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“Make A Small Mistake And People Are Inconvenienced, Capability Is Lost. Make A Big One And ­People Die.”

November 26, 2013 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Chris Hadfield, the astronaut whose Bowie cover fell to Earth, has penned an article for Wired about the need to treat Spaceship Earth the same way we treat other spacecrafts–with great care. An excerpt:

“The communities and countries best at using energy to optimize a micro­climate for human life are also the ones whose ­people have the longest average lifespans. Canada, Sweden, and Iceland—places with inhospitable winter weather—are front-­runners in sustaining human health and life. They have no choice but to use what energy they have in the most efficient manner. Like the careful, constant nurturing of mushrooms in a hothouse, the right application of technology and stability can lead to the greatest yield.

Earth has never fed as many ­people as it does today. From orbit, the ­gingham-quilt patterns of farms all across eastern Europe and the massive grain fields of the world’s steppes and prairies are clearly laid out. Vast fields for supply connect to roads and railways for transportation, all leading to dense hubs of consumption in the cities. When the sun is just right, you can even see the wakes of ocean-going ships imperturbably hauling bulk goods between continents.

The space station, high above, is a microcosm—an international collection of people living in a finite area with finite resources, just like the planet below. Power comes from a blend of fossil fuels and renewable energy. Air, food, and water come in limited quantities. Like Earth, the ISS is subject to unpredictable outside forces—solar flares, meteor impacts, technical breakdowns, budget cycles, and international tensions. And in both locations, lives are in the balance. Make a small mistake and people are inconvenienced, capability is lost. Make a big one and ­people die.”

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“What Do You Feel Is The Strangest Creature On Earth?”

November 26, 2013 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

Richard Dawkins, evolutionary biologist, atheist-in-chief, coiner of the term “meme,” and maker of perplexing comments about church sex scandals, just did an Ask Me Anything at Reddit. A few exchanges follow.

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Question:

As an expert on evolution, what do you feel is the strangest creature on Earth, or the one that just doesn’t seem to make sense from an evolutionary standpoint yet continues to survive? (Besides people)

Richard Dawkins:

Nautilus (because of its pinhole camera eye). But that’s just off the top of my head. I’d probably think of a better answer given more time (that is so often true!)

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Question:

Richard, what would you say to Muslims who point out (correctly) that during Islam’s Golden Age, science and education flourished in the Caliphate as Muslim scientists either started new fields, or built on past work by Greek and Indian scholars.

Richard Dawkins:

Great job in the Middle Ages, guys. What went wrong?

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Question:

How do you feel about South Park’s depiction of you and their take on the argument?

Richard Dawkins:

Satire is supposed to satirise. Depicting somebody as having a predilection for buggering a bald transvestite is not satire and not witty. The futuristic projection of wars between atheist factions is genuine satire and quite witty. I think it’s important understand the difference. I preferred the experience of going on The Simpsons.

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Question:

How do you feel now that memes, first discussed in your book The Selfish Gene, have become ubiquitous in internet culture?

Richard Dawkins:

I’m pleased that the concept of meme has become widely understood, but the true meaning is a bit broader than the common understanding. Anything transmitted with high fidelity from brain to brain by imitation is a meme.

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Question:

Would you like to take a moment to chat about our lord and savior Jesus Christ?

Richard Dawkins:

No thank you.•

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“He’s Misogynistic And Misanthropic, But He’s Also A Real Humanist”

November 25, 2013 in Books, Excerpts | Permalink

The wonderfully talented Françoise Mouly, art editor at the New Yorker and one of the forces behind the legendary Raw, tells Sarah Boxer of the Los Angeles Review of Books about introducing R. Crumb to the New Yorker during the 1990s:

“Sarah Boxer:

It’s amazing that you ever got R. Crumb in The New Yorker. How did that go down?

 

Françoise Mouly:

When I started back in 1992, I asked him for an image for the cover. And it was of some interest to him, because as a kid growing up with his brother, what they’re looking at is Mad magazine, but also The New Yorker covers, because it was narrative storytelling. There’s a picture of his brother Charles in their room, and on the walls are New Yorker covers from the ’30s and ’40s.

That medium of the New Yorker cover is a challenge. It’s like writing a kind of sonnet, with only so many meters, or like a haiku, because you can’t use too many words.

Sarah Boxer:

You didn’t always love Crumb’s work. In the Masters of American Comics catalog, you wrote: “I came to R. Crumb’s work with the full force of all my prejudices. I found his work unabashed in its vulgarity and was put off by the glorification of his own nerdiness, his occasionally repulsive depictions of women, blacks, and Jews, and his endless graphic representations of kinky smelly, sweaty sex.”

Françoise Mouly:

I had to get over my prejudices against the offensive part to find the incredibly sensitive, humanistic side of the man. When you read the complete R. Crumb stories, you realize he’s such a good observer of the people around him. It makes sense that he became an emblem of the ’60s, not so much for Mr. Natural, but because he is such a sensitive and communicative observer.

He’s not a hippie in any way. He may have been smoking dope and taking acid, but Crumb was always somewhat mocking of the ‘peace-man’ hippie, the long-haired, bearded hippie. He himself was straitlaced, more of a beatnik, you know, wearing a hat, his beard trimmed. Of course, he’s misogynistic and misanthropic, but he’s also a real humanist. I don’t believe they are incompatible.”

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“The TV Business Is Having Its Worst Year Ever”

November 25, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

TV has never been so celebrated or so despised. People want the content but not the medium’s cumbersome anti-portability and passe economic model. Cable TV subscription prices will continue to rise and milk the dwindling customers until it all falls down. From Jim Edwards at Business Insider:

“The TV business is having its worst year ever.

Audience ratings have collapsed: Aside from a brief respite during the Olympics, there has been only negative ratings growth on broadcast and cable TV since September 2011, according to Citi Research.

Media stock analysts Craig Moffett and Michael Nathanson recently noted, ‘The pay-TV industry has reported its worst 12-month stretch ever.’ All the major TV providers lost a collective 113,000 subscribers in Q3 2013. That doesn’t sound like a huge deal — but it includes internet subscribers, too.

Broadband internet was supposed to benefit from the end of cable TV, but it hasn’t.

In all, about 5 million people ended their cable and broadband subs between the beginning of 2010 and the end of this year.”

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“Hovering In The Air…Climbing In Slo-Mo”

November 25, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Videos | Permalink

Tiny robots drifting in the air is the ultimate goal of an experiment in jellyfish design at NYU. From Sandrine Ceurstemont at New Scientist: “Tiny flying robots usually mimic nature’s flyers, like birds and insects – but perhaps that’s due to a lack of imagination. A four-winged design created by Leif Ristroph and colleagues at New York University, which boasts a body plan reminiscent of a jellyfish, is more stable in the air than insect-like machines.”

“It’s 35 Years Of History Through The Lens Of TV News, Captured On A Dwindling Format”

November 25, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The opening of Sarah Kessler’s Fast Company article about Marion Stokes who taped news stories from her television on 140,000 VHS tapes over a 35-year period:

“In a storage unit somewhere in Philadelphia, 140,000 VHS tapes sit packed into four shipping containers. Most are hand-labeled with a date between 1977 and 2012, and if you pop one into a VCR you might see scenes from the Iranian Hostage Crisis, the Reagan Administration, or Hurricane Katrina.

It’s 35 years of history through the lens of TV news, captured on a dwindling format.

It’s also the life work of Marion Stokes, who built an archive of network, local, and cable news, in her home, one tape at a time, recording every major (and trivial) news event until the day she died in 2012 at the age of 83 of lung disease.

Stokes was a former librarian who for two years co-produced a local television show with her then-future husband, John Stokes Jr. She also was engaged in civil rights issues, helping organize buses to the 1963 civil rights march on Washington, among other efforts. She began casually recording television in 1977. She taped lots of things, but she thought news was especially important, and when cable transformed it into a 24-hour affair, she began recording MSNBC, Fox, CNN, CNBC, and CSPAN around the clock by running as many as eight television recorders at a time.”

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“Some Observers Saw That Battle As A Historic Test For Human Intelligence”

November 24, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Sports, Urban Studies | Permalink

Garry Kasparov’s defeat at the hands–well, not exactly hands–of Deep Blue was supposed to have delivered a message to humans that we needed to dedicate ourselves to other things–but the coup de grace was ignored. In fact, computers have only enhanced our chess acumen, making it clear that thus far a hybrid is better than either carbon or silicon alone. In the wake of Computer Age child Magnus Carlsen becoming the greatest human player on Earth, Christopher Chabris and David Goodman of the Wall Street Journal look at the surprising resilience of chess in these digital times. The opening:

“In the world chess championship match that ended Friday in India, Norway’s Magnus Carlsen, the cool, charismatic 22-year-old challenger and the highest-rated player in chess history, defeated local hero Viswanathan Anand, the 43-year-old champion. Mr. Carlsen’s winning score of three wins and seven draws will cement his place among the game’s all-time greats. But his success also illustrates a paradoxical development: Chess-playing computers, far from revealing the limits of human ability, have actually pushed it to new heights.

The last chess match to get as much publicity as Mr. Carlsen’s triumph was the 1997 contest between then-champion Garry Kasparov and International Business Machines Corp.’s Deep Blue computer in New York City. Some observers saw that battle as a historic test for human intelligence. The outcome could be seen as an ‘early indication of how well our species might maintain its identity, let alone its superiority, in the years and centuries to come,’ wrote Steven Levy in a Newsweek cover story titled ‘The Brain’s Last Stand.’ 

But after Mr. Kasparov lost to Deep Blue in dramatic fashion, a funny thing happened: nothing.”•

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“In Norway, you’ve got two big sports–chess and sadness”:

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“You Wouldn’t Think The Prospect Of Nuclear Apocalypse Would Make For A Reading Treat”

November 24, 2013 in Books, Excerpts | Permalink

A Guardian feature has a number of name authors choosing their favorite titles of 2013. Here’s Jonathan Franzen’s selection:

“My vote is for Eric Schlosser’s Command and Control (Allen Lane). Do you really want to read about the thermonuclear warheads that are still aimed at the city where you live? Do you really need to know about the appalling security issues that have dogged nuclear weapons in the 70 years since their invention? Yes, you do. Schlosser’s book reads like a thriller, but it’s masterfully even-handed, well researched, and well organised. Either he’s a natural genius at integrating massive amounts of complex information, or he worked like a dog to write this book. You wouldn’t think the prospect of nuclear apocalypse would make for a reading treat, but in Schlosser’s hands it does.”

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“As Kubrick’s Filmic Anticipation Of The iPad Makes Clear, Ive’s Devices Have Been Imagined Before”

November 24, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Edwin Heathcote of the Financial Times isn’t very high on the new book about Apple designer Jony Ive, noting that seamlessness makes for beautiful products but ineffable biographical subjects. An excerpt from his new review:

“As Kubrick’s filmic anticipation of the iPad makes clear, Ive’s devices have been imagined before. Think of Ettore Sottsass, the Italian who made Olivetti the Apple of its time, designing typewriters and early computers with flair. Or Dieter Rams, the German designer whose products for Braun defined the company and are among the most beautiful products of the 20th century (and whose designs profoundly influenced Ive, even down to the rounded corners). Ive is far from unique as a designer who is synonymous with his company. What is new is the ubiquity of the products and the way they have insinuated themselves into every aspect of our lives.

Apple’s products are so beautifully and mysteriously constructed (where are the joints and bolts?) that they somehow mirror the obsessiveness of this secretive corporation. All of which makes them difficult to write about. Arguably what is most interesting is why they have become such a success, the social, political, aesthetic and cultural context which they have slotted into – or remade. And why have other companies not managed to emulate Apple’s design-led model?”

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“Pop Warner Lost 23,612 Players”

November 24, 2013 in Excerpts, Sports, Urban Studies | Permalink

Another bit coming from the Frontline program “League of Denial,” which looked at the impact of brain injuries stemming from American football:

“The nation’s largest youth football program, Pop Warner, saw its participation rate drop 9.5 percent from 2010-2012, according to an Outside the Lines report by League of Denial authors Steve Fainaru and Mark Fainaru-Wada. ‘Pop Warner lost 23,612 players, thought to be the largest two-year decline since the organization began keeping statistics decades ago,’ the report found. ‘Pop Warner officials said they believe several factors played a role in the decline, including the trend of youngsters focusing on one sport. But the organization’s chief medical officer, Dr. Julian Bailes, cited concerns about head injuries as ‘the No. 1 cause.’”

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“Bacteria Can Produce Another Generation In As Little As Twenty Minutes”

November 22, 2013 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

I watch Frontline the way most Americans watch slasher films and zombie TV dramas: to frighten the fuck out of myself. The recent episode, “Hunting the Nightmare Bacteria,” pointed out a yawning hole in the free market: Big Pharma companies have very few antibiotics in R&D because they’re expensive to develop and they’re supposed to be used as little as possible. It’s much more feasible to produce a diabetes or heart drug–something for long-term care. 

Of course, we actually haven’t been careful about restricting antibiotics, overprescribing them to humans in the past and currently practically pouring them into livestock. And the more we use these drugs, the less efficacy they possess. So the ones we have are losing effectiveness, and there are no answers in the pipeline. From Maryn McKenna’s Medium essay, “Imagining the Post-Antibiotics Future“:

“Predictions that we might sacrifice the antibiotic miracle have been around almost as long as the drugs themselves. Penicillin was first discovered in 1928 and battlefield casualties got the first non-experimental doses in 1943, quickly saving soldiers who had been close to death. But just two years later, the drug’s discoverer Sir Alexander Fleming warned that its benefit might not last. Accepting the 1945 Nobel Prize in Medicine, he said:

‘It is not difficult to make microbes resistant to penicillin in the laboratory by exposing them to concentrations not sufficient to kill them… There is the danger that the ignorant man may easily underdose himself and by exposing his microbes to non-lethal quantities of the drug make them resistant.’

As a biologist, Fleming knew that evolution was inevitable: sooner or later, bacteria would develop defenses against the compounds the nascent pharmaceutical industry was aiming at them. But what worried him was the possibility that misuse would speed the process up. Every inappropriate prescription and insufficient dose given in medicine would kill weak bacteria but let the strong survive. (As would the micro-dose ‘growth promoters’ given in agriculture, which were invented a few years after Fleming spoke.) Bacteria can produce another generation in as little as twenty minutes; with tens of thousands of generations a year working out survival strategies, the organisms would soon overwhelm the potent new drugs.”

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“Why, It’s An Honor For Me To Be Here”

November 22, 2013 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

Jimmy Breslin, lying on trunk of car, interviewing, Robert F. Kennedy. (Image by Jim Hubbard.)

Fifty years to the day of John F. Kennedy’s assassination, here’s the opening of what’s arguably Jimmy Breslin’s most famous column, his 1963 profile of the quiet, sober work of the gravedigger at Arlington National Cemetery who attended to the President’s burial plot:

Washington — Clifton Pollard was pretty sure he was going to be working on Sunday, so when he woke up at 9 a.m., in his three-room apartment on Corcoran Street, he put on khaki overalls before going into the kitchen for breakfast. His wife, Hettie, made bacon and eggs for him. Pollard was in the middle of eating them when he received the phone call he had been expecting. It was from Mazo Kawalchik, who is the foreman of the gravediggers at Arlington National Cemetery, which is where Pollard works for a living. “Polly, could you please be here by eleven o’clock this morning?” Kawalchik asked. “I guess you know what it’s for.” Pollard did. He hung up the phone, finished breakfast, and left his apartment so he could spend Sunday digging a grave for John Fitzgerald Kennedy.

When Pollard got to the row of yellow wooden garages where the cemetery equipment is stored, Kawalchik and John Metzler, the cemetery superintendent, were waiting for him. “Sorry to pull you out like this on a Sunday,” Metzler said. “Oh, don’t say that,” Pollard said. “Why, it’s an honor for me to be here.” Pollard got behind the wheel of a machine called a reverse hoe. Gravedigging is not done with men and shovels at Arlington. The reverse hoe is a green machine with a yellow bucket that scoops the earth toward the operator, not away from it as a crane does. At the bottom of the hill in front of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, Pollard started the digging (Editor Note: At the bottom of the hill in front of the Custis-Lee Mansion).

Leaves covered the grass. When the yellow teeth of the reverse hoe first bit into the ground, the leaves made a threshing sound which could be heard above the motor of the machine. When the bucket came up with its first scoop of dirt, Metzler, the cemetery superintendent, walked over and looked at it. “That’s nice soil,” Metzler said. “I’d like to save a little of it,” Pollard said. “The machine made some tracks in the grass over here and I’d like to sort of fill them in and get some good grass growing there, I’d like to have everything, you know, nice.”•

“I Think Airport Security Should Be Rolled Back To Pre-9/11 Levels”

November 22, 2013 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Bruce Schneier, a security expert (online and offline), just did an Ask Me Anything at Reddit. The following is an exchange about post-9/11 airport security:

“Question:

I am of the opinion that our airport security is poorly designed and for the hassle passengers go through, we get minimal benefit. I feel like we react to specific circumstances to create an illusion of security and that perception is more important to the TSA than creating a constructive plan to deal with threats. I know you are a proponent of the fail well philosophy which accepts failure and tries to compartmentalize and minimize the damage. Based on this theory what should be the security steps that airports should be taking?

Bruce Schneier:

I think airport security should be rolled back to pre-9/11 levels, and all the money saved should be spent on things that work: intelligence, investigation, and emergency response.

Only two things have improved airplane security since 9/11: reinforcing the cockpit doors, and teaching passengers that they have to fight back. Everything else has been security theater.”

 

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“Can You Explain The Difference Between The Types Of Executions You Had To Perform?”

November 21, 2013 in Excerpts, Politics, Urban Studies | Permalink

Jerry Givens, who served as Virginia’s executioner for nearly two decades, lives with regret. He now campaigns against capital punishment. Just one exchange from an Ask Me Anything he did at the Guardian:

Question:

Can you explain the difference between the types of executions you had to perform?

Answer:

When I first started, it was only death by electrocution. Electrocution consists of 2,400 to 3,000 volts. The condemned receives 45 seconds of a high volt shock and 45 seconds of the low cycle. It takes about 2.5 minutes. Then there is a five minute grace period to let the body cool down. Then a physician goes in the room with a stethoscope to see if there is a heartbeat. Back in the mid-1990s, Virginia decided to go with lethal injection instead. That consists of seven tubes that are injected into the left arm. Three tubes of chemicals and four that are flush. So you administer the first chemical (sodium pentothal), then a flush, then the second chemical (pancuronium), then a flush, then the third chemical (potassium chloride) and then a final flush at the end. You have to keep people who remove the body from being exposed to chemicals.

If I had a choice, I would choose death by electrocution. That’s more like cutting your lights off and on. It’s a button you push once and then the machine runs by itself. It relieves you from being attached to it in some ways. You can’t see the current go through the body. But with chemicals, it takes a while because you’re dealing with three separate chemicals. You are on the other end with a needle in your hand. You can see the reaction of the body. You can see it going down the clear tube. So you can actually see the chemical going down the line and into the arm and see the effects of it. You are more attached to it. I know because I have done it. Death by electrocution in some ways seems more humane.”

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“Vollmann Became Famous For Fiction That Treated The Sex Worker As Muse”

November 21, 2013 in Books, Excerpts, Politics, Urban Studies | Permalink

One thing you can say assuredly about writer William T. Vollmann is that he’s enjoying a singular career. There’s no one else practicing his brand of gonzo ardor for the sad casualties of modern life, the geographically remote, the politically fraught and the historically arcane–no one else even trying, really. The opening of Alexander Nazaryan’s Newseek article about the writer, who’s just published The Book of Dolores, perhaps his most personal and idiosyncratic work to date:

“If William T. Vollmann ever wins the Nobel Prize in Literature – as many speculate he will – he knows exactly what he will do with the $1.1 million pot the Swedes attach to the award. ‘It will be fun to give some to prostitutes,’ he says, sitting on his futon, chuckling, a half-empty bottle of pretty good bourbon between us.

He is neither flippant nor drunk, though more booze awaits us out there in the temperate Sacramento twilight. Vollmann became famous for fiction that treated the sex worker as muse – especially the street stalker of those days in the Tenderloin of San Francisco when AIDS was just coming to haunt the national psyche and the yuppie invasion was a nightmare not yet hatched. His so-called prostitution trilogy – Whores for Gloria, Butterfly Stories, and The Royal Family – is overflowing with life and empathy, nothing like the backcountry machismo of Raymond Carver or fruitless experimentation of Donald Barthelme, both oh-so-popular with young writers when Vollmann first came on the scene after graduating from Cornell in 1981. He approached the prostitute like an anthropologist, yet did so without condescension, writing in Whores for Gloria, ‘The unpleasantnesses of her profession are largely caused by the criminal ambiance in which the prostitute must conduct it.’

He was a gonzo humanitarian, too: Vollmann once rescued a young Thai girl, Sukanja, from a rural brothel, installing her in a school in Bangkok; he later paid her father for ownership of the girl, essentially making himself the owner of another human being. (‘She loves the school,’ he told The Paris Review in 2000.) So if sex workers reap some of that Nobel money, it will be only be because they have long served as Vollmann’s subjects and companions, objects of his curiosity, his compassion, and, sometimes, his carnal impulses. He insists the last of these is not an occasion for shame. Of paying for sex, he once said, ‘We’re a culture of prostitutes.'”

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