Excerpts

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“But Space Invaders Didn’t Always Generate Favorable Press”

October 18, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

From “The Space Invader,” Simon Parkin’s interesting New Yorker blog post about Tomohiro Nishikado, who created the quarter-sucking sensation in 1978:

“Space Invaders sold an unprecedented hundred thousand machines in Japan; Bally Midway, the game’s U.S. distributor, sold around sixty thousand units in 1979 alone. Today, with its jagged shapes and sine-wave squeals, the game is an icon of the industry’s formative days and the medium’s ongoing appeal: a simplistic rendering of fears that can be overcome with determination and a steady focus.

But Space Invaders didn’t always generate favorable press. In Japan, soon after the game’s release, a twelve-year-old boy held up a bank with a shotgun. He didn’t want notes, he told the clerk, just coins. Under interrogation, he admitted that he wanted the money to play Space Invaders. In England, in November, 1981, a fourteen-year-old schoolboy prostituted himself in a parking lot for two pounds. This was enough, he later quantified, for ten games of Space Invaders. Police in the South of England dubiously claimed that the Space Invaders obsession had ‘doubled housebreaking figures,’ while the Labour M.P. George Foulkes, fearing for the ‘glazed eyes’ of youngsters, lobbied to subject the game to local authority regulation in Parliament. The novelist Martin Amis wrote, in his 1982 ode Invasion of the Space Invaders, of a young actress he knew with injuries sustained in the arcade so severe that her index finger ‘looked like a piece of liver.'”

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“Think Of It As An Instrument People Can Use To Create Their Ideal Coffee Experience”

October 18, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

 

I have never met a Starbucks barista who wasn’t delightfully off in some way, but they’re all amazingly patient and hardworking people who wish to tell me about their childhoods in rural Oregon. Alas, they are people, so their days are numbered. In the long run, when the pain has diminished, it will be for the best. The opening of Christopher Mims’ Quartz article about automated caffeine:

Starbucks’ 95,000 baristas have a competitor. It doesn’t need sleep. It’s precise in a way that a human could never be. It requires no training. It can’t quit. It has memorized every one of its customers’ orders. There’s never a line for its perfectly turned-out drinks.

It doesn’t require health insurance.

Don’t think of it as the enemy of baristas, insists Kevin Nater, CEO of the company that has produced this technological marvel. Think of it as an instrument people can use to create their ideal coffee experience. Think of it as a cure for ‘out-of-home coffee drinkers’—Nater’s phrase—sick of an ‘inconsistent experience.’

Think of it as the future. Think of it as empowerment. Your coffee, your way, flawlessly, every time, no judgments. Four pumps of sugar-free vanilla syrup in a 16 oz. half-caff soy latte? Here it is, delivered to you precisely when your smartphone app said it would arrive, hot and fresh and indistinguishable from the last one you ordered.•

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“The Most Talked-About New Devices Are Wearable”

October 18, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Even people who want a Google Glass sort of eyewear will not use such a product until it stops being the creepiest thing you can put on in the morning. Perhaps that’s another reason why Apple just hired Angela Ahrendts from Burberry. From the Economist:

“A bigger job will be to ready Apple for the coming fusion of fashion and technology. The most talked-about new devices are wearable. Google’s Glass smuggles a smartphone into a pair of spectacles. Samsung’s Galaxy Gear squeezes some smartphone functions into a wristwatch. Apple is also keen to surf the wearable wave. An iWatch, which Apple may launch next year, would pull it towards Ms Ahrendts’s home turf, since it would compete with fashionable timepieces like Burberry’s.”

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“I Suspect Comics Will Have Less Widespread Cultural Impact”

October 17, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Jake Rossen of Mental Floss managed to snare a rare interview with Calvin & Hobbes creator Bill Watterson. In this excerpt, he discusses where the comic-strip form is now and where he thinks it will go:

“Question:

Where do you think the comic strip fits in today’s culture?

Bill Watterson:

Personally, I like paper and ink better than glowing pixels, but to each his own. Obviously the role of comics is changing very fast. On the one hand, I don’t think comics have ever been more widely accepted or taken as seriously as they are now. On the other hand, the mass media is disintegrating, and audiences are atomizing. I suspect comics will have less widespread cultural impact and make a lot less money. I’m old enough to find all this unsettling, but the world moves on. All the new media will inevitably change the look, function, and maybe even the purpose of comics, but comics are vibrant and versatile, so I think they’ll continue to find relevance one way or another. But they definitely won’t be the same as what I grew up with.”

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“Biology Is A Software Process”

October 17, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The opening of Kate Lunau’s new Maclean’s interview with Ray Kurzweil, partner of Peter Diamandis at Singularity University:

“Question: 

You say we’re in the midst of a ‘grand transformation’ in the field of medicine. What do you see happening today?

Ray Kurzweil: 

Biology is a software process. Our bodies are made up of trillions of cells, each governed by this process. You and I are walking around with outdated software running in our bodies, which evolved in a very different era. We each have a fat insulin receptor gene that says, ‘Hold on to every calorie.’ That was a very good idea 10,000 years ago, when you worked all day to get a few calories; there were no refrigerators, so you stored them in your fat cells. I would like to tell my fat insulin receptor gene, ‘You don’t need to do that anymore,’ and indeed that was done at the Joslin Diabetes Center. They turned off this gene, and the [lab mice] ate ravenously and remained slim. They didn’t get diabetes; they didn’t get heart disease. They lived 20 per cent longer. They’re working with a drug company to bring that to market.

Life expectancy was 20 a thousand years ago; 37, 200 years ago. We’re now able to reprogram health and medicine as software, and that [pace is] going to continue to accelerate. We’re treating biology, and by extension health and medicine, as an information technology. Our intuition about how progress will unfold is linear, but information technology progresses exponentially, not linearly. My Android phone is literally several billion times more powerful, per dollar, than the computer I used when I was a student. And it’s also 100,000 times smaller. We’ll do both of those things again in 25 years. It’ll be a billion times more powerful, and will be the size of a blood cell.”

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“The Center Would Be Able To ‘Paint A Pretty Detailed Picture Of Someone’s Personal Life, Someone Who May Be Innocent”

October 17, 2013 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Oakland authorities are repurposing federal anti-terrorism money to create crime-fighting initiatives based on Big Data. The changes will be so subtle, you’ll hardly notice a thing. From Somini Sengupta at the New York Times:

“Libby Schaaf, an Oakland City Council member, said that because of the city’s high crime rate, ‘it’s our responsibility to take advantage of new tools that become available.’ She added, though, that the center would be able to ‘paint a pretty detailed picture of someone’s personal life, someone who may be innocent.’

For example, if two men were caught on camera at the port stealing goods and driving off in a black Honda sedan, Oakland authorities could look up where in the city the car had been in the last several weeks. That could include stoplights it drove past each morning and whether it regularly went to see Oakland A’s baseball games.

For law enforcement, data mining is a big step toward more complete intelligence gathering. The police have traditionally made arrests based on small bits of data — witness testimony, logs of license plate readers, footage from a surveillance camera perched above a bank machine. The new capacity to collect and sift through all that information gives the authorities a much broader view of the people they are investigating.

For the companies that make big data tools, projects like Oakland’s are a big business opportunity. Microsoft built the technology for the New York City program. I.B.M. has sold data-mining tools for Las Vegas and Memphis.”

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“For The Past 20 Years, American Politics Has Been Defined By Republican Revolt”

October 17, 2013 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

Clinton was impeached and Kerry swiftboated and Obama deported (to Kenya, if figuratively), as the radical right came to disqualify as Other anyone who wasn’t one of them. The mainstream GOP (Gingrich, Rove, etc.) found the yahoos useful and embraced them until they couldn’t get their arms back. In “Radical Republicans” at Slate, Jacob Weisberg traces the descent into madness. The opening:

“For the past 20 years, American politics has been defined by Republican revolt. The right-wing radicalism that now worries the whole world first emerged in response to Bill Clinton’s election in 1992. It’s not that Republicans were never extreme before that time. Challenges to the legitimacy of federal authority from the people who now identify as Republicans trace back to pro-slavery attempts at nullification and segregationist assertions of states’ rights. But it was 20 years ago that the Congressional wing of the GOP, led by House Speaker Newt Gingrich, adopted belligerent noncooperation as its defining stance.

It was Gingrich who turned bipartisanship from Washington’s greatest virtue to its most reviled vice. Under his leadership, congressional Republicans refused any quarter on Clinton health care reform and supplied no votes for the economic plan that spurred the long boom of the 1990s. In their new mode, Republicans refused to vote on presidential nominations and buried the White House in investigations and subpoenas. It was Gingrich who in 1995 invented the tactic of refusing to raise the debt ceiling as a cudgel to get Clinton to agree to outsize spending cuts. It was Gingrich who invented the tactic of shutting down the government for the same end.”

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“If I Have A Nanobot, I Don’t Need Any Money”

October 17, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Peter Diamandis, founder of Singularity University and author of Abundance, is a true believer in technology, one who sees a near-term future filled with nanobots, asteroid mining, transparency and immortality. He thinks tomorrow will be largely wonderful. Diamandis just did an Ask Me Anything at Reddit. A few exchanges follow.

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Question:

(1) If abundance and amazing technology is our future, what will be the motivation for anyone to disconnect from Matrix-like, fully immersive, virtual worlds (where anything imaginable might be possible)? Also, considering that advanced alien civilizations probably reach the technological ability to create virtual reality like this before interstellar space travel, would this be a valid explanation for the Fermi Paradox?

(2) Being in medical school I am extremely interested in what being a physician will actually entail two decades from now. You have a unique perspective since you actually went to Harvard Medical School (and somehow started you own space company and university while attending) but decided not do your residency afterwards. If you were graduating today, what residency would you choose (i.e., has the greatest potential)?

Peter Diamandis:

(1) The human body is a collection of 10 trillion cells working together… i think we are heading towards the transformation of humanity being a collection of 9 billion human brains working together… towards a “Meta-INtelligence” where you can know the thoughts, feelings and knowledge of anyone. that’s where tech is driving us… As such, i don’t know that i would want to live outside of this, just like any one of your human cells has a disadvantage living outside of your body.

(2) Wow, Medicine is going to change ALOT. I can imagine a time in the near future where the patient is saying “NO WAY… I don’t want that human doctor doing the surgery, he/she makes mistakes… i only want the robot… its done 300,000 perfect surgeries in a row.”

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Question:

What exactly do you feel will be the greatest contribution in the next 4-5 decades in regards to both Earth-domestic technological advancements and in space exploration/colonization?

Peter Diamandis:

Over the next 30 – 40 years (not 40 – 50) humanity will establish itself in space, independent of Earth. We finally have the technology at hand to do this… and the wealth… and the will. That is HUGE. Millions of years from now, as people look back at these next few decades, it will be the moment in time that we broke away irreversibly and became a multiplanetary species. Not since lung fish crawled out of the oceans onto land has this happened!

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Question:

Do you feel that our potential to reach a future of abundance faces significant threats from these sorts of negative factors? (environmental damage and resource depletion, and the unrest that has potential to ferment in such conditions) Are there any areas that you feel need critical attention to avoid derailing a successful future?

Peter Diamandis:

I actually am an optimist about human nature and people usually do “bad things” in the shadows. As tech continues to drive towards MASSIVE Transparency, where you can’t hide, it will actually cause us to be safer in society and allow us to take action more quickly when things are heading in a negaive direction. Knowledge is the Bright light we need.

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Question:

A year ago someone brought up the question of abundance and its implication on labor. As technology takes over more complex tasks (via automation) less labor is needed. However, if we reach a critical point where labor needs decrease dramatically there is no economic population to purchase the output (as they would have no jobs). While total “abundance” is perhaps unreachable there has to be a tipping point where labor markets and automation balance each other out. Would you mind commenting on this concept, its implications and perhaps limitations? Thank You. 

Peter Diamandis:

GREAT question…. There is a race to the bottom. What you say above is true. It is also true that were we spend our money… Health, education, energy etc is “Demonetizing” i.e. tech is making it effectively FREE, so we will need less money. ALSO, and ultimately we will partner with technology. I’m an engineer and i look at boundary conditions… the final result is nanotech.. and if i have a nanobot, i don’t need any money.•

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“The Service Uses The GPS Coordinates Of A User’s Smartphone To Make Textbook Deliveries”

October 17, 2013 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Even though it wasn’t particularly cost-efficient, early airplanes (or “aeroplanes”) were sometimes utilized to deliver newspapers. While physical textbooks are a questionable commodity in an age when the Encyclopedia Britannica can be put on the head of a pin, an Australian company is using drones to deliver them. From Emily Keeler in the Los Angeles Times:

“Imagine the book you need to ace the exam showing up at your door, care of your friendly neighborhood drone.

A textbook rental company is trying to mimic the instantaneous speed of e-book delivery for printed books by utilizing civil drones in Sydney, Australia. Zookal, a service that rents textbooks to university students, has partnered with Flirtey, an outfit specializing in unmanned aerial vehicles, to aerially deliver print books to customers within minutes after an order is placed.

The Age reports that the service uses the GPS coordinates of a user’s smartphone to make textbook deliveries, a win for cramming students who have left studying to the very last minute and and need to save all the time they can. After one of six Sydney drones has been dispatched, students will be able to track the realtime journey of their unmanned textbooks on a Google-powered map.”

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141 Questions Thomas Edison Asked Job Applicants

October 16, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Not to pick on Google today because as an outsider I’m fascinated by what the company is trying to accomplish, but they used to ask prospective employees ridiculous questions to make themselves feel special. But that company wasn’t the first to be criticized for such a practice: In 1921, Thomas Edison was taken to task for a similar thing. Here are 141 of the questions he asked applicants, per the New York Times:

  1. What countries bound France?
  2. Where is the Rover Volga?
  3. What country and city produce the finest China?
  4. Where does the finest cotton grow?
  5. What country consumed the most tea before the war?
  6. What city in the United States is noted for its laundry machine making?
  7. What city is the fur centre in the United States?
  8. Can you play any musical instrument?
  9. What country is the greatest textile producer?
  10. Is Australia larger than Greenland in area?
  11. Where is Copenhagen?
  12. Where is Spitzbergen?
  13. In what country other than Australia are kangaroos found?
  14. What telescope is the largest in the world?
  15. Who was Bessemer and what did he do?
  16. Where do we get prunes from?
  17. How many States in the Union?
  18. Who was Paul Revere?
  19. Who was Hancock?
  20. Who was Plutarch?
  21. Who was Hannibal?
  22. Who was Danton?
  23. Who was Solon?
  24. Who was Frances Marion?
  25. Who was Leonidas?
  26. Where did we get Louisiana from?
  27. Who was Pizarro?
  28. Who was Bolivar?
  29. What war material did Chile export to the Allies during the war?
  30. Where does the most coffee come from?
  31. Where is Korea?
  32. Where is Manchuria?
  33. Where was Napoleon born?
  34. What is the highest rise of tide on the North Atlantic coast?
  35. Who invented logarithms?
  36. Who was Emperor of Mexico when Cortes landed?
  37. Where is the Imperial Valley and what is it noted for?
  38. In what cities are hats and shoes made?
  39. Where is the Sargasso Sea?
  40. What is the greatest depth ever reached in the ocean?
  41. What is the name of the large inland body of water that has no outlet?
  42. What is the capital of Pennsylvania?
  43. What state is the largest? The next?
  44. Rhode Island is the smallest state. What is the next and the next?
  45. How far is it from New York to Buffalo by way of the New York Central Railroad?
  46. How far is it from New York to San Francisco?
  47. Of what State is Helena the Capital?
  48. What State has the largest copper mines?
  49. What State has the largest amethyst mines?
  50. What is the name of the famous violin maker?
  51. Who invented the modern paper-making machine?
  52. Who invented the typesetting machine?
  53. Who invented the printing press?
  54. On what principle is the telephone based?
  55. Of what is brass made?
  56. Where do we get tin from?
  57. What ingredients are in the best white paint?
  58. How is leather tanned?
  59. How is artificial silk made?
  60. What is a caisson?
  61. What is coke?
  62. How is celluloid made?
  63. Where do we get shellac from?
  64. What causes the tides?
  65. To what is the change of the seasons due?
  66. What is the population of the following countries: Germany, Japan, England, Australia, Russia?
  67. From what part of the North Atlantic do we get codfish?
  68. Who discovered the south pole?
  69. What is a monsoon?
  70. Where is Magdalena Bay?
  71. From where do we import figs?
  72. From where do we import dates?
  73. From where do we get prunes?
  74. From where do we get domestic sardines?
  75. What railroad is the longest in the world?
  76. Where is Tallahassee?
  77. Where is Kenosha?
  78. How fast does sound travel per foot per second?
  79. How fast does light travel per foot per second?
  80. What planet is it that has been recently measured and found to be of enormous size?
  81. What large river in the United States is it that flows from south to north?
  82. Where are the straits of Messina?
  83. In what country are earthquakes frequent?
  84. What mountain is the highest in the world?
  85. Where do we import cork from?
  86. Name six big business men in the United States.
  87. Who is called the father of railways?
  88. Where was Lincoln born?
  89. Who stated the following: ‘Fourscore and seven years ago,” &c?
  90. What business do you like best?
  91. Are you experienced in any of the following: Salesmanship, clerk, stenography, bookkeeping?
  92. Name a few kinds of wood used in making furniture, and the highest priced?
  93. What kind of wood is the lightest?
  94. What kind of wood is the heaviest?
  95. Of what kind of wood are axe handles made?
  96. Of what kind of wood are kerosene barrels made?
  97. What part of Germany do we get toys from?
  98. What states bound West Virginia?
  99. Where do we get peanuts from?
  100. What is the capital of Alabama?
  101. Who wrote “Home, Sweet Home”?
  102. Who wrote the “Star-Spangled Banner”?
  103. Who composed “Il Trovatore”?
  104. Who was Cleopatra?
  105. Where are Condors found?
  106. What voltage is used on street cars?
  107. Who discovered the law of Gravitation?
  108. What cereal is used all over the world?
  109. Where is the Assuan Dam?
  110. What country produces the most nickel?
  111. What is the distance between the earth and the sun?
  112. Who invented photography?
  113. Where do we get wood from?
  114. What is felt?
  115. What states produce phosphates?
  116. Why is cast iron called pig iron?
  117. Name three principal acids?
  118. Name three principal alkalis?
  119. Name three powerful poisons?
  120. Who discovered radium?
  121. Who discovered the X-ray?
  122. What is the weight of air in a room 20x30x10?
  123. Where is platinum found?
  124. With what metal is platinum associated when found?
  125. How is sulphuric acid made?
  126. Who discovered how to vulcanize rubber?
  127. Where do we get sulphur from?
  128. Where do we import rubber from?
  129. Who invented the cotten gin?
  130. What is the price of 12 grs. of gold?
  131. What is vulcanite and how is it made?
  132. What is glucose and how is it made?
  133. What is the difference between anthracite and bituminous coal?
  134. Where do we get benzol from?
  135. Of what is glass made?
  136. How is window glass made?
  137. What is porcelain?
  138. What kind of machine is used in cutting the facets of diamonds?
  139. What country makes the best optical lenses and what city?
  140. Where do we get borax from?
  141. What is a foot pound?

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“Companies Like Google Actually Embody A Particular Notion Of Progress Rather Than Populism”

October 16, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

In “What Is ‘Evil’ to Google?” Ian Bogost of the Atlantic tries to decipher the slippery moral code of the search giant that aspires to be so much more:

“All moral codes are grounded in something: a religious tradition, a philosophical doctrine, a cultural practice. Google’s take on virtue doesn’t reject such grounds so much as create a new one: the process of googlization itself. If anything, Google’s motto seems to have largely succeeded at reframing ‘evil’ to exclude all actions performed by Google.

There is a persistent idea that Internet technology companies embody an innocent populism. That the rational engineer is an earnest problem-solver, his fists striking tables instead of noses. But there’s something treacherous in believing that virtue and vice can be negotiated in the engineering of an email client or the creation of a spreadsheet—that evil is just another problem to overcome, like usability or scalability.

Companies like Google actually embody a particular notion of progress rather than populism, one that involves advancing their technology solutions as universal ones. Evil is vicious because it inhibits this progress. If Google has made a contribution to moral philosophy, it amounts to a devout faith in its own ability to preside over virtue and vice through engineering. The unwitting result: We’ve not only outsourced our email hosting and office suite provisioning to Google, but also our information ethics. Practically speaking, isn’t it just easier to let Google manage right and wrong?”

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“The Idea…Involves Embedding Powerful Microprocessor Chips In Everyday Objects”

October 15, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Smartphones are embedded with improved technologies which will be useful in autonomous cars which will create other technologies useful in other souped-up tools, as the algorithms popularized on the Internet escape through the screen. The objects grow smarter whether or not we do. From “The Rapid Advance of Artificial Intelligence,” by John Markoff in the New York Times:

“The enormous amount of data being generated by inexpensive sensors has been a significant factor in altering the center of gravity of the computing world, he said, making it possible to use centralized computers in data centers — referred to as the cloud — to take artificial intelligence technologies like machine-learning and spread computer intelligence far beyond desktop computers.

Apple was the most successful early innovator in popularizing what is today described as ubiquitous computing. The idea, first proposed by Mark Weiser, a computer scientist with Xerox, involves embedding powerful microprocessor chips in everyday objects.

Steve Jobs, during his second tenure at Apple, was quick to understand the implications of the falling cost of computer intelligence. Taking advantage of it, he first created a digital music player, the iPod, and then transformed mobile communication with the iPhone. Now such innovation is rapidly accelerating into all consumer products.

‘The most important new computer maker in Silicon Valley isn’t a computer maker at all, it’s Tesla,’ the electric car manufacturer, said Paul Saffo, a managing director at Discern Analytics, a research firm based in San Francisco. ‘The car has become a node in the network and a computer in its own right. It’s a primitive robot that wraps around you.’ “

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“My Interest In Science Is Related To How Mysterious It Is”

October 15, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Ross Andersen, excellent writer and Aeon Senior Editor, spent a night at Star Axis, artist Charles Ross’ secretive and still-to-be-completed desert installation and observatory in New Mexico. From “Embracing the Void“:

“I followed Ross and [Jill] O’Bryan in my car, down to the desert floor and then to the top of an adjacent mesa. We parked in front of their makeshift ranch house and headed inside, being careful to step around a six-foot rattlesnake that was sunbathing a few feet from the front door. O’Bryan showed me the bathroom, and explained how to work the manual pump toilet — hold the flush lever down for 20 seconds, then do it again — while Ross went to look for a book he wanted to show me, a collection of essays about quantum mechanics. He returned with the book, and the two of us flipped through it while he gave me a tour of his studio. Ross keeps a close eye on new research in physics, and sometimes enlists astronomers to help him at Star Axis. In the 1990s, Leroy Doggett of the US Naval Observatory measured the staircase’s first and last steps. And the week before I arrived, Ross had an astronomer out from the University of Washington to do the others. I asked him if these encounters with scientists enriched his work.

‘My interest in science is related to how mysterious it is,’ he told me. ‘I have found that if you get astronomers and physicists drunk enough, you can get them to admit that what’s going on in the quantum field is not a hair’s breadth from metaphysics. That tells me the world is not getting easier to decipher. The deeper they go with this stuff, the more mysterious it gets.’ “

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“Some Of The Most Consistent Innovators Of The Modern Era Have Also Been Among Its Biggest Monsters”

October 15, 2013 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

There’s now a large industry of writers and speakers telling you bullshit narratives about how you can think counter-intuitively, how you can see hidden patterns if you look through their eyes, how you too can become a creative thinker. Maddeningly, many of them do it supposedly supported by science and math. Taking aim with a cash register (just a Square is necessary, really) at the creative mind during the the dying days of the Industrial Revolution might be a good business model, but that doesn’t make it useful. From “TED Talks Are Lying to You,” Thomas Frank’s Salon essay about the sad state of the creative class and the lacking literature aimed at it:

“Those who urge us to ‘think different,’ in other words, almost never do so themselves. Year after year, new installments in this unchanging genre are produced and consumed. Creativity, they all tell us, is too important to be left to the creative. Our prosperity depends on it. And by dint of careful study and the hardest science — by, say, sliding a jazz pianist’s head into an MRI machine — we can crack the code of creativity and unleash its moneymaking power.

That was the ultimate lesson. That’s where the music, the theology, the physics and the ethereal water lilies were meant to direct us. Our correspondent could think of no books that tried to work the equation the other way around — holding up the invention of air conditioning or Velcro as a model for a jazz trumpeter trying to work out his solo.

And why was this worth noticing? Well, for one thing, because we’re talking about the literature of creativity, for Pete’s sake. If there is a non-fiction genre from which you have a right to expect clever prose and uncanny insight, it should be this one. So why is it so utterly consumed by formula and repetition?

What our correspondent realized, in that flash of bathtub-generated insight, was that this literature isn’t about creativity in the first place. While it reiterates a handful of well-known tales — the favorite pop stars, the favorite artists, the favorite branding successes — it routinely ignores other creative milestones that loom large in the history of human civilization. After all, some of the most consistent innovators of the modern era have also been among its biggest monsters. He thought back, in particular, to the diabolical creativity of Nazi Germany, which was the first country to use ballistic missiles, jet fighter planes, assault rifles and countless other weapons. And yet nobody wanted to add Peenemünde, where the Germans developed the V-2 rocket during the 1940s, to the glorious list of creative hothouses that includes Periclean Athens, Renaissance Florence, Belle Époque Paris and latter-day Austin, Texas. How much easier to tell us, one more time, how jazz bands work, how someone came up with the idea for the Slinky, or what shade of paint, when applied to the walls of your office, is most conducive to originality.”

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“In A Dusty Yard Under A Blistering August Sun, Rover Was Hard At Work”

October 15, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

In the long run, robots will be good for us, once the pain of displacement subsides and we have figured out a way to navigate the new normal. For instance: a solar plant that doesn’t produce many jobs but offers the promise of cheap, clean energy. From Diane Cardwell in the New York Times:

“RICHMOND, Calif. — In a dusty yard under a blistering August sun, Rover was hard at work, lifting 45-pound solar panels off a stack and installing them, one by one, into a concrete track. A few yards away, Rover’s companion, Spot, moved along a row of panels, washing away months of grit, then squeegeeing them dry.

But despite the heat and monotony — an alternative-energy version of lather-rinse-repeat — neither Rover nor Spot broke a sweat or uttered a complaint. They could have kept at it all day.

That is because they are robots, surprisingly low-tech machines that a start-up company called Alion Energy is betting can automate the installation and maintenance of large-scale solar farms.

Working in near secrecy until recently, the company, based in Richmond, Calif., is ready to use its machines in three projects in the next few months in California, Saudi Arabia and China. If all goes well, executives expect that they can help bring the price of solar electricity into line with that of natural gas by cutting the cost of building and maintaining large solar installations.”

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“The End Result Could Be A Wholesale Shift In The Way We Treat Illness”

October 15, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

From Elizabeth Murphy’s Fast Company article about 23andMe, a company founded by Anne Wojcicki, which will conduct genetic testing at birth on your child for $99, beginning the self-quant analysis before the first word or step, arming you with information, so much information:

“Wojcicki is connected to the fabric of Silicon Valley, which has served her well. But her goals are global. ‘We’re not just looking to get a venture-capital return,’ Wojcicki says. ‘We set out with this company to revolutionize health care.’ On the same December day when she closed a $59 million round of financing, she dropped the price of 23andMe’s genetic testing from $299 to $99. While prices like that may not make taking control of one’s health a universal, democratic reality, they accelerate our society’s move in that direction. The end result could be a wholesale shift in the way we treat illness, a move away from our current diagnostic model to one based on prevention. That’s why, if Wojcicki gets it right, 23andMe could help change the health care industry as we know it. ‘At $99, we are opening the doors of access,’ she says. ‘Genetics is part of an entire path for how you’re going to live a healthier life.’

As 23andMe scales, its business model will shift. Right now it gets most of its revenue from the $99 that people like me pay in return for test-tube kits and the results we get back after we send off our spit-filled tubes. ‘The long game here is not to make money selling kits, although the kits are essential to get the base level data,’ says Patrick Chung, a 23andMe board member and partner at the venture-capital firm NEA. ‘Once you have the data, [the company] does actually become the Google of personalized health care.’ Genetic data on a massive scale is likely to be an extremely valuable commodity to pharmaceutical companies, hospitals, and even governments. This is where the real growth potential is.”

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“We Were Absolutely Not Out To Get People To Boycott Football”

October 14, 2013 in Excerpts, Sports, Urban Studies | Permalink

Would be lying if I said I wasn’t disappointed in a chat that accompanied the excellent Frontline program, League of Denial, which examined the NFL’s obfuscation in regards to its concussion problem. I was especially dismayed by journalist Mark Fainaru-Wada’s answer to a question about what he and his brother, Steve Fainaru, hoped to accomplish with the program and their book: “I think our hope is that through the book and the film people will be more informed about the challenges the game faces and how it might deal with that.”

There’s a certain element of denial there as well. I think the honest answer would be that if you allow your children to play football, they may very well incur some brain damage, especially considering how prone their skulls are at that age. Any adult who plays college football or in the NFL is at great risk of brain damage. Anyone who buys a ticket to a game or who supports it in other ways is complicit in these injuries. Football, like boxing, can’t escape this problem which is embedded into the game, and equipment alterations or rule changes won’t eliminate it. It’s not merely a “challenge,” so let’s be honest about what we’re risking and what we’re supporting.

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Comment From Kristi Hofacker:  

Why did frontline not mention all the advancements and changes of game regulations that have been put in place to decrease TBIs? People have been working to gain concussion awareness so they can further their movements to fix the problem. After the frontline special, people don’t want to help, they want to boycott football all together. Is that what you were trying to accomplish?

 
Mark Fainaru-Wada: 

First and foremost, we were absolutely not out to get people to boycott football. Steve and I are both huge football fans — he has season tix to the 49ers — and we love the sport. I think our goal was simply to trace what the league knew, when it knew it and to what extent it sought to tamp down the emerging science. There’s no question the league has made strides on this issue since it was hauled before Congress in 2009, and we note that to some degree in the film, although the commissioner is still not openly acknowledging a link. I think our hope is that through the book and the film people will be more informed about the challenges the game faces and how it might deal with that. Again, though, it’s a violent, brutal sport, which is one of the things many of us love about it, and not sure that can/should be changed.

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“Even In A Mountain Cave, Diminutive And Smiling, He Looked Fresh As A Flower”

October 14, 2013 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

From the Economist obituary of General Vo Nguyen Giap, who drove well-funded foreign powers from Vietnam and lived to 102:

“Not that he was a populist, exactly. His father had been a lettré, a local scholar, as well as a farmer; he himself had a law degree. He was dapper, reviewing his troops in a white suit, trilby and club tie; even in a mountain cave, diminutive and smiling, he looked fresh as a flower. He wrote poetry, and his French was impeccable. The French, though, could see through that to the hatred that burned beneath, ever since the deaths of both his father and his first wife, after brutal torture, in French prisons. They called him ‘a volcano under snow.’

Nonetheless, he made an improbable soldier. He had no training, and would never have become a military commander, he said, if Ho Chi Minh, the leader of the Vietminh forces and later of North Vietnam, had not decided it for him. He first met Ho (above, top right) in China, realised they had been to the same school, and idolised him, from his tufty beard to his white rubber sandals. He called him ‘Uncle’; Ho called him ‘beautiful as a girl.’ “

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“A Hybrid Public-Private, Domestic-Foreign Nexus Lies Beneath The Miracle”

October 14, 2013 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

If population concentrates as media and tools become increasingly decentralized, will regional authority outrank the national kind? Would a city-state set-up with public and private sectors vying to solve problems lead to improvements or greater inequalities–or doses of both? These are some of the hot topics in politics and development right now. The opening of “The End of the Nation State?” Parag Khanna’s New York Times Opinion piece:

“SINGAPORE — EVERY five years, the United States National Intelligence Council, which advises the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, publishes a report forecasting the long-term implications of global trends. Earlier this year it released its latest report, ‘Alternative Worlds,’ which included scenarios for how the world would look a generation from now.

One scenario, ‘Nonstate World,’ imagined a planet in which urbanization, technology and capital accumulation had brought about a landscape where governments had given up on real reforms and had subcontracted many responsibilities to outside parties, which then set up enclaves operating under their own laws.

The imagined date for the report’s scenarios is 2030, but at least for ‘Nonstate World,’ it might as well be 2010: though most of us might not realize it, ‘nonstate world’ describes much of how global society already operates. This isn’t to say that states have disappeared, or will. But they are becoming just one form of governance among many.

A quick scan across the world reveals that where growth and innovation have been most successful, a hybrid public-private, domestic-foreign nexus lies beneath the miracle. These aren’t states; they’re ‘para-states’ — or, in one common parlance, ‘special economic zones.'”

“Budget Deficits Are Now A Second-Order Problem Relative To More Pressing Issues Facing The U.S. Economy”

October 13, 2013 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

One of the more awful things about the current (and manufactured) American economic crisis is that it has nothing to do with economics. Republicans will say that they’re shutting down the government to force spending cuts to correct long-tern budget deficits. Except that there likely are no long-term budget deficits, and a little more government investment would probably make that certain. This conflict is driven rather by ideology; it’s about wanting to enact punitive measures against our most vulnerable people to teach them a lesson of some sort. The opening of “The Battle Over the US Budget Is the Wrong Fight,” a new Lawrence Summers piece in the Financial Times:

“This month Washington is consumed by the impasse over reopening the government and raising the debt limit. It seems likely that this episode, like the 1995-96 government shutdowns and the 2011 debt limit scare, will be remembered mainly by the people directly involved. But there is a chance future historians will see today’s crisis as the turning point when American democracy was to shown to be dysfunctional – an example to be avoided rather than emulated.

The tragedy is compounded by the fact that most of the substance being debated in the current crisis is only tangentially relevant to the main challenges and opportunities facing the country. This is the case with respect to the endless discussions about the precise timing of continuing resolutions and debt limit extensions, and to the proposals to change congressional staff healthcare packages and cut a medical device tax that represents only about 0.015 per cent of gross domestic product.

More fundamental is this: budget deficits are now a second-order problem relative to more pressing issues facing the US economy. Projections that there is a major deficit problem are highly uncertain. And policies that indirectly address deficit issues by focusing on growth are sounder economically and more plausible politically than the long-term budget deals with which much of the policy community is obsessed.”

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“An Executive Carrying A Personal Communicator Could Send And Receive Electronic Mail And Facsimile Message”

October 13, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

It may have been driven by greed, but the idea of handheld personal-computing devices was clearly not a pipe dream. Some people were just a decade too early in their predictions. From Peter H. Lewis in the July 19, 1992 New York Times:

“Sometime around the middle of this decade no one is sure exactly when — executives on the go will begin carrying pocket-sized digital communicating devices. And although nobody is exactly sure what features these personal information gizmos will have, what they will cost, what they will look like or what they will be called, hundreds of computer industry officials and investors at the Mobile ’92 conference here last week agreed that the devices could become the foundation of the next great fortunes to be made in the personal computer business.

‘We are writing Chapter 2 of the history of personal computers,’ said Nobuo Mii, vice president and general manager of the International Business Machines Corporation’s entry systems division.

How rich is this lode? At one end of the spectrum is John Sculley, the chief executive of Apple Computer Inc., who says these personal communicators could be ‘the mother of all markets.’

At the other end is Andrew Grove, the chairman of the Intel Corporation, the huge chip maker based in Santa Clara, Calif. He says the idea of a wireless personal communicator in every pocket is ‘a pipe dream driven by greed.’

These devices are expected to combine the best features of personal computers, facsimile machines, computer networks, pagers, personal secretaries, appointment books, address books and even paperback books and pocket CD players — all in a hand-held box operated by pen, or even voice commands.

Stuck in traffic on a business trip, an executive carrying a personal communicator could send and receive electronic mail and facsimile messages from anywhere in the country. She could also call up a local map on a 3-inch by 5-inch screen, draw a line between her current position (confirmed by satellite positioning signals) and her intended destination, and the device would give her specific driving instructions (as well as real-time warnings about traffic jams or accidents). Certainly, these are just predictions for now, but they sure are fun to think about.”

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“It Will Begin To Lose Ground Even In Districts That Republicans And Polling Experts Now Regard As Safe”

October 13, 2013 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

It’s hard to argue with math, but John B. Judis of the New Republic pushes back at Nate Silver’s idea that the GOP House is safe for the foreseeable future despite the government shutdown. An excerpt:

“One could argue, of course, that the Republican Party will readapt to its rightwing base and eventually create a new majority of’ ‘true fiscal conservatives’ who will disdain compromise. But there is reason to believe that Chocola and the Club for Growth will never achieve their objective. Rightwing populism, like its predecessor, Christian conservatism, is intense in its commitment, but ultimately limited in its appeal. Tea Party Republicans and the outsider groups probably had their greatest impact when they were still emerging phenomena in the 2010 elections. But when the Republican Party becomes identified with the radical right, it will begin to lose ground even in districts that Republicans and polling experts now regard as safe. That happened earlier with the Christian Coalition, which enjoyed immense influence within the Republican Party until the Republican Party began to be identified with it.”

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“They Had Computerized Their 20th Century Shape”

October 11, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

An excerpt from “Imagine a World Without Shops or Factories,” Peter Day’s provocative BBC News Magazine piece, which asserts, among other things, that those who attempt to retrofit the Digital Age to the specs of the Industrial Age will be lost:

“What is so extraordinary is how this Fordist model of mass production and this mechanised quest for ever greater efficiency so quickly came to dominate not just car manufacturing but production in general, in nearly every industry. The production-line big corporation became the absolute model for business everywhere in the industrialised world and the concept of work for millions of people. It brought huge prosperity and material goods to people who had never been able to have them before. It created the suburbs where people who made the cars and bought them could live. Then, after 80 years of Fordist Western domination, the rich world manufacturing machine began to move away to other, far flung locations. But here too, in the mighty Chinese industrial revolution and when services were outsourced en masse to India, mass production prevailed. During the last decade of the 20th Century and into the 21st, I felt that the only way for businesses to be sure of survival in the developed world, in the US and in Europe, was to abandon competing with the world’s low-cost producers I had seen emerging so fast in China and many other new industrial nations. I became convinced that the explosion of digital connectivity was the answer.

At the time, the internet was helping to generate vast amounts of information about consumers and their desires and was creating vast fortunes for a new generation of entrepreneurs. Yet when in 1998 I went to visit one of the most celebrated management gurus of all time, he said something that struck me as weird.

The late Prof Peter Drucker, then 87, said: ‘The computer has yet to really influence American business.’ It sounded crazy when so much money had been invested in computing. But he was right – as usual. He meant that the shape and structure and hierarchy of the corporation had not responded to the huge flows of information that companies now had at their fingertips about their customers, should they wish to use it. They had computerised their 20th Century shape, rather than responding to how the computer network was upending much of what they had been set up to do decades before. It was one of the many things they don’t teach you at business school. Companies remained stuck in the 20th Century when life was moving on.”

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“It Is A Masterful Ideological Manipulation”

October 11, 2013 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

In a new Guardian piece, Slavoj Žižek, that player, links the current U.S. government shutdown to the 2008 economic collapse, noting the similarly unholy alliance between working-class protesters and the wealthy interests who find them useful:

“In April 2009 I was resting in a hotel room in Syracuse, hopping between two channels: a PBS documentary on Pete Seeger, the great American country singer of the left; and a Fox News report on the anti-tax Tea Party, with a country singer performing a populist song about how Washington is taxing hard-working ordinary people to finance the Wall Street financiers. There was a weird similarity between the two singers: both were articulating an anti-establishment, populist complaint against the exploitative rich and their state; both were calling for radical measures, including civil disobedience.

It was another painful reminder that today’s radical-populist right reminds us of the old radical-populist left (are today’s Christian survivalist-fundamentalist groups with their half-illegal status not organised like Black Panthers back in the 1960s?). It is a masterful ideological manipulation: the Tea Party agenda is fundamentally irrational in that it wants to protect the interests of hardworking ordinary people by privileging the ‘exploitative rich,’ thus literally countering their own interests.

This twisted ideology is also behind the current federal government shutdown in the US. An opinion poll at the end of June 2012 showed that a majority of Americans, while opposing Obamacare, strongly support most of its provisions. Here we encounter Tea Party ideology at its purest: the majority wants to have its ideological cake and eat the real baking. They want the real benefits of healthcare reform, while rejecting its ideological form, which they perceive as a threat to the ‘freedom of choice.’ They reject the concept of fruit, but they want apples, plums and strawberries.”

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“We Believe That Self-Driving Cars Will Be Profoundly Disruptive”

October 11, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The opening of a Wired report by Damon Lavrinc about new consumer research into autonomous vehicles, which registered with more acceptance among Americans than I anticipated at this point:

“Nearly every automaker is working on some form of autonomous vehicle technology, but according to a new study, consumers are more interested in a self-driving car from Google than General Motors.

The study, conducted by U.S. audit and advisory firm KPMG, polled a diverse group of drivers from both coasts and in between, pulling samples from Los Angeles, California; Chicago, Illinois; and Iselin, New Jersey.

The focus groups were asked about their willingness to use an autonomous vehicle every day, and rank their trust in the company producing the car on a scale of one to 10. While high-end automakers like Mercedes-Benz received a median score of 7.75, tech companies like Google and Apple scored an eight, and mass-market brands (Chevrolet and Nissan) came in at five.

‘We believe that self-driving cars will be profoundly disruptive to the traditional automotive ecosystem,’ said Gary Silberg, KPMG auto expert and author of the report.”

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