Excerpts

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“[He] Began To Use His Down-Home Theatrical Style To Drum Up More Business”

September 10, 2013 in Excerpts, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Cal Worthington, legendary West Coast car salesman and innovative pitchman, just passed away at 92. The opening of his Los Angeles Times obituary penned by Martin Miller:

“Cal Worthington, the Oklahoma native whose old-time carnival flair built one of the most successful car dealerships west of the Mississippi, has died. He was 92.

Worthington died Sunday while watching football at his home on the Big W Ranch near Orland, Calif., said Brady McLeod of the Miles Law Firm in Sacramento, which represented Worthington.

Described as a cross between Dale Carnegie and Slim Pickens, Worthington was best known for his wacky television pitches that had him wrestling with a tiger, flying upside down on an airplane wing or riding a killer whale. His sales antics with his ‘Dog Spot’ drove a career that took him from a three-car lot on a patch of Texas dirt to a multi-make dealership empire that grossed billions of dollars and stretched from Southern California to Alaska.

In 1950, Worthington bought a car dealership in Huntington Park and in the years that followed began to use his down-home theatrical style to drum up more business.

Worthington’s enduring mark on regional television wasn’t made until 1971, when he began running his famous ‘Dog Spot’ commercials. The ads were inspired by two competitors, Ralph Williams and Fletcher Jones, who both ran television ads featuring dogs. In particular, Jones was shown cuddling puppies and promised he’d give customers a dog from the pound.

‘I decided I’d mimic them,’ Worthington told the Los Angeles Times in 2002. So he borrowed a gorilla, chained it to a car bumper and let the cameras roll. With the ape snarling in the background, Worthington said: ‘Howdy, I’m Cal Worthington and this is my dog Spot. I found this little fella down at the pound, and he’s so full of love.'”

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Cal and his “dog”:

Soupy Sales spoofs him as “Cal Nothington”:

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“He Is Like Any Other C.E.O.—Plagued By Constant Meetings”

September 9, 2013 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

In “The Man Who Came To Dinner,” Sarah Ellison’s new Vanity Fair piece about Julian Assange, we get a look at the Wikileaks mastermind as he’s confined to the Ecuadorian embassy in London, dodging a likely indictment from the U.S. for espionage and certain interrogation from Sweden about alleged sex crimes. Yet behind closed doors, he telecommutes at will, running his document dump seamlessly, striking a pose that’s equal parts Ellsberg and Polanski. An excerpt:

“Even before the Snowden affair brought him back into the limelight, Assange had been busy. During his year of confinement at the embassy, he has released a vast cache of documents, written a book, addressed the U.N., founded a political party in Australia and launched a bid for a Senate seat there, entertained socialites and celebrities, maintained contact with leakers and whistle-blowers all over the world, and worked behind the scenes to influence depictions of him that are now hitting movie screens (the most high-profile being a DreamWorks production starring Benedict Cumberbatch). As for the Snowden case, Assange and WikiLeaks have served, in effect, as Snowden’s travel agents, publicists, and envoys; it is still not clear how far back the Snowden connection goes, or precisely how it originated, though the filmmaker Laura Poitras likely played the key role.

Assange cannot move from his quarters, but he is either at his computer or in conference, working in an impressive number of spheres. ‘He is like any other C.E.O.—plagued by constant meetings,’ WikiLeaks told me. He employs sophisticated encryption software, which anyone wishing to make contact with him or his circle is encouraged to use. To gain a sense of his life and work, during the past months I have spoken to Assange’s lawyers and to many longtime or former friends, supporters, and professional associates. (Some have requested anonymity.) Daniel Ellsberg, the former U.S. military analyst who brought the Pentagon Papers to light, has met with Assange and speaks with personal knowledge about the lonely life of a leaker and whistle-blower. ‘We are exiles and émigrés,’ he told me.

But the fact that Assange has had to take himself physically out of circulation has had the effect, oddly, of keeping him more purely at the center of things than he was before. His legal perils have not receded, but his state of diplomatic limbo means that he is no longer being hauled out of black vans and in front of screaming reporters and whirring cameras. The U.S. government has tried to decapitate his organization, which has only made him a martyr. No one is talking, as they were when he was free to mingle with the outside world, about his thin skin, his argumentative nature, his paranoia, his self-absorption, his poor personal hygiene, his habit of using his laptop when dining in company, or his failure to flush the toilet.

‘If anything, I think he’s stronger and more sophisticated than he used to be, and so is the organization,’ Jennifer Robinson, an Australian human-rights lawyer best known for her work defending Assange in London, told me. ‘They’ve weathered three years of intense pressure and all forms of legal and political attacks, and they are still here and still publishing and still making headlines.’ Today, Assange is alone and unbothered, but not isolated—the unquiet center of a web whose vibrations he can both detect and influence.”

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“I Believe There Are Other Bolts Out There”

September 9, 2013 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech, Sports, Urban Studies | Permalink

A few exchanges from the early part of an excellent Ask Me Anything at Reddit being conducted by the Sports Illustrated and ProPublica journalist David Epstein, author of The Sports Gene: Inside the Science of Extraordinary Athletic Performance.

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Question:

I have always thought that Usain Bolt was dirty. He was beating the best guys in the world easily, and they were doping. But in your book you talk about why the Jamaicans are so good at sprinting. Essentially it is years of breeding amongst the best athletes that produced the best sprinters in the world in this tiny part of this tiny island. After reading that section, I started thinking, “Wow, this guy may actually be clean!” So do you think Bolt is clean, or just the possessor of the best genes the human race has to offer?

David Epstein:

I don’t want to be naive, but if I were absolutely forced to bet on it at this moment, I would go “clean” for Bolt. Would I be surprised to be wrong? Not really. After all the lying from athletes, it’d be crazy to be surprised any more. That said, there hasn’t been the proverbial “smoke” around Bolt yet, and not because people aren’t looking, so I give him the benefit of the doubt. And not that this means he’s clean, but I think his junior records are at least as impressive as his world records, so at least my suspicion index doesn’t increase just because he made bizarre performance jumps. Honestly, I think a guy like Randy Moss would potentially be Bolt-like, but in how many countries does a guy who is 6’4″ at age 15 with blinding speed end up on the track? Jamaica, Trinidad, Bahamas, maybe Barbados, and probably nowhere else. I believe there are other Bolts out there, but the sifting system I describe in chapter 10 makes sure they find them in Jamaica.

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Question:

How do you think the U.S. would do in World Cup Soccer if the best athletes in pro football, baseball, and basketball were playing soccer instead?

David Epstein:

I think the U.S. would do extremely well. In The Sports Gene, I write about a Danish scientist who takes muscle biopsies of soccer players, and his frustration that they don’t get enough guys with a high proportion of fast-twitch muscle fibers at the top level. We have a load of sprinters here! And I also write about the Netherlands soccer pipeline, and a sports scientist who helps track the top kids, and look how well they’ve done with a relatively small population. One thing she has found is that the kids who go on to the pros are always, starting from age 12, about a quarter second faster on shuttle runs than the kids who don’t make it. I tend to think if Adrian Peterson and athletes like him grew up playing soccer, we’d have a much better team. At numerous points in the book, it’s clear that one way a country dominates a sports is simply by making sure the best general athletes go through the talent funnel of that sport. Obviously, we’re massively diluting that in the U.S. I think we would be a world power if even just American football were taken out of the equation.

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Question:

With all the new science on concussions and other health issues, do you think football, the NFL in particular, will exist in a decade.

David Epstein:

I think it will exist. I look at boxing, which is completely medically indefensible, and it still exists. That said, every time I look through the new scientific literature on brain trauma, here’s the troubling trend: rather than concussions being of primary importance, the accumulation of sub-concussive hits is taking center stage. So all the rule changes in the NFL that go toward protecting defenseless receivers and all that, those are great PR but do nothing for the linemen who are taking the sub-concussive hits to the frontal lobe on every single play. And, of course, the majority of players who are ending up with their brains dissected are linemen, not receivers. …In The Sports Gene, I write about a gene variant–ApoE4–that about one in five people and that we know makes it more likely that a carrier will have permanent brain damage from taking hits to the head. All in all, I think there’s increasing evidence that some people, maybe many people, simply can’t play football without being brain damaged in some way, whether that damage is temporary or permanent. I do think, ultimately, that it will reduce the pipeline of children who participate in football, but I don’t think the game will be gone in a decade. Here’s a piece I wrote about subconcussive hits in high school players, for whom the cost/benefit analysis is vastly different than an NFL pro.•

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“He Stated That Bukowski Is An Excellent Tenant Who Never Associates With Any Of His Neighbors”

September 9, 2013 in Books, Excerpts, Politics, Urban Studies | Permalink

Charles Bukowski, a poet of despair who questioned the wisdom of crowds, was a person of interest for the FBI. Open Culture points out that Bukowski.net has published 113 pages of FBI documents from 1968. It’s mostly pointless investigation into a man who was most dangerous to himself and his spouses, but it’s there if you’re a completist.

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“His Proprietary System Of Gleaming Mirrors And Flashing Lenses Will Transform The American Southwest”

September 9, 2013 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

This month is the one-year anniversary of the launching if Aeon, the digital magazine that has quickly become the best producer of essays I can find in print or online. Congratulations to Paul and Brigid Hains, who founded the publication, and to all their contributors.

From “Catching the Star,” Lee Billings’ new Aeon essay about astrophysicist Roger Angel, who wants to transform the American Southwest, which is getting closer to dying of thirst, into one of Earth’s chief solar-power stations:

In the first decade of this new century, Angel began to shift his focus from planets around other stars to the planet that we live on, the planet that was growing parched and crowded before his eyes. He has spent years devising a three-decade plan to build and launch 16 trillion tiny, autonomous spacecraft to form a sunshade to cool the Earth to pre-industrial average temperatures, thus counteracting anthropogenic greenhouse heating. The associated expenses would amount to some $5 trillion, although Angel hastens to point out that this would constitute less than one per cent of the world’s gross domestic product for the project’s duration — a bargain compared with the much higher projected costs of allowing global warming to proceed unabated.

No one could find technical flaws with Angel’s audacious plan: the physics was eminently feasible. It was also meticulous. Angel had considered practically every relevant physical variable and technological scenario. Even so, he considered it little more than ‘a Band-Aid’, something that could buy perhaps a century of cooler temperatures. More sustainable long-term adaptations would be needed to deal with the recent spike in greenhouse gases, which promise to linger in the atmosphere for tens or hundreds of thousands of years.

“The sunshade may seem like mad science,” he quips from time to time, “but the fact is, we live upon a mad world.” Not mad enough, however. Not yet. Few would seriously contemplate building anything like Angel’s sunshade until catastrophic warming and sea-level rises are already well under way, and by then, it may be too late. Angel himself prefers that it never be built at all. He believes that cutting carbon emissions would be considerably cheaper in the long run.

To that end, Angel has been working on a new project since 2008, an effort less ambitious than blotting out the light of the sun but audacious enough. He wants to make grid-scale solar power that costs about a dollar per watt — as cheap as or cheaper than electricity from burning coal or other fossil fuels. Moreover, he thinks he has found how to do it, and has even formed a company, REhnu, to gather capital investment and develop the necessary technology.

In years to come, if Angel has his way, his proprietary system of gleaming mirrors and flashing lenses will transform the American southwest and other sun-drenched regions into the 21st-century powerhouses of the globe, driving markets to leave all the world’s remaining coal in the ground. He has attracted several research grants from government agencies, as well as a considerable number of backers from the upper echelons of US astronomy and energy research who, having seen Angel build the Mirror Lab from nothing, prefer to bet with rather than against him.•

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“Words Become For Rumsfeld His Own Way To Regain Control Over Reality And History”

September 9, 2013 in Excerpts, Film, Politics | Permalink

Fat-necked babyhead Karl Rove spent a good part of Sunday excoriating the President for inching backwards from his line in the sand on Syria, but I’m glad Obama retreated if only a little. I know he doesn’t want a Rwanda to happen on his watch, but it’s difficult to bomb a country into a safer place. Not impossible, but difficult. Obama did what responsible adults do when they feel emotions getting the best of them: They doubt. And then perhaps they proceed or maybe they realize that strength isn’t only in being inflexible, the way JFK did after the Cuban Missile Crisis. Khrushchev sure seemed forceful when banging his shoe on a table, but even if he won a day or two with bluster, he didn’t win the history books. Certitude alone doesn’t do that.

Doubt was in short supply when Rove’s candidate, President George W. Bush, was in office. He and his inner circle knew that Iraq had WMDs, and there was no bending their spines of steel. So many people died because they had no doubt. In Errol Morris’ new Donald Rumsfeld documentary, the former Secretary of Defense still doesn’t question his decisions. From Gregg Kilday’s Hollywood Reporter interview with Morris about Rumsfeld’s desire to own the narrative even though the facts say he got owned:

“Hollywood Reporter:

You eventually interviewed him for 33 hours.

Errol Morris:

Over 11 separate days, four separate trips to Boston. We filmed in a studio in Allston over the course of a little bit more than a year.

Hollywood Reporter:

And you had him read his memos as part of the interview?

Errol Morris:

Yes, the memos are memos that he shared with us. I don’t believe they were ever available before we started talking with him. I sometimes describe it as a kind of history from the inside out rather than the other way around. What was so fascinating and still is fascinating about the memos is that they came from [various] periods, whether it was the Ford Administration or his role as an ambassador-at-large in the Middle East during the Reagan Administration and during his tenure as secretary of defense for George W. Bush. They also reflect how he wants other people to see him. They are complex. It gives some kind of insight into what he was thinking, how he wanted to present himself to others, how he wanted to present himself to history. I think there are a lot of complicated things going on that fascinated me and still fascinate me. For a lot of people when you make a movie, you’re supposed to come away with definite answers about things. I’m not sure that is my M.O. In fact, I’m pretty sure it is not.

Hollywood Reporter:

He seems strangely obsessed with the definition of words.

Errol Morris:

I’ll tell you how I interpret it. When we think of words and the definition of words, I immediately think of George Orwell because he wrote so extensively about it. Orwell was obsessed with language and how language could be used to manipulate people. But I don’t think that’s what’s going on here. It’s something stranger. Words become for Rumsfeld his own way to regain control over reality and history as he feels it slipping away. I’m not sure I’m even characterizing it correctly either, but there’s something strange and powerful about it. If somehow he gets the right word or the right definition of words, everything will be OK. America will win the war in Iraq, the insurgents will vanish. It’s all a problem of vocabulary.”

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“It Doesn’t Know What The Rules Of The Car Industry Are, And Has No Desire To Follow Them”

September 8, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

It appears that Elon Musk has succeeded where John DeLorean failed, in creating a successful automobile company from scratch. I suspect others will likewise blaze those trails as 3D printing power becomes more profound. But what about a large if young company like Google? Can it compete with the traditional automakers in the autonomous sector? From a post by Brad Templeton, who it should be noted is a consultant to Google:

“While I don’t comment on Google’s plans, I do believe it has one big advantage in this race. It doesn’t know what the rules of the car industry are, and has no desire to follow them. The car companies have huge resources, and better expertise on cars, but their internal rules and practices, honed over a century, are sure to hobble them. They won’t take the risks that non-car companies will take, won’t want to damage existing business lines, and will face attacks within the companies from the ‘company immune system’ which seeks to attack disruptive ideas within big companies.

Google’s main impediment is that it is also a big company, though an unusual one. But this business is so hard to enter that we have yet to see a start-up make a play.”

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“If Jellyfish Fall On Hard Times, They Can Simply ‘De-Grow'”

September 8, 2013 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Another thing to worry about: jellyfish. In “They’re Taking Over!” Tim Flannery’s New York Review of Books critique of Lisa-ann Gershwin’s Stung!, he explains how the colorful stingers are perhaps becoming kings of the sea. An excerpt:

“To understand why jellyfish are taking over, we need to understand where they live and how they breed, feed, and die. Jellyfish are almost ubiquitous in the oceans. As survivors of an earlier, less hospitable world, they can flourish where few other species can venture. Their low metabolic rate, and thus low oxygen requirement, allows them to thrive in waters that would suffocate other marine creatures. Some jellyfish can even absorb oxygen into their bells, allowing them to ‘dive’ into oxygen-less waters like a diver with scuba gear and forage there for up to two hours.

Jellyfish reproduction is astonishing, and no small part of their evolutionary success: ‘Hermaphroditism. Cloning. External fertilization. Self fertilization. Courtship and copulation. Fission. Fusion. Cannibalism. You name it, jellyfish [are] ‘doing it.’’ But perhaps the most unusual thing is that their eggs do not develop immediately into jellyfish. Instead they hatch into polyps, which are small creatures resembling sea anemones. The polyps attach to hard surfaces on the sea floor, and are particularly fond of man-made structures, on which they can form a continuous jelly coating. As they grow, the polyps develop into a stack of small jellyfish growing atop each other that look rather like a stack of coins. When conditions are right, each ‘coin’ or small jellyfish detaches and swims free. In a few days or weeks, a jellyfish bloom is observed.

One of the fastest breeders of all is Mnemiopsis. Biologists characterize it as a ‘self-fertilizing simultaneous hermaphrodite,’ which means that it doesn’t need a partner to reproduce, nor does it need to switch from one sex to the other, but can be both sexes at once. It begins laying eggs when just thirteen days old, and is soon laying 10,000 per day. Even cutting these prolific breeders into pieces doesn’t slow them down. If quartered, the bits will regenerate and resume normal life as whole adults in two to three days.

Jellyfish are voracious feeders. Mnemiopsis is able to eat over ten times its own body weight in food, and to double in size, each day. They can do this because they are, metabolically speaking, tremendously efficient, being able to put more of the energy they ingest toward growth than the more complex creatures they compete with. And they can be wasteful. Mnemiopsis acts like a fox in a henhouse. After they gorge themselves, they continue to collect and kill prey. As far as the ecosystem goes, the result is the same whether the jellyfish digest the food or not: they go on killing until there is nothing left. That can happen quickly. One study showed thatMnemiopsis removed over 30 percent of the copepod (small marine crustaceans) population available to it each day.

Jellyfish ‘can eat anything, and often do,’ Gershwin says. Some don’t even need to eat, in the usual sense of the word. They simply absorb dissolved organic matter through their epidermis. Others have algae living in their cells that provide food through photosynthesis.

The question of jellyfish death is vexing. If jellyfish fall on hard times, they can simply ‘de-grow.’ That is, they reduce in size, but their bodies remain in proportion. That’s a very different outcome from what is seen in starving fish, or people.”

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“Philosophy Cannot Cure A Toothache”

September 8, 2013 in Excerpts | Permalink

Everything changes us, but sometimes a crash can change everything. Even though the brain is wired into a particular mode of behavior by repetition, trauma can lead to a break, to enlightenment. But far more often, suffering is simply what it is: It just hurts. Blessed are those, I suppose, who have useful tragedies. The opening of Pico Iyer’s New York Times essay:

“NARA, Japan — Hundreds of Syrians are apparently killed by chemical weapons, and the attempt to protect others from that fate threatens to kill many more. A child perishes with her mother in a tornado in Oklahoma, the month after an 8-year-old is slain by a bomb in Boston. Runaway trains claim dozens of lives in otherwise placid Canada and Spain. At least 46 people are killed in a string of coordinated bombings aimed at an ice cream shop, bus station and famous restaurant in Baghdad. Does the torrent of suffering ever abate — and can one possibly find any point in suffering?

Wise men in every tradition tell us that suffering brings clarity, illumination; for the Buddha, suffering is the first rule of life, and insofar as some of it arises from our own wrongheadedness — our cherishing of self — we have the cure for it within. Thus in certain cases, suffering may be an effect, as well as a cause, of taking ourselves too seriously. I once met a Zen-trained painter in Japan, in his 90s, who told me that suffering is a privilege, it moves us toward thinking about essential things and shakes us out of shortsighted complacency; when he was a boy, he said, it was believed you should pay for suffering, it proves such a hidden blessing.

Yet none of that begins to apply to a child gassed to death (or born with AIDS or hit by a ‘limited strike’). Philosophy cannot cure a toothache, and the person who starts going on about its long-term benefits may induce a headache, too.”

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“And what good is cancer in April?”:

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“John Baldessari Is Unafraid To Poke A Little Fun At The Art-Industrial Complex”

September 8, 2013 in Excerpts, Videos | Permalink

The opening of Julie Belcove’s Financial Times article about the contrarian conceptualist John Baldessari, who is trying, in his own way, to undo what the art world has done:

“In an age when contemporary art is very big business, and works by even living artists can command eight-figure prices at auction, John Baldessari is unafraid to poke a little fun at the art-industrial complex. The California-based conceptual master’s most recently completed body of work – a send-up of art history’s canon – takes a jab at the art world’s appetite for household names and easily identifiable visuals.

There is, for instance, an image of a soup can, a classic Warhol motif, but done in blue instead of Campbell’s red, without the label’s familiar logo, emphasising instead the can’s clean, minimalist, geometric shapes favoured by Sol LeWitt, whose name is printed underneath. Another piece takes a detail of a Jackson Pollock gestural abstraction but renders it in Matisse’s trademark yellow and blue and labels it with the latter artist’s name.

‘I was getting mildly irritated by artists getting branded – ‘This is a Warhol,’ ‘This is a de Kooning’ – and you don’t even look. It just has to look like a brand,’ says Baldessari, in fine fettle at 82 years old, on a warm summer afternoon at Marian Goodman Gallery, his New York dealer. ‘And I said, I wonder if I can slow that down.'”

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“A Brief History of John Baldessari,” narrated by Tom Waits:

“1970: Baldessari destroying his paintings”:

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“America Will Never Be A ‘No Drone Zone'”

September 8, 2013 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

As I’ve mentioned numerous times, including yesterday, drones will get increasingly smaller à la microchips, until the information-gatherers, much like the information, can fit on the head of a pin. The opening of John W. Whitehead’s Rutherford Institute essay, “Roaches, Mosquitoes, and Birds: The Coming Micro-Drone Revolution“:

“America will never be a ‘no drone zone.’

That must be acknowledged from the outset. There is too much money to be made on drones, for one, and too many special interest groups—from the defense sector to law enforcement to the so-called ‘research’ groups that are in it for purely ‘academic’ reasons—who have a vested interest in ensuring that drones are here to stay.

At one time, there was a small glimmer of hope that these aerial threats to privacy would not come home to roost, but that all ended when Barack Obama took office and made drones the cornerstone of his war efforts. By the time President Obama signed the FAA Reauthorization Act into law in 2012, there was no turning back. The FAA opened the door for drones, once confined to the battlefields over Iraq and Afghanistan, to be used domestically for a wide range of functions, both public and private, governmental and corporate. It is expected that at least 30,000 drones will occupy U.S. airspace by 2020, ushering in a $30 billion per year industry.

Those looking to the skies in search of Predator drones will be in for a surprise, however, because when the drones finally descend en masse on America, they will not be the massive aerial assault vehicles favored by the Obama administration in their overseas war efforts. Rather, the drones coming to a neighborhood near you will be small, some nano in size, capable of flying through city streets and buildings almost undetected, while hovering over cityscapes and public events for long periods of time, providing a means of 24/7 surveillance.”

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“It Was A House Built To Replicate An Above-Ground House”

September 8, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Speaking of wealthy eccentrics, the Messy Ness Chic blog has a story about the former home of the late Girard B. Henderson, a longtime Avon bigwig who in 1978 built a 16,000-square-foot abode 25 feet below ground in Las Vegas. Like a lot of folks in the Cold War days, Henderson feared his family would disappear into a mushroom cloud–but no mere fallout shelter would do for them. He created a bunkered McMansion, replete with soundstage scenery, a swimming pool and putting green. (It’s currently on the market.)

Henderson had experience in subterranean endeavors having sponsored in 1964 the Underground Living exhibit at New York World’s Fair. He also in 1950 founded one of America’s first cable TV companies (which brought the service, of course, underground). Unsurprisingly, he kept details about his private life buried. The opening of a paywalled 1966 Time article about him and a video about the house follow.

Girard Brown Henderson, a director of Avon Products, Inc., owes his wealth to the cosmetics firm’s cheery, door-to-door sales technique, but he is not the kind of fellow that a stranger comes calling on. A 5-ft. 6-in., onetime barnstorming pilot, Henderson at 61 is one of the richest men in the U.S., and one of the most secretive. Though he has interests in half a dozen businesses ranging from investment companies to a community antenna television outfit in California and is a member of the New York Stock Exchange, he is rarely seen at his Wall Street office.•

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“All these trees are faux trees obviously”:

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“It’s A Firm I’ve Had A Close And Pleasant Relationship With”

September 8, 2013 in Excerpts, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Apart from money, J. Paul Getty wasn’t a very rich man. A billionaire in a time when such things were unheard of, Getty was a strange and miserly sort with five marriages and a procession of troubled heirs. In this 1970s commercial, the industrialist spoke on behalf of E.F. Hutton, the brokerage firm that was swallowed in a series of mergers beginning in the 1980s.

The jaw-dropping tale of the 1973 kidnapping of Getty’s grandson, from the heir’s 2011 New York Times obituary:

“J. Paul Getty III, who was a grandson of the oil baron once believed to be the richest man in the world and who achieved tragic notoriety in 1973 when he was kidnapped by Italian gangsters, died Saturday at his home near London. He was 54.

His son, the actor Balthazar Getty, confirmed the death in a statement relayed in an e-mail from Laura Hozempa, one of his agents. Mr. Getty had been wheelchair-bound since 1981, when a drug overdose caused him to have a stroke that left him severely paralyzed, unable to speak and partly blind.

At the time of his abduction, Mr. Getty was just 16 and living on his own in Rome, where his father, J. Paul Getty II, had, for a time, helped oversee the family’s Italian business interests.

Expelled from a private school, the young Mr. Getty was living a bohemian life, frequenting nightclubs, taking part in left-wing demonstrations and reportedly earning a living making jewelry, selling paintings and acting as an extra in movies. He disappeared on July 10, 1973, and two days later his mother, Gail Harris, received a ransom request. No longer married, she said she had little money.

‘Get it from London,’ she was reportedly told over the phone, a reference either to her former father-in-law, J. Paul Getty, the billionaire founder of the Getty Oil Company, or her former husband, who lived in England.

The amount demanded was about $17 million, but the police were initially skeptical of the kidnapping claim, even after Ms. Harris received a plaintive letter from her son, and a phone call in which a man saying he was a kidnapper offered to send her a severed finger as proof he was still alive. Investigators suspected a possible hoax or an attempt by the young Mr. Getty to squeeze some money from his notoriously penurious relatives.

‘Dear Mummy,’ his note began, ‘Since Monday I have fallen into the hands of kidnappers. Don’t let me be killed.’

The eldest Mr. Getty refused to pay the kidnappers anything, declaring that he had 14 grandchildren and ‘If I pay one penny now, I’ll have 14 kidnapped grandchildren.’ His son said he could not afford to pay.

Three months after the abduction, the kidnappers, who turned out to be Calabrian bandits with a possible connection to organized crime, cut off Mr. Getty’s ear and mailed it, along with a lock of his hair, to a Roman newspaper. Photographs of the maimed Mr. Getty, along with a letter in which he pleaded with his family to pay his captors, subsequently appeared in another newspaper. Eventually the kidnappers reduced their demands to around $3 million. According to the 1995 book Painfully Rich: The Outrageous Fortune and Misfortunes of the Heirs of J. Paul Getty, by John Pearson, the eldest Mr. Getty paid $2.2 million, the maximum that his accountants said would be tax-deductible. The boy’s father paid the rest, though he had borrow it from his father — at 4 percent interest.

The teenager, malnourished, bruised and missing an ear, was released on Dec. 15; he was found at an abandoned service station, shivering in a driving rainstorm.”

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“You’d Have To Provide A Piece Of The Drone To Prove Your ‘Kill'”

September 8, 2013 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

In this strange time, everyone is spying on everyone and privacy as we knew it is not returning. Yet people believe–or pretend to believe–that something can be done about it. While many think legislation is the answer, some in Colorado have a different idea: license citizens who wish to shoot down government drones. (Those involved haven’t yet said what they will do when drones shrink from the size of planes to that of fleas.) From Jason Bittel at Slate:

“Is it just me, or are things really coming off the rails in Colorado? Earlier this summer, a handful of northern counties got all hyped up on freedom juice and started talking about secession. (The rural counties were reportedly upset over ‘restrictive gun laws and clean energy mandates.’) Now, a town to the south has been inundated with requests for drone-hunting licenses—and we’re not talking about using flying robots to shoot deer on the ground. Naturally, it doesn’t matter that there’s no such thing as a drone-hunting license.

Here’s how the whole brouhaha began. In June, some dude in Deer Trail, Co., proposed that there should be a town-wide ordinance to shoot down government drones, complete with a $100 bounty should one successfully ground one. (FYI: You’d have to provide a piece of the drone to prove your ‘kill.’) Despite the fact that the town won’t even vote on the ordinance until October, the story snagged national media attention, which in turn spurred red-blooded Americans everywhere to send Deer Trail a check for $25 (the proposed cost of the license that doesn’t exist). When the town clerk stopped counting, they’d received $19,006.”

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“If You’re Smart In The First Place, You’re Even Greedier For Cognitive Boosts”

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

From “Zapped,” Mary HK Choi’s Aeon article about her experimentation with Transcranial Direct-Current Stimulation, which may be a performance enhancer:

“The godfathers of modern TDCS are Dr Michael A Nitsche and Dr Walter Paulus from the department of clinical neurophysiology at the University of Göttingen in Germany. In the year 2000, Nitsche and Paulus published an article in The Journal of Physiology, which described how TDCS alters excitability in different regions of the brain by up to 40 per cent. In the brain, excitability affects synaptic plasticity, which means that the neural pathways that determine the capacity for memory and learning are changing substantially, depending on where you’re zapping. There are various electrode montages, each correlating to what we understand about regions in the brain. If you want to stimulate the language centre, you place your anode and cathode on different parts of your head than if you’re interested in reducing epileptic seizures. It seems straightforward but it’s actually mysterious. For example, stimulating the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex influences memory but also helps you quit smoking.

Most of the recent internet write-ups on TDCS have been about the ‘foc.us,’ a TDCS headset that claims to ‘overclock’ your brain and make you better at video games. Priced at $249, the unit comes in two colours (red and black) with a fancy zippered carrying case like the kind that overhyped headphones made by ex-rappers are packaged in. They’re beleaguered with shipping issues and have fallen a couple of weeks behind in fulfilling orders (mine has not arrived yet) but their customer service is highly communicative. The website is a riot. In the ‘press’ section, there’s a handful of high-resolution images with attractive models wearing the headset with Blue Steel expressions, very low-cut jeans, and ‘come hither’ eyes. It’s clear this stuff is marketed to gamer bros, but from what little I know, I’m not convinced of the effectiveness based on the foc.us contact points. The sponges are too small and flat and the headset looks hard, like a girl’s plastic headband. I can’t imagine the electrodes are placed snugly enough on the skin to guarantee an effective circuit.

Despite my scepticism, and the fact that I don’t even know what it means to ‘overclock’ the brain, I’m intrigued. After all, the desire to make yourself smarter is universal, and in my experience, if you’re smart in the first place, you’re even greedier for cognitive boosts. When I get writer’s block, I’ll do almost anything to get over it. Sometimes, I even give a guy money to let me lie in the dark in his saline-filled tank. The only thing I won’t do is noortropics. Smart drugs scare me. Especially ProVigil (Modafinil), the pill that’s referred to as the ‘Limitless’ drug since it behaves like NZT-48, the brain-boosting stuff that takes a doltish Bradley Cooper and makes him superhuman-smart. Certain overachieving Silicon Valley types are candid about taking it regularly, like Dave Asprey, aka The Bulletproof Executive, who also cops to augmenting his chemically heightened brain function and alertness with TDCS. He’s had a kit for over a decade, and he throws it on like a light cardigan whenever he feels like it. He claims it allows him to efficiently reach ‘gamma states,’ a transcendental level that takes the Dalai Lama four hours of meditation to achieve. I know this because he talked about it on Joe Rogan.”

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“There Was A Time When The People At Canon Photocopiers Used To Ply Him With Experimental Cartridges”

September 5, 2013 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

All the Lawrence Weschler books I’ve read—Vermeer in Bosnia, Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder, Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees and A Wanderer in the Perfect City—are wonderful, difficult, surprising and unique. The same can be said of his new Smithsonian article about artist David Hockney’s relationship with technology and optical techniques. An excerpt:

“As I say, despite his critique of the optical look created by early technologies, a striking openness to new technologies has long been a feature of Hockney’s career. There was a time when the people at Canon photocopiers used to ply him with experimental cartridges, long before they went to market, just to see what he’d come up with. (He came up with a suite of ‘handmade prints.’) Likewise fax machines in the time of their impending ubiquity, and the long-distance, widely broadcast collages he managed to wrest out of those. For that matter, he was one of the first people I knew who had tape and then CD players installed in his cars—the better to choreograph elaborately pre-scored drives through the Santa Monica and San Gabriel mountains, soaring and swooping hours-long affairs, alternating between composers, that almost invariably culminated as one came hurtling over the last pass heading back toward the coast, Wagner at full throttle, with a transcendent vantage of the setting sun just as it went slipping into the sea.

Now it was the turn of the iPhone, whose dazzling potential as a color drawing device, by way of its Brushes application, Hockney was one of the first artists fully to exploit. He’d spend hours noodling around on its touchscreen, and further hours away from the phone itself, just thinking about how he might achieve certain effects: the effect of white porcelain, for example, or cut glass or polished brass; the effect of cut flowers or bonsai or cacti; the effect of the morning sun rising slowly over the sea. This last challenge proved especially engrossing for Hockney. An inveterate chronicler of California sunsets, he’d long wanted to introduce sunrises into his repertory, but had never been able to do so, since it was always too dark to make out the paints and colored pencils, and when he turned on an indoor light to see them, he’d drown out the dawn. But since with the iPhone light itself was the very medium, this was no longer a problem; he could chronicle the most subtle transitions starting out from the pitchest dark. Suddenly his friends all around the world began receiving two, three, or four such drawings a day on their iPhones—each of the incoming dispatches, incidentally, “originals,” since there were no other versions that were digitally more complete. ‘People from the village,’ he told me one day, ‘come up and tease me, ‘We hear you’ve started drawing on your telephone.’ And I tell them, ‘Well, no, actually, it’s just that occasionally I speak on my sketch pad.’ And indeed, the iPhone was proving a much more compact and convenient version of the sorts of sketchbooks he always used to carry around in his jacket pockets, and a less messy one at that (notwithstanding which, each time he slid the phone back into his pocket, he’d rub his thumb and forefinger up against his trousers, by force of habit, wiping off all that digital smudge).

From the iPhone he graduated to the iPad; and from interiors of cut-flower bouquets or the morning view out his window over the dawn-spreading sea, he moved on to more elaborate plein-air studies of the Bridlington environs of the kind he’d already been painting on canvas. In particular, there was an extended suite, comprising 51 separate digital drawings titled The Arrival of Spring in Woldgate, East Yorkshire in 2011 (twenty eleven). Later that fall, back in California for a visit, he launched a perhaps even more evocative iPad investigation of Yosemite Valley—wider vistas in a narrower frame.

At the same time he and his team began exploring the limits of technological capability when it came to transferring digital drawings onto paper—the crisper the image and greater the surface, the better. The resulting wall-size prints held up exceptionally well and soon became an integral feature of the exhibitions surveying this Yorkshire period of Hockney’s lifework.”

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“London Newspaper Columnists These Days Are Demanding His Scalp”

September 5, 2013 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

The opening of a 1968 Life magazine portrait of David Frost at 28, an enfant terrible and empire builder:

“There is more for England to fret about than the pound, the loss of empire and the damnable decision of her fashion arbiters to lengthen skirts almost to the ankle. There  is also the young man sunk in the ultramodern chair on the preceding page, surrounded by barbed quotes from his new book, The English (Stein and Day), which he wrote with Antony Jay.

There are many influential Britons who feel that the most charitable solution to the question What to Do about David Frost? would be simply the stuff him and put him on display at Madame Tussaud’s where all the other really famous people are. As Britain’s most obtrusive TV personality. David would not mind being there, actually, but not quite yet.

London newspaper columnists these days are demanding his scalp with headlines like THE PERIL DAVID FROST REPRESENTS and stories underneath that say, ‘Is he conducting an entertainment or a public pillory?’ The London Evening News said, ‘Mr. Frost seems to have taken upon himself the role of public inquisitor, and his program reminds one of the Court of the Star Chamber.’ Still another paper complained that the Frost show was becoming a supplementary house of Parliament. 

In seven short years since he left Cambridge, David Frost has become the sometime conscience of his country, a provocateur extraordinaire, a cunning and ferociously ambitious preacher’s boy who at 28 has built out of discomfort a show-business empire that has taken over Great Britain and is reaching across the Atlantic to the U.S.”

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“It Should Be As Easy To Get A Subscription To The Post As It Is To Buy Diapers On Amazon”

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

Via Matt Cantor at Newswer, a few quotes from Jeff Bezos during his visit to the Washington Post offices:

  • “If it’s hopeless, I would feel sorry for you guys, but I wouldn’t want to join you,” he said, per journalist Cara Ann Kelly.
  • Still, “What’s been happening over the last several years can’t continue to happen.”
  • “It should be as easy to get a subscription to the Post as it is to buy diapers on Amazon.”
  • “People will buy a package,” but “they will not pay for (an individual) story.”
  • “All businesses need to be forever young … If your customer base ages with you as a company, you’re Woolworth’s.”
  • As to content: “Don’t be boring.”

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“Criminals Take Selfies And So Do Cops”

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

Perhaps no act in modern life speaks more aptly to these very democratic, decentralized and dumb times like the taking of the selfie, that narcissistic attempt to pretend that the minutiae of our lives is important. It’s the new religion. But not everyone agrees it’s a bad thing. Sarah Hepola defends the digital obsession in the Morning News. An excerpt:

“These days, the sight of someone pulling over to the side of the road—or standing at a bar, or flashing a peace sign in front of a building, or waiting at the drive-thru in the front seat of the car—and taking a picture of themselves is not bizarre at all. We live in the endlessly documented moment, and the arm outstretched with that small, omnipotent rectangle held aloft is one of the defining postures of our time. We’ve had selfie scandals, from Weiner’s weiner to Amanda Bynes’ meltdown. We’ve had a million billion cautionary tales about sending erotic selfies, though it doesn’t seem to stop anyone. Criminals take selfies and so do cops. The presidential selfie surely could not be far behind. (On this, Hillary was first.) 

But people are also worried about the selfie. Well, worried and irritated. Several trend stories have pondered the psychological damage on a generation that would rather take a picture of their life than actually live it. A recent studyfound that posting too many selfies annoys people (for this, they needed science?). Last month, the word made its way into the Oxford Dictionaries Online, but it has also become something of a smear, another tacky emblem of a culture that has directed all possible spotlights toward its own sucked-in cheeks. ‘Are you going to take a selfie?’ a friend asked with mock derision when I pulled out my phone at dinner to check the time. And it was clearly a joke, but I wasn’t sure if he was making fun of people who do such things, or the fact that I was one of them.

I have many friends who would never take a selfie. Never, ever. The practice is too conceited and unserious, and it would hurt them in their perfectionist bones in the way that 10 mariachis showing up at the dinner table and singing ‘Happy Birthday’ would hurt them. Sometimes life can be too embarrassing.

But I am a selfie enthusiast—I’m not yet ready to say ‘selfie addict’—who has to constantly monitor my own usage.”

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“It Could Still Connect To Any TV And Read And Write To A Compatible Cassette Recorder”

September 4, 2013 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Just one entry from Roberto Baldwin’s fun Wired piece about tech items that were available thirty years ago in the Fall/Winter Sears catalog:

“Timex Sinclair 1000 Computer: $49

Catalog Description:

2K memory expands to a powerful 16K. Most of the 40 keys are programmed for up to five commands. ‘One Touch’ keyword entry system eliminates a great deal of typing keywords (RUN, LIST, PRINT, etc) all have their own single key entry. Pressure Sensitive, plastic membrane keyboard.

The Timex Sinclair 1000 Computer was the entry-level computer for anyone interested in computing. While it didn’t measure up to more sophisticated offerings from Atari and Texas Instruments, it could still connect to any TV and read and write to a compatible cassette recorder. If you splurged on the $40 16K RAM expansion, you could even play some of the hottest black and white games on the market.

The real power of the Sinclair 1000 was teaching you how to program in BASIC — something that would be helpful years later when you wanted to understand ’20 GOTO 10′ jokes. All of this and it was $48 cheaper in the Fall/Winter 1983 catalog than the one prior. Now that’s a value!”

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“Marry That Girl, She Lives In Monte Carlo”

September 4, 2013 in Books, Excerpts, Politics, Videos | Permalink

David Frost was mocked as a lightweight outsider by mainstream media when in 1977 he purchased an interview with Richard Nixon, especially excoriated by Mike Wallace the week before it was to air. But he ultimately checkmated the disgraced former President in a contest that was even higher stakes than Fischer-Spassky.

From a colorful Hollywood Reporter essay about the colorful Frost by former girlfriend Caroline Cushing Graham, who was with him during the momentous interviews and was played by Rebecca Hall in the Ron Howard adaptation of Peter Morgan’s play:

In 1975 David and I traveled to Florida for a series of The Guinness Book of World Record shows he hosted. One was about the fattest man, the sword swallower, and another about a post office built for small people. The human bomb blew himself up for the camera, he had added an extra stick of dynamite to impress David. We were impressed and horrified by the effort – that was a typical Frost program.

In February 1977 David asked me to come to Beverly Hills, where he was preparing for the historic interviews with Richard Nixon. At the time there was anxiety and money needed, and ads to be sold to pay for the cable TV channel airing the interviews. In the Beverly Hilton, a group of famous journalists were researching questions with David, along with our good friend and advisor Clay Felker, founder of New York and New West magazines. 

David worked himself to the bone in Beverly Hills, with a painful root canal emergency done a few days before the Laguna Beach interviews. I accompanied David with the team down south to Laguna, he did not drive, contrary to the Frost/Nixon movie. As David prepared to interview Richard Nixon, I made the sandwiches for their lunch. When the last days’ interview was over, there were 28 hours of interviews, Nixon invited us for drinks at the Western White House. Diane Sawyer accompanied us to a private room for cocktails. Nixon asked me if I liked good wine, as he was proud of his cellar. Driving away that evening I felt sorry for Nixon, he was so lonely and we were going to a party at Ma Maison, where Sammy Kahn was performing.

Nixon had said to David, as we posed for a photograph with him: “Marry that girl, she lives in Monte Carlo.” David laughed at Nixon’s remark and it became a standing joke between us – he used it in his book I Gave Them a Sword.  As we returned to Beverly Hills David was anxious to meet with his team and get their reaction to the interviews before we went out to dinner.”•

From a later Frost special for the Guinness Book of World Records:

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“Are Smartphones Having Their TV-In-The-Kitchen Moment?”

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

From “Disruptions: More Connected, Yet More Alone,” Nick Bilton’s New York Times article which wonders whether smartphone immersion is permanent or whether there will be a retreat from its ubiquity:

“In the late 1950s, televisions started to move into the kitchen from the living room, often wheeled up to the dinner table to join the family for supper. And then, TV at the dinner table suddenly became bad manners. Back to the living room the TV went.

‘It never really caught on in most U.S. homes,’ said Lynn Spigel, a professor at the Northwestern University School of Communication and author of the book, Make Room for TV. ‘At one point, a company even tried to invent a contraption called the TV Stove, which was both a TV and a stove,’ she said.

So are smartphones having their TV-in-the-kitchen moment?”

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“Organoids, As She Calls Them, Are A Far Cry From The Brains In Jars Of The Writers Of Horror Movies”

September 4, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

The opening of “An Embryonic Idea,” an Economist article about the creation of “organoids,” which resemble human brains in numerous ways:

“REGENERATIVE medicine, the science of producing tissues and organs from stem cells, is a rapidly developing field. This week, however, it took a leap forward that was big even by its own demanding standards. A team of researchers led by Madeline Lancaster of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, in Vienna, announced that they have grown things which, while not human brains, resemble brains in important ways.

Dr Lancaster’s organoids, as she calls them, are a far cry from the brains in jars beloved of the writers of horror movies. But they do contain several recognisably different types of nerve cell and have anatomical features which look like those of real brains. They might be used to study, in ways that would be unethical in a living human being or impossible even in a mouse, the crucial early stages of brain development, and how they can go wrong. They could be employed to test drugs in ways that mere cell cultures cannot be. And because they can be made, if needed, from the cells of living people, they might even illuminate the particular problems of individual patients.”

“Are There Legitimate National Security Interests At Stake?”

September 3, 2013 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

Three exchanges follow from an Ask Me Anything at Reddit with Josh Keating, a global-news reporter for Slate.

__________________________

Question:

In your opinion, is Obama’s stance on Syria politically motivated due to his arbitrary chemical weapons line-in-the-sand or are there legitimate national security interests at stake?

Josh Keating:

I agree with my colleague John Dickerson that Obama boxed himself in with the “red line” comment,” but I do think the administration’s view of chemical weapons as beyond the pale compared to mass casualty conventional weapons attack is genuine. This isn’t to say the strike being considered will actually be an effective deterrent for Assad or other states considering chemical weapons use.

__________________________

Question:

Those who supported the Iraq war usually felt “duped” by the false evidence of WMDs. Shouldn’t the evidence that Assad conducted the CW attacks be the primary object of scrutiny? Evidence to date suggests that the primary source of intelligence is Mossad intercepts. Can we really rely on that? For that matter, can we really rely on our own intelligence community to have America’s best interests in mind? And now there is a mad scramble to find a “defector” to bolster the case. Can you blame an informed American for being skeptical?

Josh Keating:

Don’t blame you at all for being skeptical, but there are some critical differences between the two situations. In this case, we have an attack that took places just weeks ago rather than years earlier. It also certainly doesn’t seem like this administration has been desperately looking for pretexts for a war. All claims certainly warrant scrutiny but I wouldn’t dismiss compelling evidence just because of superficial similarities between the two situations.

__________________________

Question:

What do you think the most “unknown” world issue is? So, not something like Syria or Egypt that gets a lot of attention, but something important nonetheless.

Josh Keating:

As far as regions go, I’m always a little shocked by how little attention is paid in the U.S. conversation to Latin American politics. Given the geographical and cultural proximity, the stark ideological divides, the economic transformations we’ve seen in some countries, and how great an impact U.S. policy have there — the drug war in Central America for instance — it’s always a little baffling to me that the region gets short shrift compared to the Middle East and Asia. At least in the post-Cold War period.

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“In A Decade Or So We Could See Commercial Production Of Meat That Has Been Grown In A Lab Rather Than Reared And Slaughtered”

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

I’m a vegetarian, and I think you know I believe children shouldn’t be admitted to fast-food restaurants any more than they are bars. But I don’t have any ethical objections to lab-grown meat. I wouldn’t eat it because it’s still meat which I think is still unhealthy, but I suppose if it were ultimately made in such way as to be healthy, I would probably have it. Why not? The opening of “The Vegan Carnivore?” Julian Baggini’s new Aeon essay:

“The chef Richard McGeown has faced bigger culinary challenges in his distinguished career than frying a meat patty in a little sunflower oil and butter. But this time the eyes and cameras of hundreds of journalists in the room were fixed on the 5oz (140g) pink disc sizzling in his pan, one that had been five years and €250,000 in the making. This was the world’s first proper portion of cultured meat, a beef burger created by Mark Post, professor of physiology, and his team at Maastricht University in the Netherlands.

Post (which rhymes with ‘lost,’ not ‘ghost’) has been working on in vitro meat (IVM) since 2009. On 5 August this year he presented his cultured beef burger to the world as a ‘proof of concept’. Having shown that the technology works, Post believes that in a decade or so we could see commercial production of meat that has been grown in a lab rather than reared and slaughtered. The comforting illusion that supermarket trays of plastic-wrapped steaks are not pieces of dead animal might become a discomforting reality.

The IVM technique starts with a harmless procedure to remove myosatellite cells — stem cells that can only become muscle cells — from a live cow’s shoulder. They are then placed in a nutrient solution to create muscle tissue, which in turn forms tiny muscle fibres. Post’s burger contained 40 billion such cells, arranged in 20,000 muscle fibres. Add a few breadcrumbs and egg powder as binders, plus some beetroot juice and saffron to give it a redder colour, and you have your burger. I was at the suitably theatrical setting of the Riverside Studios in west London to see the synthetic burger unveiled. The TV presenter Nina Hossain was hired to provide a dose of professionalism and glamour to what was in effect a live TV show, filmed by a substantial crew for instantaneous webcast.

When the lights dimmed, images of gulls flying over gentle sea waves were projected onto two screens by the sides of the stage. Over some sparse, slow, rising guitar chords, Sergey Brin, the co-founder of Google and a donor of €700,000 to Post’s research, uttered the portentous words: ‘Sometimes a new technology comes along and it has the capability to transform how we view our world.’ He was right. Never before has a human eaten meat without harming or killing an animal. But in a strange way the slick presentation detracted from the truly historic nature of the moment. A scientific landmark was sold to us in the manner of a glitzy product launch, a piece of corporate puff.

What was most striking to me was how the presentation led, not with science, but with ethics.”

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